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.
Rams… Champs. Rapids… Champs. Nuggets… Champs. Mammoth… Champs. Avalanche… Champs. Arsenal FC… Champs. Arsenal WFC… Champs.
Stan Kroenke was born to win. Stan Kroenke will fix the Angels.
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?
Mets owner Steven Cohen net worth: $23 billion (per Forbes)
Stan Kroenke: $24.3 billion (also Forbes, some sites have it even higher)
MLB's new richest owner is of the Los Angeles Angels.
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.
The NHL is working with potential owners of an expansion team in Texas, and it's becoming less likely that Canadian hockey fans will see an eighth franchise land in their country: https://t.co/HfG8jHfxZ0
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?
Greg Wyshynski on The Sheet Podcast about expansion/talent dilution: "Also Daly is saying the quiet part loud, which is: the more dilution of talent you have, the more sloppy play gets, the more ineffective defensive systems become, and the more scoring that we see, and more… pic.twitter.com/hEBYeXlrNX
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.
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.
JUST IN – EU President Ursula von der Leyen says that people's savings accounts are a problem
and that she must put this money "to the service of European companies"
says her plan to "securitize them" and "supervise them"
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.
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 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.
I spent two innings watching this game on Apple Immersive Video and WOW. This is the future. I would swear I was in the on-deck circle. Hope everyone gets a chance to see a game like this! 🥽
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.
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).
The Pro-Am Triple Crown is a stat I have been unofficially tracking in my football observing life for decades. It’s an incredibly rare achievement. The feat requires winning the Heisman Trophy, the National Championship, and then being selected first overall in the spring draft that follows.
To date there have been only five players to achieve this. Three of them within the last 15 years.
Cam Newton went 14-0 at Auburn in 2010, took the Heisman, beat Oregon for the BCS title, and went first overall to Carolina that April. Joe Burrow’s 2019 at LSU is the best season a quarterback has ever put on tape — 5,671 yards, 60 touchdown passes, 15-0, and a Heisman margin so wide it broke O.J. Simpson’s 1968 record. Cincinnati took him first the next spring. The passing game coordinator who built the juggernaut offense around him was Joe Brady, current head coach of the Buffalo Bills. Burrow was also the first LSU player to win the Heisman in sixty years. The third player to complete the trifecta this century is Fernando Mendoza, and we’ll get to him.
Which brings me to the other two, both from my beloved Fighting Irish.
Angelo Bertelli won the Heisman for Notre Dame in 1943 in six games. The Marines called him up after the Navy game in late October and his college career was over. The Irish won the national title anyway and the Boston Yanks took him first overall in 1944. He never played a down in the NFL. He deployed to Iwo Jima instead.
Six years later Leon Hart did it again for Frank Leahy. Undefeated 1949, consensus national champion, Heisman and Maxwell winner, first overall to Detroit in 1950. He’s still the last lineman to win the Heisman. Notre Dame has two of the five and both of the historical ones. Nobody else has more than one.
There have been a few players in recent years that hit all three objectives but did so over the course of multiple seasons. Jameis Winston won the Heisman and the title in the same year at Florida State in 2013 as a redshirt freshman, then played another season before entering the draft in 2015 to go first overall. O.J. Simpson has all three pieces — the 1967 title at USC in his first year on campus, the 1968 Heisman, first overall to Buffalo in 1969. Billy Cannon won LSU’s title in 1958 as a junior, took the 1959 Heisman, and went first overall to the Rams in 1960. And Ernie Davis was a sophomore on Syracuse’s 1959 championship team, led them in rushing and won Cotton Bowl MVP, then took the Heisman in 1961 as the first black player to win it and went first overall in 1962. Like Bertelli, he never played a professional down. Leukemia took him at just twenty-three years old.
Bryce Young has the three honors over multiple years, but my criteria requires being a starter at their position in the national championship season. He threw for 156 yards the entire 2020 season behind Mac Jones. Vinny Testaverde is out by the same rule — he redshirted in 1983 while Bernie Kosar won Miami a championship.
Bo Jackson is the one worth arguing about. Auburn went 11-1 in 1983 and beat Michigan in the Sugar Bowl playing the hardest schedule in the country. Miami vaulted from fifth to first after the Orange Bowl and took the AP, UPI, FWAA and coaches titles. Auburn got named champion by the New York Times computer poll, Billingsley, the CFRA and a few others, and Auburn now officially claims it. Pat Dye said his team would wear New York Times rings. So Bo has a Heisman, a first overall pick, and a national title that exists entirely at the discretion of whichever selector you feel like trusting. He also never signed with Tampa Bay.
And there’s a much longer list of players who have hit two-out-of-three. Baker Mayfield won the Heisman at Oklahoma in 2017 and went first overall to Cleveland in 2018, but Georgia bounced the Sooners in the Rose Bowl semifinal. Caleb Williams took it at USC in 2022 and went first overall to Chicago in 2024 — no title, and two years between the trophy and the pick. Carson Palmer won the 2002 Heisman and went first to Cincinnati in 2003 while Ohio State won the championship and USC finished fourth. Kyler Murray, Heisman at Oklahoma in 2018, first overall to Arizona in 2019, nothing else. Earl Campbell won the 1977 Heisman at Texas and went first to Houston in 1978, and it was Notre Dame that beat the Longhorns in the Cotton Bowl and took the title. Trevor Lawrence gets there from the other direction — title as a true freshman starter at Clemson in 2018, first overall to Jacksonville in 2021, but no Heisman. He finished second to DeVonta Smith in 2020.
And then there’s the reverse case: Johnny Lujack won the Heisman on Notre Dame’s undefeated 1947 championship team and missed the whole thing by three draft slots, because the Bears had already spent the fourth overall pick on him the year before.
The newest member to this exclusive club is Fernando Mendoza, fresh off one of the most incredible seasons in College Football history. A true Cinderella story, something that would have seemed only possible in a video game just three years ago. I know, because I saw Indiana play in person three years ago and the idea they were less than two years away from a Natty then is mind-blowing.
Mendoza is an interesting case, the jury is out on if he truly possesses what it takes to be a franchise quarterback in the NFL. The truth is, I’m not sure. Both sides make salient points in their arguments. What he becomes at the pro level remains to be seen. What I do know is that because of his personality, I will be rooting for him to succeed. He’s been clowned on for his overly kind and professional disposition in interviews and for his answers getting him the nickname ChatGPT. During his appearance on Monday Night Football in the preseason this year he referred to play-by-play man Joe Buck as Mr. Buck. I love the contrast this gives to Raider Nation. The Raiders have also been making moves that make the team more competitive, and dare I say more watchable.
“He is a bad dude, man. He’s what the Raiders need.” — Jon Gruden
Which leads me to a quick sidebar: I do this insane thing as a sports fan, I hope for teams, that I don’t hate, to become fun to watch. Sports are the ultimate content, and they should be enjoyable to follow. Sure, when it’s your team it’s a whole different vibe, but the rest of the games, I want to actually have the desire to tune in and be entertained. It helps when you’re watching great ensembles that honor the game by playing it with a high-level of execution, situational awareness and discipline. Sloppy football is not good content. I’ll cover which teams I think are going to be the most “fun” to watch this season in a future post. With a few teams to be included that may surprise you.
This offseason the Raiders added Mendoza, Tyler Linderbaum, my favorite center. Yes, I have a favorite center. He’s a monster in the middle from Iowa by way of the Ravens that should be a huge contributor to Mendoza’s odds of sticking around. They gave him three years and $81 million, which makes him the highest-paid interior offensive lineman in football. They tried to trade Maxx Crosby — and by tried I mean the deal was done, two first-round picks from Baltimore, before the Ravens failed him on a physical and walked away from it. They also signed linebackers Quay Walker and Nakobe Dean, edge rusher Kwity Paye, receiver Jalen Nailor, and Kirk Cousins on a one-year deal. They also welcome in a new head coach too, Klint Kubiak from Seattle, taking over a team that went 3-14. It looks like the Tom Brady Era in Las Vegas has officially begun.
My hope for the Raiders is they lose enough games to snag a top-five pick and land Jeremiah Smith, the Ohio State WR that is the best prospect at the position in years, drawing comparisons physically to Calvin Johnson. But with Kirk Cousins at the helm and an improved roster, that may be difficult for them to pull off. A big time receiver and a fortified offensive line would help Mendoza’s chances once he gets put into the fray.
And I don’t think they should rush it, letting him sit behind Cousins for the vast majority of the season and ending the year with 3-4 starts could be a much better way to bring him along than feeding him to the wolves right out of the gate the way franchises often do with top QB’s now.
The exclusivity of Mendoza’s accomplishment should be applauded, he has entered rarified air. And his attitude and disposition make it easy to do so.
This College Football season has a few potential contenders who could actually pull the Triple Crown off. Arch Manning at Texas, Julian Sayin at Ohio State, Dante Moore at Oregon, and my personal favorite, CJ Carr at Notre Dame — who opened as the betting favorite for the Heisman, for whatever that’s worth in August.
After beef prices hit another all-time high last week — ground beef at $6.89 a pound, an 83% climb since 2017 — President Trump has announced a plan to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from overseas, tariff-free for the next 90 days, to be brought into the market at a 25% discount below market price.
“We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25% below current market prices.” — President Donald Trump
It’s estimated that 12% of the population eats around half of the supply. I’m happy to be part of this dietary elite.
In the era of 5th Generation warfare, everything is the battlefield. The schools, the media, healthcare, and you absolutely better believe the food supply.
With greater attention being shown to the declining quality of our cuisine, RFK Jr.’s MAHA push, and Tucker Carlson openly referring to it as “goy-slop”, the movement has gone mainstream.
One of the biggest issues is the loss of small cattle ranchers. We’ve been losing over 21,000 independent cattle producers a year — call it 58 a day — and more than half of every beef operation that existed in 1980 is already gone.
Rep. Massie has been reminding everyone about his PRIME Act, which would let small producers use a local custom slaughterhouse and sell in-state. It would provide some relief but doesn’t go nearly far enough to course correct the cliff we’re heading towards. It also doesn’t touch labeling. We killed mandatory country of origin labels in 2015 because Canada and Mexico complained to the WTO.
The nation’s cattle supply is at its lowest point since 1951. 86.2 million head. The beef cow herd hasn’t been this small since 1961.
I understand President Trump is looking for short term relief heading into the midterms, but the need for comprehensive reform is a critical issue that without exaggeration has national security implications. More than a third of 17-to-24 year olds are ineligible to serve at least in part because of obesity, and 11% are disqualified on weight alone.
If the government subsidized grassfed beef the way they do corn we’d quite literally be far better off. And in many ways our entire food supply is already subsidized in a negative way.
There’s been no discussion about how much EBT raises the price of groceries for the rest of Americans.
The Battle of the Beef ties into the climate agenda and the WEF Great Reset. They’ve spent decades telling you how bad red meat is for your health, and how terrible cows are for the environment.
The fact that they’re so desperate to stop us from eating it tells me it’s probably the fountain of youth.
Remember Beyond Beef? And Impossible? At least we can claim victory over the collapsed value of those companies. And the closure of Kevin Hart’s Vegan restaurant chain.
The “consensus” on cholesterol is even being questioned now, with citizen-funded imaging studies out of Cholesterol Code turning up lean, high-LDL subjects with no detectable plaque. How far does the deception really go?
“I take a vitamin every day. It’s called a steak.” — Jim Harbaugh
Inflation, foreign investment, the big four meat processors and regulation have all led us to this point. Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef handle roughly 85% of the beef processed in this country, and two of the four are Brazilian owned. A country in decline struggles to feed its people, as does one under attack.
Generational debates are happening online about how much one should spend on lunch, and while frugality is always wise, being forced to eat literal slop because our monetary policy and agricultural industry are completely out of whack is nothing to be proud of.
I’m reminded of William Wallace in Braveheart, “squabbling for the scraps from Longshanks’ table.”
We were not founded to be a nation of subjugated fools, encouraging one another to cook their hamburger helper with beans instead of ground beef.
Europe has authorized cricket powder in bread, pasta, and pizza. NSF money is funding labs trying to engineer lettuce into mRNA delivery vehicles. And our own herd is being eaten alive from the inside by New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite we wiped out in the 1960s and then let walk right back up through Central America into Texas. That’s what closed the Mexican border to cattle for a year and pulled 795,000 head out of the supply. They’re all tied together with a common thread, and one that needs to be addressed.
It’s the Talking Heads concert film, shot by Jonathan Demme over three nights at the Pantages in Hollywood in December 1983. Frontman David Byrne walks out alone with a boom box and an acoustic guitar, and the band gets built one member at a time until it’s a nine-piece.
It had been rattling around the back of my head for years. ‘Greatest concert film ever made’, according to a lot of people with opinions I respected. But I’d never really gotten into the Talking Heads, so I never bothered. Then I saw a copy on sale for five bucks and it was time to finally take the plunge.
I wouldn’t say I was wrong about the Talking Heads. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had no negative view of them, I just failed to understand how influential they truly are.
Funny thing about David Byrne — he reads as a Gen X icon, though he’s a Baby Boomer who was born in Scotland, 1952.
A concert film is the intersection of two artists. You need the act operating at the height of its powers, and you need a director with enough restraint to understand he is not the star. His only job is to take what happened in that room and deliver in the best way possible to the theatrical or home-viewing audience. And get the sound right. That’s a big one.
That takes strength, because you have to remove most of yourself from the product. Scorsese doesn’t do that exactly — he’s right there on camera in The Last Waltz, asking questions. But that’s his thing and it works. The Last Waltz has been first on my list in this category for years.
“…of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high.” —Roger Ebert
Seven years after this, Demme made The Silence of the Lambs, which landed Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. The Big Five. Only two other films in history have done it. It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Demme knew, in 1983, to keep the cameras on the stage and leave himself out of it.
Now, before I say a word about the actual music, a disclaimer. I find written reviews of music absolutely preposterous. Word salad. They read like parodies of the music review business itself: Referring to an album as a “bluesy, whiskey-soaked rag mama rock opera” — it comes across as writers spinning nonsense to describe a thing you can only get by hearing it yourself. The best you can do is tell people it’s good and advise them to go experience it for themselves. Everything past that comes out clunky and pretentious. Go read any Rolling Stone album review and you’ll see what I mean.
So with that out of the way, here’s what stood out.
Byrne has said himself that he’s somewhere on the spectrum. Watch him for five minutes and it stops being a question. That is in no way used pejoratively. The man is a certified autistic/artistic genius, and he joins a list in that regard I keep that also includes Michael Jackson, Axl Rose and Kanye West. Autist being another term that is not used lightly or to be framed as derogatory. I’m referring to those possessing actual genius.
The show is constructed visually, sonically, and with a songwriting range that shows craftsmanship and control. Song after song I’d sit there thinking, “Holy shit, this is a Talking Heads song too?” Having never fully explored their catalog on my own, I badly underestimated how deeply their DNA runs through popular music and culture.
And speaking of Kanye — the suit. That absurd broad-shouldered architectural monstrosity Byrne climbs into in the back half of the film. Decades later Kanye and Lil Pump built an entire video around it, the two of them shuffling down a hallway inside giant square shoulders. I don’t consider it as a coincidence, I see it as homage.
The version of genius people usually mean by “idiot savant” is narrow. One thing, done inhumanly well, and not much else. Byrne is the other kind. He calls on a dozen different influences and styles and makes them cohere into one thing. As a writer, I sometimes refer to myself as an idiom savant.
He is not, however, an autist at the highest order. Byrne is very left-leaning, and American Utopia — the 2018 album, then the Broadway show, then the Spike Lee film — is pro-immigration with a side of activism. While he is extremely talented, he does not reach the utmost levels of intellectual transcendence of a Stanley Kubrick or a Bobby Fischer.
The Dodgers empire may be coming apart at the seams.
“Prosecutors are investigating whether Walter’s businesses hid financial ties while borrowing billions from insurers he controls.” — Reuters
After the surprising sale of the Los Angeles Lakers last week, it now looks as though Mark Walter may need to divest himself of the Los Angeles Dodgers as well. The club says he has no plans to sell. He also had no plans to sell the Lakers ten months ago.
The situation is in the early stages, and there is serious bias in the coverage of it so far. I do remember a President of the United States who caught 34 felonies in New York, and then caught a separate half-billion dollar civil judgment for ‘inflating the value of his assets’ to get better terms on his loans — a farcical judgment an appeals court later threw out. Inflated collateral, concealed connections. Same neighborhood of accusations. The difference is that the Walter case appears to be actually substantive and not just politically motivated lawfare.
The Mark Walter situation is nuts and it's becoming a real question of whether he's going to need to sell the Dodgers to help raise $20 billion needed to pay back loans (Full story/explanation in first reply) pic.twitter.com/yjpoa3hwS1
The Dodgers having to sell isn’t the biggest story. It’s the Guggenheim group’s stake in their TV rights deal that makes this very interesting. If this is true, and it ends up costing the Dodgers their $334 million annual local television revenue, it shakes up the hierarchy of Major League Baseball immediately.
Also interesting is that Shohei Ohtani has a clause in his contract that should GM Andrew Friedman leave the team, or the ownership group change, he can opt out of his contract the following offseason.
“Ohtani can opt out if Walter is no longer controlling owner or Friedman no longer runs baseball ops.” — ESPN
Los Angeles also owes north of a billion dollars in deferred salary money to players on the team after their contracts end. That may not be a huge issue now, but if revenues are shared more evenly in the future that could become a burden to the new owners.
This only serves to add fuel to the fire for owners who desperately want a salary cap this offseason in their labor dispute with the MLBPA.
Currently the smaller-revenue teams can coast on the league’s welfare check before they spend a dime from ticket sales or local TV. They’d like a bigger cut of the pie than they’re getting, and they’re willing to institute a salary floor to get the players on board. The new CBA only needs 23 of the league’s 30 owners to approve it. If enough of the smaller fish band together and force this issue, things get very interesting. This incident could take out the ownership of the biggest financial juggernaut in the sport before the deepest parts of the CBA battle come to pass. The owners don’t care as much about leveling the competition and competitive balance as they do increasing their franchise valuations. That’s exactly what a salary cap would provide for them.
Los Angeles achieving a three-peat this fall with another World Series title would be historic and impressive regardless of the payroll, but it may also be their last chance to do so in the league’s current framework.
With the players and owners speaking different languages in early stage CBA negotiations, this tectonic shift occuring right at this time feels like another reason we may not see baseball played in 2027. The dynamics may be in such a state a flux that a reconcilliation becomes even more difficult to arrive at.
I’m counting down the five biggest crisis situations in College Football. This isn’t the worst overall programs. This factors in failing to meet expectations, mismanagement, financial and conference status, consistent losing, scandals, and falling from grace. These are situations that are faltering in the ever changing landscape of college football. Some have more viable paths back to success than others.
Honorable Mention: Michigan State
Three head coaches in four years. They fired Mel Tucker for cause in 2023 with $79 million left on his deal, a designation he’s still suing to overturn. Then they gave Jonathan Smith seven years and fired him after two, eating $32.5 million. Then they replaced him with Pat Fitzgerald, two years out of the game after Northwestern fired him amid a hazing scandal.
And I still see Fitzgerald as a potentially stabilizing force with upside. He won 110 games in Evanston with none of the resources he’ll have now.
They’ll be fine either way. Big Ten full shares averaged nearly $80 million in 2024-25 and Michigan State collects that annually. Conference status is their saving grace. The Spartans can eat the $32.5 million they owe Smith, but if Tucker settles for as much as that or more, things get a little hairy. It’s not all doom and gloom in East Lansing, but the gap between the Spartans and the Wolverines, Buckeyes, Nittany Lions, and Hoosiers has only grown wider. Not to mention how much further the additions of USC, Washington and Oregon drop them down the conference pecking order.
#5 Florida State
The ACC fell behind. Its schools pull in the mid-forties per year while the Big Ten and SEC each clear $70 million, so Florida State sued its own conference to get out early. They settled in March 2025 — a bigger cut of the ESPN money, exit fee cut to $165 million and dropping to $75 million by 2030-31, media rights included on the way out. They bought themselves a door.
The problem is there may not be a room on the other side. The Big Ten only admits AAU members — Miami got in in 2023, along with North Carolina, Duke, Virginia and Pitt. Florida State isn’t one. The SEC doesn’t need them either, since Florida already owns the state, and Finebaum’s read is they’d rather have UNC and Virginia. And if the SEC does want to expand its footprint into Florida, Miami is the more lucrative option.
The football has matched the finances. No bowl game since 2018. Third head coach in three years after Troy Taylor was fired and Frank Reich filled in for a season. Andrew Luck runs the program as general manager now, and Tavita Pritchard, a first-time head coach, runs the team. CFN projects the worst quarterback situation in the conference.
The alumni network is the counterargument, and it is a real one. Stanford graduates founded the world we live in today: Google, Nike, Netflix and Instagram, and the list goes on. The university sits on an endowment north of $37 billion. There is more capital in that donor base than in any five athletic departments combined.
It hasn’t mattered. Money moves toward things people want to be part of, and right now nobody wants to be part of Stanford football. Admissions standards don’t bend for a $23 million roster market. The travel doesn’t shorten. The media share doesn’t change until the next decade, and by then their best case scenario may be a spot in the Big 12. They are one of the big losers of the Pac-12 collapse, but not as big as the next team.
#3 Oregon State
This is the Pac-12 collapse’s biggest casualty. Ten schools left, Oregon State and Washington State were not invited anywhere, and the two of them kept the conference name and rebuilt it with Mountain West level teams. The 2026 Pac-12 is Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Texas State, Utah State and Gonzaga for basketball.
On the field it has been worse. Oregon State went 2-10 last year. They fired Trent Bray at 0-7, the worst start since 1991, and the school said the roughly $4 million buyout would come out of donor money. That is a program passing the hat to fire its own coach. JaMarcus Shephard, a 42-year-old first-time head coach, takes over. This was a top-ten team in 2023.
On a personal note, I grew up a Pac-10 kid, and I’m glad to see the name live on. The conference may end up being one of the most exciting top to bottom in the FBS. But that doesn’t change the reality of the business side of things.
For a school that was spurned by the Big 12, their prospects for a better situation in the next round of realignment look meek. A dominant run in the new Pac-12 is their best hope to return to some form of national relevance.
#2 North Carolina
The Tar Heels made a splash last offseason with the hiring of NFL GOAT, eight-time Super Bowl winner, Bill Belichick. BB was given his “mutual” separation with the Patriots after a string of strange decisions, like having a defensive coordinator coach the offense, regressing Mac Jones from year two on, and missing the playoffs two years running, among a host of other issues.
I love Bill Belichick. I know that’s not a common sentiment from most fans, or even the media. I liked his surly press conferences and his casual trolling. I found him to be extremely entertaining, even if that was never his intention. The Boston sports media does not share that sentiment. They haven’t stopped dancing on his NFL head coaching grave since he left town.
After being passed over for the Falcons job, Coach Belichick spent a season in media, making weekly appearances on the Pat McAfee show and hosting his own podcast on YouTube. In each of these appearances there was a real sense that BB was attempting to rehab his image for one more crack at holding the reins for an NFL team. He sits just 15 wins away from Coach Shula’s record of 347.
He shocked the world by agreeing to a five year deal with the Tar Heels, but it conveniently included a reasonable opt out fee if he got an NFL offer after one year. The buyout was $10 million before June 1, 2025, and $1 million after. He brought in self-diagnosed football genius Michael Lombardi, his son Steve as defensive coordinator after a year as Washington’s DC, and perhaps most notoriously his 24 year old girlfriend Jordon Hudson.
After a horrendous first year on the field, and banning the Patriots from scouting players in person, his promise to be the 33rd NFL team that would prepare players for the league better than any other school in the nation looks thin. UNC finished 4-8 and had zero players drafted, ending a streak of at least one Tar Heel selected every year since 2016.
North Carolina may have a bright future if they’re able to exit the ACC for the Big Ten in 2031, but that will be long after the short term pain being induced upon them right now. If UNC fires him without cause after this season, they owe him the balance of the guarantee through December 2027 — one year, $10 million.
The question of whether Chapel Bill still has it in him to produce a winner the Belichick way is one of my favorite storylines going into the season. Game one in Dublin, Ireland on August 29th against a TCU team that dog-walked them last year will have the eyes of the college football world upon it, and it can’t get here soon enough.
#1 Colorado
What can be said about this program that Jason Whitlock hasn’t already called out? Deion came over from Jackson State with a head full of steam. He brought Shedeur and Travis Hunter as his top holdovers from Jackson, and the “Louis” luggage he had jump in the portal. They stormed out to a 3-0 start, including a big season opening win on the road at TCU, and then the wheels fell off and they limped out to a 4-8 record. Reports came out from former players about the standoffish nature of Coach Prime Time, refusing to even speak to a significant portion of them.
In his second year they had their best record of his tenure at 9-4 and an Alamo Bowl loss to BYU. That might not sound great to you, but it was in fact enough to get two-way star Hunter the Heisman trophy. And as far as accomplishments for Deion in his time at CU, that’s the highwatermark, and frankly, nothing to sneeze at.
It appeared the CU move was just an attempt to get Shedeur into the NFL. ESPN did the best they could to assist with that, hyping him as QB 1A of the draft. Shedeur fell to the fifth round where he was selected by the Cleveland Browns, who had already selected Dillon Gabriel in the third round of that same draft. Shedeur’s time in Cleveland is well documented. I felt he held onto the ball for far too long in college to be a viable NFL starter, and some of those bad habits continue to plague his game today. Hunter was taken second overall by the Jags, who let him play both offense and defense his rookie season until he was hurt. He looked undersized in the NFL.
The run by the two athletes was enough to get their jersey numbers retired in Boulder. A move that would have been palatable had it only been Hunter’s. It seemed like Deion would mentally and emotionally check out after Shedeur moved on. He spent the CU offseason dealing with a bladder cancer issue, had a new bladder constructed, and returned in time for the start of the season. A disappointing one as the Buffs ended with a 3-9 record and won a single Big 12 game. Sanders enters year 4 having signed a five-year, $54 million extension in March 2025 that pays him an average of $10.8 million per year, making him the highest paid coach in the Big 12.
Footage has come out of Colorado’s fall camp practices this month, and the players looked extremely undersized.
𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚: The Colorado Football team has gone viral for looking like a Youth Football team during practice.
The Buffaloes' players look concerningly skinny and extremely small.
In response to the negative publicity, CU placed a comprehensive gag order on reporters attending practice. They were not allowed to report on anything, that’s right, anything they saw at the session. The email read that nothing observed may be reported, published, posted, broadcast or otherwise shared in any form, on any platform, at any time, and that if you’re uncertain whether something is reportable, the answer is that it is not. If that wasn’t enough bad publicity, footage was then released of their female strength and conditioning coach giving a folksy, “y’all” laced speech to hype up the team that went over like a description of Linda Blair in The Exorcist at the family dinner table.
Powerful: Colorado’s female strength and conditioning coach Morgen Cote has gone viral for her motivational speech to the team.
"I don’t do this for the love of the game. I do this for the love of y’all."
The Big 12 is underfunded compared to the big two conferences. Their conference wide Monster Energy jersey patch sponsor is $20 million for the entire league, which comes out to about a million a school. Notre Dame’s SoFi patch is worth $18 to $20 million for just them. Yes, the Fighting Irish patch is equal to the entirety of the Big 12.
NIL is part of the issue, but it doesn’t make it any less real. Deion thrived when it was hype and swagger and attitude that sold young men on the program. Now years of missed expectations, excuses, and negative stories have soured prospects on calling Boulder home, and when they can’t match the checks being written by mid to bottom tier Big Ten schools, it’s easy to see why.
I expect this to be Deion’s last season on the sidelines. If he makes it through the year, he can agree to a buyout, step down due to “health reasons,” and sign a lucrative deal with ESPN to be featured on College GameDay where he can be a well-compensated media personality. Which is one of the things I believe he does best. His segments on NFL Network were usually very enjoyable. Back when they had the dream team of Marshall Faulk, Warren Sapp, Michael Irvin, Kurt Warner and Steve Mariucci. The program was actually fun, entertaining and informative. Contrast that with the media slop offered up by ESPN. Suffice to say, Deion, the Buffaloes, and ESPN may all be the better for this being his rocky mountain swan song.
