Wofford vs Virginia Tech: A Tiny College in South Carolina Punches Above the Beltway, Teaching the World a Cold Lesson in Hubris By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Somewhere between the Appalachian foothills and the CNN greenroom, a liberal-arts college with fewer undergraduates than the average Brussels lobbyist mixer just spent forty minutes reminding the planet…
The Curious Case of UCLA’s Latest Patriarch: Or, How a Basketball Coach Became a Geopolitical Chess Piece LOS ANGELES—Across the Pacific, Tokyo’s Nikkei dipped 0.8 percent on Tuesday morning after rumors that UCLA had narrowed its coaching search to two men and a houseplant named Brad. In London, the BBC paused its rolling coverage of…
From the High Desert to the Pacific Palisades: How a College Basketball Scorecard Became the UN Security Council of 2023 By the time the final buzzer mercifully sounded in Las Vegas, diplomats in Geneva were already arguing whether the 68-63 upset by New Mexico over UCLA constituted a soft-power shift on par with Brexit or…
Indiana State vs Indiana: A Heartland Grudge Match as Viewed from the International Cheap Seats By Dave’s far-flung correspondent, nursing jet-lag in a Frankfurt airport lounge that smells of bratwurst and regret. To the rest of the planet, the spectacle unfolding in Terre Haute this weekend looks like two American institutions squabbling over a basketball…
When the University of Tennessee at Martin and the University of Texas at El Paso tip off in a basketball game that precisely zero European insomniacs will stay awake for, the world does not exactly hold its breath. Yet, if you squint past the flickering neon of a 10 p.m. EST tip-off and the existential…
Sacramento State vs Nevada: A Microscopic Tilt Beneath the Shadow of a Dying Empire By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere East of Reason From the vantage point of a damp café in Sarajevo—where the espresso tastes like history and the Wi-Fi still drops every time a NATO convoy rumbles past—last night’s Sacramento State Hornets versus…
Austin Peay vs. Georgia: When the World’s Problems Pause for 40 Minutes of Manufactured Hope by Diego Morales, International Correspondent-at-Large The University of Georgia Bulldogs—an outfit valued somewhere between a Baltic nation’s GDP and Jeff Bezos’ weekend yacht budget—took the floor Saturday against Austin Peay State University, whose annual athletics subsidy is roughly what the…
