Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History and Culture

How Miami Forever Changed College Football

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:03:59 GMT

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I’m out of town this weekend, but with Miami once again the number one team in the country heading into this weekend’s game against North Carolina, I figured I’d re-up this piece I wrote for Grantland back in 2013. This piece was written as the Miami legacy was being revisited and revised, most notably by Billy Corben’s rollicking 30 for 30 documentary. I later adapted it for my book. I think it (mostly) still holds up today.

There’s a moment that arises after the kick slips a couple of feet wide to the right, after the Ibis Formerly Known as Howard the Duck charges onto the field, after the camera captures the now-iconic image of a flummoxed Bobby Bowden, hands on hips, head swiveling from side to side like a man who has just watched the last crosstown bus of the evening pass him by. There’s a moment that crops up at the end of 1991’s iteration of the Game of the Century, after Keith Jackson utters the seven words that would come to define Florida college football for more than a decade — “It’s up … missed it to the right!” — and after the ABC broadcast gives way to several seconds of ambient noise. It is a moment I find fascinating, and it arrives when Jackson speaks up again, after Miami’s entire sideline, along with what seems like half the population of Coral Gables, fans out across the landscape of Florida State’s Doak Campbell Stadium in celebration of an imminent 17-16 victory over the Seminoles. And what Jackson says is such a brilliant single-sentence summation of the Hurricanes’ decade of college football dominance that I’m surprised Michael Irvin hasn’t had it copyrighted, printed up on bumper stickers, and distributed at every Foot Locker from Hollywood to Homestead.

“Miami players are all over the field, they’re going to be penalized for it,” Jackson says. “But ‘So what?’ I’m sure is their attitude.”

It was November 16, 1991, in Tallahassee, Florida, one of the last afternoons of the Miami dynasty. There were scandals in progress and scandals waiting to be unveiled, scandals involving purveyors of sexually explicit rap lyrics and bounty payments and the manipulation of Pell Grant funds; by ’91, the program was on the cusp of deteriorating from a revolutionary force into an anarchic state, thereby fulfilling all the racially tinged prophecies of sports columnists who viewed the Miami Hurricanes as a metaphor for the coarsening of American culture throughout the ’80s. Howard Schnellenberger and his dynamic mustache had departed for the professional ranks, giving way to the elegant coiffure of Jimmy Johnson, who departed for the professional ranks, giving way to Dennis Erickson, a passive leader who was simply not equipped to maintain control of a program that had been built on a foundational attitude of So what? (Erickson, too, would soon depart for the professional ranks.)

By 1991, one might argue, there was no realistic way to control a program that had been designed to subvert the system itself. The Hurricanes had already slapped old-fashioned notions of sportsmanship in the face during the previous year’s Cotton Bowl: Amid a 46-3 rout of Texas, they racked up more than 200 yards in penalties. 1991, school officials insisted, would be the year Miami “cleaned itself up,” conforming to the anti-celebration rules the NCAA instituted after the Cotton Bowl. And yet those Hurricanes were still boisterous and wild and kind of great, and what had Florida State done at that point but co-opted Miami’s institutional bluster in order to lure the same base of recruits?

This game — which would come to be known, in the annals of Florida football, as Wide Right I — would clear a path to Miami’s fourth national championship in nine years. And the first thing you notice when you watch the highlights of Wide Right I is the ferocity; the number of hits that would be flagged today as excessive and dangerous is near astronomical. The second thing you notice is that time has not dimmed the recognition that this was incredibly advanced football.

There were, as Dick Enberg noted in his introduction to one Miami game, “high-tech pro-style offenses” and players on both sides who were “destined for NFL glory.” In fact, the FSU-Miami clashes of that era were the first time I can recall watching a college game that felt utterly professional: The execution, the speed, the talent level. And I lamented this at the time; I remember thinking that the state of Florida was blurring the line between college and pro so completely that in another 20 years we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

But now I look back, and I see the choreography and showmanship, and I watch Miami’s players swarming that field in the final seconds in a purposeful subversion of the NCAA’s wishes, and I wonder if this particular Game of the Century was just so utterly progressive that we can only fully appreciate it in retrospect.

II.

I can pinpoint the very moment that the Miami football program became a true threat to the established social order of college football, because I was trick-or-treating. It was Halloween of 1981; I don’t recall my costume, but I’m guessing it had something to do with football, because it usually did. We were hustling from door to door, thrusting our outstretched pillowcases at the waists of neighbors toting bowls of Hershey’s miniatures, and in the process we would continually ask the score. No one needed to be told what score; it was a Saturday night in State College, Pennsylvania, and the Penn State Nittany Lions were ranked No. 1 in the country, playing on the road at Miami. In any other circumstance, I would have been home watching the game; it was a case of football versus candy, and in that moment, I’m ashamed to admit that I chose Mr. Goodbar.

College Football Games of the Century

History tells me there were 32,000 people in the Orange Bowl that night, amid a driving rainstorm. The home team’s quarterback was Jim Kelly, a junior from a small Pennsylvania town; Joe Paterno had once attempted to recruit him as a linebacker, which, in retrospect, might have been a mistake. The Hurricanes had gone 42-67 throughout the 1970s, and they’d never finished better than 6-5 in the decade. Then in came Schnellenberger, who was only 47 in 1981 but already looked like a veteran of the Spanish-American War. The night before the game, speaking to Sports Illustrated‘s William Nack, Schnellenberger said, “I took this job with the idea of building a national champion.” He said he hoped Miami’s athletic program would someday compare with those of Southern Cal and Notre Dame and Penn State; he said if Miami could win this game, the country would know the Hurricanes were for real.

Miami won 17-14, and I probably don’t need to tell you the rest of the story. You can catch Billy Corben’s 30 for 30 film (the most enjoyable exercise in ’80s-based propaganda I’d seen since the original Red Dawn), or you can read Bruce Feldman’s ‘Cane Mutiny; I’ve written extensively about the ’87 Fiesta Bowl between Penn State and Miami, and I’ve noted the retroactive absurdity of both Miami being labeled as “evil” simply because they engaged in military-style theatrics, and the retroactive discomfort of a squad whose defensive coordinator turned out to be one of the most notorious pedophiles in modern history being labeled as “the good guys.”

That Miami is the most compelling college football dynasty of the late 20th century is not in dispute here; and I say this as someone who grew up in central Pennsylvania, the nexus of self-righteous Hurricane hatred. One could argue — as others have — that in winning the way they did, the Hurricanes broke down racial stereotypes, and that they inexorably altered the stylistic elements of college football, and that they may have even helped the city of Miami to heal itself amid a decade of turmoil.

But I actually wonder if it goes beyond that. I wonder if the mere presence of a galvanizing force like Miami compelled college football’s staid power brokers to wake up to their own hypocrisies. And I wonder if the Miami Hurricanes are, in some small measure, the reason why we finally have a playoff system.

Read the rest at Grantland.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list, consider becoming a paid subscriber, and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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Ty Cobb, Nathan Fielder, and True Stories That Aren’t True

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 10:03:42 GMT

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In 1961, a writer named Al Stump found himself sitting inside a sprawling hunting lodge in Lake Tahoe with a dying baseball legend named Ty Cobb. The article Stump wrote begins there on a winter day, in the midst of an incoming blizzard, with Cobb insisting they run into town, shoot some craps, see a show, maybe go say hi to Joe DiMaggio, who’s staying at the Riverside Hotel in Reno.

What follows is something straight out of the oeuvre of Hunter S. Thompson: An outrageous portrait of a bitter and seemingly dangerous man who is living out his last days while confessing his sins to the man he had chosen to be his ghostwriter. There is a moment where Cobb fires a gun into the air to silence the partying drunks at a nearby hotel; soon after, Cobb confesses to killing a man in Detroit some fifty years earlier. There is a scene where Cobb threatens a bank president in the middle of the night to stop a five-dollar check; later, Stump sneaks Cobb out of the hospital for a late-night bender at a series of bars and casinos. It is a remarkable piece of writing, infused with verve and stunning detail, and the central problem with this story—which was published in True magazine—is that it may have been a lie.

Al Stump, wrote the author Charles Leerhsen, was a “hard-drinking hack newspaperman” who had never met Ty Cobb until Doubleday assigned him to write Cobb’s biography. He spent a few days with Cobb, and then left to write the book, and what he produced “is filled with anecdotes that read like heavy-handed 1950s B-movie scenarios,” said Leerhsen, who published his own biography of Cobb in 2015. Cobb almost certainly didn’t kill a man in Detroit; Leerhsen argues that he may not have been the virulent racist he’s often portrayed as, and that most of the escapades that Stump wrote about appear dubious at best. Stump ghostwrote Cobb’s autobiography, and sanitized many of the stories he later used in the True article (many of which may have not been true in the first place); Cobb hated the book, and Stump disowned it, too. But Stump had a more colorful story to tell. The article became the legend, and the legend became a movie that built the myth of Ty Cobb as a miserable brawler and bigot, and over time, it became difficult to know where the truth mingled with the lies.

II.

At some point midway through the strange and brilliant Nathan Fielder documentary You Can See Everything, I began to think about all the stories that I’d gotten wrong over the years. It is inevitable, if you do this kind of work for long enough—if you tell stories that other people consume, whether in print or on-screen or between the covers of a book—that you are going to think back on the things you missed, on the angles you took that now seem untenable, on the interviews you did that led you down a cul-de-sac of utter confusion.

I thought about how when I was young, I interviewed a star high-school athlete who had been involved in a confusing and terrible situation that wound up with him standing trial before he got acquitted. I remembered sitting on the bleachers next to a rutted practice field on a humid August afternoon, and I remembered him looking me in the eyes and insisting he’d been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wasn’t sure whether to believe what I was hearing, but I wrote it as if I did. And as You Can See Everything unfolded in a series of absurd and implausible twists, and as the truth became increasingly murky, the only thing that seemed clear was that Fielder had tapped into that same kind of authorial anxiety, where the deeper you dive into a story, the more difficult it becomes to grasp any sort of truth at all.

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Baseball Has Lost Its Middle Class

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:03:41 GMT

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Four years ago, a British magazine called Sight and Sound compiled a list of the one hundred greatest movies ever made. This is something Sight and Sound does every ten years by polling critics, scholars, curators and a vast array of film buffs and film snobs; in most of the previous polls, Citizen Kane was number one, though it had recently been displaced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But in the 2022 poll, Vertigo placed second, and Citizen Kane was third; at number one was a movie called Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by a Belgian auteur named Chantal Akerman.

I have not seen Jeanne Dielman (though I have DVRed it at least three times off Turner Classic Movies with the intention of watching it, which is the next best thing). I’m imagining that you, like a number of iconic film writers and directors, haven’t seen it either—and that even if you have, you did not get through all three hours, twenty-one minutes. By all accounts, this is a deliberately tedious film that captures the quotidian life of a woman who also happens to be a sex worker; I am told there are multiple scenes of the main character doing laundry and peeling potatoes. It is the kind of movie that people who watch movies for a living believe is groundbreaking and important and celebrates the diversity of film, even if it is unwatchable at times.

And this is kind of how I feel about seeing the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series.

II.

At a fundamental level, you have to admire what the Rays have done—how, over the last decade or more, that they’ve regularly crafted a competitive baseball team out of spare parts on a shoestring budget. Like me, you may absolutely despise their aesthetics—has there ever been a franchise in any sport whose uniforms have been so consistently awful for two decades?—and you may be repulsed by their circus tent of a stadium, and you may cringe when you see that video of an ALCS watch party that itself feels like a scene from a low-budget independent film...

…but you also have to kind of appreciate a team that can make the World Series with a collection of anonymous dudes who could almost certainly go unrecognized at the Hooters in Clearwater.

One of the Rays’ best pitchers, Nick Martinez, is a 36-year-old journeyman who spent four years in Japan, hurling sinkers for the Nippon-Ham Fighters. Their best position player, Junior Caminero, is a 23-year-old who they stole in a trade with Cleveland when he was 19, and, presuming baseball’s fundamental economic model doesn’t change, I imagine he will leave Tampa for a more lucrative future in a larger market. The Rays’ appearance in this World Series is miraculous, and that has led a number of people to argue that their very presence in this series, alongside the Milwaukee Brewers team that throttled the billion-dollar blockbuster known as the Los Angeles Dodgers, proves that baseball operates just fine without any kind of salary cap.

But I’m not sure I buy into that logic. I think it might be a sign of dysfunction if the only options for a team to win are to blow out the budget or to scrape along with a series of outcasts and hope it comes together every few years. I think it shows that baseball has essentially adopted the dysfunctional modern logic of the movie business; as with so many other things, I wonder if it proves that baseball has hollowed out its own middle.

III.

I would argue (and I am certainly not alone in this) that one of the best films of the 21st century is Michael Clayton, the 2007 legal thriller written and directed by Tony Gilroy and starring George Clooney, about a jaded lawyer-turned-fixer who stumbles across a massive cover-up. Michael Clayton is an homage to the kind of movie that built out the new Hollywood in the 1970s; it is a subversive mid-budget thriller with a brilliant script that was made for just over twenty million dollars. Here, according ’s Substack, is a list of other mid-budget films that once defined the genre: The Insider, A Few Good Men, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Erin Brockovich, The Firm, Eyes Wide Shut, Basic Instinct, Jerry Maguire, The Fugitive, and Heat.

Each of those films adhered to a simple formula: Hire a star (or stars), and let a great writer and/or director cook. Those movies struck a balance between big and small and forged a product that was both intelligent and compelling. And while those kinds of movies have not disappeared entirely, they have become harder and harder to find. Either you blow it out and make Avatar or Jurassic World, or you pull a film like Backrooms or Obsession straight off YouTube in an attempt to forge a new kind of populist auteur system. That leaves very little for those of us who grew up watching the movies that split the difference. And I would argue that this roughly mirrors what baseball has become in the post-Moneyball era: The teams that attempt to occupy some middle ground between big-budget and small-budget, like my increasingly embarrassing San Francisco Giants, have no easy place to fit in.

Blame that on the Giants and their ilk, if you wish, and on the decision to overpay certain players that both the Rays and the Brewers decided weren’t worth the money. Make the case, as many hardcore baseball people will, that everyone could be as smart and savvy as the Tampa Bay Rays, if only they tried (or even make the case that the Brewers are kind of a mid-budget team with a legitimate superstar, though they rank in the bottom half of the league in payroll). But I don’t know; this is still the World Series, and while I am happy that the Dodgers’ 2026 iteration of a third-rate Avengers film has face-planted, I’d like to see at least a few movie stars on both sides in late October. I’d like to believe a level playing field would cull the extremes and bring back the mid-budget team, and if that means instituting a salary cap, then I’m fine with it. Maybe this will be an enjoyable World Series after all, television ratings be damned. But I’m not sure it really resolves anything.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list, consider becoming a paid subscriber, and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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College Football Has Become New Coke

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:03:42 GMT

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Sometimes you have no choice but to set the opening of your newsletter at a supermarket in Sioux City, Iowa, in the summer of 1985. Now, you may not be familiar with the Boulevard Food Store at Sunset Plaza, and having never once been to Sioux City, neither am I1, but that is not the point. The point is that what took place inside that supermarket on a blissful July day in the city once known as Little Chicago—not necessarily because Sioux City bore any resemblance to its more sprawling Midwestern sibling, but because it, too, became a hot spot to score some hootch and run the numbers during prohibition—was a prime example of the hot journalistic topic of the moment. What took place inside that supermarket was a taste test that proved human beings may be fundamentally irrational, but they sure know what they want.

It wasn’t just happening in Sioux City. They were doing it all over the country that spring and summer, from Jackson, Mississippi to Wilmington, Delaware. And so the local newspaper, The Sioux City Journal, sent a reporter named Marcia Poole out to that Boulevard Food Store at Sunset Plaza, where she corralled forty-eight participants of varied ages and demographics (as much as demographics might have varied in Sioux City in 1985), set a series of unlabeled paper cups before them, and subjected them to experimentation. In one of those paper cups was Coca-Cola’s new formula; in the other cup was Coke’s old formula. And over the course of the day, Poole discovered what a lot of other people had come to learn: Without the label on the can, most people preferred the taste of the New Coke to the taste of the Old Coke.

This was happening in taste tests from coast to coast; these kinds of blind trials were the very reason that Coke had decided to change its formula in the first place. But most people refused to accept the results. They engaged in an open revolt that had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with familiarity. They didn’t care if New Coke was somehow objectively more pleasing to their own taste buds; they wanted to believe, as consumers, that they had agency, and that people in power were actually listening to them. If they were fans of a product, shouldn’t they have a say in the future of that product? “What they’re saying is, ‘I don’t care how this other product tastes,’” one local Coca-Cola bottler told The Sioux City Journal. “‘I just want what I’m used to—I want it back.’”

New Coke won nearly every taste test it was subjected to, and yet, according to a survey taken at nearly the same time as the Great Boulevard Food Store Experiment, only 30 percent of customers would admit to liking New Coke. And as The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel astutely noted, those poll numbers are nearly identical to the way consumers of college football feel right now about a sport that has succeeded in willfully ignoring the fans of its product for nearly as long as Coca-Cola has existed.

II.

Before we address the remarkable whiplash of college football’s sudden and bizarre embrace of a 24-team playoff—and the notion that, in the course of just a few short years, without any real input from the people who watch the sport, we’ve vaulted from scarcity to abundance—we should go back to the beginning. Pretty much everything about college football’s origin story is weird and unsavory; that’s part of what makes it so quintessentially American. But the thing about the ancient history of college football is that there was a time a century ago when people didn’t really care about how it ended. Not really; not in any contentious way. Nobody argued about who was “number one,” the legendary Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins observed in his book Saturday’s America, because they were busy striking for an eight-hour workday and inventing the airplane. They watched the games, and they moved on to more important things. And then at some point, our societal expectations changed.

In the 1920s, an economics professor at Illinois named Frank G. Dickinson developed a mathematical formula for ranking teams. Word got out to a clothing manufacturer in Chicago who wanted to reward the top Big Ten (then Big Nine) teams, and that trickled down to Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who suggested that maybe they could present a national trophy that would conveniently be backdated to be awarded to Notre Dame for the 1924 season. And then the nerds took over, and the sportswriters co-opted from the nerds, and the Associated Press began officially ranking teams starting in 1936. All of this was good for college football, because it established The Argument, the idea that college football’s exceptionalism rested in its stubborn refusal to solve any of its problems in any definitive way. College football was an “amateur” pursuit (even though it wasn’t) with no real number one (even though everyone with even the faintest case would lay claim to number one), and that was part of what made it unique. This, you might say, was College Football Classic, which leads us to this remarkable quote, uttered in 1984, just a few months before New Coke was introduced to the world.

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Farewell to the Dodgers, the Defining Team of a Broken Age

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:03:58 GMT

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Let us engage in the bold presumption that it’s actually all over. Let us cross our fingers and pray that the Los Angeles Dodgers have not invested some small percentage of their surplus revenue in a team of physicists who have determined a method to bend back time itself. Let us hope that we can actually embrace reality in this world where nothing feels real anymore. Let us believe that the Dodgers have really, truly, actually been swept by the very, very good Milwaukee Brewers. In the process, the Dodgers’ incredibly expensive T-800 may have gone permanently on the fritz; their French Laundry tasting menu of a pitching staff curdled amid the heat of October, and many of the free agents they poached from less fortunate franchises wilted under the pressure. Their deferred money and complex financial trickeration could purchase two straight World Series championships, but it seems incapable of buying a third.

So, presuming all of this to be true, let us take a deep breath and ask ourselves, How will history judge this moment?

The answer, of course, is through the lens of money. There is no way now, and there will never be another way, to think about the 2024-2026 Los Angeles Dodgers without thinking about money. Say what you will about their front-office savvy and their ability to develop a first-class farm system; the money they paid to build their roster is what will always stand out when this team is remembered two or three decades from now. The disparity of the money the Dodgers were willing to shower upon every free agent who even dared to glance in their general direction is what came to define them.

It’s all very weird, isn’t it? I can’t think of a team in any sport in my lifetime that has been more purely defined by such a massive financial disparity. There are dynasties in football, but those dynastic teams work within a system guided by a salary cap; even the NBA’s era of superteams unfolded under a similar system that offered certain guardrails. The New York Yankees of the late 1970s are a mere pittance by comparison to the Dodgers’ gilded roster:

In case you’re wondering, $330,000 in 1977 would be roughly $1.8 million in today’s dollars; according to Baseball Reference, the only players on the Dodgers roster making less than that are role players or young players who remain under team control. Most of the Dodgers’ regular starters make nearly ten times that number. And look, I am not another middle-aged man here to grouse about overpaid ballplayers; I recognize that the economics of baseball have shifted in weird ways over the course of the past fifty years, and that those players are going to grasp for all the market can bear. But for all of this imbalance to coalesce right now, when government officials are openly embracing complex pay-to-play schemes, when institutions and systems have become increasingly enshittified by the relentlessness of the profit motive, when inequality is the central economic issue defining America itself…I’m not sure if there’s going to be any other way to remember this Dodgers team than as a proxy for the current moment. You can argue that this is not fair, but perhaps this is the metaphorical asterisk you gather in the history books for allowing your franchise to mirror the inequality of society itself.

II.

I don’t know where baseball goes from here. Once this World Series ends, I don’t know if we’ll see another game at all until 2028. But I’m not sure there’s ever been a more stark metaphor for where we are right now than the 2026 Dodgers, who were so deep and so wealthy and so utterly convinced of their own superiority that they spent most of the year screwing around and resting half their roster and still won a hundred games. And then when it mattered, when they were on the verge of solidifying their dynasty, they completely choked on the fumes of their own arrogance.

On Wednesday night in Los Angeles, a 31-year-old journeyman named Jake Bauers—a career .223 hitter who is in the midst of what is by far the best season of his career—culminated an 11-pitch at-bat with a home run off Blake Snell, who is one of the best pitchers of this era. But perhaps the most remarkable part of Bauers’ story, as the always-entertaining points out, is that Bauers nearly quit baseball, and then decided to come back because his wife was pregnant with their second child and they needed the health insurance. Here was a career spare part in search of a lower deductible hitting a dagger of a home run off a pitcher who could afford to purchase an entire health-care system.

I’ve said it before and been completely wrong, so I’ll add a caveat here: I don’t know if Jake Bauers’ home run qualifies as a vibe shift, particularly when baseball appears to be on the verge of descending into a dark era with its fate in the hands of one of the slimiest and most untrustworthy commissioners it’s ever known. But either way, there is no separating these Los Angeles Dodgers from the moment that helped create them. They are a dynasty built purely on money, and I can see a future in which they will be viewed entirely as a byproduct of an age of stark inequality that most of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to forget.

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Fifty Years Ago, Football Went on Trial. What Have We Learned Since?

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:05:07 GMT

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AP/via New York Times

Fifty years ago, on an untamed and dirt-caked football field in Oakland, a Raiders safety named George Atkinson charged toward Steelers receiver Lynn Swann. The action on the play was happening elsewhere, a pass from Terry Bradshaw to Franco Harris, and yet Atkinson kept charging. He approached Swann from behind and threw a forearm shiver into his chin, a sucker punch that knocked Swann to the ground and left him concussed.

There was no penalty on the play, because none of the officials had seen what happened. Steelers coach Chuck Noll was furious; in the AFC Championship game the year before, Atkinson had also knocked Swann out of the game with a concussion, and at a press luncheon on the Monday after the Raiders game, Noll wondered aloud where we were meant to draw the line between football and antisocial behavior. Atkinson, Noll proclaimed, was part of a “criminal element” in the league, a group of athletes who repeatedly crossed that line, and who deserved to get thrown out of the league. And this proclamation spurred a remarkable chain of events that led professional football to literally go on trial.

First, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle sent a letter to Atkinson, in which he fined Atkinson $1,500, and wrote:

Our sport obviously involves intense physical contact, but it requires of all players discipline and control and remaining within the rules.

Rozelle then wrote a letter to both Noll and Raiders coach John Madden, expressing his concern that the Steelers-Raiders rivalry was on the verge of “erupting into something approaching pure violence”; and then he wrote a separate letter to Noll, noting that he had violated a bylaw which prohibits criticizing an opposing team or player, and fining him a thousand dollars. That letter led Steelers owner Dan Rooney to dash off an angry reply; meanwhile, George Atkinson was convinced that Chuck Noll had slandered him by referring to him as a criminal, and filed a lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages. And that led to one of the most bizarre trials in the history of professional sports.

II.

What took place in a U.S. district courtroom in San Francisco in the summer of 1977, wrote Sports Illustrated’s William Oscar Johnson, was “so beyond the realm of common sense and ordinary imagination that it might have been the creation of some mad comic producer—a cross, say, between Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade.”

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Brock Purdy Is the ABBA of Quarterbacks

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:04:14 GMT

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Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group

In 1976, the Swedish band known as ABBA released a pair of albums: a Greatest Hits collection and a new record called Arrival. ABBA was already a global pop behemoth by then, winners of the Eurovision Song Contest a couple years earlier, an impeccably polished pop group whose exponential sales were matched only by the degree to which they managed to crawl under the skin of every rock critic this side of Gothenburg. In his review of Greatest Hits, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote of its appeal to “Americans with an attraction to vacuums, late capitalism, and satellite TV;” in his review of Arrival, Christgau openly mused about how to keep them from landing in America before they further poisoned the culture. (Later, Christgau would famously write of ABBA, “We have met the enemy and they are them.”)

That same year, thousands of miles from Stockholm, a man named Paul Salata came up with a ridiculous and performative idea. Then again, Paul Salata specialized in ridiculous and performative ideas: He was the kind of guy who hired a marching band to serenade his wife on her birthday, realized he’d promised to feed the band afterward, and sent his daughter to McDonald’s to buy a hundred burgers, a hundred milkshakes and a hundred orders of fries while an array of tubas and clarinets crammed into his house.1 Salata was also a former professional football player, and every year he and his family attended the NFL draft in New York City, where he reunited with old friends and schmoozed with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle while answering the phones that relayed the picks from team headquarters to draft headquarters.

One day, Paul Salata found himself wondering why the first few draft picks wound up getting all the media attention. If the goal was merely to make it to the NFL, wasn’t it irrelevant where you were actually picked? Wasn’t it a minor miracle just to get drafted at all? And in that case, why not fete the last pick in the draft with a weeklong celebration of himself, just like he was the first pick in the draft? Salata brought the idea to Rozelle, and Rozelle loved it, and in that moment, the concept of Mr. Irrelevant was born, a celebration of the sheer absurdity and randomness of the draft itself. And then in 2022, shortly after Paul Salata’s death, Mr. Irrelevant evolved into something more; Mr. Irrelevant became a reminder that, in the moment, the critical consensus is often wildly incorrect.

II.

I have a theory about Brock Purdy, in part because it is my patriotic duty to have a take on Brock Purdy, and in part because I have watched Brock Purdy play football nearly every week of an NFL season since he became Mr. Irrelevant in 2022. My theory has nothing to do with Purdy’s ability to play quarterback, because at this point, it is clear that he has become one of the best quarterbacks in all of professional football. No, my theory is more about why Purdy has become one of the most oddly polarizing figures in the NFL, despite possessing a personality that would suggest the exact opposite. My theory is about why certain people still refuse to believe that Brock Purdy could be on his way to becoming a transcendent NFL quarterback.

My theory is that Brock Purdy is the ABBA of quarterbacks.

It is not an airtight analogy, I know. But bear with me here, because at the very least, I swear this column will end at some point. There are two things that I think work against Purdy’s reputation, and the first is that he does not look like a great quarterback. He does not fit the archetype. Think about a prototype NFL quarterback, and what comes up? You picture someone ruggedly handsome, preternaturally cool, and periodically iconoclastic. You picture Namath and Favre; you think of Montana and Starr. You see Len Dawson inhaling on a cigarette in the halftime locker room; you remember a swaggering John Elway helicoptering in mid-air or a fearless Steve Young weaving through defenders as he desperately dodges yet another concussion. What you do not think of is this guy:

At that age, I imagine Tom Brady was already berating his tight ends and setting the stage for an adult life that would totter between brilliance and misery; at that age, I imagine Aaron Rodgers was already burrowing into conspiracy theories about Area 51. But Brock Purdy has none of that edge. Brock Purdy still looks almost exactly like he did in the picture above, so much so that people regularly wonder if he ever has to shave at all.

Now, here is the cover of ABBA’s Arrival album:

I guess that is technically a helicopter, but I have to admit, I always presumed it was meant to be a spaceship—as if these clean-cut Euros had arrived outside of Topeka in order to snatch our souls from our bodies and return them to their home planet of Stepford. I imagine this imagery, as much as the music, had to do with why critics like Christgau reviled ABBA so much amid the grungy aura of the 1970s: They were the antithesis of the rock-and-roll archetype, a scrubbed-looking band that recorded polished (or as Christgau and contemporary critics would argue, soulless) pop songs. In real time, it was hard to get your head around the idea that many of those songs were nearly flawless in their construction. And it is odd, in retrospect, to think about how this perfection actually worked against them.

III.

And this brings me to the second thing that works against Brock Purdy’s reputation: That—in large part because he was the last pick of the 2022 NFL draft—he must somehow be a “system quarterback,” a Stepford child engineered by his coach, Kyle Shanahan, into an impossibly polished product. Take away those production values, people ask, and what is Brock Purdy, anyway? And here is my counterargument:

Go ahead and tell me that’s not a perfect pop song. Does it matter how much it was produced or engineered, nearly fifty years after the fact? Does it matter if it cuts against the archetypes that formed Christgau’s taste profile in the late 1970s? Not at all. The point is that this song is absolutely mind-blowing; it does exactly what it needs to do to work at a high level, and anyone who cannot appreciate the brilliance of it—and of much of ABBA’s back catalogue, for that matter—is lying to themselves at this point. And you can say the same about this guy:

That is the only way I know how to describe what Brock Purdy has done so far this season: He plays like a quarterback who has complete command of his own unique brand of artistry. He never does too little, and he never does too much. It doesn’t even matter at this point what can be attributed to his coach, and what can be attributed to Purdy; far beyond ABBA, this the equivalent of the marriage of every great producer and every great band in modern history, and it is wondrous to behold. I don’t know how long it will last, but I am going to enjoy it while I can, because it is a reminder that there are times when the critics and the skeptics get it entirely wrong. Sometimes, the enemy is not them; sometimes, the enemy is us.

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The Raiders Are (Maybe) Good Again. But They'll Never Be the Raiders Again.

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:04:19 GMT

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In 1964, the Oakland Raiders and Houston Oilers played an exhibition football game in Las Vegas. This was, not surprisingly, the brainchild of Raiders general manager and coach Al Davis, the iconoclastic face of a rebellious franchise in what was then an insurgent organization known as the American Football League. Las Vegas was a city built and run by outlaws and renegades and skimmed by the mob; the Raiders and Las Vegas were an ideal match, the dual avatars of America’s darkest and most masochistic urges. The game was sponsored by a local businessman who owned a hotel that was actually run by Moe Dalitz, who had ties to a mob syndicate in Cleveland; it was largely a success, and yet for decades, this was the only major professional football game ever played in Las Vegas, a city that the NFL (for obvious reasons) wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

For the next several decades, as the Raiders bounced from Oakland to Los Angeles and back to Oakland again, they became the most recalcitrant franchise in American sports, the Badasses of the league, their image defined less by the city they played in and more by the idiosyncratic persona of one man who was repeatedly determined to defy the demands of the establishment. Before the AFL and NFL merged, Davis served a brief stint as the AFL’s commissioner and fostered a grudge against NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that would last for the remainder of each man’s life. Davis was part of the NFL, but he stood apart from the NFL itself, the face of a franchise that took pride in its continued obstinance.

Nobody told Al Davis what to do, which is why he drafted a left-handed quarterback named Ken Stabler when a number of other teams wouldn’t; it was why he embraced a series of reclamation projects with troubled pasts, many of whom became some of the best players in franchise history; and it was why he sued his own league and then testified against that league in court. The Raiders were so unique that they literally inspired amateur poetry. “Let me just say this, young man,” Davis told one of his draftees, a lineman named Harry Schuh, whom he had once hidden away in a Vegas casino during the war for talent between the AFL and NFL1. “Anything good in this life is worth cheating for.”

At some point Davis could not avoid the inevitable fate that awaits every cultural insurgent, from Castro to Trump: He got old. His ideas grew stale. The Raiders slowly became a parody of themselves. Davis grew enamored with a problematic quarterback named JaMarcus Russell; he spent first-round draft picks on wide receivers who could run fast and couldn’t do much of anything else. Fifteen years ago this week, Al Davis died and effectively left the team to his son Mark, who inherited all of his father’s weird energy and none of his charisma. And as the Raiders struggled to figure out what they would become in the wake of the death of the man who defined them, Mark Davis chose to move his team from Oakland to Las Vegas, to a city that, just like the Raiders, was in the midst of its own burgeoning identity crisis.

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Everything Is Getting Dumber. Even Insurance Commercials.

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:03:44 GMT

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I was watching my alma mater play a college football game last Saturday, which meant I was already mired in a deep state of annoyance. They were playing badly, and as the afternoon dragged on, it kept getting worse. Soon, they would choke away the game in a sequence of events so absurd and improbable that I cannot even explain what happened, partly because none of it made any sense, and partly because by that time I was drinking bourbon straight from the bottle.

The game was long, because every college football game is roughly the running time of a Christopher Nolan movie now, if Christopher Nolan movies were interrupted every seven minutes by the appearance of a hairball-shaped third-string Muppet whose existence was conjured by a couple of shroomed-out ad executives who spent an afternoon holding deep philosophical discussions with a shag carpet. And so I had plenty of time to think. And since I did not particularly want to think about football, and because I was in a state of desperation and despair and I was almost out of bourbon, I began to think about insurance commercials.

Like all fans of televised sports, I have spent roughly forty-two percent of my adult life watching insurance commercials. I imagine if I had used that time productively, I might have written a sequel to Infinite Jest by now. Instead, I got to know a British lizard. Really, that’s all football is these days: Ten minutes of action surrounded by four hours of Flo. And I know television commercials during sporting events have always been ubiquitous, and I know television commercials have always appealed to the basest human instincts as a way to attract our attention. But like everything else in America, they appear to be getting subtly dumber and more desperate for attention. And the moment it hit me was when I watched this particular insurance commercial:

That is an Allstate ad that was supposedly filmed at my alma mater, Penn State University, though I imagine it was probably shot at a soundstage in Burbank. That said, I give credit to Allstate for pandering; it obviously caught my attention. This is one in a series of ads set on college campuses and at college football games, built around the theme of Check First, in which people do the “smart” thing—checking Allstate for insurance rates, like college students so often do organically and without any kind of brand-driven prompting, seriously—and then they do something so unbelievably cruel and/or patently idiotic that it completely invalidates any credibility they might have accrued for thinking to purchase insurance in the first place.

There is one ad set at a Michigan football game where a fan literally steals cotton candy from a child. And while this, to be fair, is my default belief about the ethics of most Michigan fans, rampant theft from the youth of America doesn’t seem like something that one of America’s elite public universities should be readily endorsing (also, is there a functioning adult who actually enjoys eating cotton candy?). There is another one set at an Alabama football game, in which a group of Crimson Tide players get off the team bus—never mind that most of those players appear to be old enough to qualify for Medicare—and some dude shouts High Tide instead of Roll Tide, because he apparently traveled straight from the surface of Uranus to Tuscaloosa. There is one where a Texas student lets an 1,800-pound steer run loose while taking a selfie (he literally had one job!), and there is one where a young Duke fan meets his girlfriend’s family, only to realize they’re North Carolina fans, which leads me to wonder:

How do you actively date a girl to the point where you get invited to her house for a Duke-Carolina game without ever discussing your rooting interests? Is the degradation of the youth of America so complete that they now speak only in emojis?

II.

And then there is this Penn State commercial. The conceit is that a young woman, presumably a college student, attends a football game, posts a picture on social media with the school mascot, and, in a classic Gen Z trope, somehow doesn’t account for the possibility that her boss might be following her on social media, while she also uses Allstate to check rates on car insurance. And you may be shocked to learn that amid this dramatic zenith, there are plot holes large enough to drive an uninsured F-150 straight through them.

Plot Hole A: First, this is a college football game, which means it’s being played on a Saturday afternoon. Second, the lead character is presumably a college student, and since I grew up in the town where this ad is supposedly “set,” I am aware that it consists of a series of classroom buildings and fraternities surrounded by literally thousands of sandwich shops. Therefore, my deduction is that she works a retail job at one of these hero establishments, in which case, how much does she really care about losing her gig slinging ham and cheese in the first place? It’s not like she’s missing out on developing mRNA vaccines on a Saturday afternoon.

Plot Hole B: There is literally nothing going on in this town during a football game other than the football game. Therefore, her “sickness” excuse would already appear flimsy to her boss, unless he is a complete idiot. Also, did he really need an additional employee on a Saturday afternoon? What is the demand level for meatball subs when literally the entire town is at the game?

Plot Hole C: As friend of Throwbacks Darian Somers points out, the wi-fi at Penn State games is absolutely terrible, so how in the hell would our lead character even be able to post on social media at all? How are we supposed to trust a company built on trust if it has so little faith in us?

III.

Now you might ask yourself why any of this matters, and honestly, that’s entirely correct. But this is my newsletter, so I’m going to try to convince you anyway. Here’s my case: I think the insurance commercial is kind of an interesting gauge of where we are as a culture, mostly because I spend six hours each week consuming them between occasional breaks to watch a quarterback throw a three-yard bubble screen. I believe what Allstate is counting on is that the logic of the idea has become entirely irrelevant, because most of us are never paying attention to anything anyhow. The only aim of the commercial now is to somehow demand our attention, and apparently insurance companies have decided the best way to do that is with quick comic hooks that make no sense if you ever bother to think about them. (And I guess the fact that I’m writing this means it kind of worked.)

There was a time when insurance companies utilized a fundamental American tactic: They scared the living shit out of us, like in this ad from the 1970s:

But then these companies realized that no one cares about insurance enough to feel scared. They realized that we only buy insurance because we have to, and we don’t care about it otherwise, and that the best way to differentiate themselves was to saturate the one thing we enjoy—football—with stilted humor and omnipresent recurring characters. This is how we wound up with Jake and Flo and the Gecko and something that resembles the tennis ball your golden retriever lost under the deck six years ago. And now we live in an age where we’re so distracted by our devices that we’re not actually paying attention to anything or abiding by any social order, and these companies have decided the best way to pawn insurance is to sell us on our own stupidity.

In a way, I kind of admire them for it. A year from now, I will not remember which company created these ads, but I will remember the fact that they repeatedly insulted my intelligence while prolonging the game for an extra four hours. Kudos to them for embodying the spirit of America in 2026. High Tide.

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The Greatest Postseason in History Was Also the Beginning of the End of Baseball As We Know It

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:04:02 GMT

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“Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The ‘golden age of sports,’ the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.”—Ken Dryden

II.

The way I remember it, I was at a bar mitzvah the night the ball trickled through Bill Buckner’s legs. That is my first tell, and it leads to my first disclaimer, which is that I am fully aware the 1986 Major League Baseball postseason occurred at the optimal time in my childhood. I imagine that’s part of the reason why it remains, for me, the zenith of the sport in my lifetime, and the peak of the last golden age for baseball. But also: When you look back on it with four decades of hindsight, you realize just how insane it all was, and you wonder if you were merely lucky enough to live through one of the greatest months in baseball history at exactly the right time. It wasn’t only Buckner; it began weeks before that, with a pair of championship series where crazy shit just kept happening, over and over again. There was this:

And there was this:

And, of course, there was this, with the Red Sox trailing the American League Championship series 3 games to 1:

All of this theater was narrated by a handful of the greatest voices in broadcast history—Keith Jackson, Al Michaels, Vin Scully—and all of it was performed by some of the most wondrous archetypes in modern baseball history. There was the seemingly unhittable pitcher who may or may not have been scuffing baseballs to make his split-fingered fastball drop off the table; there was the young rookie straight out of Disneyland who suffered a bizarre injury that sent him to the hospital as the ALCS reached its breaking point; there was the team with another unhittable pitching phenom that was both buoyed and weighed down by an imaginary curse named after a long-dead icon; and there were, of course, the New York Mets, Doc and Darryl and Dykstra and Hernandez, the swaggering id of their home city when materialism was all the rage.

There are moments when the alchemy of sports reaches a symphonic crescendo, and October of 1986 was one of those moments. Saturday, October 25: We came home from that bar mitzvah just in time for me to catch the late innings of Game 6, and everyone else went to sleep, and I’m not sure I even sat down until it was over. This, for me, at my age, was as good as baseball could possibly get; it appeared to be a sport that had attained a perfect equilibrium, with rich characters and competitive balance. And it wasn’t until years later that I began to understand the way everything was already shifting under the surface.

III.

In September of 1985, a Wall Street financier named Ivan Boesky gave a speech at Cal-Berkeley, built around the idea that it was O.K. to chase after and seek wealth, because wealth was what ultimately enabled you to make a difference in the world. “Greed is all right,” he’d said, according to Haynes Johnson’s cutting chronicle of the 1980s, Sleepwalking Through History. “Everybody should be a little bit greedy…you shouldn’t feel guilty.”

A month later, Major League Baseball’s owners met during the World Series at the headquarters of the Anheuser Busch beer company in St. Louis. They had a new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, a man who had successfully parlayed the Olympics into a money-making machine. Ueberroth, facing a room full of owners who were suddenly terrified about losing money, delivered an analogy straight out of the Boesky playbook. Imagine, Ueberroth told them, you had a red button and a black button in front of you. Imagine that if you pushed the red button, you’d win the World Series, but you’d lose $10 million. And imagine that if you pushed the black button, you’d finish in the middle of the standings, but you’d make a $4 million profit.

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“I Don't Want to Read About Any Injuries in Your Bleeping Newspapers”

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:04:05 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

The Athletic

One Wednesday in the fall of 1988, in the midst of a largely forgettable season, a college football coach named Don James undertook a determined attempt to forge his own alternate reality. Three days before his University of Washington team was set to play USC, a small gathering of newspaper reporters attended practice, where they bore witness as the Huskies’ quarterback, Cary Conklin, banged his right hand into a teammate’s helmet and then watched the rest of practice from the sideline, his thumb wrapped and iced.

Later, those some reporters saw a Washington tailback hobble off with an injury. And when it was over, they did the thing that journalists are paid to do: They asked Don James questions about these injuries. “There were no injuries here today,” James told them. “And I don’t want to read about any in your bleeping newspapers.”

Two of the reporters decided it was their professional obligation to immediately report the truth. When they did, James—an intense, ornery, old-school coach—banned those two newspapers from practice on Thursday. When the ban itself became news, and when James was asked why he didn’t ban everyone from practice, he said, “I’ve got to be loyal to those who were loyal to me.” And even after Conklin played through his injury in Washington’s 28-27 loss to USC—and even after Conklin admitted to reporters that he dislocated his thumb on Wednesday, and that it remained incredibly painful on Saturday—James refused to acknowledge that Conklin had injured his thumb at all.

II.

I suppose I should note the obvious here, which is that Don James is far from the only college coach to resort to strongman tactics in order to mask the truth. For decades, the college coach was the closest thing American sports had to an authoritarian dictator, a figure who presided over his own fiefdom with its own rules and whims, and who therefore felt empowered to declare that the First Amendment did not apply under his (or sometimes her) own roof. There have been hundreds of college coaches throughout the years who, in moments of desperation, retreated into an Orwellian shell in order to protect themselves. There are many who made a good living by continually courting public anger toward the media as a way of boosting their own reputation. Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight, the apotheosis of the tin-pot college coaching totalitarian, essentially froze Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Russ Brown out of press conferences for years (and then fired a blank from a starter pistol at Brown, and somehow didn’t get himself fired for a couple more decades). The current standard-bearer for coaching jerkishness, Lane Kiffin, once banned reporter Scott Wolf from USC practices for accurately reporting that a kicker had undergone surgery.

That relationship has begun to shift amid the new reality of college sports, and as college coaches slowly recognize that they don’t have the same unfettered power as they once did. (It is absurd and infuriating that college football didn’t demand universal transparency about injuries years ago, though that is beginning to change, thanks in large part to the pervasiveness of legalized gambling.) Yet every fall, these same tactics inevitably come back around. Just this week, the University of Maryland, a struggling football program with a struggling coach, reportedly declared that it would no longer allow follow-up questions at press conferences with that coach; down at TCU, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had its credentials rescinded for reporting on an incident that took place in the locker room.

And so these things keep happening, even as they never actually succeed in accomplishing much of anything other than exposing the sheer desperation of those who wield these tactics. It is true that the American public has lost trust in the media, for a variety of reasons, many of which have to do with the deterioration of the business model that propped up journalism for so long; but it’s also true that the vast majority of the American public still believes in the overarching concept of press freedom. Most people can see through the bullshit, even when they might have their own loyalties. Most of them recognize that a coach who fears the truth is a coach who is desperately attempting to mask his own weakness.

III.

After Don James banned the media from his practices, his team lost three of its last five regular season games and failed to make a bowl game for the first time in ten years. “Reporters thought it was bizarre behavior from a mature head coach,” the Associated Press wrote the following year, and a few years later, James’s program reached its peak, sharing a national championship in 1991 before he resigned two years later.

A generation removed from the era of Don James, a pair of Senators introduced an amendment to impending legislation this week that would regulate college sports. The amendment would cap coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year. This is not something that will ever pass; if anything, it could assist in torpedoing the entire bill1. It was more a provocation than an actual policy proposal, but it does raise an interesting question about the balance of power between coaches and players in college sports in this new era. And it comes at a moment when the balance of power in government itself has become so skewed that the whole system has tipped into dysfunction.

That dysfunction is driven by the refuse of those in charge to acknowledge reality; they are, in fact, so desperate to mask the truth that they are selectively attempting to sort the loyal from the disloyal. Yet as long as the First Amendment holds up, those who attempt to value loyalty above truth will continue to expose nothing more than their own shortcomings.

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One of those Senators, Chris Murphy, came across as so arrogant and condescending about this issue during an appearance on Kaitlin Collins’ CNN show last week that I’m not sure he has much credibility here.

Ernie Accorsi (1941–2026) and the Making of the Modern NFL

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:03:56 GMT

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The first time Ernie Accorsi was asked to write a scouting report, he had absolutely no idea how to write a scouting report. He was a former newspaper reporter turned public-relations man, and when he landed a gig with the Baltimore Colts in 1970, he became a scout by default, because that was the way it worked back then. In those years after the NFL-AFL merger, professional football was still in the midst of a transition from a family business into a massive conglomerate, and the full-time scouting staff of the Colts consisted of three people. The gaps were filled in by everyone else in the building, including the team’s equipment manager, and including Accorsi, who found himself sitting next to the team’s scouting director, Upton Bell, at a Penn State-West Virginia football game.

“I’m going to give you a player to watch,” Bell told him. “Don’t ask me any questions. Don’t mention his name. Don’t listen to anybody else in the press box talking about him. Just watch him and give me a report.”

So, Accorsi told me earlier this year, he sat silently and watched. He focused in on a linebacker named Dale Farley, who would wind up getting picked in the third round by the Miami Dolphins in 1971. He wrote what he could, and over the course of the next several years, under the tutelage of Bell—the son of former NFL commissioner Bert Bell—and Bell’s assistant, George Young, Accorsi got an education on the fly. He was with the Colts when the franchise literally got traded for the Los Angeles Rams in 1972; he continued his education under a scout named Joe Thomas, who had helped build the Vikings and Dolphins into powerhouses before arriving in Baltimore. Thomas didn’t have any kind of formalized system beyond a yellow legal pad and his own instincts, but he and Accorsi spent hours together one year when Accorsi’s wife was sick in the hospital and Thomas’s family was in Miami during the season.

Over time, Accorsi—who died last week at the age of 84—began to trust his own instincts. He became an assistant general manager, and then a general manager, a Zelig-like figure who seemed to be present at so many turning points for the NFL throughout the 1980s and beyond, from the John Elway trade to the Eli Manning trade. By the time he retired, he was one of the most universally respected talent evaluators in professional football. And I realized something as I was speaking to Accorsi about all of this history: He was one of the last living bridges between the old NFL and the new NFL, one of the last people with institutional memory of the league’s growth from what the New York Times called “a more homespun, streamlined entity,” into a corporate behemoth.

II.

I spent nearly two hours on the phone with Accorsi (thanks to our mutual friend Dave Jones) for a project that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years with the broadcaster Rich Eisen, who’s been one of the voices of the draft since the early 2000s. It’s a book that’s ostensibly about the history and culture of the NFL draft, but I’m hoping it also serves as a de facto history of the NFL itself, and more broadly, a look at how a small operation grew and evolved over the course of decades into one of the biggest corporations on earth. It’s called Draft Days, it’ll go on sale next March. Here’s the obligatory link to pre-order, and here’s the obligatory shot of the cover...

The NFL draft has indisputably become the off-season Super Bowl, and the biggest event in sports that doesn’t involve an actual sporting event. And on a fundamental level, none of this makes any sense, particularly when you think about what it actually is (a literal recitation of names straight out of a middle-school graduation), and when you look back at what it used to be.

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The Reaction: What Happens If the Cleveland Browns...Actually Start Winning?

Michael Weinreb — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:03:34 GMT

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Three decades ago, in the fall of 1996, the Cleveland Browns ceased to exist. And I know you can argue that this is not technically true; I know you can argue that over the course of the next three years, the Browns retained their name and colors and remained an NFL franchise, even if they did not play any actual football games. But it also is clear that something happened over the course of those three years that led the Browns to become even more of a cursed franchise than they were in the 1980s, when they were literally fumbling away opportunities to win Super Bowls.

When the Browns returned fresh and new in 1999, hope curdled faster than anyone could have imagined. They hired the wrong coach, drafted the wrong quarterback, and fell into an unceasing death spiral that has lasted for more than 25 years. In 2000, their sliding-door selves, the Baltimore Ravens, won a Super Bowl, and everything continued to lurch downhill from there—a ceaseless parade of coaches and quarterbacks, a mudslide of indignity that feels, at this point, as it might be the permanent state of the franchise. Back in 2019, I wrote about the Browns’ two decades of indignity at a seeming moment of hope for the franchise, and how the fan base just kept assuming things had to get better sometime in a league that had been built to encourage parity.

And then somehow, it actually got worse. The Browns ditched their franchise quarterback, Baker Mayfield, presuming he was washed long before he’d reached his expiration date; instead, they brought in DeShaun Watson, a man who landed in Cleveland dragging a series of horrific allegations along with him. Watson was hurt much of the time over the next several seasons, and when he wasn’t hurt, he wasn’t very good. The Browns kept playing quarterback roulette in the draft until their new coach, a man named Todd Monken, decided to stake his future the franchise’s future on Watson.

In normal circumstances, with a normal franchise, Watson and the Browns’ 23-19 win over Mayfield and the Buccaneers on Sunday would arguably have offered the most hopeful moment for Cleveland football this decade. But now, I’m not sure what it means. Watson’s very presence in Cleveland is so utterly distasteful, so thoroughly alienating, that a lot of Browns fans have stopped paying attention to the franchise at all. The fact that national football writers are attempting to portray this as the first chapter in some kind of potential redemption story is so clumsy that it comes across like a parody. But it did raise an interesting question, one that seemed irrelevant up to this moment: What happens if the Browns—after decades of ignominy—do somehow start winning with Watson as their quarterback?

II.

It was, it turned out, a weekend to take stock of moral and ethical compromises. In Oxford, Mississippi, a comically diabolical trickster named Lane Kiffin returned to Ole Miss, the school he’d abandoned roughly nine months earlier, as the head coach of LSU. I’m not sure I’d ever heard a more vociferously angry college football crowd; the noise felt like something straight out of the Roman Colosseum. This is partly because of the emotion that Kiffin arouses; he has long had the most punchable face in college football, and he is so aware of this fact that he has transformed it into his entire identity. So to watch LSU lose to Ole Miss, 32-24, was satisfying in an arc-of-the-moral-universe kind of way.

And yet when it was over, I kind of found myself wondering, What happens now? Does this game really make any difference in the grand scheme of a world where performative assholes like Kiffin have come to dominate the cultural landscape? At least it’s kind of hopeful the way Browns fans have turned on DeShaun Watson; obviously, the allegations against him are far more dire and serious than anything that’s ever been leveled at Kiffin—who is, really, just a performative jerk—and it’s nice to think that even sports fans are willing to draw a line somewhere. But if Watson starts winning? Then the true test arrives.

I am hopeful that Browns fans will stay strong in their approbation (particularly since the odds of Watson actually winning more games than he loses still seems like a long shot). I hope they continue to assert the idea that this is the kind of Faustian bargain that they are not comfortable with, even after three decades of wallowing in absolute desperation. There are certain lines that should never be crossed, and in an era where those lines are crossed every day in America, it would be heartening for Browns fans to recognize that if you lash your hopes to the wrong person, there is no redemption story at all.

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This Is Not a Newsletter About a Naked Woman in a Gambling Ad

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:04:19 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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One day in 1974, Peggy King, an advertising copywriter from Winston Salem, North Carolina, sat in the office she shared with a guy named Dave. Peggy was on her way to becoming a pioneer in the business, a woman who would rise to vice-president of her firm and manage accounts for some of the region’s largest companies; Dave was a disgruntled stoner who drifted from one job to the next in a cloud of smoke, the walking embodiment of an era when the country appeared to have lost its sense of purpose. That afternoon, Dave walked in after lunch “in a sweet-smelling haze,” Peggy told Namath biographer Mark Kriegel; he was worked up over the demands of the firm’s creative director, who was searching for a way to energize a tired brand, Hanes Beautymist pantyhose.

And so Dave, bereft of ideas, turned to Peggy. They sat on opposite sides of the partition that divided their workspace and traded brainstorms for a while. At one point, Peggy suggested using Burt Reynolds, who had just appeared in Playgirl, and Peggy waited for a response from Dave and got none, so she stood up and looked over the partition and saw Dave passed out on his typewriter. But the next day, Dave brought up the Burt Reynolds idea in a meeting, and his bosses liked it. The problem was that Reynolds wanted too much money, so a stumped Dave turned back to Peggy again, who had just heard Howard Cosell talking about Namath’s beat-up legs on a Monday Night Football broadcast.

The creative director shrugged when Peggy brought it up herself. Everyone wanted Namath, he said. Where was the creativity in that? But then Peggy told him her idea for the spot, and everything changed. They drew up the storyboards, and they sent them to Namath, and he deliberated for a while before agreeing to film one of the most memorable and provocative commercials of the 1970s.

II.

O.K., so this is the part where the naked woman comes in. The naked woman is an actress named Sydney Sweeney, who is, as Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post, “best known in the cinematic world for her role on ‘Euphoria,’ best known in the marketing world for already starring in one controversial ad campaign, and best known in the physical realm for possessing what can only be described as a truly stunning chest.” There are also hints that Sweeney might actually be a Republican, and therefore, everything she does is freighted with the absurdity of the modern public discourse.

I’m going to assume Sydney Sweeney is self-aware and clever enough to understand what’s she’s doing. But either way, what I can say for certain is that Sydney Sweeney is quite skillful at attracting attention in a culture where attention is the primary form of currency.

The latest supposed controversy involves an advertisement for a sports-betting website that I have also never heard of, and that I have no interest in linking to here. In the ad, Sweeney appears nude, holding strategically placed sporting equipment over her otherwise exposed nether (and upper) regions and uttering the word “Sports” repeatedly. This has succeeded in doing precisely what the betting website hoped it would do; it has generated a legitimate discussion about how Sweeney’s (literally) naked ploy has set back the cause of women’s sports, while it has also triggered the usual contrarian blowhards who insist we are making something out of nothing even as they spend much of their time mocking the WNBA.

And let me assure you that I don’t want to talk any more about that than I already have (if you want to read about it, I refer you to Hesse’s excellent column). What I do want to talk about is how this crass and patently obvious cry for our attention dovetails with our ongoing fear and loathing of sports gambling.

III.

This week, the players’ associations of the major American sports, along with the leagues themselves, issued a statement decrying the harassment their athletes are receiving online over sports gambling. This is a legitimate issue that drew exactly the backlash you’d expect from consumers who are constantly and relentlessly pounded over the head by sports gambling advertisements during the games those athletes play.

@AdamSchefter Maybe the best way is to stop shoving gambling down our throats every second","username":"belowavgjoe99","name":"Joe","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2094624830737784832/M10KF2FT_normal.jpg","date":"2026-09-15T13:34:46.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":7,"retweet_count":15,"like_count":849,"impression_count":15247,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

And that’s really the thing here, isn’t it? It’s that we live in an age of such rampant hypocrisy that it isn’t even hard to spot anymore. I can’t imagine there are many people who think it’s a good thing that sports gambling has slingshotted from being completely verboten to being so toxically ubiquitous. Yet here we are, besieged on a daily basis as these websites shout in our faces so relentlessly that it’s difficult to even focus on the games themselves.

And part of me wonders if that’s what at least some of the backlash to the Sydney Sweeney thing is about—it’s that a sports-gambling website yet again pulled the most obvious gambit imaginable in order to capture our attention at a moment when sports gambling websites are already inescapable. It’s a tired ploy at a tired moment. There was no sense of creativity in this campaign, as there was back when Peggy King was waving away Dave’s weed smoke and asserting her own creativity; it was just a pure awooga play, and not a very interesting one at that. But here we are, trapped in the sweet-smelling haze of a country that seems to have lost all sense of purpose beyond screaming out for attention, over and over again.

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The Reaction: The NFL is a Red Zone League Now. And I’m Not Complaining About It.

Michael Weinreb — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 GMT

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I am not ashamed to admit that at precisely 9:59 a.m. this past Sunday morning on the West Coast of the United States, I opened the YouTube TV app on my iPad, turned to the NFL Red Zone channel, and left it there pretty much all day long. And yes, I am aware that the NFL Red Zone is a seven-hour dopamine hit that has almost certainly contributed to the fundamental rewiring of my brain over the course of nearly fifteen years; I am aware that it has altered the way we consume the NFL on Sunday afternoons, and that it leads to further emphasis of fantasy football and betting on football over actual football; I am aware that consuming football in bite-sized chunks strips away some of the necessary tedium of the game and emphasizes the sexiness of the touchdown over the weightiness of the big stop on 4th-and-2; and I am aware that the host of the Red Zone channel, a man named Scott Hanson, is essentially the most brilliant and capable game-show host of his generation, and that his job is essentially to dose us with a steady stream of caffeinated hype from the moment he signs on until the moment he throws us out of his studio like Ferris Bueller at the end of the closing credits.

I know all of this, and I suppose there was a time where I might have felt at least a little bit guilty about it. But that time has passed. And part of the reason I believe that time has passed is because the NFL has essentially become a Red Zone league.

II.

The above conclusion may read as a disparagement, but I assure you it is not, and here’s why:

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“What Do We Do Now?”

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:03:26 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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It was Halloween in New York City, and six weeks later, the smell on the streets lingered, and I don’t quite know how to describe it except to say that was as if the entirety of Lower Manhattan was marooned inside a dank and musty basement. I was on assignment for New York Newsday, a month away from moving to the city, auditioning for a job that would never fully materialize, wandering the streets during Game 4 of the World Series, attempting to capture just what New York looked like and felt outside of Yankee Stadium. I met doormen who were listening to the game on portable radios on the Upper West Side; I met a street vendor hawking toy police cars and fire trucks who insisted on patting me down and checking my I.D. before he would speak to me. And as the game lingered into the middle innings, I wandered into the Dakota Roadhouse, an otherwise nondescript establishment which bore the distinction of being the bar nearest to the green-lined fencing that marked the boundaries of Ground Zero. “Bin Laden missed us; Don’t You, Too,” read a banner on that fencing, advertising the place.

The night before, the president of the United States had thrown out the first pitch, but now it was just baseball, and there was a sense that no one was quite sure how to feel about it as it lingered on in the background. Hard-hats and flashlights were laid upon the bar; “Pink Houses” played on the jukebox; I eavesdropped on an in-depth discussion about excavating techniques. Shift change was at seven, and by nine, the bar was nearly empty, and the bartender told me they’d be back at midnight for lunch, and that she served more food than drinks these days. I remember, 25 years later, sitting alone in that bar and staring blankly at the television, and wondering whether the game should have even been played at all.

II.

On December 7, 1941, in the moments before an NFL game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, an announcement rang out over the loudspeaker at the Polo Grounds, paging a Colonel named William J. Donovan. This was the first subtle clue that something was amiss, as Donovan, known as “Wild Bill,” was head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. Up in the press box, a Western Union operator studied the ticker; already, according to ’s excellent book The League, the Western Union man had reacted with surprise when he found out the Cardinals had gone ahead of the Bears in Chicago. So when he uttered an “Oh my god,” the sportswriter sitting next to him asked him if the Cardinals had scored again.

“No,” the Western Union man said. “The Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Word trickled down to the locker rooms by halftime. On the Giants’ side, coach Steve Owen’s account was so bleak that “it was like we didn’t want to go back on the field,” one player said. In the Dodgers’ locker room, halfback Ace Parker paced the room, asking, “What do we do now?” The teams finished the game, and the NFL finished its season, but for the next four years, sports largely faded from public view as much of its labor force went off to war.

III.

Twenty-two years later, pro football found itself on the precipice of a new era of broad popularity, driven by an NFL commissioner—and an American president—with a masterful sense of how to channel the power of both football and the burgeoning medium of television. Wrote Charles P. Pierce in Sports Illustrated: “Both the NFL and the Kennedy Administration were pure products of the brawling, confident America that had been built by the generation that had fought World War II.” But now, on a practice field in Washington, D.C., on a November afternoon in 1963, a coach named Bill McPeak called his team to midfield, and told them to take a knee and pray because the president was dead.

“It never occurred to me,” said a Washington running back named Bobby Mitchell. “I mean, that somebody would shoot the president of the United States? It took me a couple of seconds to realize that was what he meant.”

There was no template for something like this; there was no way of knowing how to handle it. And so the commissioner of football, Pete Rozelle, placed a call to his friend Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary. “Pierre, it’s Pete,” Rozelle said. “What do we do?”

They talked briefly. Salinger told Rozelle that the president would have wanted the games to go on, and that the country would be reassured by the presence of football that Sunday. Rozelle issued a statement to that effect, declaring that, “It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy.”

The backlash was immediate and intense. At least two NFL owners begged Rozelle to reconsider. The Dallas Cowboys, in town from the city where Kennedy had been shot to play the Cleveland Browns, required extra security to get through the weekend. Newspaper columnists condemned Rozelle’s decision as cheap and tawdry, as a “sick joke.” Later, Rozelle would write that the decision to play the games that weekend was the worst of his career.

“You're never sure how that kind of thing will affect you, or when,” Mitchell told Pierce. “We all learned from it, I think. Back after 9/11, there wasn't any choice: Teams just didn't play. That was something we learned from that weekend in 1963.”

IV.

In the hours after September 11th, the NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, cautious and measured lawyer that he was, drafted a pair of memorandums: One declaring that the NFL would play football that weekend, and the other that they would not. He already knew the right answer, but committing it to paper made him realize, he later said, that, “You can't describe the situation and logically or compassionately say We're going to play. Once you describe it, it's a no-brainer.”

Twenty-five years removed from September 11th, it’s harder than ever to describe the way the world changed that day. To me, it only gets more and more difficult as time passes. It wasn’t easy for Bobby Mitchell to describe, five decades later, the way JFK’s assassination altered the American psyche, just as there was no easy way to describe the impact of the sudden shock of Pearl Harbor. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, in an era when the problems of the world now appear minuscule by comparison; those years have become a kind of fantasia for the millennials and Gen Z-ers who have grown up amid the chaos of a cruel and changing world, at a time when every day plays out like an ongoing crisis. And in those moments when everything feels as if it’s shifting under your feet, you can’t help but wonder why sports even exist.

“You're in your 20s, you think the moon and stars rise and fall with how well you do in a football game,” said a New York Giants wide receiver, Amani Toomer. “Then you get totally sidetracked -- there's a real world that has nothing to do with the NFL. It really shocks you. There's a real world, and football is just an escape people use.”

This is all true. But it’s also true that sports are an essential element of the American routine. As football begins anew this weekend, there will be inevitable attempts to twist a sport into a kind of patriotic totem, and there will be people who lose all sense of perspective, but there is also a refreshing sense of peace in the ritual of watching football itself.

In the days and weeks after September 11th, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “There was an emphasis on trying to make America feel normal again.” That meant playing football; it meant playing baseball. It meant feeling as if the world was stable enough and steady enough that we once again had the luxury of escape. That Halloween night in late October in Lower Manhattan was like nothing anyone had ever known, but when the Yankees won Game 4, there was a moment when the city came alive again, and when, if only for a moment, things began to tip toward normalcy once more.

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History Repeats Itself: Patrick Mahomes Is Primed for His Joe Montana-ish Second Act

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:03:39 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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Forty years ago this week, in the midst of the San Francisco 49ers’ 31-7 season-opening win over Tampa Bay, Joe Montana took a snap, rolled to his left, threw across his body to the right, and tweaked something in his back. It didn’t appear particularly serious in the moment, but a week later, after the Niners lost to the Los Angeles Rams with backup quarterback Jeff Kemp, Bill Walsh announced that Montana would undergo back surgery.

This was 1986, and as the 49ers coach would later tell author David Harris, “None of us knew much about backs in those days.” Walsh’s presumption was that Montana would never play football again, largely because he assumed anyone who had back surgery was not capable of playing football again. This seemed particularly true for a quarterback, who played one of the most demanding positions in professional sports; in the aftermath, the headlines in the local papers reported that Montana’s return to football was essentially a 50-50 proposition. Two days after the surgery, Montana’s teammates, Ronnie Lott and Dwight Clark, went to visit him in the hospital; as they were leaving, the nurses encouraged Montana to get up and walk his visitors to the elevator. It took a pair of nurses to help Montana to his feet; he looked so frail and exhausted, Lott later said, that “I was afraid to touch him.” When the elevator doors closed, Lott had to hold back tears. He thought to himself, This guy’s never going to play again.

A few months earlier, Joe Montana had turned 30 years old. Two months after Lott and Clark visited a man in the hospital who could barely make his way out of bed, Montana would return to football. A year later, he would make the Pro Bowl. In 1988, he would win the first of two straight NFL Most Valuable Player Awards.

As I write this, Patrick Mahomes is 30 years old, which means he is the same age as Joe Montana was in 1986, when the best years of Montana’s career were presumed to be behind him.

II.

I had a fantasy football draft last week, as I imagine many of you did, and before your eyes glaze over and you mash that unsubscribe button, let me assure you that I am not going to tell you about my fantasy football draft, but the two things I realized in the process of preparing for and executing this draft: A.) Fantasy football has become increasingly attached to advanced statistical analysis, and B.) This often means it has become increasingly detached from real life. And nowhere does this strike me as more obviously true than in the case of Patrick Mahomes.

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The Reaction: The Clocks Strike Thirteen in Ann Arbor

Michael Weinreb — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:04:55 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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The hope is to write more of these quick-hit reactions to the weekend throughout the football season (and hopefully beyond).

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In 1994, the Fox network wrested the television rights for the National Football Conference away from CBS. The implications of this purchase for both Fox and American society were earth-shaking (and, as it turns out, quite dystopian), but let us save that for another paragraph and stick, for the moment, to sports. Because what Fox did next was also a seismic leap in the way we processed what we saw on television. Inspired by European soccer broadcasts, Rupert Murdoch’s enterprise introduced something called the “Fox Box,” a constant on-screen graphic linked directly to the scoreboards at NFL games.

It is odd to think that at first we rejected this convenience—that, in the weeks after Fox introduced it, the first calls to an affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia ran 50-1 against the Fox Box. People believed it was too distracting; they believed it cluttered their screens; they viewed it as something like a dust particle trapped in their eye that they couldn’t get out. But people got used to it, and it soon lent television broadcasts an air of increased authority. It also came along at a moment when the Internet was about to make our lives both far more informed and far dumber, a moment when Rupert Murdoch was just beginning to recognize that more information could somehow render reality less certain. And that leads me to last Saturday night, when the most Orwellian moment in recent college football history played out on a football field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

There it was on our television screens: Week 1 of the college football season, a 12-7 Western Michigan lead over Michigan, nine seconds remaining on the clock, and Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood dropping back, hurling a Hail Mary out of the back of the end zone, the clock clearly hitting zero before the ball touched anyone’s hands…and yet here were the officials insisting that we hadn’t actually seen what we just saw. So Michigan got one more play, and Underwood threw another Hail Mary, and this one was complete, and Michigan “won” 13-12, and the Michigan fans stormed the field as if celebrating the apotheosis of the modern American dystopia, and the rest of us at home were left utterly confused as to how zero plus zero plus zero had somehow come to add up to one.

II.

Two hours later, the explanation came, in a font straight out of a dusty back cover of Stephen King’s Different Seasons: Somehow, the replay officials conducting the review had actual video of a clock with one second on it when a Western Michigan player touched the ball, which was the exact opposite of the evidence we had just seen with our own eyes and ears. The justification was that this was the official clock, and that somehow the clock we had all seen on the NBC broadcast was not the official clock, and was in fact a hair of a fraction of a second off-kilter, no big thing, you know. The Big Ten appeared to not-so-subtly blame NBC for this, perhaps understanding that a broadcast partner who had paid many millions for the rights to televise its games would be willing to absorb the blame for this colossal fuck-up.

The Big Ten also released video of the officials deliberating during the review, which was supposed to foster transparency and perhaps dispel questions about a conspiracy, but instead, the utter lack of context only led to more confusion—were they making a judgment on the play from an angle where you couldn’t even see the ball?—and definitely raised new questions about how the hell the zeroes we had seen on our television screen were somehow false. And then you couldn’t help but wonder what else was false: What if down and distance was not entirely accurate? What if the Big Ten declared that the score itself was somehow wrong, and that we had all missed a phantom field goal that had been kicked while all our backs were turned?

All of this comes at a precarious moment for college football, a moment when the Big Ten itself is essentially attempting to wrest control over the sport in the midst of an ongoing crisis of leadership. Already, there is a massive trust gap between the fans and the people in charge; already, the breakdown of faith in institutions and the viral idiocy of social media has led so many to default to conspiracy theories. And now here was a conspiracy theory unfolding live, right in front of us. How could we see it as anything else?

“It is my understanding that if there is a discrepancy between the video and replay command center versus the television network video that everybody sees, that replay is to use the TV video,” former NFL rules official and Fox analyst Mike Pereira told The Athletic Sunday. “And that is the same protocol in the NFL, in the UFL. It’s the same. You use the footage that everybody sees if there is a discrepancy.”

The reason for this, as Pereira explained, is patently obvious: You don’t want people thinking there is some secret clock that’s run by some secret society that governs the results of football games. But this is not what the Big Ten did at all. Instead, the Big Ten used its own officials and its own clock, with its own numbers, and then asked us to believe that what we all saw was not the real thing at all, and now a lot of people are further convinced that the Big Ten is essentially Big Brother. And the frightening thing, in the wake of this, was the realization that we’ve become accustomed to living like this by now; the frightening thing is that every single day now we see public officials blatantly insisting that what we’re seeing is not real, and that what they’re telling us is real.

Somehow, the Western Michigan faction handled this with an alarming amount of tranquility, as if they presumed getting colossally screwed was part of the price of participating in a road game against a major-conference foe that would fund their athletic department for months. But the rest of us are not always gifted with such serenity. The rest of us are left wondering just what else college football is hiding from us, and just how much of what we’re seeing on our screens at this moment isn’t real at all.

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The Endorsement: Sean McDonough on College Football

Michael Weinreb — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:03:31 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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There will likely come a time on Saturday, as some random college football game reaches a gnarly crescendo, when I will utter a high-pitched interjection that frightens the hell out of my dog. In most cases, this sound will resemble a soprano uttering an expletive through an air horn; in certain circumstances, it may even cause my voice to devolve into a pubescent crack. Anyway, I do not apologize for this. Apologies are irrelevant, because this is clearly not something within my control. These sounds are forged of something primal, and they are not affected by the fact that the sport I’m watching is mired in a moral and ethical swamp.

Yes, yes, yes, I have deep concerns about college football that have been recently chronicled in this newsletter, but none of that matters in those moments, because I also grew up in a football town with a college problem, or whatever the T-shirts used to say, and I can no more easily let college football go than I can let go of MAD Magazine or Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. These attachments were built at a formative age; they are fused into my DNA. And if that sounds like an emotional contradiction, I don’t know what to tell you, because fandom itself is an emotional contradiction.

The good news is that I know I am not alone in this contradiction. In fact, I’d like to think I share these qualities with the best play-by-play announcer in college football. Because he is both an inherent skeptic and someone who, if the games get really, really good, is willing to strike the same warbly and high-pitched and slightly embarrassing note.

II.

It’s been nearly eleven years now since Michigan lined up to punt the football from the Michigan State 47-yard line with a two-point lead and ten seconds remaining in the game. What happened next is the stuff of legend, and not just because of the circumstances, but because of the way a play-by-play announcer named Sean McDonough described it in real time.

That is twenty seconds of riveting insanity that builds to the most riveting crescendo imaginable: McDonough’s voice literally cracking like a teenager’s as Michigan State recovers the fumbled punt (“Whoa, he has trouble with the snap!”), scores the game-winning touchdown, and we cut to an image of a Michigan fan clasping his hands to his head in the kind of classical surrender cobra posture that should hang in the Guggenheim, and then we cut to Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh squinting like a man who just missed a cross-country flight. It is arguably one of the five best calls in modern college football history largely because McDonough cannot quite modulate his own pitch.

This was not the first time that happened to McDonough. His voice cracked when Sid Bream crossed the plate with the winning run for the Atlanta Braves in the 1992 National League Championship Series; his voice cracked repeatedly during a wild Monday Night Football game between the Chiefs and Titans; his voice cracked while doing the radio broadcast of the national championship game, when Alabama scored a touchdown in overtime. His voice has cracked so many times that there is an entire YouTube video entitled, “Sean McDonough Voice Crack Compilation.”

It is, of course, impossible to contrive a moment like this, and that is the best thing about McDonough: His work is impeccable and professional and yet it is never contrived. If every Gus Johnson utterance feels as if it’s been generated by a chatbot…if the worst moments of Jim Nantz’s otherwise excellent career are defined by his pre-planned taglines…McDonough has none of that. When he gets excited, he gets excited, and in that way, it is the ideal voice for a sport whose best quality is its utter irrationality.

And yet that is not all there is to McDonough. Because he is not just a guy who gets caught up in his own passion; he is also the closest thing we have to an actual journalist in the broadcast booth.

III.

I imagine much of this has to do with the fact that Sean McDonough grew up as the son of a crusty Boston Globe reporter and columnist named Will McDonough, a “hard-nosed Irishman who looked like a henchman from a Jimmy Cagney movie,” and who once punched out a New England Patriots player who tried to intimidate him. Will McDonough was part of the murderer’s row of a sports section at the Boston Globe in the 1970s and 1980s: He was blunt, raw and unsparing, and when his son graduated from Syracuse University and then became a broadcasting prodigy, he carried some of those same principles along with him. Sean McDonough was a natural on-air; he could do it all (and still does), from hockey games to Red Sox games, but he also was unsparing, with a Cosellian streak that led him to tell it like it was. That has never changed: McDonough still calls out shaky officiating and questions institutional biases, and brings up all the things that fans might be thinking, even if it might rub his bosses or even some viewers the wrong way.

“McDonough has frequently taken the professional path of most resistance,” wrote the perpetually grumpy New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick back in 2001, noting that McDonough had questioned, among other things, Texas A&M’s running up the score and Oregon State’s copious use of junior-college transfers. “We’d rarely before heard someone with the guts to speak hard, obvious truths on college sports telecasts, and that scarcity remains.”

A year after that Michigan-Michigan State call, McDonough became the voice of Monday Night Football alongside Jon Gruden. The chemistry was all wrong, in part because McDonough didn’t seem to bear the same passion for largely meaningless regular-season NFL games as he did for tightly wound college football games; and in part because Gruden is a maniac (and, we have since learned, a rather unsavory human being) who processes football through the lens of Spider 2 Y Banana, and McDonough processes the game through stories. “There were times when I would ask him a question or make a point and he didn’t respond,” McDonough later said, “and I think it was just because he was so focused on, ‘I’m gonna dive into this play,’ and he just didn’t want to do it.”

IV.

This, I believe, is the thing college football still has going for it that the NFL never will. College football, even as it veers further toward professionalism, is built through the wild energy of youth; it is built upon storytelling and tradition. There is reason to be skeptical and there is reason to question everything about its future, but there are also those moments that make you forget all those things and squeak out some unintelligible noise as you watch the improbable unfold before your eyes. And nobody marries those contrary aspects of college football quite like Sean McDonough does.

On a recent podcast, McDonough was asked once again about the Michigan-Michigan State call, and he admitted his embarrassment about the way the instrument that’s defined his career just shattered—‘‘You think, your voice isn’t really supposed to do that,” he said—but then he also said he came to realize, over time, that it helped define that moment in college football history. But more than that, I think McDonough’s voice crack solidified the notion that college football can exist within its central contradictions—that you can spend your life seeing the game clearly and yet still be overwhelmed by it all.

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The Mannings Know How To Fail Gracefully

Michael Weinreb — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:03:25 GMT

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

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In September of 1970, before his senior season went sideways, Archie Manning appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. This was a strange transitional moment for college football, in large part because it was a strange transitional moment for the relationship between young people and authority figures in America. There were, wrote Dan Jenkins, “so many problems of a complex and sophisticated nature that college football may never be the same again.”

Archie Manning did not appear to be one of those problems. He had already become a folk hero in Mississippi, a state that had been torn apart by the civil rights movement of the previous decade. Manning was a near-universal source of pride in a tumultuous era, possessed of the kind of ineffable charisma that random postal clerks in Mississippi literally wrote songs about. He posed for a close-up photo inside SI with his windswept red hair and his freckled face and a blade of grass clamped between his lips, next to a story, written by William F. Reed, that likened him to Huck Finn and noted that his face “seems to reflect a certain quality of sadness and rural innocence.” He spoke openly to Reed of the weight of his father’s suicide; he swore that he would keep his family close and that he would endure no matter what came next. And then Archie Manning went out and embarked on a season—and on a career—that never went quite the way the folk songs had set it up.

A month after the SI cover, Manning’s Ole Miss team lost to Southern Mississippi at home. In early November, Manning broke his arm in a win over Houston, and even when he came back he wasn’t quite the same. Ole Miss lost its last three games; amid all of that, the head coach, Johnny Vaught, suffered a heart attack that would force him to resign. In January, Manning was one of three quarterbacks drafted with the first three picks of the NFL draft; he went to the New Orleans Saints, where, for the next decade, he became perhaps the greatest quarterback of a hapless franchise in modern football history. In the end, Archie Manning’s legend was built around enduring heartbreak and failure and embracing humility. And two generations later, his family’s story might once again be the piece that ties together college football as it endures yet another era of complex and sophisticated problems.

II.

Archie Manning’s grandson, Arch, is 22 years old, a junior in college, the undisputed starting quarterback at the University of Texas, and one of the most high-profile quarterbacks in college football. And yet in an odd way, you could argue that there is less buzz around him now than there was when he was a freshman or a sophomore. Those first two seasons, Arch Manning often struggled, or he didn’t play at all; he wasn’t the prodigy we imagined he might be because of his surname, and that led many to believe that he would be the first Manning to flame out altogether. But the truth is that this wasn’t surprising, and it wasn’t surprising because every Manning has failed. The truth is that the Mannings have never been about prodigal accomplishments; they have been about enduring less-than-ideal circumstances, about understanding their own shortcomings, and about succeeding on their own trajectory, rather than the trajectory the outside world sets for them.

A generation after Archie Manning landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, his son Peyton did the same, posing in 1996 for a split-screen image with his father’s own cover. That story, written by Tim Layden, begins with an image of Peyton hugging his father in the aftermath of a crushing defeat against Florida the season before. During the 1996 season, Tennessee would again lose to Florida, and then inexplicably lose to Memphis. Peyton Manning would declare that he was coming back for his senior season in 1997, where he would go 11-2, lose the Orange Bowl to Nebraska, and lose the Heisman Trophy to Michigan’s Charles Woodson.

For a decade after that, the presumption was that Manning would never win a Super Bowl; that he would always exist in the shadow of Tom Brady (just as some presumed he might exist in the shadow of Ryan Leaf). But Manning endured. He won two Super Bowls, and he became one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of professional football, in addition to one of the most self-deprecating and likable public figures in the modern history of sports. His brother, consistently underestimated and deprecated in the hothouse of New York City, would soon win two Super Bowls of his own (the general manager who drafted him, Ernie Accorsi, told me a few months ago that he traded with the Chargers for Eli Manning because he recognized the way he played when his team was matched up against superior talent). Together, Eli and Peyton now host one of the funniest shows on television, a show that’s entirely organic, and that’s defined largely by the two of them poking fun at each other’s failures.

And this is the thing about the Mannings that makes them such rare generational figures:

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