TALLAHASSEE, Wednesday—Across the globe, diplomats in Geneva fret over carbon thresholds, container ships idle in the Red Sea dodging drones, and the yen wobbles like a freshman kicker after three espresso shots. Yet for one humid Saturday in the Florida panhandle, the planet’s attention pivots to a patch of grass where young men in garnet…
Minnesota Golden Gophers Football: How a Prairie College Team Quietly Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Golden Gophers trot onto Huntington Bank Stadium this autumn, most of the planet will be busy pretending to care about something else: the Bundesliga, the Rugby Championship, the latest coup d’état, or that mesmerizing TikTok of…
The AP Poll Is the World’s Most Tolerated Lie—And Everyone Keeps Pretending Otherwise By “Globetrotting” G. M. Lefèvre, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS, FRANCE—Every Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (7 p.m. GMT, 3 a.m. Tuesday in Pyongyang for the truly committed), a cabal of 62 American sportswriters and broadcasters releases a ranking that…
UHM Football: A Tiny Archipelago in the Global Coliseum By Our Correspondent, currently between time zones somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the departure lounge of Incheon, you can almost see Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium sinking slowly into the Pacific like a discarded kettle grill. That, dear reader, is the current stage…
HONOLULU—While European ultras were torching stadium toilets and Qatari sheikhs were gold-plating their private boxes, the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors spent Saturday night doing something far more subversive: playing earnest, mid-tier American football on the outer rim of civilization, 2,400 miles from the nearest conference rival and precisely one ocean away from anyone who…
When the University of Michigan announced the “indefinite suspension” of its head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, the initial reaction in Ann Arbor was predictable: grown men in maize-and-blue jerseys weeping into their overpriced IPAs. Yet halfway around the world, the tremor registered differently. In Singapore, traders at the Marina Bay futures desk briefly paused their…
U of A Football: How a Desert College Team Became a Soft-Power Proxy in the Great American Decline By Dmitri Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker TUCSON—On a planet where glaciers retreat faster than Russian conscripts and the global south negotiates BRICS membership while the north binge-streams apocalypse dramas, the University of Arizona Wildcats still run…
Stanford vs BYU: When Silicon-Valley Nihilism Meets Mormon Moral Fibre on a Football Field and the World Watches, Bewildered From the vantage point of a Paris café where the espresso is bitter and the Wi-Fi is worse, the annual collision between Stanford University and Brigham Young University looks less like a collegiate football game and…
Huskers: How a Corn-Fed College Nickname Took Over the Planet By the time the sun sets over the Shanghai skyline, a 19-year-old in a knock-off scarlet hoodie is live-tweeting Nebraska’s spring practice in Mandarin. Meanwhile, in Lagos, a betting syndicate is crunching play-action tendencies from grainy YouTube clips of the 1995 “Scoring Explosion” squad. Somewhere…
The Boilermakers Abroad: How Purdue Football Became the World’s Most Improbable Soft-Power Asset By the time the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band struck up its halftime rendition of “The William Tell Overture” in Dublin last August, half the spectators were wondering why the corn-fed brass section had smuggled a sousaphone onto sacred Irish soil, and the…
Akron vs Nebraska: The Entire Planet Holds Its Breath (or Pretends To) Somewhere between the soy fields of Nebraska and the tire factories of Akron, two college football teams—whose combined endowments could bankroll a small Pacific island—are preparing to collide this Saturday. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the world’s seven billion non-American residents are, of course,…
The World Watches as Two Southern American Colleges Duke It Out—And Pretends to Care Geneva, Switzerland – While the United Nations Security Council was busy debating the finer points of who gets to veto whom this week, an arguably more urgent geopolitical flashpoint erupted in the American Deep South: Louisiana-Monroe versus Alabama. Yes, the Warhawks…
