Dabo Swinney: The Last American Tribal Chieftain the Rest of the World Never Asked for By Matteo “Mick” Rizzo, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large ATLANTA—From the glass boxes of Davos to the sweaty favelas of Rio, the planet is currently transfixed by only three things: whether TikTok will outlive the dollar, which hemisphere will first burst into literal…
SMU vs Missouri State: How a College Football Exhibition Quietly Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By: Our Man in the Upper Deck, Somewhere Over the Atlantic DALLAS—On a humid Saturday that felt engineered by a vindictive meteorologist, Southern Methodist University lined up against Missouri State in something the brochures optimistically labeled the “Arctic Wolf Cotton…
The world’s attention, already stretched thinner than a politician’s promise, pivoted westward last night to a patch of Astroturf in San Diego where Oregon State and Texas Tech—two universities whose combined endowments still can’t match what the EU spends on olive-oil subsidies—decided to settle their differences with shoulder pads and play-action fakes. For 60 commercial-splintered…
MUNCIE, Indiana—Somewhere between the soy fields and the haunted Arby’s off I-69, Ball State University is once again asking the eternal question: can a mid-major football program survive the twenty-first century without either becoming a farm team for the Southeastern Conference or selling its soul to a streaming service whose Terms of Service were drafted…
The Curious Case of Germie Bernard, or How One College Receiver Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong and Right With Us By the time most Europeans finished their second espresso on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, Twitter had already decided that Germie Bernard—freshly transferred wide receiver from Alabama to Washington—was either the second coming of…
TALLAHASSEE, Thursday—While COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree temperature increments, another climate summit convenes 7,800 km away inside Doak Campbell Stadium: the Florida State Seminoles’ 2024 football schedule, where the only melting ice is in overpriced margaritas. To the untrained eye, it’s a tidy twelve-game slate—Duke, Clemson, Miami, the usual suspects—sprinkled across the calendar…
**Saturday’s Gladiator Pageant: Why the Planet Still Watches College Football Games Today, Live and in Real Time** If you tune in to any college football games today live, you will witness roughly four million BTUs of adolescent kinetic energy being converted, in real time, into advertising inventory. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, satellites obediently relay the…
The quaintly named “HCU vs Nebraska” is, on first glance, only a scrap of American collegiate sport, a dust-up between Houston Christian University—population: one modest Texas campus—and the University of Nebraska, whose football program alone could probably float a small sovereign debt issue. Yet, like a well-traveled diplomat who pretends to sip tea while negotiating…
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…
