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Here’s that link again. Onto the Sports!
– Rodger Sherman
Today’s Lineup
Rodger becomes a Hull City fan for life
USA back on top of the wheelchair rugby world
Will the Phillies ever lose again?
🐯 Hull-abaloo 🐯
That was the main question about a team promoted to the Premier League by the skin of their Tiger teeth. It took a series of miracles for Hull to earn their spot in the biggest and best league on earth, and they hadn’t exactly reshaped their roster in the offseason to bring them up to speed. Hull was projected to finish dead last by every pundit and every statistical model, sometimes by tremendous margins.
But the Tigers beat Manchester United 2-0 on Saturday in one of the most improbable Day-1 wins imaginable:
Hull is still expected to be a one-year wonder, popping up to the Prem for a bit of air before getting sent back down to the lower levels of the sport. But no matter what happens this season, they’ve made a Premier League memory for the ages … and won over my fandom through a bit of mysticism and posting.
The Athletic picked Hull City to finish last. The Guardian picked Hull City to finish last. Almost all of ESPN’s writers picked Hull City to finish last, though one staffer was apparently bold enough to pick them 19th. NBC’s writers all picked Hull City to finish last. The OptaSports model projected Hull City last. The Ringer put Hull City last in their Premier League power rankings, as did CBS. Sky Sports projected Hull City to finish 18th …
Haha, just kidding, they also projected Hull City to finish last.
But after one matchup against one of the giants of the sport, they’re on top of the Premier League table. It was, admittedly, an improbable win.
Perhaps the most brutal moment of the game: The PA announcement at Hull’s stadium that the trains back to Manchester had been canceled, followed by massive roars from Hull supporters.
No word on how the Mancunians got home. Maybe they split an Uber?
Why did everybody expect Hull City to be so bad? You could look at the results. After finishing 21st in the Championship in 2024-25, only avoiding relegation to the third tier on goal differential, they finished in sixth place last year. That’s the lowest a team could possibly place and still fight their way through a promotion playoff to the Premier League. (They overtook Wrexham for sixth on the final day of the season — a big blow for reality TV.) But sixth-place finishers usually don’t make it through the playoff. The last sixth-place finisher hadn’t won promotion since Blackpool in 2010 — none had even reached the playoff final since 2019.
Or you could look at the stats, which showed Hull actually massively outperformed expectations to finish sixth. Hull finished 23rd of 24 teams in the Championship last year in expected goal differential, meaning they were more likely to get relegated to League One than promoted. While some analysts believed their on-field play was successful in ways not quite captured by the xG model, others looked at the underlying data and projected Hull as the worst Premier League promotion ever. One statistician projected Hull for just 14.7 points in the Premier League.
Or you could look at the money. Hull City’s squad is worth 144 million pounds, per Transfermarkt. That’s not just the lowest value in the league; it’s less than half of the second-worst team, Coventry City, whose squad is valued at 292 million pounds. While the other two newly promoted teams each spent at least 100 million pounds in the offseason to get their squads ready for the higher level of competition, Hull only spent about 80 million.
And Hull was promoted under truly bizarre circumstances. They were supposed to play Southampton in the promotion playoff final, but the Saints were expelled before the match due to a bizarre spy scandal (BRITISH SPYGATE!) Hull ended up winning on a 95th-minute goal by Oli McBurnie.
They keep making miracles. They weren’t necessarily the better team Saturday, with just 28 percent possession and Manchester United having nearly four times as many touches in the box. But they scored twice on two set pieces, both headers by their center backs, Semi Ajayi and Nobel Mendy.
What caught my eye? Those two goals were scored in the 17th and the 38th minutes. This was a big deal for me, personally, as the world’s No. 1 sportswriter who posts incessantly about legendary 2010s singer-slash-rapper Fetty Wap.
I’ve never had a Premier League team, but I think Hull City has secured my fandom with their remarkable string of unlikely wins … and their social media admin putting together a Fetty Wap-soundtracked celebration video. The Fetty Fates have decided for me.
According to my crack research team (which is literally just the Bluesky account for the Remember That Guy? podcast), this is the first game in Premier League history in which a team won 2-0 with goals in the 17th and 38th minutes, making this the first Footy Wapping in league history.
I’m also a fan of Hull’s so-bad-its-good MAULED BY THE TIGERS chant, complete with tiger-claw hand motions.
Even after picking up three miracle points, they’re still betting favorites to finish last in the league with implied relegation odds of about 75 to 80 percent.
I’ve always found it a bit gauche when Americans suddenly pop up as fans of The Extremely Good Premier League teams, so I’m hopping aboard the bandwagon of the team everybody thinks will be the worst of all time. It will almost never be better to be a fan of this team than it was Saturday.
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“Sure, I’m in last place now,” I told everyone. “But my 11 playoff appearances in 16 seasons is the highest rate of anybody in the league! And somebody actually had a 12-game losing streak in 2013, so my 11-gamer isn’t even the longest ever! And I’m second all-time in regular season win percentage!”
Did this get my friends to stop making fun of me for finishing last? No, not at all! But it helped me sleep at night.
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👨🦽➡️🥇 Rolling to gold 🥇👨🦽➡️
👨🦽➡️
After back-to-back-to-back Paralympic silver medals and a 16-year gold medal drought at the World Championships, Team USA finally broke through and won the World Wheelchair Rugby Championships in Brazil, beating defending world champions Australia 57-51:
Team USA used to run the world of international wheelchair rugby. They won four of the first five world championships and three of the first four Paralympics. But since their last world title in 2010, they went bronze-bronze-silver at the world championships and bronze-silver-silver-silver at the Paralympics.
One of the teams holding them back: the Steelers of Australia. (I like that the wheelchair rugby teams have cool names!) The Aussies beat Team USA in the 2022 World Championship game … and in double overtime in the 2016 Paralympic gold-medal game … and in the group stages of this tournament.
But after surviving some nail-biters — a 57-56 win over host Brazil and a 50-49 semifinal win over Japan, the defending Paralympic gold medalists — Team USA got their revenge.
The key moment? A chair-crunching hit by Chuck Aoki. The gold-medal match had been a one-score game most of the way through, but as Australia tried to tie it up at 30, Aoki went chair-to-chair with the Australian ballcarrier, forcing a turnover, and soon the score was 34-30. Team USA never looked back. I’ve got the hit queued up right here.
I was watching the game and thinking … “Are we sure the sport this most closely resembles is rugby? They don’t have scrums, they don’t throw the ball backw—” and then BOOM. That hit. Yeah, it’s rugby.
Aoki was named tournament MVP; Alex Pabon was named the best player in his classification. Here’s Pabon chasing down a deep shot for a score in the championship game:
About that: Like many sports, rugby uses a classification system: Every player is graded on physical capability (3.5 being the most, 0.5 being the least). Each team is allowed to have a total of eight points on the floor at any given time.
Wheelchair rugby gameplay revolves around letting your high-point players cook — like Aoki, a 3.0 who handles most of the ball-carrying responsibility — with low-pointers spacing the floor and throwing blocks.
But it really is a team effort. With the game tied and two seconds remaining against Brazil, Team USA sprung 1.5-pointer Travis Baker for the win on a baseball pass from Sarah Adam:
Wheelchair rugby is a mixed-gender sport, but when a female player is on the court, the team’s point allowance increases. That makes Adam kind of a cheat code — not only is she an elite player, but she also allowed Team USA to field a more skilled lineup overall.
I had a lot of fun watching the Paralympics in February and March, so I’m gonna keep an eye out for some para sports events coming up in the non-Paralympic years. Wheelchair basketball world championships coming up next month!
🔔 Phillies, Special 🔔
The Phillies extended a nine-game win streak with one of the most improbable comebacks of the year — down 4-0 in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Phils tied it up before Kyle Schwarber ended the game on this 450-foot bomb:
Schwarber is leading the majors in homers for the second straight season — he’s got 39. Between him, the reigning national football champs, and O.G. Anunoby’s tip-in, everything is Indiana Hoosiers.
🏃 Half-marathon, full record 🏃
Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha set the half-marathon world record Saturday in Buenos Aires, running a 56:51 — a full 29 seconds faster than Jacob Kiplimo’s run in Lisbon earlier this year. Kejelcha deserves a record after running the London Marathon in 1:59:41 in April, which would have made him the first runner ever to complete a sub-two-hour marathon …. except Sebastian Sawe crossed the finish line 11 seconds earlier, making history and taking the glory.
🥷 Grand Theft Alexandra 🥷
Early winner for goal of the season goes to Crewe Alexandra for this bit of sneakery:
👶⚽️ Youth movement 👶⚽️
The next generation of American soccer stars have arrived, after a baby snuck onto the field during Minnesota United’s 5-1 win over the San Jose Earthquakes. “This is better than the raccoon!”
In other American Soccer Baby news, 16-year old Cavan Sullivan is on a tear for the Philadelphia Union — he’s got two goals and two assists in their last four games, scoring again on Saturday.
🏎️🏛️ Speed Bump 250 🏎️🏛️
IndyCar held its Freedom 250 road race through the nation’s capital on Sunday. It was a pet project of Donald Trump, who signed an executive order making the Department of Transportation work on the race on behalf of IndyCar owner Roger Penske, a major Trump donor. The racecourse went past the White House and the Capitol and the National Mall … and over a bunch of literal speed bumps, as downtown DC has some raised crosswalks to slow traffic:
@indycar Turn 6 strikes again 😬 #indycar#racing#motorsport
Here’s the on-board camera footage of a car losing control over the bumps. Those incidents were in practice — raceday was relatively smooth with 20 of 25 cars completing the race.
🧟⛳️ LIVing Dead ⛳️🧟
LIV Golf completed what is likely its last-ever tournament in Indianapolis this weekend; I didn’t even realize it was happening until I read Pablo Uggeti’s de facto obit for the tour.
🇫🇷🏸 Bon-minton 🏸🇫🇷
France won two of the five gold medals at this year’s Badminton World Championships, including Alex Lanier’s surprise gold in the men’s singles competition. France had never won a gold medal at the world championships; when they hosted the Olympics just two years ago, no French competitors made the knockout rounds in any event.
US Open Mixed Doubles Championship
Tuesday-Wednesday in New York
The US Open organizers moved the often-overlooked mixed doubles tournament up a week so that the biggest stars could compete without jeopardizing their singles tournaments — all eyes will surely be on the pairing of Carlos Alcaraz and Serena Williams. But I remain steadfast: I will be rooting for the doubles specialists to beat up on all these singles tourists. Let’s go, Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori! Make everybody mad! — RS
🌴 Dodgers 🌴 vs. 🪓 Braves 🪓
Series begins Tuesday at 7:15 p.m. ET (TBS)
The Braves and Dodgers have both been in On Deck for series against the Brewers in the last few weeks, and now they’re going head-to-head. Two of these three have to meet in the NLCS, right??? Los Angeles notched its sixth straight win and league-best 10th sweep over the weekend after downing the Pirates, while Atlanta fell to Milwaukee. A Braves series victory would go a long way toward determining who gets a first-round bye given that the Dodgers are currently four games ahead in the NL standings. — BL
🟣 Valkyries 🟣 vs. 😺 Lynx 😺
Monday, 8 p.m. ET (USA Network)
The league’s two best teams will battle for the second time in six days, after the Lynx beat the Valkyries 77-66 last Wednesday. In that game, Olivia Miles and Kayla McBride combined for 40 points. BTW, here’s your Olivia Miles highlight reel of the week:
Golden State will need to shoot better after going 32 percent from the field and 19 percent from three, although that might be a tall task against the Lynx, who have the third-best defense by points per game and field goal percentage. — BL
🚴🇪🇸 Vuelta a Espana 🇪🇸🚴
Every morning for the next couple of weeks, somewhere in Spain (Peacock)
I told you Tadej Pogacar is the GOAT. Don’t you want to watch the GOAT try to win something he’s never won before? Pogacar has raced in the Vuelta once, in 2019, finishing third. — RS
🚣 World Rowing Championships 🚣
Continue Monday in Amsterdam (WorldRowing.com)
The Netherlands is hosting after securing four gold medals at the 2024 Olympics. The Dutch have been dominant, winning the most medals in 2023 and 2025. Women’s single scull gold medalist Karolien Florijn should be a fan-favorite in her home country. American Olympic winners Nick Mead and Michael Grady have transitioned to college coaching, which explains their absences. — BL
🛶 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships 🛶
Begin Wednesday in Poznan, Poland (Peacock)
OK. So that was the rowing world championships, which has oars, and this is the canoe sprint world championships, which has paddles. That’s all I’ve got. — RS
🤺🏊 World Modern Pentathlon Championships 🏊🤺
Begin Monday in Guiyang, China (UIPM TV)
New names should fill the podium in this event, with reigning men’s and women’s gold medalists Ahmed El-Gendy (rest) and Michelle Gulyas (injury) both sidelined. Egypt’s Moutaz Mohamed aims for consecutive wins, but the Czech Republic’s Matěj Lukeš looms as the No. 1-ranked participant. On the women’s side, 14-year-old Egyptian phenom Farida Khalil eyes another milestone, but will have to best Hungarian runner-up Blanka Guzi. — BL
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