A football thread.

Does Erceg need a hug? Some trail mix? Or is he trying to get released? He has been soooooo bad this year. BB,BB, HBP… to 7, 8, 9 in the order. Can’t protect a lead if he was given a mile head start to a sloth. Still reliable, but now sadly for all the wrong reasons.

This is not a SNL skit. It is an actual Italian restaurant outside of La Crosse WI (Onalaska). Holy “there’s no way they said these things” misogny. Titled: At Angelini’s they prefer male Servers.” Subtitle - owner/EEs put career in grave peril. youtu.be/-1thoPbKiOg

Read @russell_nm op-ed about the Trump interview disaster that she spun into why conservatives distrust ”the media.” No admonishment of decorum. Rather than holding him to a higher standard, she salivates over his sharp tongue … “stupid piggy.” So on brand.

This is Noah Shannon, model citizen, slated to be Hawkeye senior defensive captain 2023. He had guilt pangs for having bet $10 on the Iowa Women's Basketball team in the 2023 NCAA tournament. The only bet he ever made. He turned himself in to coaches for the transgression who forwarded it to the NCAA. They ruled him inelligible for the entire season, effectively ending his career. If the NCAA allows someone else to play after making thousands of bets, including many on his own team, I am going to fucking riot

Today is a great day for the Royals to fire the manager and hitting coach anyway

Brilliant.

On one side, you have a seasoned journalist with decades of credibility and colleagues who can speak to his integrity, on the other, you have a lifelong bullshit artist who has failed upward by flattering the powerful. I just don’t know who to believe.

Strong arm of the liberal media? Liberal? Larry Ellison owns CBS, CBS News, TikTok a billion dollars into X which is owned by Elon Musk. The Murdock’s own Fox, Fox News, The Verge, Eater, Polygon, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins, The Times, The Sun, Sky News Australia, Tubi, and the Vox media podcast network. Zuckerberg owns Meta- Facebook/ Insta.

reminder that bari weiss quit in shame at @nytimes because my team called her out for being A LIAR

Factual thoughts….@ScottPelley and @mhenryschuster were embedded with my Marine infantry unit in 2009—it was incredibly violent in Helmand. They told our story well. Years later, my unit suffered multiple suicides, they came back to cover that too. I wrote him when I was hired.

I worked at CBS News for almost 6 years. It was a place that frequently drove me crazy bc of how resistant it was to change. How difficult it was to get things done bc you had to fight so many people and their “Cronkite and Murrow would roll over in their graves if they saw” mentality. For those who think Scott Pelley was part of the problem, you are wrong. Yes he could be rigid and a stickler for certain traditions. But I will tell you now the Gen Z people I worked w all loved him. Like me, they forgave a lot of his boomer ways bc we were in awe of investigations he did using hidden cameras exposing snake oil salesmen hurting Americans; showing us how Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people; the pain of rural Americans waiting for half a day to get affordable healthcare in a parking lot of a mobile clinic; his searing interviews w survivors of mass shootings. Yeah he was old fashioned in some ways. I used to tease him bc he always had trouble pronouncing Beyoncé’s name. But he was willing to be pushed. He was open to new ideas. The fact that someone like me and someone like him got along so well is proof of that. The guy made me a better thinker and a better journalist.

Wishing you birthday fire with the angels today, #Ace30 RIP.

So let me get this straight. Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?” Please.

You ever think male amateurs think to watch female golf swings and go. "You know. I don't need to swing it 125mph to hit it 265yds and find fairways". Probably not. Lesson in watching this. How's your ego?

New statement from Scott Pelley:   There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.   The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.   “60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.   The waste is heartbreaking.   Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.   For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.   At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.   I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.   Scott Pelley

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Watching and emulating LPGA swings instead of PGA swings would do most amateurs a lot of good.

I have been told countless times over the last 48 hours that I am a conspiracy theorist. That I do not know basketball. That I do not understand the WNBA. And that my articles are too long. So I wrote this... I do not believe there is some organized, calculated operation to take down Caitlin Clark. That would be too simple. The truth is deeper... and far more damaging. Caitlin Clark walked into a league that spent nearly three decades convincing itself that its weaknesses were culture. For years, the WNBA was not a mainstream sports product. It was a cause. A talking point. A subsidized idea. A league people were told they should support, even when the product on the floor often failed to earn that support from casual fans. The empty seats were excused. The financial struggles were excused. The rough offensive flow was excused. The poor spacing was excused. The inconsistent officiating was excused. The excessive physicality was excused. The lack of mainstream interest was excused. And anytime fans questioned the product, the answer was usually the same: You just do not understand women’s basketball and you're racist. That was the lie the league told itself for too long. Because a lot of fans understood basketball perfectly fine. They just did not like what they were watching. Too often, the WNBA confused physicality with quality. It confused survival with success. It confused being protected with being excellent. It confused an insulated culture with a strong one. And then Caitlin Clark arrived. She did not come in asking people to support the league out of obligation. She made people want to watch. That is the difference. Caitlin brought range, pace, vision, passing angles, court gravity, creativity, and real basketball electricity. She made regular-season games feel like events. She made casual fans stop scrolling. She made people who had ignored the WNBA for years suddenly care about matchups, rotations, officiating, coaching decisions, and league standards. And that is where the collision happened. Caitlin Clark exposed the gap between what the WNBA had convinced itself was good enough and what mainstream sports fans actually expect. Fans want skill. They want spacing. They want pace. They want shooting. They want smart coaching. They want fair officiating. They want stars protected. They want basketball that looks modern, intelligent, and entertaining. They did not show up to watch Caitlin get grabbed, held, shoved, bumped, and treated like every possession needs to become a wrestling match in the name of “physicality.” They also did not show up to watch the basketball constantly pushed into the background while social messaging, league-approved narratives, and cultural lectures compete for center stage. That is not evolution. That is a league clinging to old habits because it does not know how to handle the future standing right in front of it. And Caitlin Clark is the future. That does not mean she is perfect. She is not. That does not mean veterans have no value. They do. That does not mean physicality has no place in basketball. It does. But there is a difference between physical basketball and ugly basketball. There is a difference between toughness and fouling. There is a difference between defensive pressure and mugging someone off the ball. There is a difference between culture and bad habits that went unchallenged because not enough people were watching. Caitlin did not create the league’s problems. She exposed them. She exposed the officiating. She exposed the coaching gap. She exposed the outdated style. She exposed the resentment toward new fans. She exposed the discomfort some people have with a player becoming bigger than the system that was supposed to contain her. And more than anything, she exposed a league that is still trying to force a generational player into an old version of basketball that she has already outgrown. That is why this does not feel like a conspiracy. It feels like resistance to change. The WNBA finally got the player who could push the league into a new era, and too many people inside the ecosystem seem determined to make her prove she belongs in the old one. That is backwards. You do not take the most skilled, market-changing player your league has ever seen and ask her to shrink into the culture that failed to attract mainstream fans in the first place. You build around her. You modernize around her. You protect what she represents. Because she is not just another player. She is the mirror. She is showing the league what it has been, what it is, and what it could become if it would stop defending its flaws as tradition. And the frustrating part is that the next generation is already here. You can see it with Caitlin. You can see it with Paige Bueckers. You can see it with Sonia Citron. You can see it with Aliyah Boston. You can see it with JuJu Watkins. The skill is changing. The training is better. The footwork is better. The shooting is better. The spacing is better. The basketball IQ is better. But too much of the league around them is still operating like nothing has changed. Same coaching habits. Same officiating problems. Same marketing instincts. Same defensive excuses. Same resentment toward criticism. Same belief that the old WNBA culture must be protected, even if it means slowing down the very players who could make the league bigger than it has ever been. That is the real story. Caitlin Clark is not being taken down by some secret plan. She is being resisted by a league that still does not fully understand what she represents. She represents a better product. A bigger audience. A more skilled game. A more modern game. A version of women’s basketball that does not need to be sold as charity, activism, obligation, or guilt. It can be sold as basketball. Great basketball. But that requires the league to stop pretending its weaknesses are sacred. It requires officials to clean up the game. It requires coaches to modernize. It requires veterans to adapt. It requires media voices to stop protecting the old product from honest criticism. And it requires the WNBA to stop resenting the very fans it spent decades trying to attract. So no, I do not think there is a coordinated takedown of Caitlin Clark. I think it is bigger than that. I think Caitlin walked into a league that spent years convincing itself its flaws were culture. And now that a generational player has arrived to expose the difference, too many people are trying to humble her instead of learning from her. That is not Caitlin Clark’s failure. That is the league refusing to recognize the future.

One of the deepest musical regrets of my life is being way too late on The Tragically Hip 🇨🇦. Pretty confident, should they give them a deep drink, much of the US 90’s kids would feel the same. Flipping brilliant. RIPGD

mo.milesplit.com/articles/67… My nephew Lincoln Herring practiced and worked out essentially every day in the offseason and it paid off - set a school record for the javelin and has won every meet this year. Best thing - he’s such a great human. Please vote for @lincoln_herring !

At 100 years old, WWII veteran Bernie Smoot still drives his convertible Ford Mustang to play golf five days a week, shoots in the low 80s and shares wisdom from 74 years in the game: “You live to play golf. But to reach my age, you play golf to live.” To celebrate Bernie — who landed at Omaha Beach just months after graduating high school — his PGA Coach and friend Jeff Maynor organized a tournament in his honor at the University of Maryland Golf Course, where Bernie plays five days a week. Maynor, the course’s PGA Director of Golf, has run a @PGAHOPE program there for Veterans since 2019, which Bernie loves to support. The tournament for Bernie was a chance for those Veterans to thank him and celebrate his love for the game.