The World Watches Central Michigan vs. Michigan, or: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mid-Major By L. Marlowe, International Desk, somewhere between despair and a Marriott minibar. From the banks of the Tigris to the glass towers of Singapore, humanity awoke last Saturday to discover the globe’s most pressing geopolitical fault…
Oklahoma vs Temple: A Dispatch from the Imperial Margins By Sergei “Sarge” Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert pinged in from a bar in Tbilisi, a city that knows something about being a buffer zone between empires. A college football game—Oklahoma versus Temple—was trending worldwide. Not because the Sooners might drop 50 points on…
Nick Saban, American Caesar of the Gridiron, Retires—And the World Somehow Keeps Spinning By Helena Draxler, Senior International Correspondent | Dave’s Locker PARIS—While glaciers melt, supply chains choke, and half the planet queues for a passport that still means something, the United States paused yesterday to rend its garments over the retirement of a 72-year-old…
Haynes King: The Quarterback Who Became a Global Metaphor for Second Chances By our jaded but still-sentimental foreign correspondent If you’ve never heard of Haynes King, congratulations—you’ve successfully avoided the American habit of exporting every middling athletic drama as if it were the Magna Carta. Yet here we are, dragging the Texas A&M quarterback onto…
Oxford, Mississippi—population 25,000, humidity 100%—has once again etched its fall Saturdays onto the global consciousness with the release of the 2024 Ole Miss football schedule. To the uninitiated foreign correspondent, the announcement looks like a polite Southern afterthought; to the rest of the planet, it is a Rorschach test of late-imperial priorities. While the Sahel…
MADISON, Wisconsin—While the rest of the planet was busy debating whether A.I. will replace us before climate change finishes the job, roughly 80,000 bipeds clad in dairy-scented scarlet fleece poured into a concrete horseshoe on a Saturday night to scream at 19-year-olds in tights. Welcome, dear cosmopolitan reader, to Wisconsin football: the Midwestern passion play…
Oregon vs Northwestern: A Gridiron Rorschach Test for the Apocalypse By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from thirty-five thousand feet, Saturday’s Oregon-Northwestern skirmish looks less like a football game and more like a polite, padded referendum on which flavor of decline the planet prefers. Out…
Nico Iamaleava and the Geopolitics of a 19-Year-Old’s Arm Dave’s Locker – International Desk When the University of Tennessee’s freshman quarterback Nico Iamaleava uncorked a 55-yard rope against Virginia last weekend, satellites in low-Earth orbit probably flinched. Not because the football threatened their orbital paths—although at this point the Pentagon is probably running the math—but…
Headline from the Apocalypse’s Sports Desk: Humanity, having successfully weaponized climate, currency, and cat memes, now turns its restless gaze to—of all things—UCLA football. Somewhere between the melting Arctic and the latest crypto-cult, the search for a new Bruins coach has become, improbably, a geopolitical Rorschach test. Let us begin in São Paulo, where a…
Deion Sanders Is America’s Last Exportable Myth—And the Rest of the World Is Buying By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in four continents and counting PARIS—While European cafés argue over whether football is the one with the round ball or the pointy one, Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders has quietly become the most American thing the…
Noah Fifita and the Great Pacific Quarterback Pipeline: How a 5’10 Hawaiian Kid Became a Geopolitical Sleeper Agent By the time Noah Fifita dropped a 40-yard dime on national television last Saturday, three continents were already arguing about him on Reddit. That’s the new math of college football: one Samoan-Hawaiian kid from Anaheim who still…
Dana Holgorsen, the man whose name sounds like an IKEA bookshelf you assemble after six beers, has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test. From the oil-slicked sidelines of Houston to the neon shrines of Macau, the 52-year-old American football coach now stands as a living metaphor for every empire that’s convinced itself the next quarter…
