**When the World Watches America Play Dress-Up: College GameDay Week 4 and the Theater of Imperial Decline** While the rest of the planet grapples with minor inconveniences like climate collapse, food insecurity, and the occasional coup d’état, the United States has once again demonstrated its uncanny ability to transform higher education into a three-ring circus…
Moscow wakes up to the news, Lagos scrolls past it, and a Copenhagen barista shrugs: Kirk Ferentz just signed on to coach Iowa through 2029. On the surface it’s a provincial American story—college football’s answer to tenure—but in the age of global streaming, NIL money that would make a Swiss banker blush, and universities that…
Cooper DeJean, the 21-year-old Iowan who can apparently outrun both his own shadow and the existential dread of living in a state whose main export is corn and repressed memories, has become the latest American football prodigy to be hoisted onto the international stage. For those who’ve wisely invested their sanity in soccer, cricket, or…
Mike Gundy, the Oklahoma State University head football coach whose mullet once qualified as a diplomatic incident in several NATO countries, has improbably become a case study in how American provincialism still manages to ricochet across the planet like a rogue drone over the Black Sea. In a week when French farmers dumped manure on…
TULSA v. OKLAHOMA STATE: How One Dust-Bowl Derby Quietly Explains the End of the American Empire From the vantage point of a café terrace in Lisbon, where the espresso is strong and national decline is just another menu item, the annual collision between the University of Tulsa and Oklahoma State resembles a morality play staged…
Lafayette Football: The Tiny, Militantly American Sport That Somehow Still Matters to the Rest of Us Bylines from Parisian cafés, Lagos traffic jams, and the sort of Tokyo izakaya that smells like soy sauce and regret. The words “Lafayette football” conjure, to most citizens of Earth, a baffled shrug followed by the inevitable follow-up: “Is…
Tulsa vs Oklahoma State: A Microscopic Powder Keg in the Heartland That the World Pretends Not to Notice From a safe distance—say, a café in Lisbon or a metro platform in Seoul—tonight’s tilt between the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane and the Oklahoma State Cowboys looks like a statistical tremor in a subreddit no one…
Miami, Florida—The same week that COP28 delegates argued over adjectives in Dubai and the Bank of Japan toyed with negative interest rates like a toddler with a light switch, the University of Miami quietly dropped a press release that will echo far beyond Coral Gables. Mario Cristobal, the Hurricanes’ head football coach, has received yet…
Camp Randall: Where America’s Colosseum Meets the World’s Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Nursing a Warm Beer and Global Resentment MADISON, WISCONSIN – On any given autumn Saturday, 80,000 cheese-brained pilgrims storm a red-brick fortress on the edge of a glacial lake, howling a war chant that sounds suspiciously like a Bavarian…
Quinn Ewers, Quarterback, Accidental Geopolitical Pawn By the time the sun rises in Austin, it has already set on some other nation’s patience. In that daily rotation of hope and disappointment, a 20-year-old Texan with a haircut that cost more than the GDP of Tuvalu has become the latest proof that the world’s most powerful…
Kirk Herbstreit and the Strange Global Empire of American Football Commentary Dave’s Locker – International Desk PARIS—At 03:47 CET, while most of the civilized world was either asleep or pretending to be, Kirk Herbstreit was live on ESPN International breaking down the Alabama-Georgia SEC Championship with the solemnity of a UN weapons inspector. Somewhere in…
From the banks of the Thames to the neon sprawl of Shibuya, the name “Jake Retzlaff” is trending on the same algorithmic conveyor belt that once ferried Baby Yoda memes and the phrase “quiet quitting.” If you’re outside the United States, you may have first seen the syllables attached to a grainy clip of a…
