Dan Lanning: How a 37-Year-Old Football Coach Became the Planet’s Most Reluctant Diplomat In the grand tradition of humans assigning cosmic importance to men who scream about blocking schemes, Dan Lanning has been elevated from mere American football coach to a walking foreign-relations metaphor. The University of Oregon’s head coach—who still looks like he should…
PORTLAND, Oregon—Somewhere between the ninth replay of a 19-year-old wide receiver hurdling a safety and the inevitable cutaway to Nike founder Phil Knight checking his pulse, the planet tilts ever so slightly on its axis. Oregon football, that neon-green fever dream spun out of a Eugene apparel empire, has become a rare American export that…
When the world’s attention is fixed on Gaza’s rubble, Kyiv’s blackouts, and whatever fresh horror the algorithm coughs up next, an American football game between San José State and Stanford somehow elbows its way into the international feed. Not because the planet has developed a sudden fetish for West-Coast gridiron—CNN International didn’t cut away from…
Kentucky vs South Carolina: A Microscopic Lens on Humanity’s Macro Meltdown By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between a whisky hangover and a diplomatic visa queue From the outside looking in, the annual collision of Kentucky and South Carolina on a rectangle of manicured grass in the southeastern United States is, strictly speaking, a college…
Phoenix, Arizona – In a world where grain futures gyrate like a Tokyo pachinko machine and the Arctic melts faster than a popsicle in Riyadh, the American collegiate pastime known as football somehow still commands transcontinental bandwidth. This weekend’s curiosity: the Arizona Wildcats hosting the Iowa State Cyclones in what U.S. broadcasters call a “non-conference…
The Accidental Geopolitics of a Thursday Night in Blacksburg By R. M. Delgado, International Affairs Desk Somewhere between the Blue Ridge and the broad Atlantic, two modest land-grant universities will collide Thursday night in what the American sports-industrial complex bills, with endearing provincial grandiosity, as “Virginia Tech vs. NC State.” The rest of the planet,…
A Dispatch from the Heartland’s Coliseum: How Indiana University’s Football Calendar Has Become the Planet’s Morality Play By Dave’s Far-Flung Correspondent, filing from a press box that smells faintly of popcorn and existential dread. BLOOMINGTON, Indiana—Somewhere between the soy-fields and the vape shops, the 2024 Indiana University football schedule has been unfurled like a medieval…
Baylor vs Oklahoma State: How Two Obscure American Colleges Became the World’s Unlikely Geopolitical Barometer For the uninitiated, “Baylor vs Oklahoma State” sounds like a regional spat between rival cattle barons or a dispute over whose wheat has higher gluten. But to the global cognoscenti monitoring the tremors beneath American exceptionalism, Saturday’s clash in Stillwater…
Lincoln Riley, the man who swapped Oklahoma’s endless horizon for Los Angeles smog like a pilgrim chasing cheaper botox, has become an unlikely barometer for the planet’s collective neuroses. From Abu Dhabi boardrooms to São Paulo sports bars, his career pivot is less about football and more about the universal human urge to trade integrity…
A Tiny Ripple in a Very Large Pond: The Curious Case of Tayven Jackson and the Global Football-Industrial Complex By D. Lockhart, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In the grand geopolitical theatre—where grain blockades, chip embargoes, and the occasional crypto-coup du jour monopolise the front pages—news that an American college quarterback named Tayven Jackson has elected…
In the grand amphitheater of American college football—an institution that somehow convinces itself it’s amateur while coaches earn more than the GDP of Tonga—Georgia Southern and James Madison prepare to hurl themselves at one another this weekend. To most of the planet, this is a quaint regional quarrel between two schools whose mascots sound like…
Ypsilanti, Michigan—While the planet’s attention ricochets between Gaza, the South China Sea, and whatever Elon has tweeted before breakfast, two universities separated by 120 kilometers of potholed interstate are staging their own cold skirmish. Eastern Michigan versus Central Michigan is not, on the face of it, the stuff of United Nations briefings. Yet if you…
