First of all. Rally driving. Holy crap. Basically, the idea is “driving as fast as possible through winding unpaved backcountry roads while the guy in the passenger seat yells steering instructions at you.” Here’s the on-board footage from Solberg’s car during a race in Chile this past September.

Solberg is rally royalty. His father, Petter Solberg, won the 2003 world championship. And Oliver is a prodigy. He dominated the second-tier WR2 last season, and stormed up the standings to contend for this year’s championship. He made up 20 points on Evans at that race in Chile, the second-to-last event of the year. And over the first two days of the Rally Italia Sardegna, he made up 19 more points to put him in a virtual tie with Evans.

Evans had to be thinking: oh god it’s happening again. Evans was the runner-up in five of the last six WRC seasons. Twice, including last year, Evans led the standings entering the final race but lost the title to nine-time champion Sébastien Ogier. In 2020, Evans crashed out, veering off a snowy mountain road in Italy.

This year, whoever finished higher on the final stage of the season would win the title. In a video shot before the race, Evans and Solberg looked like the two most stressed athletes I have ever seen: Evans, keenly aware that he was on the precipice of a third final-day fiasco, appeared to be on the verge of tears. Solberg hit the interviewer with a sarcastic “wow, soooooo easy!” when told all he has to do is finish ahead of Evans.

(Scandanavian people only resort to humor when they’re incredibly stressed.)

I recommend finding some foreign language announcers calling the crash; here are the Spanish, Japanese, and Welsh calls.

Despite his crash, Solberg technically won the event. He got his car back on course — this is a pretty critical skill for rally drivers — and finished with the best overall time across every stage. So after losing the championship in heartbreaking fashion, he had to stand on top of a podium and spray champagne in a burst of confetti. It has a real “trying to cheer up your buddy who just got dumped by making him come out to the bar with you” vibe.

Regardless of who won, Solberg and Evans are teammates — they both race for Toyota Gazoo Racing, which has won six straight manufacturer’s championships.

(The team is named after Gazoo.com, a Toyota-owned Japanese car website derived from the word gazo, meaning “image.” It is not affiliated with the tiny Martian guy who showed up on The Flintstones when they ran out of jokes related to the original premise of a cartoon show about people living in the stone age.)

Despite the drama, the ending leaves us with a pretty good narrative: Evans got the win he’s been chasing for years, and Solberg showed that he’s a youngster with a bright future. He’ll get his someday.

And besides, Solberg says he has no regrets about his driving, even if the loss stings. In an emotional post-race speech, he said “my heart hurts a lot,” but that “if I lost on time, I probably couldn’t be able to live with myself.” For a racer, it’s better to crash trying to be the fastest than to take it easy and finish second.

WNBA officiating has been a consistent complaint from players and fans for years. (Admittedly, there isn’t a league on Earth where fans and player like the refs, but it seems to be a slightly bigger issue in the WNBA.) But ultimately, the job of knowing how many timeouts remain rests with a team’s coach.

The Liberty have a new head coach, Chris DeMarco, who was hired this offseason to replace WNBA legend and two-time champ Sandy Brondello. It’s not just his first season with the team, but his first season in the WNBA; he had spent his entire coaching career with the Golden State Warriors.

Demarco’s Liberty tenure has been pretty disappointing. They’re one of the most talented teams in the WNBA and just two years removed from a championship, but they are the 8-seed in this year’s playoffs. They did get a shock win over the top-seeded Lynx in the first round, but now it seems like they’re hitting a wall.

There are very real differences in the rules between the NBA and WNBA. In the NBA, teams get two timeouts in overtime; in the WNBA, teams get two timeouts and an additional “reset timeout” that allows them to advance the ball to half-court, but doesn’t allow them to huddle and draw up a play.

The Liberty only played in two overtime games this season. I reviewed the play-by-play of those two games, and the Liberty never used a reset timeout. While DeMarco coached in dozens of overtime games with the Warriors, it’s possible he didn’t know that teams get an extra reset timeout in OT.

WNBA teams are increasingly hiring coaches with backgrounds predominantly or exclusively in men’s basketball — in fact, it kinda seems like many WNBA owners are deliberately seeking out coaches from NBA staffs. DeMarco, Alex Sarama of the Portland Fire, and Nate Tibbetts of the Phoenix Mercury had never coached women’s basketball before getting hired as WNBA head coaches, while Sydney Johnson of the Washington Mystics and Tyler Marsh of the Chicago Sun had long careers in men’s hoops before short stints as WNBA assistants that led to head coaching jobs. That’s five of the league’s 14 coaches!

I think it’s fine that there’s crossover between men’s and women’s basketball coaches. It’s all ball! But the flow of coaches isn’t exactly equal in both directions. While the NBA-to-WNBA pipeline is blooming, no coach with WNBA experience, male or female, has ever become an NBA head coach.

When WNBA teams hire male NBA assistants as head coaches, bypassing the many female coaches already in the WNBA, it sends a message that the W is a second-rate league that isn’t developing basketball minds.

So if they’re going to do that … can they at least make sure the guys coming over are learning the rules?

First off: Will Wade. Wade is a habitual line-stepper disinterested in following NCAA rules. I’ve always liked the guy for this reason, but it’s fair to wonder whether his player advocacy stems from genuinely wanting to improve student-athlete welfare or simply trying to win games by any means necessary.

Wade was fired by LSU — the same school where he is currently the head coach! — in 2022 after a scandal in which he was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing payments to LSU player Javonte Smart. (Specifically, a “strong-ass offer” to Smart.) Wade pretty quickly rehabilitated his image once everybody realized that it was absurd to get mad at a guy for paying players in an era when players are openly paid. He built up McNeese and beat Clemson in the 2025 NCAA Tournament before leaving for NC State. After one year there, he was welcomed back at LSU.

Wade did not bring back any players from the 2025-26 roster that finished dead last in the SEC. He also did not recruit any freshmen. His roster was supposed to be 100 percent transfers and international prospects.

Four players are cleared: Kentucky transfer Mo Dioubate, Michigan State transfer Divine Ugochukwu, Kansas State transfer Abdi Bashir Jr., and UTSA transfer Austin Nunez. All of them are juniors or seniors.

Wade gave a press conference in late September that began with “we’ve been practicing 2-on-2 for the last few months …” before clarifying that he was joking. “We’ve got a full roster, we’ve got 15 guys,” Wade said.

I do think LSU will eventually end up with a few more players; here’s a full breakdown from August of every player on the hypothetical roster. I don’t see why former UCLA players Skyy Clark and Donovan Dent shouldn’t be allowed to suit up. They both played four seasons of college basketball in four years, but the NCAA now allows student-athletes to play five seasons in five years.

LSU also has at least four international players who have played professional ball in Europe. Brice Dessert, a French prospect who played in Turkey last season, should be able to play. He’s expected to suit up in Thursday’s scrimmage and was recruited by several other college teams, which I assume means that those other teams also felt good about his eligibility. And I don’t see why the Tigers wouldn’t be able to play two other players — Gilad Levy and Michael Ruzic — who played pro ball internationally but never signed with an NBA team.

But Senegalese-Italian prospect Saliou Niang was the 58th pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, which could be an issue, and Márcio Santos played in Summer League with the Atlanta Hawks, and has headed back to Spain.

And then there’s RJ Luis Jr., the 2025 Big East player of the Year at St. John’s. Luis began his college career in 2022, so this would be his fifth season … but he spent his fourth season trying to make it in the NBA. He declared for the 2025 NBA Draft, went undrafted, signed a contract with the Utah Jazz, and was traded to the Celtics. Although he never played in a game for the Jazz or Celtics, nor their G-League affiliates, he did sign the contracts.

Luis was granted an injunction to play this season, but the SEC has sued LSU over playing former pros. The lawsuit was filed in response to LSU football’s maneuverings, but Luis is basically in the same boat — he signed a contract with a pro team but never suited up in a regular season game for that team — and the lawsuit remains active even though Kiffin decided not to play those football players.

The range of outcomes here is vast. If all of these players get OK’d, Wade has a legit squad, with several proven college stars and tons of size. If none of them get OK’d, LSU might have to forfeit some games. The options in between are pretty grim. You don’t need 15 players to win college basketball games, but if Wade is only able to get a handful of the edge cases approved, LSU may need to give extended minutes to walk-ons if injuries or foul trouble stack up.

Wade compared his program to a move-fast-and-break-things startup:

Will do, coach.