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…
Rice vs Charlotte: A Clash So Local It Might Actually Matter to the Rest of the Planet Somewhere between the South China Sea’s latest near-collision and the European Central Bank’s newest interest-rate séance, two American college-football programs—Rice University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—will collide in a contest that, on paper, is about…
Tre Harris and the Great Global Redistribution of Hope By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you haven’t yet heard of Tre Harris, congratulations—you still possess the blissful ignorance that 7.9 billion other people lost somewhere between the third TikTok remix and the seventeenth think-piece. Harris, a 20-year-old wide receiver out of Mississippi State, has spent…
Ole Miss Head Coach Lane Kiffin—yes, the Twitter-addicted, visor-tilting American football savant—has quietly become a global Rorschach test. From the shadow of Oxford’s Confederate statues to the fluorescent glare of Seoul’s Gangnam sports bars, Kiffin’s 280-character grenades ricochet across oceans, reminding the planet that the most American export isn’t corn or democracy but unfiltered, algorithmic…
Raleek Brown: The 5’8″ American Who Just Gave the Planet a Pep Talk on Perseverance By Dave’s International Desk | 19 June 2024 Somewhere between the cease-fire negotiations in Rafah and the latest AI-generated apology video from a Fortune-500 CEO, a 19-year-old kid from Mater Dei High—yes, the one whose recruiting profile still lists him…
Gridiron Gluttony: How 25 American College Scores Became the Planet’s Guilty Pleasure By Diego “Dolorous” Morales, Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker While COP28 delegates argued over who gets to sell the last barrel of oil, an arguably more combustible product—American college football—detonated across 25 stadiums last weekend. From the rust-belt cathedrals of the Big Ten to…
Columbia Calling: How South Carolina’s 2024 Football Slate Quietly Mirrors a Fracturing World Order By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk The first thing an overseas observer notices about South Carolina’s freshly released gridiron itinerary is not the games themselves—nobody in Marseille is losing sleep over Furman—but the exquisite way the schedule replicates great-power anxiety. Week…
Boston College vs Stanford: A Duel of Jesuit Guilt and Silicon Valley Optimism on the World’s Most Expensive Stage By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific Let us begin with the obvious: a football game between Boston College and Stanford is not, by any sober metric, a seismic event. It will not move the Shanghai…
Texas State vs Arizona State: A Microscopic Lens on the Macroscopic Mess We Call Civilization By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over Greenland The dispatch arrives, as most do these days, via a cracked iPhone screen glowing in the half-light of a budget airline cabin: Texas State University will face Arizona State University in something…
**The Ghost of Bo Jackson Haunts Columbus, and the World Watches with Popcorn** COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a universe where college football recruiting scandals erupt with the predictability of a Swiss cuckoo clock, the latest twist involving Bo Jackson’s spectral presence at Ohio State has achieved the rare feat of making the entire planet pause…
From the banks of the Mekong to the banks of the… well, the Cedar River, the planet tilts slightly every August as 80,000 corn-fed pilgrims in black-and-gold descend on a town that smells of hog confinement and hope. The Iowa Hawkeyes’ 2024 schedule has just been released, and—believe it or not—this scrap of Midwestern Americana…
