Jabrill Peppers and the Global Theater of One Man’s Hamstring Byline: Helmut van der Linde, filing from a hotel bar in Doha where the Wi-Fi is sponsored by a regime that thinks “ACL tear” is a political slogan. Jabrill Peppers tore his ACL last week. Somewhere in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a franchise that has…
Harrison Smith and the Curious Global Cult of the American Safety Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where Wi-Fi costs more than a decent bottle of Moldovan wine and still drops every time the plane hits a cloud. From this altitude, the spectacle of modern fandom looks remarkably uniform: whether you’re in Lagos, Lyon, or Lahore,…
Nate Landman: The Linebacker Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Punchline If you squint hard enough from the cheap seats of the global amphitheater, Nate Landman’s story resembles the kind of parable the World Economic Forum would commission after three negronis: a South African-born, Colorado-raised tackling machine who now earns his keep in Atlanta, proving that…
Mark Davis, the 69-year-old owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, is currently enjoying the sort of international fame normally reserved for tax-dodging pop stars or small Balkan strongmen. From the neon canyons of Nevada to the neon karaoke bars of Seoul, his silver-and-black hair-helmet has become the unofficial flag of late-stage capitalism—equal parts brand asset…
Cameron Heyward: The Last Man Standing in a League Bent on Self-Immolation By our man in the cheap seats, Brussels Bureau Let us begin with the obvious: Cameron Heyward is a very large human paid to run into other very large humans on behalf of a city whose river once caught fire. This is, on…
Bill Cowher: When a Steel-City Warlord Conquers the World’s Couch By the time Bill Cowher’s gap-toothed snarl first appeared on an NFL sideline in 1992, the planet was already busy dismantling itself elsewhere. The Soviet Union had just officially expired, leaving fifteen orphaned republics to argue over who kept the family nukes. Yugoslavia was auditioning…
Carolina Panthers Depth Chart: The Geopolitical Playbook Hidden Between the Hashmarks By “Vlad the Impaler of Sports Bureaucracy,” Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk The Panthers’ freshly minted depth chart dropped this week like a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in a midsize petro-state—full of euphemisms, passive voice, and the quiet understanding that someone, somewhere,…
Raiders Depth Chart: A Global Power Ranking of Hope, Hubris, and Third-String Linebackers By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Las Vegas—The Raiders released their latest depth chart this week, a tidy Excel sheet that purports to map the hierarchy of 53 men who chase an oblong ball for money while wearing armor. To the…
The Browns’ Depth Chart: A Global Power Struggle in Shoulder Pads By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still jet-lagged from Moldovan border traffic CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the Cuyahoga River and the Sea of Okhotsk, the Cleveland Browns’ depth chart has become the most democratic reading of American anxiety since the last Federal Reserve statement. On every continent…
PARIS – On the surface, the 2024 San Francisco 49ers schedule is a tidy spreadsheet of seventeen autumn Sundays, a few Mondays, one Thanksgiving evening (surely to the delight of tryptophan-dazed uncles coast-to-coast), and the obligatory Saturday cameo in December. Yet in the grander scheme—say, the scheme that keeps the lights on in Singapore sportsbooks,…
Amsterdam, Wednesday – While European bureaucrats argue over the precise circumference of a cucumber and American politicians auction off their dignity in thirty-second television spots, the planet’s most cosmopolitan sport keeps quietly exporting a very particular kind of hope: the multilingual, multi-passport, multi-time-zone wide receiver named Amon-Ra St. Brown. Born in Anaheim to a German…
Eagles Schedule: The 17-Week American Gladiator Calendar the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Watch By the time the NFL’s 2024 Philadelphia Eagles schedule dropped—on a Thursday night, because nothing says urgency like prime-time marketing—the planet was already busy. Tokyo’s Nikkei had closed up 0.4 % on semiconductor gossip, Berlin’s Bundestag was arguing about…
