2026-01-14 00:11:52
With the football world's sudden fixation on Mike Tomlin's future or lack of same in Pittsburgh raising the question of why coaching longevity is suddenly a bad thing, we have completely forgotten the more obvious reason for caring about the Steelers—the end of Aaron Rodgers' career. Which is fair enough: Tomlin's annual flirtation with unemployment is familiar by now, but Rodgers' career has been ending, gratingly and in public, for just as long. What's one more indignity?
Tomlin was booed by home fans for still having his job during the dying stages of last night 30-6 throttling at the hands of the otherwise unimpressive Houston Texans, which was a reasonable response to his team's performance but otherwise no indication of anything in particular. The NFL is going through one of its occasional firing binges, only with more big names that ever before and no longer limited to teams that don't make the playoffs. Why, you can still hear the sighs of disappointment from the Green Bay Packers' announcement that they intended to work out a new contract with Matt LaFleur.
But the larger issue in Yinzerville Heights this season has been Rodgers, the 42-year-old future Hall of Famer whose last few seasons have been so marked by physical and reputational injury that they've served almost as a repudiation of the previous 14. The whomping he took on Monday night will make for a melodramatic coda to all of it if he decides (or has decided for him) that football is now a thing he used to do. Rodgers threw a melodramatic but meaningless pick-six to Calen Bullock for the final score in a game long since lost, and dramaturgists across the sport saw that as the telling end to his end. And this was after Rodgers had been pounded into a fumble that was housed by Texans defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins. The Houston defense outscored everyone on the field except Houston kicker Ka'imi Fairbairn, and Rodgers' age was the statistic most referenced by Joe Buck and Troy Aikman the entire night.
2026-01-13 23:37:21
This week's Nothing But Respect with returning champion and human body expert Henry Abbott was a very fun one. Before we get too far into what was said, I have to tell you, I have been thinking nonstop about something Henry said over an hour into the recording: When he played high school basketball in Oregon, one of the teams in their conference played on a court with a pillar in the center. He said they knew how to set picks with it. I cannot imagine a better combination of dangerous and comical in a basketball scenario.
We also talked a lot about the NBA's injury crisis and Henry's expertise on the matter. His recent book, Ballistic, is a fascinating look at the frontiers of the human body and the science of its perfection. I loved it, as I loved his ability to name most of the muscles in the calf. Harry also brought up the story about the 49ers maybe suffering an injury crisis because of electromagnetic radiation.
2026-01-13 22:56:06
You heard me. Is eight dollars five dollars? Or is eight dollars 10 dollars? Why are you making that face right now? Stop making faces and answer the question: How much is eight bucks?
Stephen Totilo, games journalist and author of the Game File newsletter, got into the ontological nature of eight bucks in a recent conversation with Nick Kaman, co-creator of the video game Peak, a cute indie climbing adventure. Kaman and his collaborators developed a theory of spending to arrive at a decision to charge $8 for their new game. According to their theory, eight bucks is the upper threshold of five-buck-dom.
"In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.
"Four bucks is also kind of five bucks," he continued. "Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.
"So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks … that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.
"And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?
"So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal."
2026-01-13 06:19:34
When we last caught up with No. 12 LSU and declared them schedule merchants in for a rude awakening, the Tigers were reeling from an 0-2 start to SEC play and looking ahead to a game against undefeated No. 2 Texas, an even tougher opponent than the Kentucky and Vanderbilt teams that had already beaten them. Head coach Kim Mulkey had supplied a simple diagnosis: “We’re not tough enough,” she told reporters. But on Sunday, LSU’s band of athletic guards rediscovered the ways of Mulkeyball. In an ugly 70-65 home win, they handed the Longhorns their first loss of the season and also handed me the 10,000th loss of my blogging career.
Writing from a distance and in relative obscurity, I can at least suffer my defeat in peace. Not everyone is so lucky. For someone who decries newspapers, Mulkey has a remarkable faculty for remembering every single thing any journalist has ever written about her. Reed Darcey, the LSU women’s basketball beat writer at the New Orleans Advocate, pointed out after the Kentucky loss that LSU had yet to beat an SEC opponent ranked in the top 12 of the AP poll since Mulkey was hired in 2021. “They're now 0-8 in those games. Five losses to South Carolina, two to Texas and one to Kentucky,” he posted.
2026-01-13 03:33:02
On Sunday, U.S. Figure Skating announced its Olympic roster, which adhered, as is natural, to the top three performers at its national championships. The men's event saw the most upheaval from the anticipated roster, but not in a way that was particularly interesting for Olympic prospects: Ilia Malinin is still the prohibitive favorite to win everything, and no other American man is expected to contend seriously for a podium finish. By contrast, the expected Olympic roster in the women's event nailed their programs: 18-year-old Isabeau Levito, who enjoys an ice princess image on ice; and two serious contenders for the Olympic podium in 20-year-old Alysa Liu and and 26-year-old Amber Glenn.
Unlike Liu, known to the greater populace ever since she became the U.S. women's national champion and the country's women's figure skating savior at age 13, Glenn was not an immediate prodigy. (Whether being a prodigy is to anyone's benefit is highly debatable. Liu retired from figure skating after the 2022 Olympics, when she was only 16, though her story has had a happy continuation: She made a practically unheard of return to the highest level in 2024, and found out how to skate on her own terms. As Levito said of Liu in a press conference last week, "She keeps the hoes on their toes.") What Glenn does have over Liu, and much of the women's singles field, is the ability to nail a triple Axel.
In the recent post-quad era of women's figure skating—brought in by the banning of the Russian skating federation and a raise to the minimum age of participation at the senior level—the triple Axel is the massive technical differentiator. The Axel is one of the easiest jumps to recognize by a figure skating neophyte, as unlike all other jumps, the skater faces forward at take-off; this also makes it the toughest, as the Axel requires an extra half rotation. Correspondingly, the base value for a triple Axel sits at 8.00, compared to the double Axel's base value of 3.30. No other triple jump has a base value above 6.00.
2026-01-13 02:39:58
The early rounds of the FA Cup are supposed to be straightforward. While every lower-division team that faces Premier League opposition dreams of pulling off the unexpected, these matches tend to look more like Manchester City's 10-1 thrashing of League One side Exeter City on Saturday. The money and talent gap between divisions is just too ginormous for upsets to be much more than pipe dreams. The best one can usually hope for is something like Wrexham's win over Nottingham Forest on penalty kicks last Friday—a nice story, to be sure, but the Championship's ninth-placed team besting the EPL's 17th-placed team isn't exactly David killing Goliath.
But the thing about dreams is that sometimes they do come true, especially in a low-scoring sport like soccer, and especially especially in a single-leg knockout match. Just ask reigning FA Cup champions Crystal Palace, who went into Saturday's match against sixth-tier Macclesfield FC expecting to win comfortably, only to see its cup defense end in stunning fashion at the hands of a semi-professional side.
