Division I football starts TONIGHT!
OK, it’s only FCS games like Maine vs. Towson. The games featuring power conference schools start Saturday. And there’s only a few games on Saturday because technically it’s Week 0 and we’ll have to wait until Week 1 next week for every team to play. But it’s probably the best Week 0 ever, according to Jason Kirk’s essential Watch Grid.
Long story short: DIVISION I FOOTBALL STARTS TONIGHT! It’s college football: the fun is in the confusion and the technicalities. It’s my favorite sport, and I can’t wait to write about it for you guys.
– Rodger Sherman
Today’s Lineup
The Pro Bowl is no more. Cause of death: Old age
Angel Reese has become unstoppable
WE HAVE COLLEGE FOOTBALL THIS WEEK
🪦 RIP Pro Bowl, 1950-2026 🪦
(Jamal Adams gawking at the 2019 Pro Bowl Trophy breaking. Nobody had cared enough to upload the Pro Bowl trophy presentations from most of the years since 2019.)
The NFL announced that its annual all-star game, the Pro Bowl is officially canceled. The league will continue to name Pro Bowl teams as an honor for the players, but no game will be played.
What killed the Pro Bowl? Was it the dismal TV ratings? The failure to create an acceptable format? Disinterest from players, who often declined invitations even when healthy? Was it Shedeur Sanders getting an injury replacement invite last year after throwing seven touchdowns and ten interceptions for the 5-12 Cleveland Browns? All of that, probably.
But ultimately, I think the Pro Bowl died of old age. All-star games are relics of a bygone era in American sports. Decades ago, an all-star game was a rare opportunity to watch star players from other teams and cities. Now, we can watch every moment of every game by every player if we want, or pull up a player’s highlights in seconds. The NFL may be the first big-time league to kill off its all-star game, but it probably won’t be the last.
The Pro Bowl underwent a series of Extreme All-Star Game Makeovers in the last 15 years. From 1970 to 2012, it was an actual football game between one team of AFC players and one team of NFC players …
… but in 2013, it became a game between two fantasy-drafted teams selected by Hall of Famers — Jerry Rice vs. Deion Sanders, Michael Irvin vs. Cris Carter, etc. …
… until 2016, when it went back to the AFC-NFC format … until 2022, when the NFL got rid of tackling and made it “the Pro Bowl Games,” a series of skills competitions concluding in a flag football game …
… until this year, when the league ditched the skills competitions and just had a flag football game. (Also, in 2020 they just played Madden, which is understandable.)
Pro Bowl viewership cratered. In the 1990s, as far back as data goes, the game drew upwards of 10 million viewers. When it dropped off to six million in 2022, that seen as a catastrophe. This year? Two million people tuned in, a 60 percent drop from last year’s record low. For a league that typically dominates American TV ratings with any game in any time slot, two million viewers is not worth the effort.
The game also changed time slots (it used to be a week after the Super Bowl, then a week before the Super Bowl, then this year it was played on the Tuesday of Super Bowl week) and locations (it used to be in Hawai’i, then was moved to Orlando, then rotated with the location of the Super Bowl.) Players hated the move from Hawai’i. They cherished the fact that being one of the league’s best players earned them a free exotic vacation in February.
Like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, the Pro Bowl is dying at the same time as its ancestral home. The demolition of the long-abandoned Aloha Stadium in Honolulu has been underway for months. Remember, Aloha also means goodbye.
Football, as a sport, was always going to have a difficult time hosting an engaging all-star game. It’s a definitionally violent sport, and nobody wants to play in a dangerous exhibition game. Players never really went 100 percent and, to be honest, football looks kinda dumb when played at half-speed. A great hitter isn’t putting much on the line by swinging for the fences in the MLB All-Star Game, but Pro Bowl running backs are risking their careers.
(Plus, I think 95 percent of Pro Bowl practices involved installing whimsical trick plays. It’s a very complicated sport and nobody was installing real offenses or defenses in a week. Towards the end of the tackle game, teams were banned from using pre-snap motion or blitzing.)
Everybody agrees on the greatest play in Pro Bowl history: The moment when the late, great Sean Taylor inexplicably lowered the boom on Bills punter Brian Moorman on a fake punt:
But it’s not like the Pro Bowl of 20 years ago was a game filled with pad-popping hits. Taylor’s hit stands out because the games weren’t like this. You could run a fake punt in the Pro Bowl and usually there wasn’t a superstar safety driving the punter through the turf and back to the mainland. It’s not a Pro Bowl highlight; it’s a Sean Taylor highlight. It tells us a lot about Taylor that he showed up to an exhibition and couldn’t turn off his motor.
Waning all-star game interest is not just a football issue. Baseball’s All-Star Game peaked with more than 20 million viewers in the 1980s; 2025 saw a record low 5.8 million viewers before jumping back up this year. The NBA All-Star Game regularly got 15 million viewers in the Jordan era. As with the Pro Bowl, the NBA experimented with format changes to combat a lack of in-game effort, but viewership dived below five million viewers in 2023. (It has recovered somewhat after returning to NBC.)
Players also have less financial incentive to play well in these games than ever. Players on the winning team at the 2025 Pro Bowl made $92,000, while the losers made $46,000. That’s not nothing, but it means less in an era when the salary cap is 10 times higher than it used to be. Players aren’t going to risk $50 million contracts for $50,000.
We also know more than ever about the effects of wear-and-tear on players’ bodies. NBA teams often ask their best players to sit out of games that count. Of course those players aren’t going to risk their well-being for a game that doesn’t.
So what’s next? One option is … simply not holding all-star games. Something I didn’t realize: All-star games are kinda just an American thing! They don’t really do it in most other sports and countries!
I think leagues are going to look closely at ways to replace all-star games with actually competitive events, like the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, or the quadrennial WNBA All-Star Game before the Olympics in which the actual Team USA faces off against a “Team WNBA” of players who didn’t make the cut. (The rejects have won two in a row.) They should’ve done that again this year ahead of the FIBA World Championships!
😇 An Angel gets her wins 😇
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For a couple of years, I was out on a very lonely limb: Guy Who Didn’t Think Angel Reese Was A Very Good WNBA Player (But, Like, Not Because Of Racism, Just Because Of Basketball, I Promise, Although I Understand Why You’re Suspicious.)
But this season, Reese has leveled up and won me over. After getting free from the depressing Chicago Sky franchise, Reese has become a key piece of the Atlanta Dream, one of the league’s best teams. And last week was the best of her career, capped by setting a league record. She grabbed 26 rebounds against the Los Angeles Sparks, breaking the all-time WNBA record set by Hall of Famer Chamique Holdsclaw.
What a week for Reese. Last Thursday, she shot 9-for-9, becoming just the third player in WNBA history to have a 20-point double-double while shooting 100 percent from the field. Saturday, she scored a career-high 31 points. And then Monday, she broke that 22-year-old WNBA rebounding record.
Reese is writing her own section of the WNBA record book. She has played just three seasons in the league, and they’ve been the three best rebounding seasons in WNBA history — the only three seasons in which a player has averaged more than 12 rebounds per game. That also makes her the career leader in rebounds per game, averaging 12.7 for her career. Nobody else has ever averaged more than 10.
There’s also a player in the NBA who owns the top three rebounding seasons in league history. His name is Wilt Chamberlain. (Admittedly, he was a little better at scoring than Reese.)
Reese holds the all-time career records for offensive rebound percentage, defensive rebound percentage, and (you guessed it) total rebound percentage.
Reese has been hounded throughout her career by the narrative that her gaudy numbers primarily come from rebounding her own missed shots — derisively termed “mebounds.” There is some truth to it: Reese is an excellent offensive rebounder and, quite frankly, a pretty poor finisher. And it’s true that she is the league’s leading mebounder. But her mebound percentage is actually lower than many other players’. And if you took out all of her mebounds in 2026, she’d still be the league’s leading rebounder.
And the fact that Reese is the all-time leader in defensive rebound percentage — meaning she has rebounded a higher percentage of the other team’s missed shots than any player in league history — makes it obvious that she’s not just grabbing her own misses.
(Reese has since trademarked “mebounds,” which is coincidentally a pretty good example of her ability to turn a miss into a scoring opportunity.)
ESPN’s Katie Barnes wrote about Reese’s rebounding superpower last week:
“How does she do it? She's tall but not the tallest. She's quick but not the quickest. She's bouncy but not the bounciest. Some point to her vision. Some point to her motor. Others point to her mind. Some even wonder if there's something just beyond human understanding going on. Something closer to, say, clairvoyance? Says Reese, sitting on a courtside chair in a quiet moment at Atlanta's Gateway Center Arena: "I just know."
With Atlanta, Reese has become a more efficient and more effective player on a better team. She’s one of three All-Stars on the Dream, alongside Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray. (And they just added six-time All-Star DeWanna Bonner after she asked for her release from the Phoenix Mercury.) The Dream have won 25 games so far this year; in her two years in Chicago, the Sky won 23 games total.
The last time we wrote about a WNBA player breaking out, it was Olivia Miles, who was drafted with a pick that the Sky traded to the Lynx so they could select Reese. And the time before that, we were writing about Marina Mabrey, who the Sky also traded away in 2024. Reese’s time with the Sky was basically over at the end of last year when the team suspended her for calling out its poor roster construction (she said she would not be “settling for the same s--- we did this year.”) In other news, Chicago hoops writer Ricky O’Donnell just published a piece called “The Chicago Sky are a disaster of their own making.”
I think it’s probably a bit much to expect the Dream to contend for a championship this year — they’re 1-4 against the Lynx and Valkyries, with the one win coming by one point all the way back on opening night. But if the season ended today, they’d play the Indiana Fever in the first round, and I think me and a few million other people would like to see that matchup with Caitlin Clark.
🌨️🚵 Hail Pogačar! 🚵🌨️
Lovely story from the Vuelta a España, where a stage was canceled due to a sudden, violent hailstorm. A random one-star hotel in a tiny mountain village took in all the riders, providing them with hot drinks, hot towels, and food. The hotel has reportedly refused the Vuelta’s offer to pay the bill, but has been flooded with 5-star reviews from cycling fans.
As for the racing … it’s a little bit less heartwarming. Tadej Pogačar is having one of the most dominant Grand Tours imaginable. He currently leads every individual classification he can — overall, points, mountains, and combativity. As far as I can tell, he’d be the first racer to win all four competitions in one Grand Tour.
🇨🇿🎾 Czechs Mix 🇨🇿🎾
The Czech combo of Karolína Muchová and Jakub Menšík won the US Open mixed doubles tournament in a match tiebreaker, but the best drama of the competition came in the semis, when Muchová and Menšík battled their way back from two match points and won.
Another round of applause for the new-look mixed doubles competition, which debuted last year and allowed the biggest stars to compete. The pairing of Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz melted my cold cynical heart. They won their first-round matchup in what might be the last competitive win of Serena’s career, but lost in the quarterfinals.
🇦🇹⚽️ Lask to First ⚽️🇦🇹
Incredible comeback in the early rounds of the Champions League: Austrian side LASK Linz trailed Celtic 4-0 on aggregate but came back to win:
🇸🇦 Per$onal Matter$? 🇸🇦
Some NWSL drama: Reigning NWSL champions Gotham FC released their leading goalscorer — Spanish striker Esther Gonzalez, who scored the winning goal in the 2023 NWSL Championship — after the 2023 World Cup-winner publicly announced that she needed to attend to personal matters in Spain.
… Gonzalez then signed with a club in Saudi Arabia this week. Gotham was apparently caught off-guard; if they hadn’t voluntarily released Gonzalez, they could have received a hefty transfer fee for one of the world’s best players.
If Gonzalez does, in fact, have a personal matter that is easier to deal with in Saudi Arabia than New York, we wish her the best.
🎓📚🏈 Back to school? 🏈📚🎓
I was going to do an entry on college football players attempting to return to their college teams from NFL training camps after the NCAA passed its five-seasons-in-five-years rule this offseason — players like Ole Miss-turned-Cleveland Browns-turned-LSU tight end Dae’Quan Wright.
But the Big Ten and SEC jumped quickly to make such returns from pro contracts illegal. Honestly, if I was going to keep you up to date on NCAA eligibility rule changes, I’d have to start publishing this newsletter daily. Maybe someday.
On Deck is written by Bradley Locker.
🐯 Memphis 🐯 vs. 🎰 UNLV 🎰
Saturday, 10 p.m. ET (FOX)
The headliner game on the Week 0 slate is UNC-TCU from Dublin, but Memphis-UNLV has bigger stakes with real ramifications on the Group of Six playoff race. Memphis head coach Charles Huff makes his debut after arriving from Southern Miss. Meanwhile, the Rebels have won 10-plus games in consecutive seasons and feature a high-flying offense under Dan Mullen. UNLV is set to feature Auburn transfer Jackson Arnold and/or Michigan transfer Alex Orji at quarterback. (“And” is a real possibility here.)
🧦 Red Sox 🧦 vs. 💣 Yankees 💣
Series begins Friday at 7:05 p.m. ET (Apple TV)
For most of the first half of the season, this matchup would’ve offered little reason to watch other than “rivalry,” but now there’s far more at stake. Boston has caught fire since the All-Star Break, going a league-best 27-12 behind a dangerous rotation to move into the second AL wild card slot. The team above them? None other than the Yankees, who themselves have heated up as players like Cody Bellinger and Carlos Rodón have returned. New York enters play Thursday only 2.5 games above Boston for the top wild card spot, so this four-game series looms large.
🦅 Falcons 🦅 vs. 🐬 Dolphins 🐬
Friday, 8 p.m. ET (NFL Pro)
It may only be the preseason, but this game features a very juicy storyline in Falcons quarterback Tua Tagovailoa facing his former team. The ex-Dolphins standout has endured a tough (and meme-riddled) start to his Atlanta tenure, but he is still the frontrunner to be QB1 in Week 1. With Michael Penix Jr. cleared to practice but not playing in this game, Tagovailoa’s performance against his old squad will go a long way in determining which player Kevin Stefanski decides to ride long-term. Even when Tagovailoa gets subbed out, stay for rookie backup Jack Strand; the former Minnesota State Moorhead gunslinger has been turning heads.
🟣 Valkyries 🟣 vs. 🗽 Liberty 🗽
Thursday, 8 p.m. ET (Prime Video)
Both of these teams have already secured spots in the league’s eight-team playoff field, and it’s entirely possible that they’ll rematch in late September after the FIBA World Cup break. According to The Athletic’s playoff bracket simulator, the Valkyries have an 84% chance to claim the No. 2 seed, while the Liberty hold a 27% chance at No. 7 while currently tied with the Mystics. Golden State wants to stay in pursuit of the top slot after downing the top-seeded Lynx earlier this week behind a Veronica Burton masterclass (Go ‘Cats!). Meanwhile, New York is coming off a close win over the Fever.
🚵 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships 🚵
Through Sunday in Val di Sole, Italy (FloBikes)
Val di Sole is considered one of the most challenging venues in mountain biking in both downhill and cross country racing. Headliners in the XC races include Tom Pidcock, Mathieu van der Poel, and Puck Pieterse, who are also some of the most fearsome racers on the road in the men’s and women’s pelotons. Team USA stars Haley Batten, who won silver at the 2024 Paris Olympics. (And yes, downhill cycling is as terrifying as it sounds.)
🏑 Field Hockey World Cup 🏑
Semifinals Thursday and Friday, finals Saturday and Sunday in the Netherlands and Belgium (CBS Sports Network)
The men’s and women’s World Cup are taking place simultaneously in the Low Countries. Team USA only qualified for the women’s tournament and was knocked out in the group stages, although they did tie semis-bound Argentina on a goal by Northwestern senior Ashley Sessa (go ‘Cats!) — RS
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