Football Fun Index

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The 2026 NFL season kicks off tonight with a rematch of February’s Super Bowl. The Seahawks unveil their second banner while the New England Patriots visit. We’ll see the debut of A.J. Brown in a Patriots uniform, and Mike Vrabel’s first regular season game coaching since his six year affair with The Athletic’s NFL Insider Dianna Russini was exposed this spring.

The Seahawks should enjoy the ceremony this evening, as Washington has adopted a new “Millionaires Tax,” charging a 9.9% rate to all earnings over $1 million. This will effectively give them 5-7% less cap space per year, depending on their road schedule. It doesn’t take effect until 2028, but it is going to be a consideration every player and agent makes when they sit down to sign a contract in Seattle. This will also be their first game since announcing new ownership. And it’s not very promising either, Vinod Khosla talked lavishly about being a diehard Steelers fan and still watching every one of their games in his introductory presser.

The NFL used to be a way of life for me. I knew nearly every rostered player, would study mock drafts and prospects for months in the spring, knew every coach and most of the coordinators. A lot of that luster has faded. If I had to sum up the reason why, I’d simply say, Roger Goodell. He has been a poor steward of the game in my estimation. I’ll happily dive into that topic another day, but a perfect example is him fining running backs for lowering their shoulder and delivering contact to a defender.

While the NFL isn’t the draw for me it once was, I still like to follow the sport, and in particular like to follow teams with interesting storylines, exciting players, or just straight up trainwrecks I can’t look away from. Teams that actually make the game fun. Matchups, announce crews, broadcast windows all play a factor in whether I tune in or not, but a major factor is whether the teams are actually enjoyable to watch. So without further ado, here is the official 2026 Football Fun Index.

Honorable Mentions

Las Vegas Raiders

In my Pro-Am Triple Crown article, the Raiders were described as a potentially ascendant team with a possible franchise quarterback to be, first overall pick, Heisman trophy winner and National Champion, Fernando Mendoza. But he’s only a part of why they make the list. New acquisitions in free agency, highly talented returning players in Brock Bowers, Maxx Crosby and Ashton Jeanty, and Super Bowl winning offensive coordinator from the Seahawks, Klint Kubiak, in as a first year Head Coach. Also, Kirk Cousins starting the season under center. The new building in Vegas hasn’t played host to a relevant Raiders team yet, and this could have the foundations of getting there in the next few years.

Pittsburgh Steelers

This is it for Aaron Rodgers, back for one more rodeo along with his former Packers Super Bowl winning coach Mike McCarthy, he takes over after Mike Tomlin stepped down at the end of a 19 year run that saw him win a Super Bowl and never once post a losing season.

Rodgers has a talented defense, some new pieces on offense in Michael Pittman Jr., Rico Dowdle and rookie second-rounder Germie Bernard, and has been all smiles since the Anthony Fauci Covid Chronicles were released and the beleaguered former NIAID director invoked the fifth amendment 111 times in a Senate hearing, even though Joe Biden had already handed him a preemptive pardon.

Buffalo Bills

A new stadium, a new head coach, and an old familiar curse. Coach Joe Brady steps into the head coaching role after two and a half seasons as the play-caller for the Bills with the most pressure of any new coach in the league. It’s super bowl or bust for Buffalo, and with a roster that isn’t at the caliber of the other top NFL teams, and an opening five game slate that includes Houston, Detroit, LA Chargers, New England and LA Rams, the Bills could be in a tough position heading into their sixth game in Las Vegas.

But they return Josh Allen two years removed from an MVP season, a true X receiver in DJ Moore, Bradley Chubb and TJ Parker on the edge on defense, and plenty of reason for optimism. I will say, as a Bills fan, their games are only fun when they’re winning. With a tough schedule and little room for error, that could break either way early.

Now onto the top five: 

5. New York Giants

This pick may surprise people, but the pieces are in place for something special to begin. First year Head Coach John Harbaugh takes over in New Jersey after 18 years at the helm in Baltimore. Including a super bowl title during that reign. Second year QB Jaxson Dart, fresh off his introduction of the President of the United States that humorously caused a media meltdown, and a brain dead response from teammate Abdul Carter, they have some serious weapons on both sides of the ball. Along with Carter, the pass rush looks stout with Kayvon Thibodeaux and Brian Burns, and as a group they’re probably the best set of edge rushers any team in the league can put on the field. I also think they drafted the best player in the rookie class in Arvell Reese all the way down at number 5 overall. Reese played all linebacker positions for the Buckeyes and has too much athleticism and instinct to not produce on sundays. They also drafted Francis Mauigoa at tackle from the U at number 10. They get elite WR Malik Nabers back from an ACL, and football maniac Cam Skattebo back from a dislocated ankle, fractured fibula and torn deltoid ligament suffered in Week 8 against Philadelphia. How effective they’ll be this year post injury remains to be seen, and they still have the turf of doom that causes so many of these injuries to play on.

4. Detroit Lions

As long as the o-line holds up, I’m calling the Lions being back. Too much talent, too much pride, and too much grit to stay down. Dan Campbell should have his team back in the hunt. I look forward to their games, have plenty of favorites in their roster (Penei Sewell, Aidan Hutchinson, Sam LaPorta, Jack Campbell), and giving them back their underdog status could produce the chip on their shoulder needed to take the next step.

3. Los Angeles Chargers

I love Jim Harbaugh. He’s a football psychopath. It was just a matter of time before he corrected the ship after being hired back to the league from Michigan. There are serious pieces there, and the added dynamic of bringing in Mike McDaniel, the anti-Harbaugh as a head coach, as Offensive Coordinator could give them an explosive and dynamic point-scoring machine they haven’t had under Harbaugh’s current regime. Looking forward to how their season plays out.

2. Chicago Bears

Da Bears are back. Will they compete for a Super Bowl? I highly doubt it. Ben Johnson is the best young coach in the league, and he gets to show off what year two in his program looks like. Caleb Williams has been appearing in public with a more masculine look, and even showing up sans nail polish, so you better believe the NFC North has been put on notice. This team won seven games last year after trailing inside the final two minutes. Plenty of weapons on offense in Rome Odunze, Luther Burden III, Colston Loveland, Cole Kmet and D’Andre Swift, but a defense that got gutted this offseason, losing Tremaine Edmunds, Kevin Byard, Jaquan Brisker and C.J. Gardner-Johnson. While the Bears have a lot of positives, questions about that defense keep them from the top spot. There’s also the fact that DJ Moore is now in Buffalo, so Odunze will have to step into a larger role. 

Last year they became an even bigger favorite of mine by erasing an 18 point halftime deficit against Green Bay in the Wild Card round at Soldier Field in legendary fashion.

1. Los Angeles Rams

I have been a Rams hater for a while. In my opinion, they appeared to have been gifted the Super Bowl against Cincinnati with endless last drive penalties until they finally got the game winning score. The conspiracy portion of my brain (essentially the whole thing), thought they did so because the Super Bowl was in LA, the Rams had moved back there and weren’t gaining traction, and in crowning them the fairweather fans of the region could hop on board. 

Something else that gave me a sour taste was Matt Stafford’s wife going on a podcast to brag about running around with Matt’s backup quarterback at Georgia to make him jealous. Yuck.

On top of that, when Amazon secured Thursday Night Football in a landmark deal with the league, they offered the color commentary position to Sean McVay, who was at the time considering stepping aside from coaching. Instead the position went to my least favorite announcer on earth Kirk Herbstreit. Now Americans are forced to endure his commentary for both the Thursday night game, and the ABC primetime college football game on Saturday, as well as his presence on College Gameday if they’re so inclined to watch that. Personally, I’m more of a Big Noon Kickoff guy myself. Brady Quinn, Matt Leinart and Joel Klatt clear the Gameday crew, even though I love the addition of Nick Saban. McVay could have saved us from Herbstreit, and for that I held a grudge.

But the time to bury the hatchet has come, in spite of Herbie, I’m glad that McVay, who is a brilliant football mind, is still coaching in the league. And the addition of Myles Garrett and the return of Aaron Donald, and cornerback Trent McDuffie have their defense looking nicey.  We can’t forget Puka Nacua, who is coming off an all time offseason where he appeared to be inebriated at a UFC card this spring, was sued over an alleged biting incident and an alleged antisemitic remark, entered rehab, and is out in time to rejoin the Super Bowl favorites.

It’s clear I’ve had my issues with this team in the past, but things change. There’s no question they will be the team to watch this year. Their owner Stan Kroenke also just liberated the baseball world from Arte Moreno’s disastrous 23 year tenure as owner of the Angels, and if the Rams can keep the Chiefs, Ravens or Eagles from winning it all, isn’t that a good thing?

The Rams are must see TV, they take the top spot on this year’s index, and they start their quest for the Lombardi tomorrow night in Melbourne against the 49ers.

I’ll have my eye on all of these teams as the season gets underway.

My Super Bowl Prediction:

Lions over Bills

Bills finally get back to the big game, and a curse is at long last ended, but in ironic fashion that only Bills Mafia can truly appreciate, the curse that is broken belongs to their opponent, and the Lions grab their first ever Lombardi trophy.

Rams are loaded, but myself and everyone else anointing them as the team to beat is giving 2011 Eagles paper champion vibes.

When something looks like a sure thing at the beginning of the season, it usually isn’t.

Photo: Erik Drost / Cropped (CC BY 2.0)

Categories NFL

Going Nuclear

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The conservative party in power has actually presented something that would help the American family.

The Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a rule change that would pay married parents roughly $9,000 a year per child to stay home and raise them. The money comes out of the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion Clinton-era program built to pay for daycare so parents could go to work. To qualify you have to be married, and one spouse has to be putting in at least 35 hours a week. It doesn’t need a bill or a vote — just White House sign-off and a comment period.

This, if followed as presented, would be one of the most pro-family policies to come out of Washington since the mid-20th century.

“Parents who bear the toil, expense and opportunity cost… currently get zero.” — Roger Severino

When our birthrate was declining, I found it mighty peculiar that the only remedy presented for this problem was infinite immigration from all parts of the non-westernized world. It certainly wasn’t to create policy that encouraged and enabled the native population of the nation to start families. (Yes, Americans are a nation. It was considered people living in America of European descent.) Hungary has offered tax incentives for having children — mothers of four or more have paid no income tax for life since 2020, and Orbán has since dropped that threshold to two. Russia pays lump sums for births with regional bonuses stacked on top. China ended the one-child policy in 2015 and finally started cutting checks last year — 3,600 yuan, about $500, every year until the kid turns three. That’s real money in a country where the average rural person lives on about $3,500 a year.

Why worry about the people of your nation reproducing when there’s billions of people ready to flood into your country that you can hand jobs and small business loans to! The SBA refused to even list country of origin for these loans they’re giving out. To this administration’s credit, the SBA finally shut that window in March. Green card holders are barred from 7(a) loans entirely now. It only took until 2026.

The key element of this childcare rule change that must be maintained for it to actually be a “pro-family” policy, is that it must only apply to married individuals. Married-couple households were 74% of this country in 1960. They’ve been under 50% since 2010. Children born to unwed mothers went from 5% to roughly 40% across the same stretch, and the share of kids living with only their mother nearly tripled. It’s as if the Great Society had the opposite effect of its title. The numbers don’t lie.

Automation and AI are coming and will utlimately wreak havoc upon the labor market once the new paradigm is built. The people who want to sell you the idea that “they’ll just create new jobs, someone has to work on the robots!” Yes, someone does have to work on the robots, and at some point it will be another robot. In the meantime, one mechanic servicing a fleet of 500 robots who have replaced 3 human workers each does not offer industrial revolution labor growth.

A lot of people are going to be out of the work force anyway, moving into familial support roles is the most desirable outcome.

This would pair perfectly with a home-school voucher in the $7k per child range. Public schools spent $17,619 per pupil in FY2024, the highest figure ever recorded. The federal slice of that is about $2,500. Tearing down the indoctrinating and ineffective school system would help accelerate the nation’s flight from the grasps of cultural marxism.

Private, cooperative and religious schools would thrive. Sure, the inner cities would be a mess, many of the kids wouldn’t be able to pass basic reading or mathematics proficiency. Oh wait, we’re already there. Five percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2024. Cleveland was at eight. Nine percent of Baltimore eighth graders were proficient in math.

My instincts, or political whiplash conditioning, tell me this may be another policy that will have been presented first as a good idea, get railroaded by the media and the Democrats, then get walked back, turned into something completely ineffective, and yet still victory will be declared.

But that is certainly not my hope.

This change is one that is worth fighting for.

“Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again.” — Michael Corleone

Photo: Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Want (1943), public domain.

Sex, Drugs, and College Football

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North Carolina came in at number two on our College Football Crisis Rankings, and that may need to be elevated after a decent showing by number one ranked CU last night, oh, and this absolutely insane report about the Tar Heels that came out before the Buffaloes kicked off.

University of North Carolina football general manager Michael Lombardi, the highest-paid general manager in college football, resigned Thursday after a tumultuous tenure in Chapel Hill working alongside Bill Belichick, the university said. 

But the investigation is still ongoing, and lawyers hired by the university are now focused on behaviors by defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, people familiar with the investigation tell WRAL.

Colorado went into Atlanta and beat Georgia Tech 14-13, Julian Lewis hitting Charlie Williams for the go ahead touchdown in the final minute. Then blocked the Yellow Jackets’ attempt at a game winning field-goal to secure the victory. 

Amazingly, both teams began the season 1-0. Another reason that College Football is the absolute best. 

University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill is one of the most epic party schools in the country. And that’s just the Football staff.

Self-described Football Genius, Michael Lombardi abruptly resigned as UNC’s general manager Thursday, a month after being placed on paid administrative leave, and hours before WRAL published what the investigators have actually been asking about. Lawyers hired by the university have been questioning people about whether defensive coordinator Steve Belichick used drugs on the job, or handed them to at least one player. Steve has been on medical leave since early August.

And that’s only half of it. The same lawyers have been asking whether a female member of the recruiting staff had a sexual relationship with a player, and separately, whether assistant coaches were sleeping with the recruiting staff.

Can we add this to the list of benefits to come from women being shoehorned into coaching and staff positions in this sport?

“The head coach’s tenure has generated far more off-field headlines than on-field success.” — WRAL

Bill being Bill, he appears unfazed. And honestly, that’s part of what I love about the guy. The fact that the media, in particular the Boston sports media that has been trying to claim his scalp for years and continues to do so while he’s down in Chapel Hill, still can’t get him to change, apologize, or bow down to their demands. I loved the surly, poker-face press conferences he gave in New England. But I will not pretend he hasn’t done irreparable damage to his reputation since Brady left Foxborough. And many would argue, it wasn’t too hot back then either.  In this case, things appear to be getting uglier than they did in Foxborough, Aaron Hernandez aside. And still, they got pretty ugly.

People thought Bill having a 25 year old girlfriend was the craziest thing about the situation. Chapel Bill, one of the many nicknames that he trademark-rushed the second he took the UNC job, or as I am dubbing him, Boner Pill Bill, is the staff member who appears to have his personal life the most together. But clearly his efficacy as the leader of a Power 4 football program is abysmal. 

Having first-year Tar Heel Offensive Coordinator Bobby Petrino in the house for this really is the perfect garnish. Arkansas fired Petrino for cause in April 2012 after he laid his Harley down on Highway 16 with 25-year-old Jessica Dorrell on the back. He held a press conference two days later in a neck brace and said he was riding alone.

Dorrell was a former Arkansas volleyball player he had just hired onto the football staff at $55,735 a year, picked out of 159 applicants after an unusually short search, four days before the crash. He had also given her $20,000, which she used to buy a car. The state police report was about to go public, so he finally told his athletic director. He lost an $18 million buyout over it.

In true Bill Belichick fashion, amidst a storm of chaos, he pulled off a massive upset win over the TCU Horned Frogs last Saturday in Dublin, Ireland.

He’s not here to make sure people aren’t getting high and getting freaky, he only requires that you Do Your Job.

With this hellstorm, Belichick has accomplished in a year and a half what it takes other coaches decades to pull off. Another reason he’s the GOAT. 

Lane Kiffin, the King of Horny Coaches, burning bridges, and bringing ex-NFL players to college football, it’s your move pal. 

Photo: Hameltion (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ball’s Clipped

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The Los Angeles Clippers have been handed the basketball equivalent of the death penalty.

The NBA has stripped the Los Angeles Clippers of five first-round draft picks and fined owner Steve Ballmer $30 million at the conclusion of its probe into allegations that All-Star Kawhi Leonard received impermissible benefits during his tenure with the team in violation of the league’s salary cap.

The league is also fining Leonard $700,000.

The NBA announced the decision Wednesday. The Clippers will be stripped of first-round picks in the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033 NBA Drafts.

The league is also suspending Ballmer “from all league and team activities for one year.” — Yahoo Sports

And that’s just the top of it. Gillian Zucker, president of business operations, suspended a year without pay — directly culpable, and she lied to investigators. Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, six months. Five years of league compliance monitoring. Kawhi’s uncle and former business manager Dennis Robertson barred from doing business with NBA teams on behalf of any player for five years.

Here’s what they were accused of doing. Ballmer put $50 million of his own money into a “green bank” called Aspiration in September 2021. Later that month the Clippers announced a $300 million partnership with the same company. In April 2022 — nine months after Kawhi signed a four-year, $176.3 million max deal — Aspiration signed Kawhi to a four-year, $28 million endorsement contract through his LLC, KL2 Aspire. The contract let Kawhi decline to do anything the company asked. It also voided if he left the Clippers. Aspiration went bankrupt, its co-founder is doing 14 years in federal prison, and Kawhi never publicly endorsed a thing. Pablo Torre reported it, and won a Pulitzer for it. The league’s outside law firm spent a year confirming the details. Aspiration wasn’t alone either — investigators found the same pattern with Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton, all of them doing business with the team. The Clippers also covered personal expenses for Kawhi and his family.

“I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules” — Adam Silver

The team shows no signs of surrender. “We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings” — the Clippers, who called the investigation biased and built backward from a predetermined conclusion, and said what the league told them privately doesn’t match what it announced publicly.

Now compare this to last October. The FBI arrested Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Heat guard Terry Rozier on the same morning, 34 people indicted across two cases, rigged poker games backed by the Mafia and insider prop betting on a player faking an injury. Actual crimes. Federal indictments. And what happened to Portland and Miami? Nothing. The league put two men on leave and let the franchises walk. Jontay Porter got a lifetime ban in 2024 and Toronto didn’t lose a second-round pick over it.

Gambling gets individuals in trouble, touching the salary cap gets your franchise gutted for a decade. The NBA actually does draw the line somewhere, at least there’s that.

Ballmer is the white knight who rode in to save the league from Donald Sterling. April of 2014, Sterling’s silly rabbit — her words, V. Stiviano on national television, to Barbara Walters — recorded him telling her not to bring Black people to Clippers games, Magic Johnson by name, and the tape went to TMZ. Adam Silver banned him for life, fined him the maximum $2.5 million, and moved to force a sale. Shelly Sterling had her husband declared incapacitated and sold the team to Ballmer for a then-record $2 billion. Twelve years later another scandal has rocked the team and the league.


Steve Ballmer made his fortune as a pitch-man for Windows. Not a software or engineering background, he did what the nerds can’t always do (Steve Jobs not included), he moved fucking product.

Ballmer paid $2b for a new super state of the art arena in Inglewood, and he is barred from watching his team in it for the next twelve months.

He should have placed a bid on the Angels to keep him busy in the meantime, he has the scratch lying around.

I like Steve Ballmer, he’s an absolute psychopath in a way that makes for great content and sports radio fodder. And he is obsessed with winning, something sports fans claim to want from their owners more than anything else, well that and paying for their own stadiums, which Ballmer also did.

Five first round picks being stripped away, plus California’s 13.3% tax rate, and the big brother Lakers still being the A side in town, the Clippers need a miracle to compete for a title again in the next decade.

But I guess when you put it that way, the sanctions may end up having little effect on them.

Photo: All-Pro Reels — CC BY-SA 2.0

X Money X Problems

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This week X, formerly Twitter, began the rollout of X Money. This has been something I have been anticipating since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.

“X Money is designed to make traditional bank accounts unnecessary for users.” — The Paypers

X Money is not simply a feature of X, but may be the reason Elon acquired the social media platform to begin with. Elon had originally envisioned X.com as a payments system all the way back in 1999. The concept behind it would go on to become PayPal. Elon has long understood the potential for innovation and opportunity when payments and finance finally merge with technology in a truly meaningful way. Far beyond the reaches of what CashApp and PayPal offer today.

X is positioning itself to become the WeChat of the rest of the world.

WeChat is China’s everything app, and has been for over a decade. Tencent launched it as a messaging service in 2011. Today it runs about 1.43 billion monthly users. It’s messaging, it’s a social feed, it’s video, and it’s WeChat Pay — roughly 935 million people paying for things by scanning a QR code, from a department store checkout down to a guy selling fruit off a cart. But the part Americans consistently miss is Mini Programs. These are app-like services that run inside WeChat itself, 4.3 million of them, used by around 945 million people a month. You book the doctor, hail the cab, pay the power bill, order dinner, buy the movie ticket, and file your government paperwork without ever leaving the app or downloading a single thing. You don’t have twelve apps, twelve logins, and twelve saved credit cards. You have one.

Yes, the Chinese version is restrictive, surveillance heavy, and censored. That’s not the part I’m pointing at. The singular model is the point. Whether we end up with their version of it here is a separate question.

Nobody in the West has built it — not because it can’t be built, but because the pieces were always owned by different companies with no reason to cooperate. Apple owns the wallet. Meta owns the social graph. Your bank owns the settlement layer. Elon is the first person sitting on all three at once.

X Money is offering Premium users 4% on their Stored Value Accounts and to its Premium+ users, 6%. Yes, 6% on cash you have parked in the X account, and they’re issuing digital debit cards and physical metal Visa cards. The card drops into Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a virtual version is issued the moment you sign up, so you’re spending before the metal one hits your mailbox. Not in New York, though — no money transmitter license there, which means no APY at all for New York residents. Massachusetts is out entirely. It’s live in 41 states plus D.C.

They have also partnered with Cross River Bank as their sponsor bank. X isn’t a bank and doesn’t hold a charter, so Cross River provides the charter, the FDIC-insured deposits, the compliance backbone and the payment rails. This is the banking-as-a-service model, and Cross River is effectively the bank behind fintech — a state-chartered New Jersey outfit in Fort Lee running more than 120 clients including Stripe, Affirm, Coinbase, Best Egg and Upstart on an $8 billion balance sheet. If you’ve ever financed a purchase through Affirm or moved money through Coinbase, Cross River probably executed it and you never knew their name. Deposits are insured to $250,000, with up to $10 million available through a cash sweep across partner institutions.

And the Stored Value Account doesn’t have to stop at cash. Right now X is paying 4% to Premium and 6% to Premium+ on dollars parked in the app. Let users hold stablecoins in that same account and the yield options widen considerably — tokenized Treasuries, on-chain lending, staking proof-of-stake assets like Ethereum or Solana. Your checking account, your savings account, and your brokerage stop being three separate things you log into.

There has been talk about “paying in crypto” with X Money, but I think that is the wrong angle to look at this. The GENIUS Act that passed in July 2025 by the US and signed by President Trump allows for a company like X to issue its own stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged one-to-one to a dollar and backed by reserves the issuer is legally obligated to redeem at face value, but they don’t even need to do that. They can allow X users to hold existing stablecoins (RLUSD, USDC) in their X value accounts, then transact them with merchants, peers, make payments, settling them with a blockchain like Solana, Ripple or Stellar as the middle layer. This will happen instantly and appear just as normal to someone as your standard PayPal transaction, but real-time settlement, with negligible fees on a ledger that confirms it for both sides. The change isn’t sending .0001 Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for your burrito bowl, it’s that you don’t even see that layer underneath.

Innovation’s most bearish babe, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote Musk in April flagging what she called a “suspicious carveout” that lets a private commercial company like X issue its own stablecoin, and noted that Thune had blocked a bipartisan floor amendment to close it. She’s right about the mechanism. She’s just wrong about which part should worry anyone.

When you swipe a card today, the transaction looks instant. It isn’t. What happened was an authorization — a promise. The real money moves later, batched overnight, run through the card network, settled between the merchant’s bank and yours over the next day or three. Venmo and Cash App are the same trick. Your balance updates the second you hit send because the app is just moving a number from one row of its own ledger to another row of its own ledger. The actual dollars are still sitting at a bank, waiting on ACH.

Distributed ledger technology collapses all of it. The transfer is the settlement. There is no authorization, then clearing, then settlement — there’s one event on a ledger both sides can verify, running 24 hours. That’s the important change. Not the currency, the plumbing. If it seems inconsequential, it frees up trillions of dollars in capital currently kept in limbo when done at scale.

X Money can put that in the palm of your hand. (Yes, perhaps like the Mark of the Beast.)

The move could potentially merge banking, investing, social media and AI into a singular app.

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.” — Elon Musk

The concept of the “everything app” is the next evolution in the “everything phone,” the smart phone. A smart-app that allows users to go back and forth between all of these aspects seamlessly, when done well, reduces friction to such a degree that adoption becomes inevitable.

The future is already being born. The good thing about it is that it only comes one day at a time.

Photo: Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0

Angel Investor in the Outfield

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The Los Angeles Angels fanbase has been set free.

“Arte Moreno has agreed to sell the team to billionaire Stan Kroenke.” — MLB Trade Rumors

Terms weren’t disclosed, but the LA Times reports the price clears the record $3.9 billion the Padres just sold for.

Arte’s disastrous run as owner of the Angels finally comes to an end. After years of “Sell the team!” chants, and fumbling having both Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani on the same team, in their prime, in the nation’s second largest media market with nary a postseason appearance. Not even a freaking Wild Card. They just concluded their 11th consecutive losing campaign. They haven’t played an October game since 2014 — eleven straight postseasons missed, the longest active drought in baseball. The Butcher of Anaheim has finally relinquished the reins.

Kroenke continues to build his sports empire. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment owns the Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, the Colorado Mammoth, and Arsenal — and now a controlling interest in the Angels, pending MLB approval, with the deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2027.

Kroenke has proven to be a very successful owner. Arsenal won the Premier League this past May, their first title in 22 years, and came a penalty shootout away from a Champions League double. The Nuggets won the NBA title in 2023. The Avalanche took the Stanley Cup in 2022, the Mammoth won the NLL Champion’s Cup that same year, and the Rams won Super Bowl LVI in February 2022. Five different leagues, five trophies, five years.

Also interesting that with the Dodgers potentially being up for sale in some capacity later this year, he opted for the Angels instead. Perhaps preferring outright ownership to being part of a group.

This brings up the question, is Stan Kroenke, with a net worth of $24.3 billion, in favor of a salary cap as an MLB owner?

Hey John Henry, your turn to cash in! #SellTheSox

Photo: Keith Allison (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Slop Shot

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The NHL appears ready to expand into either Houston or Austin, with Houston having the current edge, and then beyond.

The league currently has 32 teams, and in many ways I feel this is the perfect number, they could mirror the NFL model. Eight divisions of four teams apiece, two sixteen-team conferences. It all fits together so nice and neat, and makes postseason seeding much easier to formulate.

I have even mocked this up for the NHL, done with respect to history and regional rivalries:

Eastern Conference

Atlantic — Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo

Metro — NY Rangers, NY Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia

East — Pittsburgh, Washington, Columbus, Ottawa

South — Carolina, Tampa Bay, Florida, Nashville

Western Conference

Central — Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas

North — Winnipeg, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah

Pacific — Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle

West — San Jose, LA, Anaheim, Vegas

Instead, the NHL is currently at four divisions of eight teams that aren’t even geographically aligned, and their playoff seeding format is incredibly confusing. Their point allocation for wins and overtime is designed to keep teams closer together, which last season led to Vegas winning the Pacific Division at 39-26-17 while Anaheim, who won four more actual hockey games at 43-33-6, finished third in the same division. Vegas banked seventeen overtime losses, worth a point each against the two a team nabs for a W. San Jose won exactly as many games as the division champions and missed the playoffs by nine points. Vegas went on to lose the Stanley Cup Final.

The NHL has no interest in fixing this issue, or the currently constructed divisional format, instead they’re hungry for expansion. The league’s seven Canadian based franchises mean there are only twenty-five American markets with NHL teams. Leaving opportunities in places like Houston, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix.

Atlanta has already failed twice as an NHL city, but the times have changed considerably since their last outing. Corporate sponsorships, which the ATL can provide the team en masse, and the boom in live sporting events, makes it a relatively safe bet for success if given a third chance.

Phoenix just lost their team to Salt Lake City over an arena. The Coyotes were pushed out of Glendale in 2022 and spent their last two seasons playing in Arizona State’s 4,600-seat Mullett Arena while chasing a permanent home. When Tempe voters rejected a $2.1 billion arena and entertainment district referendum in May 2023, the clock started. The franchise was sold and moved to Utah eleven months later.

What may come as a surprise to some, Phoenix is actually a city with a prominent hockey culture. Suburban families out there have money, and when it’s 115 degrees for four months a year, an ice rink is the best place in town to take your kid.

Sabres center and franchise cornerstone Tage Thompson was born in Phoenix while his father was in the Coyotes organization. Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews, the 2016 first overall pick, moved to Scottsdale as an infant and got into the game watching the Coyotes play. The Tkachuk brothers, Matthew and Brady, now both on the Florida Panthers, were both born in the Valley during Keith’s run as Coyotes captain. Sabres winger Josh Doan, son of Coyotes franchise scoring leader Shane Doan, was born in Scottsdale and came up through the Phoenix Jr. Coyotes program. Phoenix hockey culture is a significant factor in what brought home the gold for the USA at this year’s Winter Olympics, the country’s first since 1980.

It makes sense the NHL would want to expand into more markets in the United States, but crossing the thirty-two team threshold will water down the talent pool, and potentially weaken the excitement of the game.

What would, say, a thirty-seven team league in major American sports look like? Is there enough elite talent to fill out that many rosters and maintain the level of quality game-to-game? Is the thirty-two team concept just the current psychological barrier based on where the NHL and NFL currently sit? 

Teams being added in low-tax states would spur more competition at the top, but may make the gap between them and the rest of the field even wider.

The league sees dollar signs with new franchises going for two billion dollars — three times what Seattle paid and four times Vegas — with the arena build pushing the total investment to $3.5 billion for the Friedkin family, who will own the new Texas franchise should it be greenlit. Greater inventory of games to sell to broadcasters, more arenas to fill, more markets to sell merchandise, and so forth. The current 32 teams pull about $625 million a year from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, and the next media rights negotiation starts after the 2027-28 season. The lowest grossing of the big four American sports leagues being the first to test the ceiling for teams sounds risky. 

I’d prefer to see Austin get the nod. Houston may be the larger TV market, but ATX would be the better cultural fit and be home to more people who actually care. Austin FC showed there’s a sporting culture outside the Longhorns, and the corporate suites would sell out immediately. The Spurs already play home dates at the Moody Center — Austin is San Antonio’s B town for basketball. Put the NHL in Austin and San Antonio becomes the same for the Capital. 

On the upside, it would likely make it even harder for Canada to bring home the Stanley Cup. Thirty-three teams with Houston? One team for every season since a Canadian club last raised the Cup. 

Photo: Mack Male (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Capital Punishment

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One of the more surreal articles I read in the last decade explained how some nations would move toward negative interest rates for personal bank accounts. Meaning the money you have in checking and savings, you could lose an ever increasing % of it annually for not spending or investing it, according to the whims of the ruling class. And if you did invest it, you would be taxed on its unrealized capital gains.

It sounded absurd, but if you want to see the truly unimaginable enacted into law, you usually have to look no further than the European Union.

This isn’t a new idea either. The European Central Bank, the institution that sets monetary policy for the eurozone, ran a negative deposit rate from June 2014 until the middle of 2022. The banks passed the bill down. By July 2021, 372 German banks were charging negative interest, and what started as a fee on large corporate balances had spread to private accounts of any size. Denmark’s Jyske Bank did it to its retail customers too. Europeans have already had money pulled out of their accounts for the crime of leaving it there.

Fresh off its grotesque new rollout, the “Migration Pact“, which forces quotas of foreigners into European nations, or charges €20,000 per migrant for turning them down, the protectors of liberal democracy continue to spread peace and prosperity with an iron fist: 

As the EU is now interested in personal savings accounts, no doubt dismayed by the fact that the individual wealth of their nations is seeking to extricate their capital to places that are less ideologically punitive in their approach to personal finances.

Notice what the solution never is. It’s never lower taxes, fewer regulations, or an economy someone would actually want to park capital in. The money isn’t leaving because Europeans are financially illiterate. It’s leaving because they can do math. So rather than create nourishing conditions, they’d rather cage it in. 

Something that will be possible when the EU moves to a Central Bank Digital Currency is baking into the currency negative interest rates, and even expiration dates on the funds, forcing people to spend their money before it becomes irredeemable. Using it to force stimulus and investment, and increasing their ever tightening control over the native populations they continue to subjugate.

My view on Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, and Decentralized Finance, is that it has both the power to financially liberate, or ensnare a people, depending on who is, and how it is, finally implemented.

It’s critical when the transition takes hold that competition, individual rights, personal choice and national sovereignty are the driving forces behind it, not technocratic enslavement.

The Last Commodity

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You’re spending your most important resource right now and you may not even realize it. Your attention. And I thank you kindly for spending a little of it here.

Attention is the last commodity. It’s what is truly being struggled over in the streaming wars, sports, gaming industry, and both directly and peripherally, the AI boom.

Streaming was supposed to streamline, no pun intended, where your attention was going. Pay the fee, skip the ads. That lasted about a decade. Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Disney, Paramount — all of them run ads now. More than 60% of new Netflix signups take the ad tier. Streamers often lose money on their ad-free tiers versus what they would be paid to take less money and show their subscribers ads. When people began to cut the cable cord, corporations were desperate to get their brands and products in front of the eyes of consumers, wherever they so happen to be.

With YouTube Premium I skip the ads that play through Google AdSense at the beginning of the videos, but I have to manually fast-forward to avoid the product placement and paid sponsorships. Then there’s promo codes. Affiliate links. The ad used to interrupt the content. Now the ad is the content and you often can’t find the seam.

And we’re still just talking about advertising. That’s just one small aspect of this, the larger picture is simply, what gets our attention. And that applies to everything.

Underneath it all sits the algorithm, which isn’t trying to show you what’s good. It’s trying to keep you there. Short-form video is the purest version — an infinite column of stimulus tuned by a machine that knows your weak spots better than you even do.

“SVA was associated with attentional deficits, impaired executive control, and working memory problems.” — International Journal of Adolescence and Youth

SVA is Short Video Addiction. Executive control is the part of you that decides. That’s what’s eroding, and it’s already reached a dangerous point.

YouTube has recently changed their creator pay-out system, and it’s rewarding long form again after the short form gold rush. The thresholds went up on both sides, but long-form still takes the bigger cut of the split. The goal is simple. Keep people on the platform longer, and have more content people are willing to sit through ads to see. A short captures, but doesn’t hold you. A fifteen minute video does.

If you think I’m overselling it, there’s already a cryptocurrency for this. Basic Attention Token, built by the guy who created JavaScript. It measures how much attention you spend and pays you a cut. Raised $35 million in under a minute.

“BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users and is denominated by relevant user attention.” — Basic Attention Token

Denominated. There’s a whitepaper. There’s a ledger. The commodity of attention has been priced and put on a market. Which shows something unprecedented is taking place that we’re still on the ground floor of.

What does the world look like when generations of people are living life with augmented and virtual reality headsets/eyewear on, gaming, gambling and gooning? The last one is a Gen Z term for one who obsesses over pornography.

Yes, I imagine people will be dating, mating and living their lives in a parallel digital world. And in some fashion getting paid for it.

Facebook/Meta tried to make it a thing, spending more than $80 billion on it and wound up failing miserably. It was so poorly constructed it feels like a money laundering scheme. I haven’t seen that much money result in so little production since California’s high-speed rail.

If the picture I painted sounds bleak, a dystopian future that blends WALL-E, Ready Player One and Idiocracy, know that we’ll have a choice in the matter.

A counterculture movement taking place today seeks to take back our time, attention, and energy from all that entangles us. Rawdogging Flights has become a meme, young men who will board flights across the country and instead of burying their heads in a tablet for six hours, they merely look at the flight tracker on the seatback screen in front of them and people watch, and think, and daydream.

One of the fastest-growing accounts on X is a book club that seeks to use classic literature as a way to combat modernism and all its attention-deficit inducing pitfalls. They’re currently reading The Brothers Karamazov. There’s another trend happening where people dive into The Count of Monte Cristo.

I also don’t believe this is merely an economics story. The battle taking place goes deeper than just being for our mind. The Church Fathers had a word for it long before these technologies existed — nepsis, watchfulness. Guarding your mind against the thoughts that wander in uninvited. They understood your attention is the doorway to your soul.

The modern world is designed to separate this from you all day, everyday, without you even realizing it.

Anyways — thank you for your time. You’ve earned .00001 BAT.

Any Way You Slice It

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Earlier this week I asked, Where’s the Beef?, and mentioned how Trump’s plan to import 300,000 metric tons of beef from overseas at 25% below market value can offer a little relief to the symptoms, but doesn’t address the disease. Including how the big four meatpackers have a pseudo-monopoly on the game.

POTUS has responded to that this week. Not directly to me, but — Mr. President, if you have been checking the site, please read till the end.

It’s an important step, one that actually provides some relief to our ranchers. But not one that will be felt immediately (or on your next trip to the grocery store).

Next up, please wipe out the national debt using crypto, return the nation to a gold-backed currency, and deport the 50 million foreign-born people living in the country today. (According to former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, the real number of illegals alone is more than double that.) Then seize all the farmland owned by China and every other foreign nation, along with whatever the transhumanists like Bill Gates and the climate agenda outfits are sitting on.

That should get rising food costs back under control.

What’s for dinner?