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…
Arizona vs Kansas State: A Dust-Bowl Derby for the Age of Global Collapse By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific The world’s longest-running reality show—American college football—returns to its regularly scheduled desert melodrama this Saturday, as the Arizona Wildcats host the Kansas State Wildcats in a contest so regionally specific it…
Indiana State Football, or How a 2-9 Season Quietly Explains the Collapse of Western Civilization By “Roving” Roisin MacAllister, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk PARIS—On a drizzly November afternoon along the Seine, the bistros are abuzz with talk of pension strikes, Ukrainian grain corridors, and whether the Sycamores can finally break their 39-game road…
Matthew Golden: The Quarterback Who Makes NATO Look Underfunded By Henrietta “Hank” Voss, Senior Foreign Correspondent ZURICH—Somewhere between the Alps and yet another Davos coffee bar that charges in Swiss francs what most nations spend on vaccines, Matthew Golden is busy redefining the word “projection.” Not the psychological kind—though anyone who’s watched game film of…
The world’s attention, never especially reliable, has momentarily swivelled away from melting ice caps and crypto-billionaires launching themselves into low-orbit ego trips to focus on a more modest spectacle: NC State versus Wake Forest, a football game whose geopolitical reach is roughly equivalent to a well-aimed paper aeroplane landing in the neighbour’s koi pond. Still,…
**The Crimson Empire: How Alabama Football Became America’s Most Successful Export Since Fast Food** While the rest of the world obsesses over actual football—the one played with, you know, feet—America has been quietly perfecting its own version of gladiatorial combat. Nowhere is this spectacle more refined than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the Crimson Tide has…
TALLAHASSEE, Wednesday—Across the globe, diplomats in Geneva fret over carbon thresholds, container ships idle in the Red Sea dodging drones, and the yen wobbles like a freshman kicker after three espresso shots. Yet for one humid Saturday in the Florida panhandle, the planet’s attention pivots to a patch of grass where young men in garnet…
