The Utah State Aggies, a football program whose greatest victories usually involve convincing 18-year-olds that Logan in February is “quaint,” have improbably become a geopolitical weather vane. From the vantage point of a barstool in Sarajevo—where the local side has been relegated so often it should qualify for EU development funds—the Aggies’ 2023 season offers…
Rutgers vs. Minnesota: A Microscopic Proxy War in the Great American Colosseum Byline: “Roving” Ravi Mehta, tallying existential scores from a safe distance Somewhere between the 41st parallel and the longitudes of self-delusion, two land-grant universities—Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—will collide on a rectangle of Astroturf…
From the comfort of a rain-lashed café in Lisbon, where locals fret more about the price of sardines than the price of oil, the satellite feed flickers to life. There it is: UCF versus Kansas State, a collision of acronyms and ambitions being beamed to every corner of the planet where people still believe a…
Jeremiyah Love: The Global Phenomenon of a Name That Refuses to Behave By the time Jeremiyah Love’s latest highlight reel hit 3.2 million views on a cracked smartphone in Lagos, the joke was already stale in São Paulo. “Another American running back with a name that sounds like a failed boy band,” muttered a Brazilian…
Kansas Football and the Art of Cosmic Insignificance by Special Correspondent Luka Petrovic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere on the vast, wheat-swept oblong Americans call “the Heartland,” 53 scholarship athletes in crimson and blue keep losing football games with the dependable rhythm of a Swiss cuckoo clock that’s…
USC vs Illinois: An American Civil War Reenactment the World Didn’t Ask For By Our Man on the Pacific Rim Who’s Already Had Too Much Coffee Los Angeles—While most of the planet was busy watching the ruble impersonate a rock climber and the Arctic circle audition for a beach holiday, the United States chose Friday…
Notre-Dame vs Arkansas: A Collision of Cathedrals, Cotton, and the Collapsing World Order By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Paris, 03:14 a.m. CEST—While the rest of Europe debates whether to heat the flat or the croissant first, roughly 7,000 kilometers away in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a different temperature is rising. Saturday…
Tallahassee, Florida – In the grand casino of global culture, where nations gamble on oil futures, semiconductor supremacy, and the next TikTok dance, the release of a college-football schedule might appear as charmingly parochial as a parish bake sale. Yet when Florida State University—those garnet-and-gold merchants of controlled violence—dropped its 2024 slate last week, the…
Ohio State vs Washington: When a College Football Game Pretends to Matter to the World HOUSTON—In a cavernous stadium the size of a small principality, two American collegiate armies will collide Monday night while the rest of Earth politely pretends to watch. The “College Football Playoff National Championship” pits the Ohio State Buckeyes against the…
Houston, We Have a Problem—And It’s Wearing Scarlet Helmets Dispatches from the Margins of the American Coliseum By the time the University of Houston Cougars lined up against their latest over-matched non-conference sacrificial lamb, the global temperature had ticked up another 0.0003 °C, a container ship the size of lower Manhattan was wedged sideways in…
A Dispatch from the Commonwealth: “Virgina Football” and the End of Global Innocence By L. Valenti, International Correspondent at Large Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a third-tier referee’s whistle. It began, as all modern scandals do, with a typo. Somewhere between a hastily drafted press release and the algorithmic digestive tract of…
Penn State vs Oregon: A Parable of Two Empires in the Age of Collapse By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific, Still Jet-lagged and Philosophical Somewhere between the ghost malls of Shenzhen and the ever-shrinking glaciers of Patagonia, two American universities—Penn State and Oregon—will collide this weekend on a rectangle of turf in Indianapolis. To…
