The budget needed to field a competitive college basketball roster seems to be the only thing in the world trending up right now, and the beautiful consequence is that most of the best players with eligibility remaining are returning to school. It is in that uncertain world, in the wake of Florida’s national championship win…
A season that was supposed to be defined by parity instead ended with the two most iconic brands in women’s basketball meeting in the national title game and UConn adding a historic record 12th title. Those programs once again top the field in this way-too-early look at 2025-26. As is tradition in these power rankings,…
The top three in my annual ranking of the best coaches in college football was easy. After that, things got more complicated. How much does recency bias factor in? For me, not as much as it does for Stewart Mandel, whose Top 25 can be found here. I’ve always given coaches more credit for what…
(Editor’s note: This article is part of the Bracket Central series, an inside look at the run-up to the men’s & women’s NCAA Tournaments, along with analysis and picks during the tournaments.) Drake’s in, so we can dispense with the arguments about whether Ben McCollum’s Bulldogs would have made the field of 68 without winning the Missouri Valley…
We’re a month removed from the national championship game, and the players who transferred from Notre Dame and Ohio State have found homes. So that’s given us a good bit of separation from the winter transfer portal window. Now that there has been time to assess all the roster movement, The Athletic spoke to 13…
The NFL Scouting Combine kicks off in a few days, and it provides a great callback to our annual Freaks List of college football phenoms. Some of those Freaks in this draft aren’t expected to work out this year, including East Carolina star cornerback Shavon Revel Jr., who is coming off of a torn ACL….
If Jim Tressel runs for governor of Ohio, it will come up. And he might run. Tressel, 72, the former Ohio State football coach whose 2002 Buckeyes won a national championship, whose teams were 9-1 against rival Michigan, and who served as president of Youngstown State University from 2014 to 2023, was easily approved Wednesday…
Five years ago, this was a fairly simple exercise: Rank Alabama either No. 1 or 2, then drop Ohio State, Clemson or Georgia immediately before or after. Look like a genius 365 days later. But these days, it takes the GDP of a small country to keep a roster intact in college football. Ohio State…
One evening after the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff concluded with four blowout games staged on campus, ESPN host Scott Van Pelt and football analyst Tim Hasselbeck held a conversation that mirrored many like it taking place on social media and in barrooms. The host teams won by an average of 19.3 points, and the…
For all of the excitement an expanded College Football Playoff has created, there is at least one unintended consequence that seems to be revealing itself during Ohio State’s incredible postseason tear. Rivalries no longer matter. For all the dancing, prancing, flaunting and flag-planting we witnessed during rivalry week this season, Ohio State is proving teams…