NEWPORT, Maine — In the calm moments — the few there are — snow slithers sideways across the northbound lanes of I-95. It’s almost graceful how the flurries snake right to left, passengers on every random gust of wind. Almost. But then the gusts become punches, pummeling and whipping the sides of this poor gray Nissan Altima. Windshield wipers are working overtime, and it takes every bit of front-wheel drive to stay aligned with the two thin tire tracks in the far right lane. And straight ahead, you see … nothing. The gray horizon swallows everything, even the tops of the soaring pines that frame the highway.
It’s like being inside a fiercely shaken snow globe.
Suddenly, amidst the whiteout, a standard green roadside sign appears: Exit 157. This whole trek — 100 miles north of Portland, past multiple “Moose Warning” signs — is to visit this tiny intersection. “Blink,” said longtime resident Josh Grant, “and you’ll miss it.”
Skate up the overpass to a stop sign; to the right is the local taxidermist, and not much else — so veer left, and welcome to Newport. Population: about 3,000. The main thoroughfare is called Moosehead Trail, but there’s no cutesy downtown with boutique shops or mom-and-pop restaurants.
There are two gas stations, a few fast-food joints — Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, Dunkin’ — a pharmacy, an ice cream shop, and two marijuana dispensaries. Around the corner there’s a Walmart, and in the parking lot, a log cabin that serves as the community’s chamber of commerce.
A few roads over, on a snowy street the plows haven’t reached, 10 houses down on the left, there’s a brown two-story, with the remnants of a basketball hoop on the left side of a curving driveway.
This is where Cooper Flagg, the best high school basketball player in America, was raised. Cooper’s enrolling at Duke next season, before likely becoming the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. At 17, the 6-foot-9 forward already has been named a McDonald’s All-American, the MVP of the annual NBA Players Association top-100 camp, and an all-star at the 2022 FIBA U17 Basketball World Cup, which he helped the United States win.
A native Mainer hasn’t been drafted in 40 years, not since the New Jersey Nets selected Jeff Turner in 1984. Yet somehow, this town — “a place for people going other places,” as resident Earl Anderson calls it — has bred one of basketball’s brightest rising stars.
Maine has only one Division I program — the University of Maine — and the Black Bears men’s team has never made the NCAA Tournament. The state rarely exports talent to other programs.
“Just because we don’t produce the big D1 athletes as much as those other states do, people don’t think basketball is as big (here),” said Ralph Flagg, Cooper’s dad. “But it really is.”
Maine has no professional sports franchises, so local TV channels stream every round of the annual state high school tournaments, and the regional and championship games are played in the state’s largest arenas, in Bangor, Augusta and Portland. People flock from as far north as Madawaska — one of America’s “Four Corners,” which sits on the Canadian border — to watch players compete to bring the coveted Gold Ball home to their community. “When it comes to tournament time, the last person leaving the town turns the lights out,” said Ralph, repeating an old Maine expression.
“High school basketball is generations deep in the fabric of all these communities,” Anderson said. “It binds them together.”
Most small Maine towns aren’t large enough to support a school themselves. (Newport, for example, is one of eight communities that feeds into Nokomis Regional High School.) It’s a few thousand people here, another couple hundred there, all coming together to support that generation of players. Anderson, who coached Cooper his freshman year, led Nokomis to its only girls state championship in 2001, a point of pride for both coach and community.
Cooper’s parents both played at Nokomis. Ralph later played for Eastern Maine Community College. And mom Kelly remains one of the top talents Nokomis ever produced; she played on the only University of Maine team to win an NCAA Tournament game, a 1999 upset over Stanford.
After college, Ralph was playing in a men’s league at the local community center — a converted 1940s armory, just a few minutes walk from the house Cooper grew up in — alongside Kelly’s dad (who also played at Nokomis). “That was kind of where we met,” Ralph said. “On a basketball court.”
They settled, like their parents before them, in Newport, raising their three boys: Hunter, the oldest, and later twins Cooper and Ace. The boys were raised with a basketball in their hands, traveling the state to watch games. Kelly — who coached the Nokomis varsity girls team — has photos of them asleep in various high school rafters. At home, the boys spent hours in the driveway (when the weather allowed it) playing pickup, with their parents or friends or just one another.
“And then even sometimes in the winter,” Cooper said, “we would shovel out a square in the snow and play with gloves on.”
By Hunter’s freshman year, Nokomis was playing in a nearby summer league, but struggled finding enough players. So Cooper and Ace joined in — as sixth-graders, against high schoolers. “(Cooper) was still the best player on either team,” Ralph said.
About the same time, Kelly got a call from a former college peer: Andy Bedard, a basketball icon in Maine. Bedard led Mountain Valley High to a state title in 1994, before playing at Boston College and Maine. Bedard was coaching his son, Kaden, and had heard about Cooper. He invited the family to attend a practice, and they were immediately impressed.
“They were surprised how I didn’t have a whole lot of time and patience for, like, kiddie gloves,” Bedard said. “The drills and the coaching and the urgency and the speed, you’d have thought you were at a high school practice, if you had your eyes closed and you didn’t see the kids out there — but meanwhile, they’re like fourth-graders.”
Eventually, Bedard and Kelly formed their own AAU program, where they could pour every dollar they raised back into their kids. They let the boys decide on a name: Maine United.
The team drew players from all over the state. Bedard was based in New Gloucester, for instance, about 20 minutes north of Portland. So Maine United didn’t have one consistent practice gym; it used a church in Portland, or a gym at Division III Bates College in Lewiston, or anywhere it could train.
Once the middle school bell rang, two or three days a week, the Flaggs trekked down I-95. They’d pack snacks, or order a pizza pickup on the way, to cut their commute. “Probably like an hour and 45 minutes,” Bedard said. “Hour and a half, maybe, if Kelly was driving 100.” They usually drove the family’s blue Chrysler minivan. They’d lay the middle row of seats down so the boys could sprawl out, then play old Boston Celtics tapes on the van’s mini DVD player.
“The ‘85-86 Celtics championship Finals disc,” Cooper said. “We watched all those so many times. Then we had Magic versus Bird. Just all those other old Celtics films.” Those tapes were Cooper’s basketball education. Larry Bird was his professor and remains his favorite player. And the way those teams played — sharing the ball, prioritizing defense — always stuck with Cooper. “Watching them every single day maybe brainwashed him into the fact that, well, that’s how you play,” Bedard said.
Maine United won quickly regionally, but soon wanted a broader barometer. They found one at a seventh-grade grassroots tournament in Washington, D.C. “I’m seeing all these big guys in the layup line, and it’s our age group,” Bedard said, “but certainly they all looked a hell of a lot older. Some of them had tattoos.” Five minutes into the game, Maine United led 24-2. “And Cooper, he’s smashing everything,” Bedard said.
Cooper’s performance that weekend put him on the national radar. “I remember my grandson texted me, ‘Do you know Cooper Flagg?’” Anderson said. “Because he had read somewhere that he was, like, the seventh-ranked seventh-grader, eighth-grader in the country.” By their eighth-grade year, prep schools from around the country started calling, asking them to transfer.
But Cooper and Ace refused. They’d grown up with the same group of friends, always cheering on Nokomis, waiting for their opportunity to play for the Warriors. “We always talked about when (Hunter and his friends) were seniors, when we were freshmen, what the team was going to look like and how we were going to win a Gold Ball together,” Cooper said. “Once we got there, we were like, let’s make it happen.”
Cooper averaged 20.5 points, 10 rebounds, 6.2 assists, 3.7 steals, and 3.7 blocks per game that season — becoming the first freshman in state history to be named Maine Gatorade Player of the Year — and Nokomis won its first state title. A photo of Hunter, Cooper, and Ace holding the Gold Ball remains the screensaver on Ralph’s phone. On the ride home to Newport, Ralph and Kelly and other parents of kids who grew up together packed into the Flagg’s Chevy Suburban, singing “We Are the Champions” as loud as they could.
As the bus carrying the team pulled off exit 157, fans lined the sides of Moosehead Trail in a miles-long parade that stretched to Nokomis. All eight townships that feed into the school sent their fire trucks and police cars to escort the team bus, and locals near Nokomis set off fireworks.
“As time has gone on, I’ve grown to appreciate it more and more,” Cooper said. “Because as the times get more hectic, and everything’s getting more crazy, I get to appreciate the simplicity of that year. I was able to still kind of just be a kid, and have fun with my friends.”
Tickets to watch Cooper Flagg’s team play in Portland, Maine, sold out within 24 hours. (John Jones / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Midway through Cooper and Ace’s freshman season, the Flaggs accepted the inevitable: The twins would have to leave home to reach their full basketball potential.
“It’s a decision you have to make at some point,” Cooper said, “if you really want to take yourself to the next level.”
Ralph and Kelly vetted schools nationwide but struggled to find the right fit. Montverde (Fla.) Academy had recruited the twins as eighth-graders, but the family was reluctant to let them move so far. Then Montverde invited the Flaggs to watch them in-person at a nearby tournament. The school’s reputation — it has produced seven first-round NBA picks since 2020 — preceded it, but the twins finally saw Montverde’s style, which prioritized the same team-first principles of the old Celtics teams they grew up studying. Leaving the gym, Cooper and Ace agreed: “This is where we want to go.”
It wasn’t an easy transition. At 15 years old, the boys were away from their support system for the first time. They couldn’t go fishing on Sebasticook Lake, or camping and bird hunting on old paper company land in northern Maine. They did their laundry for the first time. It helped some that Bedard moved to Florida — his son also transferred to Montverde — and the twins spent most weekends at his house. Ralph and Kelly flew to all the twins’ home games, and others on the East Coast, but not being around them daily took its toll. “It’s hard to have conversations with them over the phone and really get a true feel of how they’re feeling,” Ralph said.
So Ralph and Kelly did what they had to: They sold their house in Newport and moved to Florida full-time. They closed on their Newport home in November.
“It was a hard decision because we’re so close to the rest of our community, but at the same time, this is where we needed to be: with our kids,” Ralph said. “Moving down here was probably the best decision we’ve made. Just to be here with them, and not lose those last couple of years that we do have with them.”
The twins haven’t been back to Newport since last summer. When Cooper visited a Nokomis basketball camp, the kids reacted “like it was LeBron James,” said Grant, the school’s current coach. Cooper still streams Nokomis’ games and texts his old teammates after big wins. Newport will always be home, even if he no longer has a home there.
Which is what makes the first Friday night in January so special. Portland’s Cross Insurance Arena is packed.
Or, it will be.
Temperatures are almost down to single digits — there’s a “storm” coming this weekend, Mainer speak for a blizzard — but you’d never know it from the line of folks stretching down Free Street, waiting to get inside. To get a glimpse — possibly, probably, their last one — of Cooper Flagg in his home state. Most are wearing gear from one of three teams: Nokomis, Montverde or Duke.
When it was announced that Cooper and Ace’s Montverde team would be playing here — as part of “The Maine Event,” a speciality showcase put on by the same MADE Hoops group that first hosted Maine United in the seventh grade — tickets sold out within 24 hours. Ralph and Kelly joke they’re “like the governors” this weekend. The family’s entire 42-seat midcourt section is full, and there’s at least that many people hovering around it at all times. To say hello, to reminisce. To be a part of this moment, one the state has never had before.
“We’ve never had a true, native Mainer have this type of attention and this potential,” Bedard said. “And it’s not even like he’s a good player; we’ve got a chance to have one of the best ones ever.”
Cooper doesn’t emerge until midway through the first game, featuring his old Nokomis buddies. He’s barely visible in a tunnel under the stands, but he can’t stay hidden long. One lucky kid sees him first and asks for an autograph. That turns into 10, 20, almost 50, within minutes.
He gets to watch the game for maybe three minutes before security shuffles him back to the locker room.
“At one point, you were those kids,” Cooper said. “So where (the attention) can be annoying and where it can be overwhelming, I think about the fact that I used to dream to be that person, and I worked towards being that person. So I can’t be, like, annoyed with what comes with it.”
When he committed to Duke in October, through a commemorative SLAM Magazine cover, T-shirts were made of the cover — and proceeds from those sales went to the Lewiston-Auburn Area Response fund, which supports that community following October’s mass shooting, when 18 people were killed and another 13 were injured. Those In Flagg We Trust shirts dotting the crowd? A portion of those proceeds go to the Ronald McDonald House of Portland, which took care of Kelly and Ralph when all three boys were born prematurely. After wearing No. 32 his entire life, Cooper wants to wear No. 2 at Duke in honor of his former Maine United teammate, Donovan Kurt, who died of brain cancer in November 2022.
“It’s just important, wherever you are, to always stay grounded and be able to just give back to what helped you get to where you are,” Cooper said. “To show support back to all the people that are supporting me from the start.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Brendan Marks / The Athletic; John Jones, Juan Ocampo, Lance King / Getty Images)
Mandatory neck guards are coming to youth hockey in the United States.
Already required in Canada and many other countries, USA Hockey, which governs the sport at the amateur level in the U.S., has long held its line at “recommending” laceration protection — namely neck guards, but also cut-resistant socks, sleeves and undergarments.
The decision was announced Sunday and will go into effect on Aug. 1, about nine months after the issue was thrust into the spotlight when former NHL player Adam Johnson died of a skate cut to the neck during a game in England.
More NHLers have begun to wear neck protection in the months since, either regularly or to try to find something comfortable.
“You’re seeing more and more of it,” one player told The Athletic. “I wear the shirt for my wrists. I think you’re going to see more and more neck guards.”
As part of our NHL 2023-24 player poll, we asked those players what their appetite might be for a similar mandate, for neck guards and other cut-resistant equipment, at the pro level.
As you can see, for the majority — 78.45 percent of the 181 who were willing to respond to that question — it’s a no-go:
For many of the players, it comes down to personal choice.
“I think it should just be your own decision,” one said.
“Guys would be smart to use them, but I don’t think it needs to be mandatory,” another added.
“It’s their own risk, right?” said a third. “It’s their life.”
Some of the players voting no indicated that, for their part, they do wear neck guards and other cut-protective gear, including one who had been cut by a skate in the past.
“I wear it. It happened to me,” he said. “I think it’s up to you. I think that there (should) be no requirement.”
“I don’t think you should require them to, but I think it’s stupid not to (wear one),” another player said. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“We’re all big boys,” said a third. “I personally wear them. But being required to? No.”
One idea many players shared was to mandate laceration protection at minor and youth levels first, with the idea of eventually bringing it to the NHL as players get more used to wearing the equipment.
“In the NHL, I don’t think it should be required,” one player said. “But in minor hockey, I think it should.”
“If the NHL mandated it, I’d be OK with that,” said another. “But they should grandfather in everyone who’s used to not playing with it, like they did with visors.”
Some players indicated they’re not satisfied, at this point, with the engineering of skate-cut protection.
“I think we all know there’s an inherent risk, (but) I don’t think the skate-cut technology is where it needs to be for people to wear it comfortably,” one player said. “I don’t love the feeling of having stuff on my wrists. I tried the neck guard. I felt like it was so high and so tight. It would take a while to get used to.”
“You want guys comfortable with what they’re wearing.”
NHL teams have worked with manufacturers to provide options, and a number of players said that’s the right response.
“I think what they’re doing right now is perfect, providing more stuff,” one said.
“Should be provided, but not mandatory,” another said.
“I’m happy with it,” another said. “There’s lots of good choices. I wear the socks. After what happened to Adam Johnson, we’re all looking to maybe wear something more. That’s an eye-opener for everyone.”
With the popular sentiment among NHLers as it is, some simply said they don’t see a realistic path forward.
“I’d love to say yes, because I would love to never see anyone get cut ever again,” one player said. “But I think that’s easier said than done.”
“It would be hard to implement,” another said. “Maybe in the future.”
One player posed a scenario in which the league would mandate cut-resistant equipment for the neck, wrists and ankles for a trial period before deciding.
“Maybe if it was required for a short period of time, so everyone has to try them at least a little bit, I think a lot of guys would stick with it,” he said. “Everyone should have their own choice, but I wouldn’t be against it if they said yes.”
“I think everybody should try it,” agreed another.
Among the players answering yes, the idea of getting players used to it before making a decision was popular.
“Once everybody got used to it, I feel like no one would care to use it or not,” one player said. “Everybody would be used to it already. Obviously, when you grow up, you use it. At one point, it’s like you don’t even notice that’s there. If it was always a thing, I think guys wouldn’t care at all to use.”
“We grew up playing with it,” another said. “It never bothered me or probably anyone else, either. If they brought it back, I think it’s a thing to get used to, and it might take some time, but if you do it in the summer, no one would be bothered by it once the season starts.”
“We did it in Sweden,” said a third. “It’s easy to do it here.”
And most saying yes were in favor of phasing it in over time. New players coming into the league would be mandated, and eventually that’d be everyone.
“Maybe start at the youth hockey level and make it mandatory there,” one player said. “Kind of incorporate it over the years, sort of. I think (young) Canadian players might have to. In America, we didn’t have to.”
“I think you’ve got to grandfather it in just like they did with visors,” another said.
“I think that would be a good idea,” said a third.
(Top photo of T.J. Oshie wearing a neck guard: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Barring another last-minute pivot, the women’s professional tennis tour is preparing to announce that the season-ending WTA Tour Finals will take place in Saudi Arabia, marking the latest step in the country’s huge investment in elite sport.
WTA Tour chief executive Steve Simon has been holding talks with Saudi officials for the past year and if a deal is agreed, the 2024 finals will take place there at the end of the season, according to several of the sport’s top officials. The WTA has been here before, though, as recently as last summer, when it was close to a deal with Saudi Arabia but pivoted at the last minute amid public pressure.
In a statement on Thursday, a WTA spokesperson said the process is ongoing, with the intention of a final decision and announcement later this month.
“As everyone knows, we are working through a process to select a host venue for the WTA Finals,” they said. “There has been no final decision and we will continue to engage with players through the ongoing process.”
The Athletic has contacted Saudi representatives for comment.
One top tennis official, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak for the WTA, called the potential deal with Saudi Arabia “the worst kept secret in the sport.” The WTA is said to have reached the point where it is fully confident in Saudi Arabia’s ability to produce a top-level event but remains concerned about the ancillary criticism that will come with taking its signature event to a country that does not grant women equal rights.
The deal for the WTA Finals would represent the latest step in Saudi Arabia’s efforts to become a major destination for international sports. It could also signal the beginning of the country landing more big tennis events.
Saudi Arabia has been seeking to acquire a top tournament since at least the middle of 2023. While it remains unclear whether that will happen, several top tennis events are beginning the process of searching for new host sites. Leading tennis officials expect Saudi Arabia to be a significant player in the process given its hunger for sports events and the need among the top organizations in tennis for new sources of investment.
The International Tennis Federation, which organizes the Davis Cup international team competition for men and the Billie Jean King Cup for women, will soon begin searching for new sites for the final rounds of those events for the coming years.
The Billie Jean King Cup is in its final year in Seville, Spain. King, who owns 49 per cent of the event with her wife and business partner, has already thrown her support behind bringing the WTA Finals to Saudi Arabia, arguing that engagement with the government there is the best way to bring about change.
Cristiano Ronaldo joined Saudi Arabian club Al Nassr last year (Khalid Alhaj/MB Media/Getty Images)
In golf, Saudi Arabia pledged to spend $2billion on a new competition, LIV Golf — again attracting some of the sport’s biggest names to take part — and the country has become the home of elite boxing in recent years. Formula 1 has held races in the city of Jeddah since 2021 and there has also been considerable Saudi investment in Formula E. You can read more about the Saudi takeover of sport here.
Saudi Arabia hosted the ATP Tour’s Next Gen Finals — which pits the best young male players against one another — in November and exhibition matches between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur the following month.
As the tennis world gathered in Melbourne for the Australian Open two weeks ago, Rafael Nadal announced a deal to become an ambassador for Saudi Arabia’s tennis federation. The move caught the tennis establishment off guard since Nadal has a well-established reputation for avoiding political controversy.
While Djokovic played the recent exhibition match and voiced his support for further Saudi investment in the sport, he has stopped short of pursuing a deeper relationship with the country.
Djokovic has backed tennis in Saudi Arabia (Wang Haizhou/Xinhua via Getty Images)
For months, there have been discussions between the WTA and the International Tennis Federation about the need to bring the tour-ending finals and the Billie Jean King Cup Finals — which is the World Cup of women’s tennis that happens the following week — closer together and perhaps even to the same location. That would make it easier and more likely for the top eight players, who qualify for the elite tour championship, to play in the international team competition, though it is not clear whether a single market could support both events.
Tennis legend Billie Jean King (Matt McNulty/Getty Images for ITF)
The ATP Tour, which organises men’s elite tennis, has a deal for its finals event with Turin, Italy, that expires in 2025. The ATP and WTA have been working more closely than ever to find ways to grow their operations since tournaments that feature both men and women are the most popular. The idea of the tours one day combining their season-ending championships has also been discussed, though not in a definitive way.
The WTA was close to an agreement last summer to bring its event to Saudi Arabia as it scrambled to find a site to replace Shenzhen, China, which terminated its 10-year deal with the tour in response to the tour’s decision to boycott China for 18 months over the country’s refusal to investigate whether a former top government official sexually assaulted the former doubles player Peng Shuai.
The tour baulked at the last minute and chose to hold the championship in Cancun, Mexico, for one year amid pushback on social media from two of the biggest names in the sport — Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
The former on-court rivals, who are now close friends, renewed their public resistance last week, penning a joint essay in The Washington Post arguing that a deal with Saudi Arabia would represent a step backwards for women and women’s sports.
Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, united in wanting tennis to stay out of Saudi Arabia (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Saudi Arabia has passed a series of reforms in recent years aimed at making women a more substantial part of public life, including allowing them to drive, own businesses, and socialize in public with men. But it has maintained other restrictions. Women cannot marry without the permission of a male guardian and must obey their husbands if those men do not want to allow them to practice the rights the government has granted.
In addition, like other countries in the region, Saudi Arabia criminalizes homosexuality, though that has not prevented the WTA from holding tournaments in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
“We fully appreciate the importance of respecting diverse cultures and religions,” Evert and Navratilova wrote. “It is because of this, and not despite it, that we oppose the awarding of the tour’s crown jewel tournament to Riyadh. The WTA’s values sit in stark contrast to those of the proposed host.”
But unlike last summer, when Saudi Arabia stayed largely silent as critics of the plan to bring a major tournament there pilloried the country in the press, Saudi Arabia met the criticism head-on this week, a move that tennis executives saw as an attempt to buck up its potential partner.
Princess Reema Bandar Al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, released a blistering response to Evert and Navratilova, accusing them of having “turned their back on the same women they have inspired and it is beyond disappointing.”
Bandar Al Saud criticized Evert, Navratilova and other voices from overseas who write off Saudi women as voiceless victims and the voiceless.
“Perfection cannot be the price for admission,” Bandar Al Saud wrote. “For a tennis tournament or any other once-closed space that our women want to enter.”
Discomfort and resistance to an event in Saudi Arabia have waned among female players in recent months. Several top stars, including the world No 1 Iga Swiatek, noted the difficulties faced by women in the region but seem resigned to eventually playing there.
“I definitely don’t support the situation there,” the U.S. Open champion Coco Gauff said at the Australian Open, “but if we do decide to go there, I hope that we’re able to make change and improve the quality and engage in the local communities and make a difference.”
It’s the end of an era — and the biggest driver move in Formula One history.
After 12 seasons, six world championships and 82 race wins, Lewis Hamilton is leaving Mercedes for Ferrari.
It’s a day most thought would never come. Hamilton himself said last year he expected to remain with Mercedes “til my last days”, and there was “no place I would rather be.”
But the appeal of a shock move to Ferrari, announced for 2025 on Thursday, proved too strong for the seven-time champion seeking a record-breaking eighth world title.
It’s the kind of move F1 fans — and the figures at the top of the sport itself — could have only dreamed of ever happening. Partnering Hamilton, F1’s most famous and successful driver, with Ferrari, F1’s most famous and successful team, is box office stuff.
GO DEEPER
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Ferrari will likely enter the 2025 season with the strongest lineup in F1 as Hamilton races alongside Charles Leclerc, its young star. As ‘superteam’ lineups go, short of the implausible prospect of Hamilton teaming up with Max Verstappen, it’s hard to think of any bigger.
Regardless of the outcome, this will be one of the defining stories in F1 for the next couple of years as the 39-year-old Hamilton bids to write the latest — and potentially final — chapter of his glittering F1 career in Ferrari’s famous red cars.
But why quit Mercedes on the eve of the new season, for a team that hasn’t won a championship in 15 years?
Since winning his first drivers’ championship with Mercedes (the second of his career), Hamilton has been inextricably linked with the Silver Arrows. (Darren Heath/Getty Images)
A loss of faith in Mercedes?
Hamilton and Mercedes formed one of the greatest teams the sport has ever seen.
Six of Hamilton’s seven world titles arrived between 2014 and 2020, his only defeat in that stretch coming to teammate Nico Rosberg in 2016. Together Hamilton and Mercedes dominated F1, seeing off the threat of Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel, once vaunted as the combination that could put an end to years of silver success through 2017-20.
Hamilton came within one correct decision by race control at the 2021 finale in Abu Dhabi from breaking Michael Schumacher’s record and winning an eighth world title, only for Verstappen to pass him on the final lap restart and deny him the crown.
The controversy put Hamilton on a redemption arc. Fuelled by that heartache, 2022 became the season he was due to reclaim what should’ve been his — only for Mercedes to build a car that simply wasn’t up to the job. Hamilton knew from the moment he first drove the W13 it wasn’t good enough to win a title. It wasn’t even good enough to win a race, resigning him to the first season of his F1 career without a single victory.
The struggles continued through last year. Hamilton was often frustrated by the limitations of his car, leaving him to endure another winless season as Verstappen and Red Bull dominated proceedings. After the last race of the year in Abu Dhabi, Hamilton summed up his mood as “not great” and cast doubt on anyone catching Red Bull in 2024: “You can pretty much guess where they’re going to be next year.”
Hamilton’s fortunes have dipped since winning his seventh drivers’ championship came in 2020. (Salih Zeki Fazlioglu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Mercedes had already set about overhauling its car for 2024, having ditched its radical ‘zeropod’ concept midway through last year. Expectations were being managed, but there was greater confidence from the team that the car coming out of Brackley this year would not carry the same “spiteful” traits, to quote technical director James Allison, and that it would give Hamilton a better chance of success.
Hamilton won’t get an extended run in the Mercedes car until preseason testing begins in Bahrain later this month. A first taste will come in a shakedown at Silverstone when the car is launched on Feb. 14, and Hamilton will have driven a model in the simulator which can give an indication of what to expect. But there won’t be a true understanding of the W15 car’s potential until he drives it for real.
The decision to jump ship now suggests doubt in Mercedes’ ability to change course and get back to the summit from which it once looked down on the F1 competition. Were Hamilton fully confident Mercedes was the place to be to win the eighth title he craves, he wouldn’t consider going elsewhere, particularly given the emotional ties he has with the team.
It will give Hamilton and Mercedes a ‘long goodbye’ through 2024, one final year together to try and succeed. But there will also be the awkwardness of the team planning for the post-Hamilton era without his involvement, gradually phasing him out of top-level meetings.
What Ferrari can offer
This is the big question mark over the move. Mercedes has shown few signs of being able to seriously challenge for a championship in the past two years — yet neither has Ferrari.
The team started the new set of F1 regulations strongly in 2022, going toe-to-toe with Red Bull before regressing over the race distances. While it was the only team besides Red Bull to win a race last year, courtesy of Carlos Sainz in Singapore, Ferrari’s main battle lay with Mercedes. It ultimately lost the race for second in the championship by three points.
Like Mercedes, Ferrari has promised an overhaul of its car for this year, which will feature 95 percent new components. It will lay the foundations for Hamilton’s first Ferrari F1 car in 2025, the last under the current rule set before the design rules change significantly again for 2026. That is the year most regard to offer the best chance of ending Verstappen and Red Bull’s dominance.
Hamilton raced for now-Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur’s ART Grand Prix team in his early days, and they have remained in close contact ever since.(Formula 1/Formula Motorsport Limited via Getty Images)
Hamilton’s age also needs to be considered. He’ll be 40 by the time he joins Ferrari, and although he remains in peak physical condition and has expressed zero doubts over his long-term future, he’s not in the position to invest in a long-term project like many of his younger counterparts.
It means there needs to be immediate success once Hamilton joins in 2025, but his pending arrival will only help build momentum at Maranello. The team is on a recruitment drive, and the lure of working with Hamilton can only help it attract top technical talent who could aid its bid to win another championship.
On a pure competitive level, going from Mercedes to Ferrari looks like a sideways move. But there is one thing Ferrari offered Hamilton that Mercedes — and, frankly, no other team — cannot.
The romance behind the move
Ferrari has always enjoyed a mythical air in F1. It is ingrained in the sport’s history. You think of F1, and you think of Ferrari.
No team carries such prestige and prowess. Even in the fallow periods without a championship, like the current one stretching back to 2008, it has remained a team the majority of drivers dream of racing for one day. Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ team principal, even acknowledged in 2019 that “probably it’s in every driver’s head to drive at Ferrari one day.”
Or, as Vettel once put it: “Everyone is a Ferrari fan. Even if they say they’re not, they are Ferrari fans.”
There is a degree of romance behind the move. Hamilton has owned Ferrari road cars, and has a close friendship with John Elkann, Ferrari’s president. It will also see Hamilton reunite with Fred Vasseur, Ferrari’s team principal. Hamilton raced for Vasseur’s ART Grand Prix team when he was on the ranks leading to F1, and they have remained in close contact ever since.
Hamilton has always held great respect for the history of F1. He’s passionate about its roots and its history, meaning the weight of Ferrari will not be lost on him. It’s a team that so many of F1’s greatest names have driven for at one stage of their careers.
To succeed with Ferrari is, in many ways, the ultimate story in F1 — and could be huge for Hamilton’s own legacy. For his final hurrah in F1 to be with Ferrari, potentially winning the record-breaking eighth world championship, would surely be the ultimate way to end his storied career.
The alternative? Ferrari fails to deliver a car good enough for Hamilton to return to the top. The strategic miscues and mistakes that happened all too often in recent years are a source of frustration. There is no eighth world championship.
Even in that scenario, Hamilton still gets to fulfill the dream so many F1 drivers hold, and very few actually realize, of racing for Ferrari. Seeing him in those famous red overalls will take some getting used to, but it’s now going to become a reality.
It’s worth remembering when Hamilton left McLaren for Mercedes in 2013, when it had just a single race win to its name since returning to F1, the decision was widely doubted. It proved to be a masterstroke. He’ll hope his judgment has proven correct once again.
(Lead image of Lewis Hamilton: Dan Istitene, Bryn Lennon / Getty Images; Design: JohnBradford/The Athletic)
Fred Gaudelli has been the lead producer of the Super Bowl television broadcast on seven different occasions. If you are into Roman numerals, Gaudelli has produced Super Bowls XXXVII, XL, XLIII, XLVI, XLIX, LII, and LVI. He has been in the production truck for some of the most exciting NFL title games in history, including Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, which featured New England Patriots rookie cornerback Malcolm Butler intercepting Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson at the goal line with 20 seconds left to seal New England’s 28-24 come-from-behind win over Seattle. That game averaged 114.4 million viewers, which ranked as the most-viewed Super Bowl in U.S. television history before last year’s Super Bowl took the title.
During his 33 seasons as the lead producer for an NFL prime-time TV game, which included stops at ABC, ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video, Gaudelli has produced innumerable NFL games with famous people in the stands. How would he feel about the prospect of Taylor Swift attending Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas on Feb. 11 if he were producing the game?
“I would consider it a gift from the gods,” said Gaudelli.
Gaudelli, because he lives on Planet Earth, knows that Swift crosses over into popular culture and that means the potential for more eyeballs on the product. (If you are a Swift hater, this piece is going to be a cruel summer for you, and it’s best to bail out now.)
The good news for the crew — led by producer Jim Rikhoff, director Mike Arnold and replay producer Ryan Galvin — is that they’ve had the Chiefs plenty this year, including the divisional-round game in Buffalo and AFC Championship Game in Baltimore, both of which Swift attended. It would be editorial dereliction not to show Swift during the game, but at the same time, how much do you show her?
Then there is a new question: How much does the Super Bowl, a game that includes millions of people who are first-time football viewers for that season, impact your decisions on showing her?
“Let’s go to the last Super Bowl I did,” Gaudelli said of the Los Angeles Rams’ win over the Cincinnati Bengals on Feb. 13, 2022. “We had (Rams quarterback) Matthew Stafford, his wife and kids. We had (Bengals quarterback) Joe Burrow’s parents and girlfriend. We had (Rams wide receiver) Cooper Kupp’s wife. We had (Rams offensive lineman) Andrew Whitworth’s wife and kids. We had (Bengals wide receiver) Ja’Marr Chase’s mom and dad. You have these shots set up because they’re part of the story of the game and because there’s five times as many people (watching) as you would get for a normal game. Right off the bat, you’re already thinking about who’s at the game, and in L.A. we had celebrities like LeBron James and Jay-Z. (Director) Drew Esocoff was cutting those shots during the game. So when Stafford threw a touchdown pass, there’s a shot of Stafford’s wife. Burrow is on the ground writhing in pain? You see his mom and dad and his girlfriend with the ultimate look of concern.
“Now you have Taylor Swift, who also is someone that has a direct connection to the game because she’s a significant other of one of the stars of a team. Maybe you don’t show her for every Kelce sequence, but she’s going to be part of sequences when he makes a play.”
The airtime Swift has gotten so far during NFL games is much less than some think. New York Times writer Benjamin Hoffman wrote a great piece this week that chronicled “the dissonance between how many times Swift has been shown versus how many times people seem to think she was shown.” He reported Swift was on-screen for a duration of less than 32 seconds in most games, with a high of 1 minute and 16 seconds for Peacock’s coverage of the Chiefs against the Miami Dolphins on Jan. 13.
“You can’t help but put her on the air,” said Tracy Wolfson, who will be on the Chiefs’ sideline for the Super Bowl. “I can’t tell you the amount of dads who have come up to me and said, ‘My daughter is now watching football because of Taylor Swift.’ I mean, why wouldn’t you take advantage or capitalize on it? It’s great for the NFL and it’s great for ratings.”
Fox’s broadcast of the Chiefs’ game against the Chicago Bears on Sept. 24 set the template for Swift coverage because the network had to figure out everything on the fly. Lead producer Richie Zyontz said that his crew had no official word from the NFL or the Chiefs that Swift would be in attendance. (That changed in later weeks; Rikhoff knew the night before the Chiefs-Bills game Swift would be there.) They had to figure out the camera operators to use for the shots as well as how many to use.
“We were in uncharted waters having been the first to deal with the situation,” Zyontz said this week, reflecting on that game. “Moderation came to mind immediately. As the season progressed there were too many knee-jerk reaction shots, yet those were the shots that were talked about and written about on Monday. For the Super Bowl, there will be millions of new viewers because of her. Hopefully, good judgment will prevail. But for those who complain, come on, it’s a few seconds at a time, a few times a game. Is that really egregious?”
“You can’t help but put her on the air,” Tracy Wolfson, who will be working the Chiefs’ sideline at the Super Bowl for the CBS broadcast, says of Taylor Swift. (Jason Hanna / Getty Images)
The Super Bowl will be very different. If Swift is at the game, the Chiefs and the NFL will know what suite Swift will be sitting in at the stadium. So there will be no issues for the CBS broadcast production in finding her. CBS will put a request in to interview the singer. (If there is a prop bet on Swift being interviewed on camera, I’d bet no.) Gaudelli said a production’s best shot would be to go through the Chiefs who would relay the request to her through Kelce. You’d also make the ask to see if she wanted to do something off-camera.
“We didn’t put that request in during the season because we didn’t think it rose to that level at that point,” said Gaudelli, who now serves as executive producer for NBC’s NFL coverage. “But, yeah, I think you put that in for the Super Bowl. You would try to get her on the pregame show.”
Expect some guaranteed visuals in the postgame. If the Chiefs win, there will be a CBS camera operator following Kelce, for certain.
“As a producer and director, he’s one of the main guys you want to see at the end of the game because he’s a major part of his dynasty if they win,” Gaudelli said. “So where he is, she will be. You don’t really have to go hunting too far. You’re going to be looking for number 87.”
One person who is watching all of this with total amusement is Ian Eagle, the CBS broadcaster who was the first NFL national broadcaster to acknowledge the Swift-Kelce connection. On a Kelce touchdown call during Kansas City’s 17-9 win over Jacksonville on Sept. 17, Eagle cheekily tossed in a “Kelce finds a blank space for the score” line, referencing a Swift song title.
“Kelce finds a blank space for the score.”
Ian Eagle sneaking a reference into this Travis Kelce touchdown call 👀
“Back in September, there were some stories popping up linking Travis to Taylor, but it wasn’t getting major coverage at that point,” Eagle said. “When Kelce scored a touchdown in Jacksonville, I tossed in, ‘He finds a Blank Space for the score’ as a lark. I thought it was a cute throwaway line, not imagining for a moment it would blow up. I learned about the power of Swift in a hurry, and all of these months later the interest has grown exponentially with this Chiefs run. The NFL was already immense. But the relationship has somehow created even more buzz for the league. I’m just happy for those two crazy kids.”
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(Top photo of Taylor Swift and her boyfriend: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
It’s USWNT captain Lindsey Horan’s final morning in the States before a flight back to France to rejoin Lyon, her club team. She’s spending it in a hotel lobby, tucked away at a table, talking to The Athletic for an hour about her time leading a team in the spotlight, how she sees her role during this time of transition, and one thing above all:
“Can we think about the football?”
Horan was speaking almost exactly five months since being named by then-USWNT head coach Vlatko Andonovski as captain of the national team alongside Alex Morgan (Horan has been getting the armband when both are on the field at the same time). The role is the fulfillment of a life goal, but also seems like a natural outcome, given how often, and how intensely, she thinks about the game.
Her first five months in that leadership role were full of notable exits: her team’s from the World Cup, Andonovski’s, and the retirements of Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz. It was capped with a big addition: U.S. Soccer’s announced hiring of Emma Hayes as head coach.
Horan, now 29 years old and with 139 senior national team caps under her belt, is part of an in-between camp: too experienced to be a newcomer, and too new to be on the way out. It’s her generation – which also includes Rose Lavelle, Emily Sonnett and others – that must keep the team’s signature fire, that USWNT DNA, burning even as the team undergoes a serious re-think after its worst ever World Cup finish.
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“We have to continue that,” she says of herself and fellow in-betweeners. “You have to be amongst this team for a while to know what the f— that takes… it’s one of the most competitive national teams to be a part of.”
No one on the team is talking about starting from scratch. It’s just that they need more ways to win. More than mentality or fitness levels, more than a never-say-die approach. That’s what Horan said her early conversations with Hayes have been about. And that’s why she wants to talk about football, and how the USWNT can bounce back — not just by playing better, but by thinking more.
“We’ve been so successful for so long in a certain way that we play, that attack and transition,” Horan says. “We’ve had individual brilliance. We’ve had soccer players on the field and real players that want to play and it all kind of meshed together or it would always work out, or our DNA would take us to this place where we come out on top because our mentality was so f—ing good.”
The game is changing, and Horan recognizes this. She praises Portugal’s level of play at the World Cup, the investment into the game in Spain and other European countries, and the high level of up-and-coming U.S. talent (specifically citing 19-year-old San Diego Wave forward Jaedyn Shaw). If there was a theme for Horan and the rest of the USWNT in that final camp of the year, it was a repetitive one: no one actually knows the ceiling of this team.
Horan cited Shaw as an exciting young player for the U.S. (Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
“Even in these past few games, you see little glimpses of that, but it’s the final product, continuing to do that throughout the game, getting everyone on the same page, not just four or five players,” she says. “If you can develop that more, and it’s inherent in every single player on the team, you’re looking to play the combinations, all of these things? No idea what this team can do.
“Then you have the mentality aspect on top of it, where if the football is not going well, we know that we can freakin’ go. We have players on the field that are faster, stronger, capable in behind, and we’re gonna gut it out, right? The world is going to be very fearful.”
Those words could cause a stir. In 2019, Ali Krieger suggested the USWNT substitutes could take on and beat multiple other teams at the World Cup, and it was a massive point of contention for a team that got plenty more criticism from across American culture even as it was celebrated for its third consecutive title.
“We have to be one of the most talked about teams,” Horan says. “We’re always in the magnifying glass on every single thing we do or anything we say.”
Individual players can bear the brunt of that magnifying glass just as much as the team can. There’s a clear, though understandable, vein of frustration from Horan over how her own performances are understood, even from the USWNT’s own fanbase. To illustrate her point, Horan brings up that many viewers will take a television commentator’s analysis at face value.
“American soccer fans, most of them aren’t smart,” she says. “They don’t know the game. They don’t understand. (But) it’s getting better and better.”
She takes a brief pause, sensing that those words, too, will cause a stir.
“I’m gonna piss off some people,” she continues, “but the game is growing in the U.S. People are more and more knowledgeable, but so much of the time people take what the commentators say, right? My mom does it!” She breaks into laughter. “My mom says, ‘Julie Foudy said you had such a good game!’ And I’m here, just going, ‘I was f—ing s— today.’”
When playing with Lyon in France, Horan says, things are different.
“From what I’ve heard, people understand my game a little bit more, a sense of my football and the way I play,” she says. “It is the French culture. Everyone watches football. People know football.”
None of that, though, compares to Horan’s experience at the 2023 World Cup. The outside commentary, including from her own former teammate Carli Lloyd, the entrances into stadiums in their custom suits; the tone used in interviews; the body language. Everything was scrutinized. This time, though, the talk was accompanied by bad performances, and bad results.
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Horan says she wasn’t bothered by the outside criticism, but noted no one else but the players could understand what it was like to be on that team. Ultimately, she says it felt “perfectly fine” that people would find something to talk about.
“If you’re not backing it up on the field, people are gonna come and talk s— about what you’re doing, where your priorities are,” she says. “Like, ‘Are you getting ready for the game? Are you caring more about this s—?’”
Horan has leaned on Lavelle (left) to help lead a team in transition (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Horan, again, comes back to a small, seemingly innocuous detail: The traditional pre-match starting XI photo. In the NWSL, more and more teams have started using the occasion for various hijinks; something that Horan’s European teammates bring up as an example of Americans not taking their business seriously. It’s clear that it gets under her skin, too.
“I want professionalism,” she admits. “Those little things, they really irked me. I don’t think I could do it, and maybe I’m wrong in saying that, I don’t know. It just bothers me. We put so much into this game, and it’s just like a joke sometimes.”
She’s quick to point out she’s not going to be the one who shuts it down if it works for others. That’s not what she’s trying to say. It’s just that, ultimately, for her, it’s about the football.
“We need to get back to the football. The football is the most important thing” Horan says. “So maybe we should knock some of the s— out for now. We need to focus on the game, we need to focus on being the absolute best we can be.”
As captain, Horan can help enact that. It’s a role she’s clearly grown into, even as she has struggled to understand it in the months between Andonovski’s exit and Hayes’ hiring.
Hayes hasn’t officially started yet, and won’t coach in games until after her job as Chelsea’s head coach ends along with the European season in May. But Hayes’ December visit with Horan and the rest of the team helped clarify the process, Horan says. It also gave Horan a chance to open up the lines of communication, to admit that sometimes she didn’t feel like she had full control, that she hadn’t been handed the reins.
“I always felt like I was someone that could really touch on every single player and get the best out of them and try to make them the best that they could be,” Horan says. “I’m not going to be like the rah-rah speeches, all that nonsense. Becky (Sauerbrunn) and me are probably a little similar in that. I’m probably a little more crazy on the field. I want to make sure I’m the leader that I want to be, and no one’s trying to make me something else.”
Before Andonovski gave her the armband — a move made in part because longtime captain Sauerbrunn missed the World Cup due to a lingering foot injury — Horan told him that getting the armband wouldn’t change her, or how players could talk to her. What it would change, she told him, is the tone it would set. She wanted to be a role model.
“I’m not going to be a coach’s captain, I’m going to be a players’ captain,” she told Andonovski. So if that wasn’t what he wanted, then he shouldn’t make her a captain.
Horan has lived up to her word since interim head coach Twila Kilgore stepped in, leaning on Morgan, Lavelle and Sonnett to make them part of the transitional process. She has empowered the team’s relative newcomers, too. The normally-reticent 23-year-old center back Naomi Girma said Horan “encouraged me just to find my voice.”
“A lot of these new young players are going to have big freaking roles, even in this Olympics,” Horan says. “How the hell do we get the best out of them to go put us on the podium? It’s been a crazy place, but this is a really exciting role for me because I’ve felt like this is what I’m meant to do.”
The team has four months until Hayes takes over, and six until the Olympics. The sprint is very much on for this massive group project to re-establish the team at the top, before looking ahead to 2027 and a World Cup that could be hosted at home. Every voice matters to Horan, from Horan to Lavelle to Morgan to Girma to Shaw and beyond.
“We need to be doing everything we possibly can to be improving, to make each other better, holding the standards,” Horan says. “We need to change every bit of culture that we had prior to the last World Cup and going into this Olympics because we need to win. And that starts now.”
After yet another disappointing, early-season loss, Jalen Brunson stood at his locker, ready to speak with the media in Milwaukee.
As the point guard turned around, straight-faced as usual following the Knicks’ fourth defeat in six games, he donned a homemade T-shirt, all black and with white lettering on it, that appeared as if it were straight off the Vistaprint presses.
Across Brunson’s chest read a familiar idiom: The magic is in the work.
“This is a Sandra Brunson production,” Brunson said, referencing his mother, who stamped the family’s longtime motto onto the crewneck. Of course, “The magic is in the work” is not a Brunson family original.
Anyone who knows Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau has a Pavlovian relationship with that expression. Those 19 letters form his favorite saying. Find anyone who has been around the coach, mention that the magic is in the work and prepare for that person either to quip about Thibodeau or to go into an impression of a man who has dedicated his life to basketball.
Years ago, Brunson’s father, Rick, who played for Thibodeau when he was a player and when Thibodeau was an assistant coach with the Knicks in the 1990s, had ripped the parlance for himself. He and Sandra have repeated it to Jalen for two and a half decades. Rick is somewhat of a Thibodeau loyalist. He played for him in New York, where the two grew close. He was an assistant for Thibodeau in the head coach’s first stop in Chicago, his second in Minnesota and now his third in New York.
Rick would take his son to the office during those years. Thibodeau remembers back in the 1990s when Jalen was not just too small for stardom but too small for grade school and would show up to Knicks practices with ready-made impressions of the team’s top players. He did Latrell Sprewell, Allan Houston, Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson.
“He had it spot-on,” Thibodeau said. “He was, like, 6 (years old) and he had all their moves down.”
Thibodeau could never have known then that he would eventually become the head coach of that franchise. Even less so, he could not have predicted that Rick’s son would be the leader of his squad — and, as of Thursday, would officially become an NBA All-Star for the first time in his career.
No one in the clique could have guessed the engineer of that team, one that would shatter a seemingly never-ending stretch of Knicks-induced depression among its fan base, would be Rick Brunson’s at-the-time agent, Leon Rose, who would eventually work his way up at CAA, which also represents Thibodeau, to run the agency’s basketball division before the Knicks would hire him away to become their team president in 2020.
After Jalen signed with the Knicks two years ago, he provided a one-word response as to why: “Family.” He didn’t just hope to work for his father; Rose was there, too. He wanted to play for Thibodeau, the hyper-intense basketball addict he’d known since he was too young to remember. And it’s not like the Knicks had swiped away someone who was just as coveted everywhere else.
Brunson’s former team, the Dallas Mavericks, had chosen not to offer him an extension that would have been approximately half of the $104 million he eventually signed with the Knicks, a contract that was widely critiqued as an overpay. Today, it’s one of the NBA’s most team-friendly deals.
This has not been the trajectory of a typical All-Star. Brunson was a three-year collegiate constant, a second-round pick who didn’t play much as a rookie and who didn’t regularly start until his fourth professional season. He’s shorter than his peers, can barely dunk and is more obsessive about pivots than he is about crossovers.
Of all the parallel universes in existence, this is the only one where Brunson becomes an All-Star with this team in this city playing for this team president and this coach while also becoming the face of an organizational turnaround. And yet, it’s happening.
When the NBA announced the All-Star reserves Thursday, two Knicks popped up: Julius Randle, who is now an All-Star for the third time in four seasons, and Brunson, who made it for the first time.
Randle’s emergence is unconventional, as well. The Los Angeles Lakers selected him in the 2014 lottery but let him walk in free agency once his first NBA contract expired. He signed a one-year, bet-on-himself contract with the New Orleans Pelicans, who let him go after that season, too. After a chase for Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant ended with the two stars heading to the Brooklyn Nets, the Knicks turned to Randle, handing him a shorter-term deal for less money.
No one could have guessed that four and a half years later, a New York basketball team would capture the heart of the city behind its two All-Stars — and neither of them would be Durant or Irving.
“The thing that’s special is they’re self-made,” Thibodeau said. “It wasn’t given to them, and they’ve earned it. We’re proud of them.”
This was never supposed to happen. And yet, we’re watching the same events transpire night after night.
The Knicks were missing four rotation players Thursday night. Thibodeau is breaking the laws of time, running his favorites for 59 minutes in regulation games. And yet, they just keep winning.
Somehow, the Knicks, a team more associated with squalor than ballers for the past 23 years, are a half-game out of second place in the Eastern Conference. And it’s difficult to look anywhere but at Brunson.
Thursday’s performance was his masterpiece: a 40-point showing against a defense that threw anything it could at him. With the Knicks short-handed, the Pacers double-teamed him from the start. They were physical with Brunson as Brunson normally is with whomever he’s competing against — enough so that near the end of the game, Brunson took a smack to the face and collapsed to the floor only for whistles to be swallowed.
On the next play, Brunson scored an and-1, giving New York a one-point lead with under two minutes to go.
“One A, 1B, it doesn’t matter. The dude is an All-Star. He’s (having) an MVP-caliber season right now,” Donte DiVincenzo said. “He should be the player of the month this month. What else can I say? The dude’s doing everything he possibly can for us to win games. It’s not easy right now with Julius going down, OG going down, Mitch not being here. Everything’s been thrown against us and he’s still willing us to win games.”
Brunson is now averaging 27.1 points, a career-high, to go with 6.4 assists on the season. On Thursday, he had his fifth 40-point game over the Knicks’ first 49 games. He’s gone for 30-plus 19 times. Of the 534 players who have scored a point so far this season, only three, a trio of MVP candidates, have totaled more than Brunson: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Dončić.
This story, this career was meant to occur only in dreams.
If Rose hadn’t come to the Knicks, if he hadn’t hired Thibodeau immediately upon his arrival, if Thibodeau hadn’t become close with Rick 25 years ago, if Rick hadn’t been a lifelong Rose loyalist, if Rick’s and Rose’s kids hadn’t been so close for so long that Rose’s son, Sam, hadn’t grown up to become Jalen’s agent, this player with this background probably does not become an All-Star for this team.
But, somehow, it happened. Brunson has become one of the NBA’s least likely All-Stars, only the 21st second-round pick to make an All-Star Game since the league implemented a two-round draft in 1989. And somehow, the Knicks have followed in his stead.
They’ve acquired his best friends from Villanova: DiVincenzo, Josh Hart and Ryan Arcidiacono. Somehow, all those players have turned into no-brainer roster additions. Somehow, they were able to add Anunoby, who is the personification of this group’s new identity: hard-nosed, defensive-minded and team-oriented.
It starts at the top.
The Knicks have gone out of their way to sign Thibodeau-minded players: Ones who care about defense first, ones who will dive into the stands with three minutes to go in a 20-point game. But it helps when your best player plays that way, too.
“When your All-Star and your leader does it, it sets the standard,” Hart said. “But that’s something that each of us take pride in.”
In a league where some teams create rules discouraging players from diving for balls in practice scrimmages just because they can’t risk a leading performer injuring himself, Brunson takes charges in practice. He is one of two guys on the team, along with Arcidiacono, who does it. He leads the NBA in offensive fouls drawn. He is a star who carries himself like a role player, probably because he wasn’t supposed to be much above that.
He was not supposed to go for 40 this often. He was not supposed to be the one whom Knicks fans stayed late for just so they could lose their voices.
After the win over the Pacers on Thursday, MSG’s Alan Hahn approached Brunson for the typical postgame, on-court interview, the audio of which is played throughout the arena as well as on television. Of course, this was not your usual game.
Brunson had just gone for 40 points against a defense that was swarming him. He’d officially made All-Star only hours earlier. The 20,000 in attendance were the rowdiest of any group that had filled up Madison Square Garden so far this season. When the Knicks are rolling, and the fan base knows it, these games turn into another kind of event.
Most of those masses didn’t leave once the game ended. Instead, they waited for Brunson to begin his interview. Hahn asked about the night, about Brunson finally sneaking onto an All-Star team after he bore the label of the token snub a season ago. But even with the mic turned up, you could barely hear Hahn over the thousands who remained in the arena screeching “MVP!” chants.
Brunson, who’s not known for his public displays of emotion, choked up. He couldn’t bring himself to talk.
“It was cool the whole experience, how we won, obviously what happened before the game,” Brunson said. “You always work for certain moments but you never know how to react once they happen. It was special.”
That moment was not just about Thursday night — not just about a team that’s played like the best in the NBA for a month or a player who has reinvigorated a formerly woeful franchise and improbably vaulted into the land of the elite. There’s no questioning it: the Knicks’ constant hunt for an All-NBA performer, a topic ever since Rose took over the front office four years ago, needs to be reframed. This is definitively not a hunt for a star; it’s a hunt for another star.
No one could have seen this coming, except for maybe a person or three who has known Brunson since he was pre-K.
“There’s always been naysayers,” Thibodeau said. “And he always proves them wrong.”
(Photo of Jalen Brunson: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
The team owner and coach’s run together had just come to an end, and it was an appropriate time for the split. But if there had been any reservation, it was when Kraft mentioned how difficult it would be to see Belichick “in a cutoff hoodie on the sideline” for another team.
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That idea felt inevitable in the moment, with the Patriots among eight teams with a job opening and the NFL’s most successful coach on the market. Belichick, with 333 career victories, is 15 wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s record, and that seemed like an obvious attraction to ownership — on top, of course, of his coaching acumen.
That perception fell flat, however. The remaining coaching vacancies were filled this week, and it appears Belichick won’t be on an NFL sideline for the first time in a half-century.
For all the positives Belichick could bring to a new organization, numerous sources around the league, granted anonymity to speak freely without reprisal, cited a handful of reasons the coaching legend is still out of a job, and it runs deeper than the mere fact he’s about to turn 72.
The Atlanta Falcons were the only known suitor with serious interest, but they hired Raheem Morris after interviewing Belichick a couple of times.
At one point, it seemed publicly as though Belichick and the Falcons were building momentum toward a partnership. However, sources close to both sides expressed caution throughout the courting process.
Been trying to tell people for a week Belichick to the Falcons was never a sure thing. Both sides were gathering information about each other, open to seeing where it’d go, and the Falcons intended to keep their options wide open. https://t.co/0Nu0PqOWGh
They were each on a fact-finding mission to determine whether the organization’s power structure was the right fit to sustain success with Belichick, who had become accustomed to total control over football operations, as Falcons owner Arthur Blank was poised to keep his leadership structure intact.
Sources close to Belichick also cited a frosty relationship with Falcons president Rich McKay as a primary reason the parties might have decided they could or should not work together.
It’s fair to wonder why Belichick wouldn’t just put his head down, adapt to another team’s way of business and focus on coaching his way to another 15-plus wins before retiring with a monopoly of significant coaching records.
But if Belichick wouldn’t go all in to pitch Kraft on a way to turn around the Patriots’ recent misfortunes, he certainly wasn’t going to do it for a relative stranger. League sources believed Kraft might have been swayed to keep Belichick for another season if the coach committed to changing certain strategies with the personnel department, roster construction and his offensive vision, but Belichick had been accustomed to a specific approach and wouldn’t bend that far.
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That’s also pertinent as it related to the mutual fact-finding mission with the Falcons, and they were hardly alone among teams in the coaching market.
But more than anything, the Falcons were wholly sold on Morris, according to a league source. Belichick’s resume will trump any coach’s — in a hiring process, or historically — but his past accomplishments mattered less to the Falcons compared with what they thought Morris could bring to their future.
When the Falcons hired Morris, only the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Commanders had openings. At that time, league sources called it a long shot for either organization to consider Belichick, and even those odds seemed generous.
How Bill Belichick’s mishandling of Mac Jones, offense, led to demise with Patriots
At quarterback, people around the league still don’t understand how Belichick could let Tom Brady leave in free agency, but the lack of a succession plan was nearly as perplexing. Belichick went the budget route with Cam Newton in 2020 and drafted Mac Jones in the first round in 2021 but failed to develop him by virtually every measurable degree.
Jones had three offensive coordinators in three seasons, including Belichick’s decision in 2022 to employ longtime defensive coach Matt Patricia, which was almost universally criticized in league circles. The offense was poorly constructed with a patchwork line and mostly substandard skill players. Executives from opposing teams were also turned off by Belichick’s public alienation of Jones.
These issues led decision-makers to wonder whether Belichick could build an offense without Brady or have enough patience to develop a young quarterback.
The power structure was another red flag. Belichick has been fiercely loyal to his coaching confidants and like-minded personnel executives throughout his career, and those ties could be traced to the Patriots’ deteriorating records in recent seasons — again, notably with moving Patricia to offense.
Sources with multiple teams that just hired new head coaches expressed varying degrees of relief Belichick wasn’t joining their team. Some were concerned Belichick would overhaul the leadership structure and the order of command.
Others, particularly on the draft side, heard stories from Patriots scouts who didn’t feel their opinions had carried any weight with Belichick. His draft record has come under heavy scrutiny over the past decade, and word had spread across the league about occasions when he overruled his personnel department with key draft decisions. The fear, especially with scouts who spend so much time on the road away from their families, is they’d be wasting their time.
There’s also been a change in the way players want to be coached. So many current players want to relate to their coaches as people, often feeling that’s how they’ll show up at their best for seven days a week, and they prefer to feel empowered by the staff.
The latest wave of new-age coaches doesn’t have as much of an authoritarian complex, demanding players do everything they say simply because they’re their bosses. Players want to know why they’re doing things, whether it’s the weightlifting schedule or a schematic technique, and coaches who can deliver their message in such a way have become more appealing.
Though executives around the league agree Belichick can still lead a defense in the current era — and the way the Patriots played still showed revolutionary ideas, they’ve said — the concerns with the offensive approach have outweighed the defensive coaching.
History has shown us that the eight hires made in this cycle won’t have a high success rate. As the saying goes in the business, there are only two types of coaches: those who have been fired and those who will be fired. Time might determine whether these teams will regret bypassing Belichick, whether he gets another chance on the sideline to prove he can still do it or fades into retirement as those teams’ preferred hires are replaced in short order.
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However it plays out, there was a strong enough conviction Belichick wouldn’t be on most of their shortlists due to his performance over the past four years. They cited many of the same reasons Kraft and the Patriots opted to replace Belichick with Jerod Mayo.
And it’s why Belichick might have to wait at least a year before he gets another chance to lead a franchise.
Around baseball, the reaction to the valuation of the Baltimore Orioles at $1.725 billion was one of surprise and in some cases disbelief.
Seven industry analysts and rival officials, granted anonymity in exchange for their candor, all used the same word to describe the price:
“Low.”
The Orioles officially announced the sale of the franchise Wednesday to a group led by David Rubenstein, a Baltimore native who founded private equity firm The Carlyle Group. According to Puck News, which first reported the sale, the Rubenstein group initially will purchase about 40 percent of the club. The group, according to a source briefed on the terms, then will have the option to gain full control after the death of Peter Angelos, pending approval from Major League Baseball.
That approval likely would take months as the league conducts background and financial checks on the members of Rubenstein’s group and reviews the sale through internal committees. People in the sport offered a variety of potential reasons for why Peter’s son, Orioles managing partner John Angelos, accepted the $1.725 billion valuation, even though higher offers might have been available both in the past and future.
Those reasons included John’s possible frustration over the recently included lease negotiations for the Orioles at Camden Yards, cash-flow issues the family might be experiencing and the influence of Georgia Angelos, John’s mother and Peter’s wife. John Angelos has been running the club in the absence of his father, who is 94 and has been incapacitated due to illness since 2018.
A spokesperson for John Angelos declined comment.
Other major-league teams in recent years sold for less than the Orioles. The Miami Marlins went for $1.2 billion in 2017, the Kansas City Royals for $1 billion in 2019. The Cleveland Guardians, under the same type of path-to-control arrangement the Orioles are using, were valued at $1 billion in 2022.
While Miami and Cleveland are bigger media markets than Baltimore, the Orioles are seen as a franchise with greater potential because of the current quality of the team and the passion of their fan base.
Georgia and Peter Angelos at an event in 1996. (Andre Chung/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Peter Angelos bought the Orioles in 1993 for $173 million. Forbes estimated the Orioles last March to be worth $1.713 billion. That valuation, however, did not include the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), in which the team is the majority shareholder in a dual ownership with the Washington Nationals.
MASN is included in the Rubenstein group’s purchase, and some in the industry expect the group to sell the network to Ted Leonsis, the owner of NHL, NBA and WNBA franchises in Washington and a different regional sports network, Monumental, that broadcasts all three teams. Like all regional sports networks in this era of cord-cutting, MASN is not as valuable as it once was. But Leonsis at least might want to purchase the Orioles’ TV rights to enhance his programming on Monumental in the spring, summer and fall.
In late 2022, Leonsis bid for the Nationals with similar intentions, providing perhaps the most relevant data point when asssessing the valuation of the Orioles. Leonsis offered $2.2 billion for the Nationals, according to a source briefed on the discussions. The Lerner family, owners of the Nationals, did not move on the proposal, apparently believing the team was worth more.
Washington is a larger market than Baltimore, but the Nationals became a lesser partner in MASN as a condition of relocating from Montreal to Washington in 2005. So, why would John Angelos, the Orioles’ chairman and CEO in the absence of his father, not hold out for a price similar to the one Leonsis proposed for the Nationals?
The deal between the Orioles and the Rubenstein group seemingly came together quickly, catching Maryland state officials and another group interested in the club by surprise.
A little more than six weeks ago, the Orioles reached agreement with the state on a new long-term lease to remain at Camden Yards. The deal included $600 million in public funds for ballpark upgrades and potential development rights around the ballpark.
“If John (Angelos) can hear me now, it’s deeply disappointing and troubling that you could look your state in the eye and outright lie to us about your intentions.’ Maryland state treasurer Dereck Davis told The (Baltimore) Sun. “We had a right to know, given the amount of investment we were committing to this.”
People in the game, however, cited a combination of factors that might have increased Angelos’ urgency to sell and persuaded him to move forward with the deal sooner rather than later:
The final terms of the Orioles’ new lease
Angelos, in his negotiations with the state, sought to develop an area around Camden Yards and make it similar to The Battery Atlanta complex adjoining the Braves’ Truist Park, which opened in 2017.
He did not gain those rights.
All the Orioles received was an option to end the 30-year lease after 15 years if they did not reach a deal with the state on a development plan that perhaps was not even viable. The necessary land for such a project around Camden Yards does not exist. The ballpark sits in the middle of Baltimore, while Truist was built in a suburb 10 miles outside of Atlanta.
Angelos fought hard for the development rights, evidently believing they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When he failed to secure them, he was left without, at least in his view, a potentially lucrative revenue source and vehicle to boost the value of the franchise.
Cash-flow issues
The bill for the Orioles in their years-long dispute with the Nationals over television rights fees is coming due.
MASN held about $105 million in escrow preparing for the possibility of the first payment. It is not known how the network – and by extension, Angelos – planned to come up with the money for the 2017 to ’21 period.
What is known is that the Angelos family is seeking to become more liquid by selling off a variety of land assets, including One Charles Center, a 22-story office tower in downtown Baltimore.
Family considerations
The influence of Georgia Angelos, Peter’s wife and John’s mother, was no small factor in the family’s decision to sell, according to two sources briefed on the discussions.
Georgia’s exact motivations are unclear, but she and John were sued by her other son, Louis Angelos, over control of the team in 2022. According to the suit, Georgia determined it was in the family’s best interest to sell the team, but John misled her into believing he was working to accomplish that goal when ultimately he wanted to thwart it.
According to court documents from the suit, attorneys for Georgia wrote that her husband did not intend for the family to own the team forever, saying, “Although Peter felt that the Orioles should be sold on his death so Georgia could enjoy the great wealth they had amassed together, he felt that decision was ultimately Georgia’s to make.”
By identifying a buyer before Peter’s death, the family achieves resolution. The two-step sale – 40 percent now, 60 percent later – enables the family to receive an infusion of cash while avoiding a full capital gains tax it would incur if it sold the entire club before Peter’s death.
In a statement on Wednesday, John Angelos said, “When I took on the role of Chair and CEO of the Orioles, we had the objective of restoring the franchise to elite status in major league sports, keeping the team in Baltimore for years to come and revitalizing our partnership group. The relationship with David Rubenstein and his partners validates that we have not only met but exceeded our goals.”
The deal might work for Angelos. The question is whether it will create a downward ripple effect on the valuations of other teams going forward.
(Top photo (l-r) of Louis Angelos, Orioles executive VP Mike Elias, John Angelos in 2018: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Recruiting is heating up across the country with junior days being held and the beginning of the camp and 7-on-7 circuit. Here’s the latest chatter from the Mid-South from Rivals national recruiting director Adam Gorney.
The only five-star left in the 2024 class to make his final decision, Bussey will take his final official visit to Texas A&M this weekend and the feeling is that the Aggies are in strong shape to keep him in the class.
LSU is the other main competitor after the five-star athlete from Timpson, Texas, visited in recent days. Georgia also is very much in the mix.
But if things go well in College Station this weekend, Bussey is expected to stick with his initial decision.
There is growing confidence that Mississippi State is the front-runner for Cunningham especially after recently visiting Starkville again and hitting it off with the new coaching staff. The Bulldogs loaded up at receiver in the 2024 class but that won’t scare off the Ackerman (Miss.) Choctaw County standout who lives only about 30 minutes from campus.
Cunningham is expected at Florida this weekend with LSU, Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss and others involved but playing down the road is a plus and playing in that offense could be a huge deal.
*****
His older brother, Nick, flipped from Florida to Oklahoma late and has since transferred to Wisconsin but Evers’ recruitment might be a little calmer.
First, the 2026 offensive tackle from Flower Mound, Texas, had a tremendous recent visit to Texas A&M to meet the new coaching staff and he loved everything about it. He also has numerous connections to Texas A&M since both of his parents, his two aunts and an uncle went to school there. The Aggies are considered the early front-runner – maybe by far – here.
*****
Texas A&M is still going to push very hard and Ohio State is a major contender with Texas surging in Williams’ recruitment. However, Oklahoma could be the team to watch.
The five-star safety, who could move to linebacker in time, had a great visit to Norman, had some exceptional talks with coach Brent Venables and the Sooners have made a move up for the five-star from Galveston (Texas) Ball.
*****
The conventional thinking when it comes to a five-star from Louisiana is that LSU is a lock but the whispers I’m hearing is that’s not the case. USC, Texas and Oregon stand out most right now for the No. 1 prospect in the 2026 class.
That can certainly change with so much time left in his recruitment and with defensive line coach Bo Davis back in Baton Rouge, but those three others could have the edge now.
*****
This could end up being a Texas-Oklahoma battle with TCU, Kansas and Texas A&M all involved. After a recent visit to Austin, Wormley said the Longhorns will definitely be in his “top three.”
But another team could definitely be emerging here and that’s Oregon after a recent trip.
The Southlake (Texas) Carroll standout had an “unbelievable” trip to Eugene last weekend. He used the word “amazing” to different aspects of the visit and he loves the coaches there.
*****
Georgia recently offered in recent days and that could change everything when it comes to Ferguson’s recruitment but relationships are going to matter most when the Missouri City (Texas) Fort Bend Marshall reaches a decision.
Prior to the Bulldogs getting involved, Tennessee and Oklahoma jumped out as the favorites mainly because Ferguson had such great relationships with position coaches Kelsey Pope and Emmett Jones, respectively.
*****
His brother, Jake, recently transferred to Oklahoma and the four-star tight end from Washington, Okla., lives less than a hour away from the Norman campus. But the feeling here is that Ohio State should still be confident in landing him.
The former Notre Dame pledge has hit it off with the Buckeyes’ staff. There is some healthy wondering, though, why the four-star tight end hasn’t made his pledge yet if he’s so high on the Big Ten powerhouse.
Iowa State got a heck of a first commitment for the 2025 class when quarterback Alex Manske announced his commitment to the team. He made the decision public on Thursday night giving the Cyclones a…
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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Bernhard Langer tore his Achilles tendon while exercising and had surgery on Friday, putting the 66-year-old German out of golf during a year he planned to play the Masters one last time.
Langer last year broke Hale Irwin’s record for PGA Tour Champions victories when he won twice to reach 46 titles on the 50-and-older circuit.
He is a two-time Masters champion, the first one coming in 1985, and was preparing for an emotional farewell to Augusta National in April. Masters champions have a lifetime exemption, and it’s possible Langer could still return next year for one last Masters.
“Yesterday, during training exercises in Boca Raton, I tore my Achilles tendon. I will have surgery today to repair the injury, which will cause me to miss time playing competitive golf as I recover,” Langer said in a statement through the PGA Tour.
“Throughout my career, faith and family have been my bedrocks, providing me strength and guiding me through difficult times. I will lean on both as I work towards a return to competition.”
It was not clear how long he would be gone, though typically surgery to repair a torn Achilles tendon takes at least four months before walking.
Langer had a conference call Wednesday ahead of the Chubb Classic in Florida, where last year he won for the fifth time and tied Irwin’s record. He spoke of his last time going to Augusta.
“It’s going to be very emotional, especially Augusta, because it’s been a big part of my life,” Langer said. “I love the tournament. I love the golf course. I love what they do for the game of golf. It’s going to be a tough farewell for me walking up the 18th the last time in competitive circumstances.”
Among his two victories last year was the U.S. Senior Open, which gives winners an exemption into the U.S. Open. Langer also had planned to play at Pinehurst No. 2 in June.
JURUPA VALLEY, Calif. – There are many things that will be important to four-star receiver Phillip Bell when he’s ready to make his commitment.One is especially near and dear to his heart. Bell’s m…
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LaLiga said it will investigate a complaint filed by Getafe that Real Madrid midfielder Jude Bellingham allegedly used an offensive remark towards Mason Greenwood.
Spanish radio station Cadena SER originally reported the complaint by Getafe, and LaLiga confirmed the complaint to The Associated Press. It said that it will use a lip-reading service to determine what happened and then decide how to proceed.
The alleged incident occurred during Real Madrid’s 2-0 win at Getafe on Thursday.
Greenwood joined Getafe on a season-long loan from Manchester United in September. The former England forward had been the subject of an internal investigation from United after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) discontinued its case against the now 22-year-old for attempted rape, assault, and coercive control.
The CPS said “a combination of the withdrawal of key witnesses and new material that came to light meant there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction”.
Greenwood denied all the alleged offences.
Neither Real Madrid nor Getafe immediately responded to requests for comment by the AP.
Kevin Seifert is a staff writer who covers the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL at ESPN. Kevin has covered the NFL for over 20 years, joining ESPN in 2008. He was previously a beat reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Washington Times. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia. You can follow him via Twitter @SeifertESPN.
Dan Graziano is a senior NFL national reporter for ESPN, covering the entire league and breaking news. Dan also contributes to Get Up, NFL Live, SportsCenter, ESPN Radio, Sunday NFL Countdown and Fantasy Football Now. He is a New Jersey native who joined ESPN in 2011, and he is also the author of two published novels. You can follow Dan on Twitter via @DanGrazianoESPN.
Feb 2, 2024, 06:00 AM ET
The NFL’s rate of noncontact lower-extremity injuries was nearly the same on synthetic and natural turf in 2023, league officials told ESPN, the second time in three years those trend lines have essentially intersected.
The data, collected via a joint NFL/NFL Players Association committee, helps inform the ongoing debate over the safety of playing surfaces at the NFL’s 30 stadiums.
Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for communications, public affairs and policy, said the similar rates point to a “need to look at all surfaces” for ways to improve. NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell last fall called on all teams to convert to grass fields after New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers tore his left Achilles tendon on MetLife Stadium’s synthetic turf. In a statement released to ESPN this week, the union said the numbers were close in 2023 only because injuries on grass fields increased.
“As we have said repeatedly,” the statement read, “injury data in a one-year time capsule does not account for what we have known since we started tracking these injuries: that a well-maintained, consistent grass surface is still simply safer for players than any synthetic field. The story of last year’s injury data is that, unfortunately, injury rates on grass have increased from last year.
“The data cannot, however, account for what players have shared with the NFL for years: that we feel much worse after playing on synthetic surfaces and overwhelmingly prefer consistent, high-quality grass fields.
“This year’s injury data also does not explain how quick they are to flip NFL stadium surfaces from bad synthetic to better grass for international soccer friendlies and tournaments.”
The NFL/NFLPA committee defines injuries that could be attributed to the playing surface as those that occur in the lower extremities, without contact from another player, and are serious enough to force missed games. They represent about one-third of all NFL injuries and about half of all lower-extremity injuries, according to Dr. Mackenzie Herzog, an epidemiologist at IQVIA and an adviser to the NFL and NFLPA.
In 2023, the incidence rate (per 100 plays) for such injuries was 0.001 higher on synthetic turf (0.043) compared with natural (0.042). That represented a total of six to eight injuries over the course of the 17-week season, Herzog said, making the rates “virtually identical.” There was a similar difference between the rates in 2021.
In 2022, the rate for synthetic turf was 0.048 and the rate for natural was 0.035.
“Sometimes the line for synthetic injuries goes up, and sometimes it goes down,” the NFL’s Miller said, “and the same for the natural turf line. We need to have a better appreciation for why that could be over time so that both lines are heading in the same direction, and both of them are going down.”
After the uproar over Rodgers’ injury, 10 other NFL players suffered Achilles tears during regular-season games. There were another 12 during preseason games and practices, and the total of 23 was in line with previous seasons. According to NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s number of Achilles injuries has been between 20 and 22 since the league moved to a 17-game regular season.
“We did not see an epidemic of Achilles injuries this year,” Sills said.
Several teams replaced a type of synthetic turf called “slit film” after the 2022 season, noting that it had produced higher injury rates than other forms of turf and grass. Two others will do so after the 2023 season, leaving Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium as the only facility without plans to replace slit-film turf before the 2024 season.
Despite the data, and as the NFLPA said in its statement, many players say they feel less sore after games on grass than they do after playing on turf. Sills and Miller said this week that the NFL/NFLPA committee has several research initiatives underway to address surface conditions, including the possibility of growing grass for indoor stadiums.
“We think that’s important work,” Sills said. “It has not been done to the level that we think would withstand the kind of forces that NFL players put on those fields right now, but that is a very active research stream as well.
In the meantime, the committee is researching the impact of establishing a consistent set of turf management and style protocols to reduce the adjustments players must make from stadium to stadium.
“We think that’s going to be an important driver in the reduction of injuries,” Sills said.
Independent of the playing surface, the NFL experienced an unquestioned decrease in serious injuries during the 2023 season, Miller said. Missed games due to all injuries were down by about 700 from 2022, largely because of a drop in lower-extremity injuries.
The NFL believes its intervention efforts — working with team medical and coaching staffs in the early weeks of spring training on ways to manage the “ramp-up” period and reduce training camp lower-extremity injuries — are paying off.
The NFL’s numbers show a 29% reduction in lower-extremity injuries during training camp and a 50% reduction in recurrence of those injuries throughout the year. Herzog said the number of regular-season games missed due to lower-extremity strains — which represent the league’s No. 1 injury burden — was down 24% from the previous two years.
“We’ve really focused on that — made it an offseason priority to talk with coaches, strength coaches, performance directors about trends and observations, particularly on how we bring players back,” Sills said. “We’ve seen the first two weeks of training camp really provide an opportunity to reduce strains.”
The NFL also said ACL injuries were down in 2023. It registered 52 ACL injuries across the preseason and regular-season games and practices, which the league said is down 24% from the average of the previous two seasons.
Meanwhile, concussion numbers were relatively stable. The NFL had 219 concussions across the preseason and regular-season games and practices, up from 213 in 2022.
The NFL did accomplish its goal of reducing concussions on kickoffs, with the number dropping from 20 in 2022 to eight in 2023, but Miller said that’s a direct result of fewer kicks being returned because of a rule change that spotted fair catches at the 25-yard line. The concussion rate on returned kickoffs, Sills said, remained the same as in previous years.
Miller said the competition committee plans to examine the kickoff again this offseason with the goal of keeping the play in the game but making it safer. He said the committee has studied the XFL rule and will continue to look for ways to alter the play to make it safer without making it go away.
The coaches who came and went under Nick Saban, many of whom are now running their own programs, are like everybody else in the college football world. They’re still processing Saban’s retirement and have been since he announced Jan. 10 that he was walking away from coaching after winning seven national championships, six at Alabama and one at LSU.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart joked that he would like to fly all the coaches who worked under Saban to his new home in Jupiter Island, Florida, bring in a film crew and simply sit around and tell stories about Saban’s legendary career.
This is ESPN’s attempt to do just that, as we talked to 11 members of the Saban coaching tree, viewing the legendary leader through the eyes of the people who know him best.
Saban’s protégés, including Mark Dantonio from their Michigan State days, Jimbo Fisher from their time at LSU and Smart, Mario Cristobal, Lane Kiffin, Dan Lanning, Steve Sarkisian, Mike Locksley and more from Saban’s 17-year run at Alabama, share their most memorable, funny and moving moments and break down what made him one of the greatest coaches of all time.
From Saban’s decision to replace Jalen Hurts with Tua Tagovailoa at halftime of the 2017 national championship game to helping Sarkisian pick up the pieces of his life. We learn what Kiffin did to provoke an epic “ass-chewing,” about Smart’s awkward first interview and Fisher’s shared “West Virginia hillbilly” ties with his former boss/nemesis. We get insight into Saban’s softer side and some blow-by-blow accounts of Saban’s pickup basketball games.
One spoiler on those hoops games: Very rarely was Saban fouled.
‘It’s like dog years working for me?!’: Untold Saban stories
Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin has joked over the years that he received his share of “ass-chewings” from Saban during his time at Alabama. But nothing rises to the level of the one he endured during the 2016 fall camp.
The team was in a “good-on-good” drill, pitting the starting offensive players vs. the starters on defense, and even though Kiffin had been warned by other coaches not to go overboard and try to make Saban’s defense look bad, Kiffin couldn’t resist. He was hired in 2014 as Saban’s offensive coordinator with the specific goal of helping modernize Alabama’s offense.
“I’d come from the Pete Carroll camp. I wasn’t wired that way, to let the defense win,” said Kiffin, who spent three turbulent but successful seasons as Saban’s offensive coordinator.
So Kiffin had several coaches on his offensive staff present different types of plays, or what one of those assistants recently referred to as “cool plays,” and put them in before practice. Everybody in the offensive staff room knew Saban wouldn’t be pleased.
“We had a really good day on offense, ran some reverses, threw a double pass and had all these touchdowns, and he said that all I was trying to do was win the drill and trick the defense and not help the team,” Kiffin said. “I was like, ‘Isn’t that the point in good-on-good situations on offense, to see if you can move the ball?’
“He was furious.”
His ears ringing from the chewing-out the day before, Kiffin changed it up the next practice.
“Stubborn old Lane, I ran the most generic, basic, under-center offense I could, sort of their old-school offense they ran under Joe Pendry,” Kiffin said. “And the defense killed us. We’d be third-and-8, and I’d have the quarterback under center.”
In the staff meeting afterward, Saban was again miffed and wanted an explanation from Kiffin on why he was going under center on third-and-long and running the ball.
“‘I’m just running what I thought you would want me to run against the defense,’” Kiffin answered. “Again, it was just me being smart-ass me.”
At that point, Saban cleared everybody out of the room except Kiffin, who knew what was coming.
“I have to sit there, and he is screaming at me, standing over me screaming as I’m sitting in my chair. I thought he was going to fight me physically,” said Kiffin, who can laugh about it now. “So, yes, I got a lot of ass-chewings, but that’s the biggest one and one that no one saw. But I deserved it.”
Saban, however, had one last salvo, which Kiffin and the offensive coaches from that staff still find hilarious. Saban compared Kiffin to a children’s book character, P.J. Funnybunny, a spoiled bunny who went around creating havoc.
“He screamed at me that I was the bunny,” Kiffin said, “and we were like, ‘What the hell is that? There’s no way Coach has read a little kid’s bedtime story like that!’”
SMART WILL NEVER forget his first interview with Saban in 2004 when Smart was up for a job at LSU as defensive backs coach. Smart was a graduate assistant at Florida State at the time, and his old pal Will Muschamp, then Saban’s defensive coordinator at LSU, had vouched for him.
“I go on the interview, and I’m young and unassuming, and there are all these stories out there that if Miss Terry [Saban’s wife] invites you to the house for dinner, she had to give you the OK. And if you didn’t get the OK, then you weren’t going to get the job.”
Lance Thompson was leaving LSU to take the UCF defensive coordinator’s job. Smart remembers Thompson, who worked under Saban two different times, telling Smart in passing: “Working for Nick is like dog years. Every year feels like seven.”
Smart visited the Saban home on Super Bowl Sunday, and they were all sitting around and talking after dinner.
“I was comfortable and feeling good about the way it was going, and I just say, ‘I don’t get it. People say working here is like dog years.’ I don’t know why in the hell I said that. Just dumb,” Smart said. “Think about it. Why would you ever say something like that to an employer you’re trying to get a job with? But I did. I guess I wasn’t overwhelmed or intimated. I was too young to know any better.”
The next morning, Smart got a call from Muschamp after that day’s LSU staff meeting. Muschamp told Smart that an irate Saban barked to everybody in the staff room: “Which one of you dumbasses said it’s like dog years working for me? We’re trying to hire the guy, and you tell him that?”
Smart is still sheepish about it all these years later.
“I got the whole staff cussed out and somehow still got the job.”
MIAMI COACH MARIO Cristobal was Saban’s offensive line coach for four seasons at Alabama before moving to Oregon as co-offensive coordinator and later head coach. A second-generation Cuban American who grew up in Miami, Cristobal said driving to see recruits with Saban was always an adventure, especially with Saban being a renowned back-seat driver, something to which every coach who ever went out on the road with him will attest.
One time, Saban and Cristobal were driving to see a recruit in Iowa, and it was snowing heavily.
“I didn’t know how to drive in the snow, and we were almost crashing,” Cristobal said.
Saban looked at Cristobal and asked quizzically, “Tell me, man, there ain’t no snow in Cuba. Why the hell are you driving?”
OREGON COACH DAN Lanning got a taste of what working for Saban was like on one of his first days on the job as a graduate assistant at Alabama — and at Saban’s youth football camp, no less.
“I’m part of the group that’s running the bag drills. It’s not something unique, but Nick had a way that he wanted to run those drills. And it’s one of the first times I remember getting my butt chewed,” Lanning said. “The strength coach was running the drill and then he had to leave and go run the drill for our actual guys. So I had it, but I wasn’t doing a good job of paying attention to how Nick wanted the drill run.
“I learned quickly that I was running the drill wrong — and I’m talking about sixth- and seventh-graders. It wasn’t like these are the guys we’re about to coach. And it was just a great reminder to me: Pay attention to details. For me to get my best butt-chewing during kids camp, I think that just shows the intensity of Nick.”
WHEN SABAN CONTRACTED COVID-19 during the 2020 national championship season, he had to quarantine at home. But that didn’t mean he missed practice. He was there — just not physically.
Saban had Alabama officials set up cameras so he could watch practice from home via Zoom.
“We know he’s watching practice from home, and after practice, we bring it up [in the middle of the field] like we would if he was there. It was just routine,” said Marshall coach Charles Huff, who was Alabama’s running backs coach at the time.
As the team gathered, Saban’s football chief operating officer, Ellis Ponder, rolled a 19-inch television set on a stand onto the field in the indoor practice facility. Saban addressed the team on video just as he would have if he had been there in the flesh.
“And at the end, he holds up his hand and goes, ‘One, two, three,’ and everybody yells, ‘Team,’” Huff said. “It was like ‘Saw,’ the movie where the little TV rolls in, and boom, that doll pops up and gives you instructions.”
THERE WAS NO basking in championships under Saban, even after winning it all.
Georgia Tech coach Brent Key remembers traveling back home after winning the 2017 national championship, which was Saban’s fifth at Alabama. The game was on a Monday night, and the team returned to campus the next day. On Wednesday morning, there was a staff meeting, and there was very little reflection from Saban.
“He comes in, sits down and is like, ‘Guys, congratulations on a good season. We overcame a lot of adversity. We had injuries. We had guys prepared to come back,’” Key recalled.
But everybody in the room knew a “but” was coming, and with colorful language.
“But that was last year. We’re behind in recruiting. We shouldn’t have been behind in that game,” Saban said, his voice rising.
Saban had already moved on to the next challenge.
Key remembers looking over at current Maryland coach Mike Locksley, who was in his second season at Alabama as receivers coach.
“Locks goes, ‘Damn, that was yesterday! I just won my first national championship. Like, that just happened yesterday. I’m still hungover,’” Key said, laughing.
“That’s it in a nutshell, man.”
‘Is Coach OK?’: Saban’s softer side
When Kiffin’s three children were young, he remembers getting an invitation to the Sabans’ house for Easter. His first thought was: “I’m not getting yelled at on Easter. I get yelled at enough at the football complex.”
Kiffin’s former wife, Layla, was in town with the kids and convinced him to go.
“It was amazing. Coach was completely different,” Kiffin said. “I think his first grandchild had just been born, and he was walking around with [Kiffin’s son] Knox and helping him find an egg. I was like, ‘Is Coach OK?’ Because I’d never really seen that side of him before.”
Kiffin had a similar experience with Tom Coughlin earlier in his career while working with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
“Seeing that side of Coach Saban, it’s then that I understood that two of the most demanding coaches I’ve worked for were one way at home and then one way when they walked into that football building,” Kiffin said. “They felt like they had to be that way, to hold people accountable, to be tough on people, and obviously it worked because they’re both legendary coaches.
“But it was cool seeing that side of Coach Saban.”
FLORIDA COACH BILLY Napier said Saban and his wife, Terry, who have been married for 52 years, were an unbelievable team in the way they took care of their coaches and the coaches’ families.
“Don’t underestimate the impact Miss Terry had on him and all that touched that program,” Napier said. “I was always grateful when I got there in 2011 after being let go as offensive coordinator at Clemson and kind of starting my career over. He believed in me and gave me another chance, the same thing he’s done for so many coaches.”
More than just a professional boost, Napier feels even more indebted to the Sabans from a personal standpoint.
“People don’t see some of the things that he does for you behind the scenes, both he and Miss Terry,” Napier said. “My wife went through some things medically, and they were there for us. They take care of their people. My dad got diagnosed with ALS my first year as a receivers coach. I wasn’t worth a wood nickel that year, and Coach Saban helped me navigate that when I probably didn’t do my job to the best of my ability. But he had a pulse for how challenging that was for me and guided me through it.”
TEXAS COACH STEVE Sarkisian has said several times that Saban saved his career when he brought Sarkisian on as an analyst in 2016 after alcohol issues led to his firing at USC.
“He believed in me at a time when I was having a hard time even getting an interview,” Sarkisian said.
Following Texas’ 34-24 victory over Alabama last season in Tuscaloosa, Sarkisian made sure Saban knew how much he meant to him.
“None of this would’ve been possible without you,” Sarkisian told Saban at midfield.
One of only three former assistants to beat Saban, along with Smart and Fisher, Sarkisian thought about that moment at Bryant-Denny Stadium when he heard Saban was retiring.
“As great as it was for us to go and get that win, that would never have been possible without Nick Saban, ironically,” Sarkisian said. “To think that was where I kind of resurrected my career, in that stadium with him, to have that moment — which was our biggest moment in three years here — was something I won’t forget. I’m forever grateful that he and Miss Terry were both there for me at a tough time in my life.”
‘There’s no turning back’: Decisive calls, memorable moments
One of Saban’s most memorable in-game decisions was making the switch from Jalen Hurts, who was 25-2 as Alabama’s starting quarterback, to true freshman Tua Tagovailoa at halftime of the Crimson Tide’s come-from-behind 26-23 win over Georgia to capture the 2017 national championship. Tagovailoa’s 41-yard touchdown pass to DeVonta Smith in overtime won the title for the Tide.
Alabama trailed 13-0 at the half and hadn’t been able to generate any offense. A week earlier, the Tide scored only two offensive touchdowns in a semifinal win over Clemson.
“We come into the locker room at halftime of that Georgia game, and the first question Nick has is, ‘What the hell is going on? What do we need to do to get the offense going?’” Locksley said.
Locksley was then the receivers coach and co-offensive coordinator. His younger receivers were already restless about not being more involved in the passing game. Locksley looked around the locker room and spoke up.
“‘Coach, if you’re asking my opinion and you want to get the offense going, let’s give Tua a shot,’” Locksley recalled saying. “I said, ‘I’ll talk to Jalen, and if it doesn’t work, we can always go back to Jalen.’”
Any critical decision was always Saban’s call, but he wanted input from his coaches, especially in tough situations, and that’s something else that set him apart, according to Locksley.
“There was never a flinch whatsoever on his part to make that move,” Locksley said. “But you’ve also got to remember that he’s the same guy that made a decision a year before when we lost the championship to go with a new playcaller [Sarkisian] for the championship game. That’s the thing about Coach. He listens to people, but he’s the one that makes the decision. And when he does, there’s no turning back.”
Locksley said he’s not sure Saban could have managed the whole Hurts-Tagovailoa situation any better. Tagovailoa had taken most of the first-team reps prior to the semifinal against Clemson after Hurts got the flu.
“I’m not sure the ball hit the ground in any of those practices,” Locksley said. “Tua was unbelievable.”
But when Tagovailoa didn’t start against Clemson, Locksley said Tagovailoa was boiling mad and ready to transfer. It was a similar story with Hurts after he was benched in the national title game. After all, he had lost only two games as a starter — and one of those was the national championship game against Clemson the year before, when his 30-yard touchdown run gave Alabama the lead with a little more than two minutes remaining.
“It’s never easy to juggle those types of things. Only one quarterback can play, but Coach does a great job of managing it and allowing the people who are closest to the players to be a big part of it,” Locksley said. “And then in 2018, it was almost a reversal. Jalen comes in and saves us in the SEC championship game. He was ready. Those things don’t happen by accident. The tone is set at the top.”
CRISTOBAL ARRIVED AT Alabama in 2013, the year after the Crimson Tide lost to Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M in Tuscaloosa. The pregame meeting the next year in College Station remains etched in Cristobal’s mind.
“Every detail in those meetings is covered, from where the sun rises and sets, does it affect the returners, the referees, what they are prone to calling, all that stuff,” Cristobal said.
The Tide had heard all offseason that they were going to have to go play at Kyle Field, and that Manziel, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, was going to light them up again. Cristobal said the mood in the locker room was uptight, and Saban sensed it right away.
“Hey man, ain’t no one going to die today, you know?” Saban insisted. “Get your asses focused and enthused about this opportunity we have today. Ain’t no one going to die.”
Cristobal said the tension was immediately relieved.
“We got back to business,” Cristobal said. “He had a knack for doing stuff that made everybody in the organization better.”
Alabama beat Texas A&M 49-42 in one of the best college football games of the year.
THE WEEK BEFORE the 2016 national championship game, Saban abruptly cut ties with Kiffin, who was his offensive coordinator and playcaller for Alabama’s semifinal win over Washington. Saban had Sarkisian, then an offensive analyst, call plays for the title game against Clemson; the Tigers would beat the Tide 35-31 on a last-second touchdown. Kiffin had been named Florida Atlantic’s coach a few weeks earlier, and Saban didn’t feel Kiffin was fully invested in his duties at Alabama.
After Saban retired, Kiffin said he reached out to reiterate what he has told Saban almost every time he has seen him since that parting.
“I just told him that I appreciated him so much, and as I look back now at any issues we had between us, they were 100 percent my fault,” Kiffin said. “I didn’t see it at the time, but I see it now.
“It’s a lot like being a parent. You don’t always understand when you’re a kid and your parents are telling you things, but then you get older and have your own kids, and you’re like, ‘OK, now I get it.’”
Kiffin said he apologized for being so difficult, but that Saban was very gracious and talked about what a good run they had together — three SEC championships, three College Football Playoff appearances, one national title and a 40-3 record, including a 26-game winning streak to end their three years together.
“I would have really struggled with myself as an assistant coach at that stage, and I told Coach that,” Kiffin said. “Now I’m the head coach, and I see that. Yes, I would have liked me on game day because there was a lot of success and all the plays that we created. All that stuff would have been great, but always questioning things, wanting to know why and arguing back. … I don’t think I would have put up with it as a head coach.”
SABAN AND FISHER were raised a “few hollers over,” as Jimbo would say, in West Virginia, but they were never what you would call close friends after their days of working together at LSU from 2000 to 2004. Their relationship seemingly went up in flames prior to the 2022 season.
You’ve heard this part before. Saban, who once called Fisher the best offensive coordinator he ever had at the college or pro level, said at a May 18, 2022, fundraiser that Texas A&M “bought” all its players in the previous signing class with name, image and likeness deals. An enraged Fisher, then the Aggies’ coach, fired back the next day in a hastily called news conference. He called Saban a “narcissist” and described Saban’s comments as “despicable.” Saban later apologized and said he shouldn’t have singled out specific schools, but he didn’t back down on his stance that NIL was being used as a guise for pay-for-play.
Fisher said he hasn’t talked to Saban since his retirement, but is glad to see his old boss walking away when he’s young and healthy enough to do some of the other things he wants.
“I know everybody thinks we’re enemies because I said what I said, but I truly believe Nick’s a good guy and a genuine guy,” said Fisher, who was fired toward the end of the 2023 season at Texas A&M. “Now, Nick likes to win and will do what he needs to do to win. We all will. Maybe it’s the West Virginia hillbilly in us. We like to hit you and scratch you. But at the end of the day, we give a s—. That’s the way we grew up.
“I remember when we got to LSU, Nick was sort of an outsider, hadn’t coached in the SEC and really hadn’t won crazily. But none of that fazed him. You could see his vision right away, his tenacity to do it the way he knew it had to be done despite what anybody else thought. There was nothing outside his program that affected him.
“A lot of it is that we’re the same guy, Nick and me, and are point-blank about what’s on our minds.”
‘If I want to call a timeout, I’ll call a damn timeout’
Throughout his coaching career, Saban loved organizing pickup 3-on-3 basketball games with his coaches at lunchtime. Only in the offseason, mind you.
The games at times were intense, and legend has it that Saban picked the teams and occasionally picked who would guard him. At Alabama, that guy often was current Arkansas State athletic director Jeff Purinton, who was then one of Saban’s most trusted confidants as associate athletic director for football communications.
“My first years with him, I loved it and looked forward to it. My last six years, I dreaded it,” Smart said with a laugh.
Smart participated in those games at all three of his coaching stops with Saban.
“We played outside when we were with the Miami Dolphins, some great games,” said Smart, noting that current South Carolina receivers coach James Coley and former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett were part of the games.
One of the funnier stories, and Smart says Coley tells it best, was when Saban was at LSU. They went from 4-on-4 to 3-on-3, making it a faster-paced game. Coley said Saban, in his mid-50s at the time, became winded and called timeout after a loose ball. But Stan Hixon, who was on Saban’s team, was the only one who heard Saban call timeout. Derek Dooley was on the opposite team and thought Hixon had called the timeout. Dooley yelled, “There’s no timeouts out here.”
Dooley had no idea the call came from Saban, and Saban was none too pleased.
“Hey Derek, I’m 50 years old, and I’m about to have a heart attack. If I want to call a timeout, I’ll call a damn timeout,” Saban huffed.
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Nick Saban on where it all began for him as a coach
In 2018, Nick Saban told the story of the exact moment he started thinking like a coach.
Fisher said he and Saban were always on the same team during their LSU years. They would play on the practice court underneath the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
“We’d always go to 11. Nick was the point guard, and I was the shooting guard,” said Fisher, who was Saban’s offensive coordinator at the time. “Our third player would vary. I mean, we’d go at it too. I wasn’t going to lose, and neither was Nick. I’d score about nine of our points, and he’d score the other two. He could handle the ball and shoot, but I could shoot from long range. It was some serious basketball.”
Former Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt, who worked two stints under Saban at Alabama, joked that he was banged up all the time because he was constantly diving for loose balls to impress Saban, especially those first few years when Pruitt was a younger, off-field staff member.
Saban continued with his lunchtime games until spring 2019 before having hip replacement surgery. Those early years at Alabama were the best, according to Smart.
The Alabama assistants had an hour for lunch, but they were required by Saban to make recruiting calls during the break.
“So the coaches that he demanded play basketball over that lunch hour would show up across the street at Coleman Coliseum with their phones in their hands making recruiting calls,” Smart said. “Nick would jog down the steps, and we all made sure he saw us making calls before the games started.”
Kiffin doesn’t have any hoops stories because he strategically made it a point not to participate.
“I knew better,” Kiffin said. “When I got there, they told me all about the games and how Coach picks the teams and that if you cover him, you can’t foul him and probably should let him score some. And I’m like, ‘Wrong dude. That ain’t happening. I’ll just go for a jog or something.’
“I knew if I went over there, it probably wasn’t going to go well. So I never once went and played basketball.”
‘Nobody does that’: What makes Saban unique
Smart’s Bulldogs have won two of the past three national championships, and of Saban’s former assistants, he is probably the most like his old boss. Both defensive masterminds, they were together for four of Saban’s six national titles at Alabama.
“His ability to manage and motivate people was unlike anything I’ve seen, and I mean everybody in the organization,” said Smart, who beat Saban to capture the 2021 national championship but was winless in their other five meetings as a head coach.
“He leads by example. Nobody outworks Nick. He doesn’t hold you to a different standard than he holds himself. He’s smart and that’s one thing, but his message always has a purpose. Everything’s calculated, and he just does it better than everybody else.”
Saban was 31-3 against his former assistants, with one of those losses coming this past season to Sarkisian, who guided the Longhorns to their first CFP appearance and their first 12-win season since 2009. Sarkisian, the offensive coordinator on Alabama’s 2020 national championship team, marvels at Saban’s run, especially considering that in five of the 10 years prior to his arrival, the Tide failed to produce a winning season.
“I mean, from when he took [Alabama] over in 2007 and the state of the program then to what he was able to do, even until the last snap of his career, is unbelievable,” Sarkisian said. “He instilled in everybody every day that they were competing to be a national champion. He set a standard and a bar for excellence in our sport that we’re all striving to get to.”
Beyond the wins, Saban’s ability to lead resonates with Cristobal.
“He’s the epitome of an elite CEO, and one of the greatest things you learn from him is that he has a relentless attack on human nature because his belief in upholding the standards of an organization is as prioritized as it can be,” Cristobal said. “He made it very clear to us that once you don’t hold people to that elite standard, an entire organization could fall to pieces. He made sure he kept us on edge, and he challenged us all the time.”
Saban never deviated from his core beliefs, but he was continuously self-scouting, tinkering and trying to gain an edge.
“I appreciated the level of detail, the competitive spirit, the constant search for improvement and the ability to be flexible and to always be evaluating things and trying to get better and staying ahead of the curve and thinking outside the box,” Napier said. “You don’t do what he’s done unless you’re just a little bit different.”
Dantonio, elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in January, coached defensive backs under Saban at Michigan State.
“He always talked about two things: consistency and performance,” Dantonio said. “He’s been consistent throughout, and he’s built something that lasts. That’s his legacy, and I think that’s what everybody wants to do. I can still hear Nick saying something that stayed with me throughout my coaching career: ‘If you’re not coaching it, you’re letting it happen.’ There’s nothing he didn’t coach.”
Saban produced 43 first-round NFL draft picks during his 17 seasons at Alabama, with more ahead in the upcoming draft.
“It’s easy to say they just had better players. They did. Really good players,” Sarkisian said. “It’s easy to say, man, he’s the greatest defensive mind. Yeah, he’s a great defensive mind. But his ability to adapt schematically, his ability to continue to bring in new coaches year after year on both sides of the ball, his ability to motivate the different teams, the different personalities and different quarterbacks that led to all those championships is what’s fascinating.”
At the end of the day, though, Saban never lost sight of the main ingredient in winning those championships.
“He always sort of laughs and smiles and says, ‘Hey, I can’t coach bad players, either,’” Dantonio said.
Locksley, who had been a head coach or coordinator for 15 years before he joined Saban in 2016 as an offensive analyst, said his three years at Alabama were “the equivalent of Muslims going to Mecca or Catholics going to the Vatican. … For me, it was like when a college professor takes a sabbatical. That’s how much I learned.”
He has been resolute in building his Maryland program with the same blueprint Saban used.
“I tell people all the time that I’ve got grandma’s famous chocolate chip cookie recipe from my time with him,” he said. “If the process tells you to put two cups of chocolate chips in there, why the hell are you going to put three? If it says three eggs, why would you put two? Everything fits and has a perfect place for how it fits.”
Even Kiffin, who is never at a loss for words, struggles to put Saban’s career in proper perspective.
“I always look at coaching, and a lot of times, somebody has a run when they hit it right with an elite quarterback who’s a top-10 pick and then they have drop-offs,” Kiffin said. “But there’s no one who’s done it like Coach has for the last 17 years and then LSU before that. He’s withstood all these changes over the years, coaching changes and the game changing, and just kept winning.
“I mean, nobody does that. It just doesn’t happen, and I’m not sure it ever will again.”
Conor Bradley’s performance against Chelsea should be enough to keep Trent Alexander-Arnold out of the Liverpool team to play Arsenal on Sunday, says Jamie Carragher.
Bradley only made his Premier League debut against Bournemouth on January 21, but impressed enough to retain his spot ahead of Alexander-Arnold against Chelsea on Wednesday night – where he scored one and made another two as Liverpool hammered Chelsea 4-1 at Anfield.
Jurgen Klopp’s side now face one of their toughest tests of the season with a trip to Arsenal live on Super Sunday, with their title rivals boasting the third-best home record in the Premier League this season to date.
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But former Liverpool captain Carragher believes 20-year-old Bradley deserves to rack up a sixth consecutive start in all competitions.
He told Sky Sports News: “The performances of Bradley gives Jurgen Klopp a real dilemma for what he does at the weekend. He’s got form, he’s got rhythm, but Liverpool have needed back-up for a long time. They’ve got that – and it might be a little bit more now.
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Sky Sports News’ Paul Gilmour has everything you need to know about Liverpool’s emerging young star Bradley
“Look, Bradley’s a young player, he’s had a brilliant start, the rest of his career won’t go like this every week – there’s lots of ups and downs with injuries, loss of form, but he’s on a great ride at the moment and keep that momentum going. That’s why I think he should start at the weekend.
“A lot of people, myself included, have been saying for a long time that with Trent Alexander-Arnold at right-back, because he’s so good it’s difficult to bring someone in as back-up because they know they’re not going to pay.
“Another thing we always speak about with Trent, is will he eventually go into midfield? If Bradley keeps playing at the level he’s at, you have to start thinking about how to get both players in the team.
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Paul Merson says defeat to Liverpool would mean Arsenal are out of this season’s title race, and feels that amid talk around the vacant Barcelona job, it would not be a ‘move forward’ for Mikel Arteta
“You can’t leave a player of the quality of Trent Alexander-Arnold out, he’s one of the best players in the Premier League. That goes back to whether he moves into midfield, going forward.”
Should Alexander-Arnold start in midfield?
Despite Alexander-Arnold’s success in the hybrid midfield role developed by Klopp last year, Carragher believes the Liverpool boss should stick with the same trio which took apart Chelsea so comprehensively in midweek.
“I think the team played that well in that game, you keep the same team,” he said. “You look at the midfield, putting Trent in there could be a bigger picture, perhaps for the next manager.
“But the trio of Szoboszlai, Jones and Mac Allister was outstanding. There wasn’t anyone in the team who didn’t play well, and it’s very difficult to change the team on the back of a performance which was so good.
“But when you’re talking about Jurgen Klopp making a change to bring in a player of the quality of Trent, it shows how well Liverpool are doing right now.
Merson: Huge weekend for Arsenal
Sky Sports’ Paul Merson:
“Arsenal are challengers now. For years they haven’t been in title races, but that’s a different story.
“If they beat Liverpool on Sunday they are bang in with a chance of winning the title.
‘Signing a striker the hardest thing’
Sky Sports’ Paul Merson:
“It’s the hardest position in the world to try and get, a centre-forward. The one that was around was probably Ivan Toney but if it wasn’t going to happen on January 1 it was probably never going to be done this window.
“For me, they’ll go with what they have. It covers over the cracks when they put five past Crystal Palace.
“Against Nottingham Forest the other night, they absolutely dominated but were missing chance after chance.
“It comes down to this weekend [against Liverpool]. If they lose, they’re out of the title race. It’s a cup final.”
“He’ll get back into the team, he’s been one of Liverpool’s best players this season, and one of the best players in the league. But when the lad’s playing so well, his confidence is so high, I think it’s very difficult to leave him out.”
Would defeat rule Arsenal out of title race?
A Liverpool win would leave Arsenal eight points off the top of the table, and potentially six behind Manchester City if they were to win their game in hand.
That point deficit would leave the Gunners with an uphill task to win a first Premier League title in 20 years, though Carragher believes the blow to their confidence would be just as damaging to their hopes.
“It probably does [end their title chances],” he said. “Not just because of the points Liverpool and City will be in front, but psychologically – and Arsenal still have to go to the Etihad as well.
“It’d be difficult for Arsenal to believe they could win the league. They’re still having a great season, right up there with Liverpool and Manchester City, they’re the biggest challengers and still in the Champions League.
“There’s plenty for them to still play for, but it does feel like a huge game for Arsenal in terms of the title aspirations. If they win, it puts them right back in the mix – not necessarily favourites, but a loss would be a body blow.”
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The leader of a California Golden Bears team that is rebuilding under first-year coach Mark Madsen has endured adversity on the court in a difficult season.
For one, he’s playing for a team that has reached the NCAA tournament just once (2016) in the past 11 years. The Bears entered the week with a 8-12 record. They began the season losing 10 of their first 14 games, with half of those losses featuring opponents with sub-100 rankings on KenPom, including Pacific (345th). Despite this, the team continues to focus on the silver lining: Six of those losses finished with margins of three points or fewer, or ended in overtime. Currently, Cal, which is ranked second in the Pac-12 in turnover percentage, has won four of its past six games.
Through the difficult times, Aimaq and his teammates have remained optimistic, strengthened by the hurdles the year has presented thus far.
“What we’ve been doing, it’s going to work,” he told ESPN about the Bears’ season. “There is going to be a breakthrough. What we’ve been saying every single day is ‘opportunity,’ and each game is a new opportunity.”
While that’s not easy for any player to digest, the 6-foot-11 forward — who is currently sixth in the nation in rebounding (10.7 rebounds per game) and third in double-doubles (12) — has also experienced another challenge, as a Muslim man and the son of an Afghan refugee. Aimaq, who was born in Vancouver, said he often receives praise from members of the Afghan and Muslim communities who support him. He also revealed that whenever he opens his messages on social media, he often sees a lot of hate, too. Sometimes, it’s because of his performance on the court. Sometimes, it’s a reaction from Texas Tech fans still angered by his decision to transfer to Cal after last season. And sometimes, he said, it’s because he’s Muslim.
“It’s a slippery slope,” he said. “I don’t really go through a lot of my messages unless it’s a day when I’m bored and just looking through stuff. You have to try and do your part by staying focused on whatever is in front of you, and that’s just playing basketball.”
But when a fan crosses a line, it’s a challenge for any athlete to ignore.
During a November tournament in San Juan Capistrano, California, Aimaq said a man called him a “terrorist” multiple times as he walked toward his team’s bus after talking to family members in the stands following a 75-72 loss to UTEP. A viral, postgame video showed Aimaq in the stands as he confronted the person.
“You want to talk? You want to talk? I’ll slap the s— out you,” he said.
“You know, the first time I heard it, I just kept walking,” Aimaq said. “We’d just lost, and there was a lot of frustration. I was just thinking about the game, and I didn’t really process it until I heard it a couple more times. It was a big group and from there, it led to the incident that happened with the video being taken of that whole confrontation. I don’t remember, word for word, what I said. I just remember being frustrated.”
Madsen condemned the exchange and promised internal discipline for Aimaq. But he also told Aimaq, “I’m sorry you had to experience that.” His teammates consoled him, too.
“When I saw [the video], he and I immediately spoke and he told me right away what had happened,” Madsen said. “Knowing the context, obviously, it helped me understand the situation better.”
Madsen has known Aimaq for years, beginning when he recruited the forward to play at Utah Valley after Aimaq’s single season at Mercer. He knew Aimaq as a kind young man who played with Madsen’s kids after games. So seeing Aimaq’s demeanor on the video was a sign to the coach that something serious had happened.
“My main and my first message was that comments like that should never be made by a fan or anyone to another human being ever,” Madsen told ESPN. “But then as a coach, also just coming from the NBA, I’ve seen players impacted in a very negative way when things spiral out of control in the stands. So that was my main message to [Aimaq]. ‘Hey, no matter what happens, let’s stay out of the stands.’”
Aimaq’s father, Faramaz, told ESPN he was stunned when his son called and told him about the incident. Faramaz had fled Afghanistan as a teenager in the 1970s after his father had died in the Afghan Civil War.
“I lost my father, lots of family. I was 17, 18 years old,” he said. “It was really hard for me because it’s war. It was a bombing.”
He subsequently landed in Canada and built a new life for himself. He said his son’s experience hurt him both because he fought so hard for his family’s future but also because Fardaws has always been a positive and peaceful person.
“I told him, ‘Just ignore them,’” Faramaz told ESPN. “‘You go play hard.’ I give him a lot of credit because all the time [last season at Texas Tech], they used really bad words about my son. This is not fair. [A fan called my son] a terrorist. I have to be honest: On that day I was crying. It’s hard sometimes, you know?”
Fardaws trusted the discipline he has developed over the years to navigate the situation. He is the first player on the court before practice each day, and the last person to leave the floor. His childhood martial arts training taught him the value of controlling his emotions, adhering to diligence and relying on patience.
While he had every right to spend the rest of the season angered by what happened in November, he has chosen to move forward and not allow that moment to define his season.
Madsen, who spent nine years in the NBA, including being coached by Phil Jackson with the Los Angeles Lakers, said Aimaq has grown as a leader, and it’s showing results. Cal’s recent wins include an 81-75 overtime win over Washington State in which Aimaq finished with 18 points, 14 rebounds and 2 steals.
“One of the things that makes him great is his passion for life,” Madsen said. “He’s a great human being. He’s a multiple-time team captain. He has great leadership, and he is such a hard worker.”
Aimaq’s college basketball career has been a journey. He is playing for his fourth school. At all of his previous stops, he transferred after his head coaches had either taken another job (Madsen) or been fired (former Texas Tech coach Mark Adams, former Mercer coach Bob Hoffman). But now, he believes he can end his collegiate career on a high note and pursue his dreams of making history as the first player of Afghan descent to play in the NBA. He’s not currently listed on any reputable NBA mock drafts, so his odds are slim. But he has never backed down from a challenge.
On Friday, after the team’s 73-71 win over Stanford, Madsen pointed to Aimaq (13 points, 12 rebounds) in the locker room and praised him for his effort.
“When we couldn’t get a bucket, we went to you, big fella, and you produced every time,” Madsen said.
Aimaq’s teammates all clapped and cheered.
“When it’s all said and done, if you have done everything possible in your power and it doesn’t work out, then that’s one thing,” Aimaq said. “You know, for us, the reason that we’ve been so positive is that we see a breakthrough coming.”
From Vancouver, Canada, meanwhile, his father admires his son’s resilience as he endured the trials this season has presented and continues to thrive.
“I am proud of him,” Faramaz said. “He’s my hero.”
It was a passionate student letter in 2020 that caused the Southern York County school board to reconsider its logo: a Native American man, representing the “Warriors.”
Though the conversation had come up before in the suburban district located in southern Pennsylvania, 2020 was a turning point of racial reckoning after the death of George Floyd. Less than a year later, the school board voted to retire the warrior logo after it considered research on the impact the reductive imagery had on Native and non-Native students.
“I understand the attachment people have to that at the school,” said Deborah Kalina, who served on the school board at the time. “But it’s more than that. And I think we did the right thing.”
Three years later, however, the logo — a Native American man with feathers, a tomahawk and pipe — is back after a newly elected conservative bloc acted on its campaign promise and reinstated it earlier this month. It’s shaken Native communities across the country that work to challenge such logos, said Donna Fann-Boyle, co-founder of the Coalition of Natives and Allies. When one school district does it, they worry others will try, too.
“Everything could just go backward,” said Fann-Boyle, who says she has Choctaw and Cherokee heritage.
It’s a marked departure from the larger tide of communities deciding to change their mascots, a trajectory that has been underway for decades, but ramped up in 2020.
The battle to change the use of Native Americans in logos, team names and fan-driven behavior has often been in the bright spotlight due to major sports teams. The NFL’s Washington Commanders changed their decades-old name in 2019, while Cleveland’s baseball team became the Guardians in 2021. Protests are being planned at the Super Bowl once more in response to the Kansas City Chiefs.
But beyond the high-profile fights to change names, mascots and team identities, there are battles going on in local communities. It’s a rare move for the Pennsylvania district to reverse course, but it’s not the first time. At least two other school districts in Massachusetts and Connecticut reverted to logos that many Native Americans have called offensive.
A number of states have passed legislation to prohibit the mascots in the years since. Nationally, the largest nonprofit dedicated to representing Native nations, the National Congress of American Indians, has worked to challenge the use of Native imagery in logos and mascots. The organization maintains a database tracking Native mascots, and has found that nearly 2,000 schools still use them. At least 16 dropped their use of Native imagery or names between March 2022 and April 2023.
Numerous studies have found that mascots are harmful to the mental health of Native students, and increase negative stereotyping of Native people in non-Native students, said Laurel Davis-Delano, a professor of sociology at Springfield College.
The mascots are all historic — and often inaccurate — depictions, erasing the fact Native people exist today, she said. And though to some the mascots can seem like positive representation on the surface, they’re adapted from a “bloodthirsty warrior” stereotype, which was historically used in a genocidal way, Davis-Delano said.
“It’s hostile when the mascot exists, it’s hostile during the change and hostile afterwards because even when they eliminate Native mascots successfully, there’s still a backlash,” she said. “There’s still people holding on to it and purposefully displaying it. And that lasts for some years. Most of the time, people shift over and are good to go, but there are people who hang on.”
Maulian Bryant, Penobscot Nation tribal ambassador, remembers having a visceral reaction to seeing the mascots as she was growing up. Mentors in her life helped her speak out about it, and her work resulted in a 2019 law in Maine to prohibit them in public schools and colleges.
School has its pressure of homework, socializing and sports, Bryant said. Seeing non-Native peers act out stereotypes, dressed up with feathers and war paint, adds a layer for Native students: “an assault on something core to who they are,” she said.
“Adults put their pride and their resistance to progress above what students really need,” she said. “The students and teams and towns are just as proud of the new mascots.”
Some schools — like the University of Utah and Florida State University — have agreements with local tribes to use their names and imagery. The Seneca Nation approved the use of Native imagery in the Salamanca School District, due to its location on the nation’s Allegany Territory, and large percentages of Native American students and staff.
One group, Native American Guardians Association, which has Native American membership, has pushed for the continued use of the mascots across the country. Speaking at Southern York County’s school board meeting on Jan. 18, members argued removing the logo would be erasure.
Supporters agreed, and said use of the warrior head image denoted positive features and didn’t erase history. They sent droves of emails pushing for reinstatement, board member Jen Henkel said during the meeting.
But opponents — who vastly outnumbered supporters speaking at the board meeting — criticized reopening an issue that was decided years ago.
Jen Henkel said during the meeting that every single board member, save for one, lost reelection or did not run. Other candidates who did not support reinstating it lost too, she said.
“The majority community has spoken on this issue loud and clear. You might not like the results, but here we are,” she said.
After a lengthy presentation, debate and public comment, the school board ultimately voted to reinstate it, 7-2. Board President Nathan Henkel did not return a message seeking comment.
The board’s decision and Native American Guardians Association’s push, though, is in direct contrast to the Native family in the community in southern Pennsylvania, and descendants of the local Conestoga-Susquehannock tribe who sent a letter decrying the decision. Today, their tribe — which is not federally or state recognized — has about 50 members.
“We give more energy to an inanimate object than we do to actual human beings,” said Chesterfield Hall, a member of the tribe.
Andrea Ligon, a tribal elder, said the mascot is a misrepresentation of their identity.
“This is fundamentally disrespectful and offensive. We are undermined by images of the mascot that disrespects historical and personal experiences of our tribe with a one-dimensional representation,” she said. “We are opposed to this mascot because they are playing an Indian with no understanding of the deeper meaning of feathers, face paint, chants and dancing, which are all part of our culture.”
Katy Isennock, who is a Sicangu Lakota citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, grew up in the district, going to school with the warhead mascot. As a teenager, she never felt she had the power to speak out about it, or the support of the community. Then she watched her children go through the renewed discussion of the mascot.
Her son — who is Sicangu Lakota, Oglala Lakota and Seneca — wears his long hair in a braid and has been made fun of for his hair. He has started to hide it, she said. It’s something that is so normal when they’re among other Native people, but has been scrutinized in a predominantly white community, making him feel embarrassed rather than proud, she said.
“He goes through so much, having hair like that, and he shouldn’t have to and it’s like — you guys have a Native mascot and you don’t know that?” she said.
Speaking to the board, she asked them to drop the politics.
“To put the mascot away is respect,” she told them. “Retiring it is respect — for the past, for the present and for the future. It is respect for my Native kids in the district and Native kids that may pass through here in the future.”
BOSTON — LeBron James has been pleading for weeks for the Lakers’ supporting cast to provide him and fellow All-Star Anthony Davis some help as they fight to keep pace in a tight Western Conference playoff race.
With the two franchise cornerstones watching from the bench, they finally got their wish.
Austin Reaves scored a season-high 32 points and hit a career-high seven 3-pointers to help a Los Angeles team missing its biggest stars stun the Boston Celtics 114-105 on Thursday night.
“We’re all talented players. And this was an opportunity to show the world what you can do,” Reaves said. “Before the game we come to together and was like, ‘Look, the least we can do is we can do is go out there and play as hard as we can and live with the results.”
The result was perhaps the Lakers’ best victory of the season.
The anticipated nationally televised meeting between the longtime rivals was tempered when James was ruled out because of a left ankle injury and Davis by an Achilles tendon issue and left hip spasms.
That sentiment that the game would be a mismatch didn’t affect the remainder of the Lakers’ young roster.
Reaves was 7 of 10 from beyond the arc. He also was fouled on one of the misses and made all three free throws. The Lakers hit 19 of 36 3-pointers, holding off the NBA-leading Celtics to end a two-game losing streak.
D’Angelo Russell added 16 points, 14 assists and eight rebounds for the Lakers. Jaxson Hayes had 16 points and 10 rebounds.
Jayson Tatum scored 23 points for the Celtics, who had 15 turnovers. Boston has lost three of its last five at home since starting the season 20-0 in TD Garden.
“It just happens. Stretches of bad basketball happen,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “We can’t sit here and act like we’re too entitled for it to happen to us. It happens. And it’s a matter of how we respond to it and how we work through it.”
Boston never got closer than seven points in the fourth quarter.
Lakers big man Jarred Vanderbilt had 10 points, seven rebounds and three steals in 16 minutes. But he limped off the floor in the final minute of the first half as he tried to turn up court following a strip of Tatum. He sat out the rest of the game with what the team said was right foot soreness.
The Celtics came alive with a 12-2 run in the third quarter that included four straight 3s to cut it to 77-71. Tatum brought the crowd to its feet during the surge after he dove onto the floor to tie up Rui Hachimura to force a jump ball.
Thursday marked the first time this season both James and Davis have sat out the same game for Los Angeles, The Lakers began the day in ninth place in the West standings.
Ham said before the game that the injuries are things both players have dealt with throughout the season. It is unclear how long either will be sidelined. James has played 44 of of 49 games this season. Davis has appeared in 46 games.
Reaves said there’s no secret what they need to do when James and Davis return.
“If you remember Bron’s quote the other night — ‘Go out and do your job.’ And I feel like that’s just what we did tonight,” Reaves said. “It wasn’t nothing special. It wasn’t like we was out there running a million set plays. We went out there and competed our (butts) off. We gave it 110% on the defensive end. We competed. We didn’t foul much. Just bringing those two back, we need to continue to do the same thing.”
