Month: September 2026

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)