Hello! Welcome to my midseason check-in for all fifteen American League teams. The preamble to these sorts of pieces is always the hardest to write, I’ve found. It’s a lot harder to write about what you’re going to write about. I’ve found the same is true for podcasting, where it’s a lot harder to talk about what you’re going to talk about.

So, let’s talk turkey.

Tampa Bay Rays

It’s Sunday, June 28th, and the Rays sit atop the AL East. The Rays have won four in a row and will try to complete the sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks this afternoon. The Yankees have lost three in a row. The Blue Jays have lost five in a row. Junior Caminero hit three homers against the Royals on the 25th. And the top three starters for Tampa Bay — Drew Rasmussen, Nick Martinez, and Shane McClanahan — have started 46 games for the team and have a combined FIP average of 3.37. The Rays and White Sox continue their never-ending struggle to be crowned the best story in baseball this year.

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New York Yankees

The Yankees are 12-11 in June, all without the team’s best hitter, Aaron Judge. New York is 14 games over .500, and they have the highest playoff odds out of all the teams in the AL at 98.6%. Cam Schlittler is the only pitcher in the AL with an ERA in the ones at 1.62. The Yankees, like the Braves, are two teams that got off to great starts and now find themselves skating by without their best hitter in the lineup for the foreseeable future — Judge and Ronald Acuna Jr. The Red Sox can complete a four-game sweep of New York today. Quite simply, New York baseball fans are not having a lot of fun right now. Thank goodness for the Knicks.

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Toronto Blue Jays

The Blue Jays haven’t won a baseball game since the 22nd. Toronto is 5 games below .500 and finds themselves in their own never-ending struggle for the crown of most disappointing team in the AL East with Baltimore, who also has 39 wins on the season with one more loss. The good news is that Shane Bieber got activated off the 60-day IL on Tuesday. The other good news is that Dylan Cease has been phenomenal and leads the AL in strikeouts. Kevin Gausman has been good, and Patrick Corbin has turned back the clock a bit, but Toronto is still 25th in all of baseball with a team SP ERA of 4.56. 2024 first-round pick Trey Yesavage was solid in 5-and-two-thirds on Wednesday. The Blue Jays’ starting rotation becoming a strength, not a weakness, for the second half of the season seems very doable. I can’t quit the Jays just yet.

Baltimore Orioles

The Orioles are a different matter. For the second season in a row, their starters sit in the 20s in combined FIP. In 2024, Baltimore’s starters were ninth in FIP across Major League Baseball. That team won 91 games. The 2026 Baltimore Orioles are projected to win 78 games, a three-win improvement from a season ago. We all worried about the starting pitching before the season, and it’s a major problem for the O’s once again. Only Kyle Bradish has an xFIP below four for any Baltimore starter who has started ten-plus games for the team this season.

Boston Red Sox

The Red Sox have dominated the Yankees this weekend. Boston has outscored New York by 11 runs and held the Bronx Bombers to one run in two of their three victories. Because the American League is a terrible mess, even though Boston is eleven games under .500, a glass half-full fan could argue the team should not be dead-set on being sellers at the MLB trade deadline. The Red Sox do have a better run differential than the red-hot Philadelphia Phillies, the Washington Nationals, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the San Diego Padres, who are all over .500 and all could very well make the playoffs this season. (If I were Boston, I would still very much trade Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras, and Aroldis Chapman. Ranger Suarez is a keeper.)

Chicago White Sox

Before the start of the season, we all, collectively, would have presumed that the White Sox, not the Chicago Cubs, would be most likely to be atop their division at the end of June, right? No, the White Sox continue to be the biggest surprise in the sport. Here they are five games over .500 on June 28 as I type this, and yet, Fangraphs’ projections still have Chicago finishing with the third-worst run differential in baseball. The White Sox mash the baseball, with two players who have already hit twenty-plus homers and one player a couple shy. They only trail the Yankees in home runs as a team. What a delight. A true never-tell-us-the-odds team.

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Cleveland Guardians

The Guardians feel like they do every year. They are in the top-half of the league in pitching, bottom third in home runs, and in the top-5 in soft-hit percentage. The Guardians are good, not great, and are still the best bet to hang around and win the AL Central. Cleveland is three games over .500 at around the midway point in the season and are projected to finish two games under .500 by the end of the season, which would still win them the AL Central if Fangraphs’ projections nail this division the rest of the way. Lots of NFC South-ness in the AL Central.

Minnesota Twins

I do not envy the position Minnesota’s front office now finds themselves in. The Twins have about a 1-in-5 chance of making the playoffs with how they’ve played thus far, per FanGraphs. With the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals out of the picture, the Twins, Guardians and White Sox could all win this division, and all win it with a losing record. Byron Buxton has been healthy and awesome. They have six guys in the lineup with a WRC+ of over 100. Minnesota is fifth in runs scored. They are ninth in home runs. I hope the powers that be in the Minnesota front office don’t skew cynical ahead of this summer’s trade deadline. They are buyers as we head towards July.

Detroit Tigers

I almost want to combine my Tigers and Royals sections. Both teams had dreams of winning the AL Central before the season. Those dreams are likely dead. For Detroit, they have to trade Tarik Skubal. That will be sad. This is a team that has tried to break through. They signed Framber Valdez in February. Then the month of May happened. Detroit went 6-22. June has been kinder to the Tigers as they have gone 13-10 with three games to spare. What I imagine is most frustrating if you’re a Tigers fan is that you have two of the top four players in batting WAR in the AL this season: Dillon Dingler and Kevin McGonigle, at No. 2 and No. 4, respectively.

Kansas City Royals

The Royals are the worst team in the AL Central, but they have the leader in batting WAR in the AL in Bobby Witt Jr. He’s second in the AL overall in total WAR. He’s second in MLB in stolen bases. He’s No. 1 in FanGraphs’ fielding metric. He is third in AL MVP odds on FanDuel. (There is a scenario where the top-3 finishers all miss the playoffs.) The Royals are having a terrible season as a team while their best individual player is having a tremendous season. It obviously won’t be this year, but you hope the Royals can eventually turn the tide so Witt Jr. is on all of our television sets in October sooner rather than later.

Seattle Mariners

The 2026 Seattle Mariners are the “Call An Ambulance, But Not For Me” meme come to life. They got off to a terrible start. They did not look like a team that was likely to get back to the ALCS. Since May 25, the Mariners are 17-13. Over a thirty-game stretch this season, that feels about right for Seattle. Ninety-plus wins feels a bit too rich, but 84 or 85 feels right. If the Mariners can hover around this area the rest of the way, they should win the AL West, and then who knows what happens come playoff time. Oddly enough, they are still in the top-10 in all of baseball in home runs even with Cal Raleigh only accounting for eight of them in what has been a disastrous season for him. Outside of the Yankees, the Mariners are the safest long-term bet in the AL.

Texas Rangers

Like the Tigers and Royals, the Rangers and Astros feel intertwined. For the two Texas teams, though, they have won titles, and won titles recently. They won back-to-back titles in 2022 and 2023. They are both in the top-half of the league in payroll. Both farm systems are near the bottom, 25th for Texas and 29th for Houston. The Jays: Jake Burger, Joc Pederson and Josh Jung have been huge in the lineup. Their two vets atop the rotation, Jacob DeGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, have been healthy and awesome. If the playoffs started today, the Rangers would be the last team in and the Astros would be the first team out. That’s the good stuff.

Houston Astros

It will eventually get bad for Houston. The farm system is barren. They won a lot for a long time. They got their titles. They produced All-Stars everywhere. They did what the Orioles hoped to do the last two years. 2026 seemed like it might be the year the bottom fell out for the Astros. Instead, they have the current AL MVP favorite in Yordan Alvarez. They have better playoff odds than the Padres. They could end the season with a better record than the AL Central champion and miss the postseason, too. With the state of their farm system, I’m not sure how grandiose the club can be as buyers next month, but they should, and I’m so sorry for this, reach for the stars. They should push for the postseason. They should push for one more run because the bottom will fall out at some point and they will have to really rebuild. The losing is likely still coming. At some point. Not this year, though.

Athletics

The A’s are playing with house money. They are loaded with young talent. They don’t move to their new long-term home in Las Vegas until 2028. Baltimore can’t believe it’s the A’s and not the O’s doing what they’re doing. Nick Kurtz could win the AL MVP award. The team is seventh in home runs overall. The team is ninth in team batting average. The team is eighth in slugging. It’s the pitching that is dreadful. Athletics’ starters are 29th in FIP. The Athletics are one of two MLB teams that have a starting pitching FIP over 5. The Athletics are must-see television and have the best young core of hitters in all of Major League Baseball. They have six players with a WRC+ over 100, and all six are under-30. If I were to guess which AL West team won the most games over the next five seasons, it’d be the A’s.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

This team was projected to finish last in the AL West. They are usually predicted to finish last in the AL West. It’s early, and we’ve got time, but I will predict this team to finish last in the AL West next season, too. Oh, and the team fired their general manager, Perry Minasian, this week, too. There are some positives, though. Mike Trout had been excellent before his hamstring injury. Reid Detmers and Jose Soriano have been success stories in the rotation. They should probably trade the latter. Dave Dombrowski should call about Trout. The Braves should acquire Jorge Soler again. Maybe Soriano, too. All of which will not drastically jumpstart the Angels franchise. Somehow, the team also has the 28th-best farm system in baseball, too. With the White Sox’s rise, the Angels stand alone as the helpless and directionless team in the AL.

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The 2026 NBA Draft has come and gone. After many weeks filled with rumors and intrigue, the Atlanta Hawks made their selections at No. 8 and No. 23. They even traded up with the Los Angeles Clippers in the second round to snag an additional talented big in the midst of a shocking free fall. Three picks total for President of Basketball Operations Onsi Saleh. The team also pushed Buddy Hield’s guaranteed contract date. The team re-signed CJ McCollum to a one-year contract extension. The team traded for Oklahoma City Thunder wing Aaron Wiggins for two future second-round picks. The team picked up Mo Gueye’s fourth-year team option. The team also extended its head coach, Quin Snyder, on a multi-year deal. The team also promoted the aforementioned Saleh from general manager to President of Basketball Operations.

The Hawks have been busy, to say the least, and we haven’t even reached free agency. The team still has big decisions to make on a guy like Jonathan Kuminga. Do they elect to extend him or trade him? Did they see enough in his time after the trade with the Golden State Warriors to feel great about either decision? Can they get off the Corey Kispert contract? Can they find a way to bring veteran big Jock Landale back as they did McCollum on a team-friendly, one-year pact? Is Zaccharie Risacher, the former No. 1 overall pick who Saleh did not draft, still in their long-term plans going into his third season in the League?

So, yes, the Hawks have been busy, to say the least, and still have a lot to sort out before the start of next season.

There is plenty of time to write about all of those questions for Saleh and Snyder, but there shouldn’t be any question about what the Hawks see in their No. 8 overall selection, Houston guard Kingston Flemings, their lead ball handler of the future. The teams that picked before Atlanta made it easy for Saleh by taking the other Obvious Lottery Lead Guards, Keaton Wagler, Mikel Brown Jr. and Darius Acuff Jr. in order before the Hawks took Flemings. While AJ Dybantsa and Darryn Peterson will be compared to one another for years to come, Wagler, Brown Jr., Acuff Jr. and Flemings will be compared to one another for years to come, too. They’re all different one-and-done guards with different strengths and weaknesses.

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With Atlanta taking Flemings in what could be their last Lottery selection for a while, if all goes according to plan, we can see the Core Five for Saleh’s Hawks starting to come together: Flemings, Nickiel Alexander-Walker, Dyson Daniels, Jalen Johnson and Oneyka Okongwu. Going into the 2027-28 NBA season, the hope is that these five guys are your best five guys, per 100 possessions, of all your heavy-minute five-man lineups. With McCollum in the fold this year, Flemings does not have to be thrust into the lead-guy role just yet. Atlanta bringing back the 13-year veteran could prove to be one of those things we look back on many years from now that ended up being huge for the organization.

While I still have a lot of questions about what Atlanta will do on the wing next season with Kispert, Kuminga, Risacher, Wiggins, et cetera, what the rotation looks like inside will be even more fascinating. Three of the last four draft picks for the Hawks have turned out to be bigs: Asa Newell, Zuby Ejiofor, and Henri Veesaar. Atlanta picked up Gueye’s option. Atlanta greatly missed Landale in their first-round series with the New York Knicks, and he is a player you hope the Hawks can re-sign at least for one more season, like McCollum, as Snyder figures out who sticks and who doesn’t inside long-term.

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Health-permitting, Snyder is going to have lots of options inside. Even more intriguing is that they are all so different. What makes Gueye a really helpful rotation big in the NBA is very different than what could make Newell a really helpful rotation big in the NBA. You want to be able to throw out different looks, particularly in a seven-game playoff series, like Atlanta should be able to do next season inside with offense-first bigs like Newell and defense-first bigs like Gueye. If Ejiofor evolves into a player even close to Okongwu, that’s tremendous value at pick No. 23. I don’t think the lesson for Atlanta down the stretch last season was that the team needed to get bigger inside – even with Landale’s absence against New York proving to really hurt. The lesson was that they simply need more rotation bigs they trust behind Okongwu, seven-footers or not. You need Newell to take a big step in Year 2. You need to trust Gueye more overall. You need to rotate all of your bigs a lot over the course of the regular season so that you don’t find yourself in a situation where you’re SOL in the minutes where Okongwu sits.

NBA free agency officially begins on June 30. The Hawks still have lots of work to do to figure out what the 2026-27 roster will ultimately look like. Saleh and his staff have already done a lot. Saleh has assembled a deep roster. It’s a deep roster that still needs some tweaks, though. Can Atlanta thread the needle and bring back Landale? With Wiggins in the fold, can they find a way to move off Hield and Kispert’s contracts? Can Daniels regain his confidence from deep? What can the team’s third-team All-NBA forward work on this offseason to become a second-team All-NBA forward next year?

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Atlanta was one of the best teams in the NBA from the start of February on. The team has also had one of the best offseasons thus far, but big questions remain for Saleh and Snyder’s team going into next season, where fifty-plus wins isn’t out of the question. It should probably be expected. Like the draft was this week, the start of free agency next week should be very interesting for an Atlanta team on the rise.

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It’s going to be quite an interesting summer for the Atlanta Hawks. The first round of the 2026 NBA Draft will take place on Tuesday night, where, as it stands, the Hawks will make two selections at No. 8 and No. 23 if President of Basketball Operations Onsi Saleh elects to keep and use both first-round picks. Last summer, the New Orleans Pelicans came to Atlanta with a home-run trade offer that netted the Hawks this year’s Lottery selection at No. 8. The Hawks could go a lot of different ways with the No. 8 pick. They could even trade up. They can trade back. Who knows? Nobody saw a trade like the one with the Pelicans coming this time last year. It’s one of the many things that make this time of year so much fun in the NBA. Atlanta likes to maintain a level of optionality. One of those options is that they are a team that could trade for a player like Boston Celtics’ star wing Jaylen Brown.

But should they?

Reasonable minds can disagree on matters like whether the Hawks should be the potential third team in a deal that nets them the Atlanta native. Brown has been named an All-Star four seasons in a row. He is coming off a season in which he finished sixth in NBA MVP voting and was voted a second-team All-NBA player for the second time in his career. (Potentially relevant: The last two teams that have made it out of the East have been led by second-team All-NBA players in Jalen Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton.) He averaged 28.7 points per game, the highest of his professional career. He got to the line at the highest rate of his professional career at 7.5 attempts per game. He had the highest assist rate of his career. His 36.6 usage rate was in the 100th percentile across the League and the highest of his career. With Jayson Tatum out for most of the regular season, a lot was put on Brown’s plate, and he played at a level that kept Boston from sinking in the East like Indiana did this year without their injured star guard Haliburton.

That doesn’t mean the Hawks should give up assets to acquire Brown. Some teams make sense for Brown if the Celtics do ultimately decide to break up the Jays. The Milwaukee Bucks make more sense if they’d like to avert years and years of despair wandering the wilderness post-Giannis. Orlando makes sense as a team that’s desperate to break through. Miami makes sense for any star at any point. Los Angeles, too, for both the Clippers and the Lakers. What about Portland, Utah, and New Orleans? Those three seem eager to start winning a lot more right now. Brown, who will turn thirty in December, helps any of those teams win more right now.

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Atlanta, though? Not so much. Atlanta is more on the Oklahoma City path. (Obviously not in the future-picks way, but, really, nobody else in the League compares to the Thunder in that department.) Johnson just made his first third-team All-NBA team. He broke through as a bona fide star for the Hawks. Onyeka Okongwu has proven to be a core piece at the five. Dyson Daniels has to figure it out to some degree with his perimeter shot, but he’s a winning player and does so many other things at an elite level. He’s a core piece on the wing, too. Nickeil Alexander-Walker just won Most Improved Player and, again, is a winning player who pairs well in the backcourt with a savvy veteran like CJ McCollum or whichever guard Saleh takes with the eighth pick in the draft on Tuesday night. The main core, though, Johnson, Okongwu, and Daniels, are 24, 25, and 23, respectively. Alexander-Walker is the oldest at 27.

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With Shai Gilegous-Alexander, he was 26 when the Thunder won the NBA championship last season. Victor Wembanyama is 22 and propelled the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals way ahead of schedule. (Dylan Harper burst onto the scene as his future co-star as a rookie, too, at 20.) There is a fine line between doing what the Thunder and the Spurs were able to do and what the Magic and Grizzlies have not. You need some luck, a lot of luck, really, but you also need patience.

Atlanta fans should continue to be patient. The team transformed into a beast in the East from the beginning of February onward. They beat the NBA world champions more times than anyone else this postseason. Their biggest challenge is the hardest thing in sports – going from good to great. There are always a lot of good teams in the League, but only a select handful, if that, of truly great teams. But they can get there without acquiring a star player like Brown. They can add the best player available at No. 8 on their board Tuesday night. They could always run to pick up the phone if and when New Orleans calls. They could do a lot of things on Tuesday night and the rest of this summer that would continue to push them towards becoming a truly great team.

Atlanta can get to where they want to go without going Star Chasing. They have one on the roster, and they could take another one at No. 8. Or they could trade up. Or they could trade back. They, like the Thunder and the Spurs, could follow lots of different paths that could ultimately build a team that pushes for 50-plus wins routinely if they land the plane correctly. When you add a star like Brown, the timeline would change drastically for the Hawks. Saleh does not have to do that, though, like the Magic might want to. Or the Heat. Or even the Pistons, who just won sixty games and didn’t reach the Eastern Conference Finals.

The Hawks are in a good spot with their current timeline and their current core. There has never been a better time to be young and talented in the NBA. Just look at the Spurs. Last year, the Thunder won a title with their three best players being 26, 23, and 24. Johnson will turn 25 next season. The Hawks are in a great spot with their own star and their own core pieces. For Atlanta, nailing their Lottery pick on Tuesday night is the play, not adding a player like Brown, as great a player as he is. That’s a play for Detroit, or Orlando, or Los Angeles, or several other previously mentioned teams across the association.

The play is to stay the course, stay flexible, keep your young core together, keep the helpful veterans like CJ McCollum and Jock Londale, and see where next season takes you. See where Year 2 of third-team All-NBA player Johnson takes you. Could he transform into a second-team All-NBA player next year or the year after? See where Zaccharie Risacher and Asa Newell take you in Year 3 and Year 2 of their young careers, respectively. Could the No. 8 pick be as immediate an impact as a Kon Knueppel, Stephon Castle, Cedric Coward, Keyonte George, et cetera, et cetera? Atlanta has lots of options right now, but if they were to add Brown, those options would drastically dwindle. That’s an all-in addition, but the Hawks aren’t quite there yet, and that’s OK, too.

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A whole lot is going on with Northwestern football these days. Chip Kelly is the Wildcats’ new offensive coordinator. Former Michigan State and Oregon State quarterback Aidan Chiles is the Wildcats’ new projected starting quarterback. Ryan Field, Northwestern’s incredible new football stadium, is set to make its long-awaited debut on October 2 against Penn State. Did you also know that head football coach David Braun is about to begin his fourth season with Northwestern and that the Wildcats have gone bowling in two of the last three seasons?

As I said, a whole lot is going on with Northwestern football these days.

The Wildcats’ betting win total comes in at 5.5, per FanDuel, which would certainly be a disappointment for the 2023 Big Ten Coach of the Year’s fourth season in Evanston. If they win less than six games this season, it would continue the good-year-then-bad-year trend across Braun’s four seasons at Northwestern. The schedule is pretty kind to the Wildcats, though, as they should sweep their three non-conference games and all the games where they’ll likely be heavy underdogs are on the road, with those being Indiana, Oregon, and Ohio State. They get several coin-flip games at home, their new home at Ryan Field, against in-state rival Illinois, against Penn State, against Rutgers, and against Iowa.

If Northwestern accomplishes more than just going bowling for the third time in four seasons, it’s because the new combination of Kelly & Chiles clicks. For Northwestern to earn another trip to a bowl game this fall, Braun’s defense has to be around what it’s been in 2025 and 2023, a middle-of-the-pack unit in the Big Ten. We haven’t seen Northwestern in the top-3 in the conference in defensive yards per play allowed since 2020, when they went 7-2, but that was three years before Braun’s arrival in Evanston. The Wildcats’ defense has been mostly fine under Braun’s stewardship. It’s the offense, where his teams have finished 12th, 18th, and 12th, respectively, in yards per play in the conference. The Kelly and Chiles combination really needs to jumpstart this unit.

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For Kelly, it’s been an odd last two years professionally, filled with extreme highs and extreme lows. The last time he was an offensive coordinator for a collegiate program, he won a national championship with the Buckeyes. The veteran elite offensive mind parlayed that success into a return to the NFL, only to be fired by the Las Vegas Raiders before he even completed his first season as the team’s offensive coordinator. It was a gamble that ultimately did not pay off for Kelly. However, the last offense we saw Kelly call at the collegiate level finished No. 1 in yards per play. They were No. 4 in all of the FBS in 10-plus yard plays. The offense was second in third-down conversion rate in all of the FBS. It was a well-oiled machine across the board with a talented, first-year transfer quarterback under center in Will Howard.

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Enter Chiles, another talented, first-year transfer quarterback under center for Kelly’s first offense at Northwestern. Chiles followed his head coach, Jonathan Smith, from Corvallis to East Lansing. It was a rocky two years for the former four-star quarterback with the Spartans, but he showed some improvement last season, particularly with the frequency of his turnovers through the air. In nine games, but only eight starts, he cut down his interceptions to three. It was eleven the season prior. He also ran for six scores in those nine games, which could be huge for the Wildcats, particularly with new quarterbacks coach Jerry Neuheisel in the fold. The latter jump-started a UCLA Bruins offense when he took over after a brutal first third of the 2025 season, highlighted by their upset win over Penn State. UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava had three games in which he carried the ball more than ten times from the win over the Nittany Lions onward. For Neuheisel and Kelly, utilizing Chiles’ legs in the run game and limiting his fumbles, too, will be key to unlocking the talented quarterback’s full potential.

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If all goes right for Northwestern this fall, particularly the Kelly, Chiles, and even Neuheisel additions click, the middle-to-upper-tier of the Big Ten could get interesting. Iowa and Illinois have new quarterbacks. Who really ever knows with USC and Nebraska? Minnesota could have a 2027 top-5 pick quarterback under center. Penn State and Michigan hired longtime Big 12 head coaches who have never faced the kind of win-big pressure they’ll now face in Happy Valley and Ann Arbor.

Braun and Northwestern have just been quietly hanging around in the Big Ten. This offseason, though, they got a lot bolder with Kelly, Neuheisel, and Chiles. It reminds me a bit of when Lincoln Riley fired longtime defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and hired D’Anton Lynn as his new DC. You still weren’t sure of the ceiling, but you felt a whole lot better about the floor. I don’t know if this will all work out for Braun and the ‘Cats this fall, but I appreciate the big swing with Kelly in particular. If it doesn’t work, it’s hard to get too upset if you’re a Northwestern fan. There are a lot of worthwhile gambles on this Northwestern team and this staff for this upcoming season. No question, though, that Year 4 will be hardest to project thus far for Braun at Northwestern.

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The Atlanta Braves are elite. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Milwaukee Brewers, too. These three clubs also boast the three best records in the National League. They all maintain a positive run differential over 100, the only three teams in the NL with such high marks. The Washington Nationals, who have been one of the most pleasant surprises through mid-June, are fourth in run differential in the NL at +16. The gulf between the Braves, the Dodgers, and the Brewers as we inch closer to July is vast. To be sure, Milwaukee is just 4.5 games up on another pleasant surprise this season, the St. Louis Cardinals, in the NL Central. The Braves are up 7 games on the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Dodgers are up 9 games on the San Diego Padres. There is a Big Three in the NL, so it’s fair to wonder just how many sellers there will be on that side of the sport compared to the other side, where chaos reigns supreme.

The other side is the American League.

There is exactly one team with over 40 wins and a positive run differential of over 100, the New York Yankees. The only other team with 40-plus wins, the Tampa Bay Rays, have a bit of a troubling run-differential of plus-6, even though they’re twelve games over .500. The Chicago White Sox lead in the AL. The Houston Astros are seven games below .500 and just 4.5 games out of first place in the AL West. If the playoffs began today, one AL Wildcard team would have a losing record – the Athletics. With the nature of this League in 2026, could we have two iterations of the 2010 Seattle Seahawks? It’s plausible, even if unlikely, because anything in this League seems is plausible at the moment.

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The NL is like the Big Ten in college football this season. Extremely top-heavy with a handful of teams that can win it all. The Ohio States, the Michigans, the Oregons, the Indianas.

Then a huge drop-off.

The AL is like the Big 12 in college football this season. Even the top team, the Yankees, has its warts, particularly with Aaron Judge, the team’s best player, out for a while due to injury. The traditional topsy-turvy nature of the Big 12 is how I see the AL this season. There are just so many different teams that I could see winning the pennant. The Toronto Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles have lots of ground to make up to catch the Yankees or Rays, but both could quite easily earn two of the three Wild Card spots. Outside of the Kansas City Royals, everyone else can win the AL Central. Same with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and the AL West. Did I already mention that the Chicago White Sox lead the AL Central, and it’s June 17? The team that has averaged fifty wins over the last two seasons sits alone in first place in one of the three AL divisions.

Lots of That’s Baseball stuff all around the AL. Truly.

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In the NL, you understand if Arizona doesn’t get bold ahead of the 2026 MLB Trade Deadline. Or the Washington Nationals. Or the Chicago Cubs. The Phillies and the Padres should because when Dave Dombrowski and AJ Preller elect to cash in more chips, that is always entertaining, and, as I’ve written before, should always be encouraged when so many of their peers operate in a starkly different manner. The Braves, the Dodgers, and the Brewers should do Obvious Contender Buyer Things. Atlanta has to add a starter, and maybe an outfield bat, too. (Jose Soriano and Jorge Soler, perhaps?) Los Angeles could look to add a starter, like Detroit’s Tarik Skubal, but with a lockout looming, let’s hope not. Milwaukee could add another starter, perhaps in that Brandon Sproat spot in the rotation. Although Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee are in the top-4 in Team ERA, along with the Yankees. (Teams with a great Team ERA sit atop the MLB standings this season. More at 11!)

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In the AL, the Minnesota Twins could get nuts. Byron Buxton has been excellent. Joe Ryan has been excellent. I’d like to see Twins general manager Jeremy Zoll be bold and throw a little caution to the wind this summer. The Twins’ four best hitters in terms of WRC+ this season are all 29-plus. Minnesota has made the postseason one time in the last six seasons, and as you can see with Chicago, it’s a weird year in that division. Do something bold and try to be what the Tigers thought they would be this year.

Baltimore seems consistently unlucky, but they’re still 2.5 games out of an AL wild card spot. Orioles general manager Mike Elias has drafted well, but now might be the time to continue to take big swings and part with some of them for a big-time starter.

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The Rangers and the Astros are projected to finish with 80 and 77 wins, respectively, per Fangraphs’ playoff projection model. Both Texas teams already won their championships, but both are still on the high end in terms of team payroll, with Houston at No. 7, per Spotrac. For Houston, they had the look of the most intriguing seller team potentially. Now, with how open the AL is, do they feel froggy and go for it? It’s easy to forget that Seattle was four games below .500 the last week of May.

There are so many different things that so many of these different teams in the AL could do that would completely shake up the AL pennant picture. That’s unique to the AL this season. There are teams that a lot of these teams could talk to, like the Mets, the San Francisco Giants, the Cincinnati Reds, the Tigers, the Angels, and the Boston Red Sox. Skubal, Logan Webb, Freddy Peralta, Eugenio Suárez, Soriano, et cetera, et cetera. So many names, for so many teams that should be bold and talk themselves into winning the AL pennant this fall because they can win the AL pennant this fall. So, so many different teams could make it out of the AL this fall. That’s not how it is in the NL, but the stark contrast in the two leagues this year is pretty neat. I hope most of the AL executives see it this way, too.

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The New York Knicks are your 2025-26 NBA champions. The Knicks were a brilliant team that just closed out a brilliant season. They were a team that reeled off 13 straight playoff wins at one point in their championship run, their first NBA championship since 1973. The core of Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, OG Anunoby, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Mikal Bridges led the Knicks to a 16-3 postseason record, and that five-man unit finished a fantastic +13.9. From the miraculous comeback win in Game 4 to go up 3-1 against the San Antonio Spurs to the legendary 45-point close-out game performance from Brunson, the Knicks earned their first championship in 53 years.

One interesting footnote about this title run, which will be lost in the archives for every NBA fan outside the Greater Atlanta Area, is that the Atlanta Hawks were the team that bested the Knicks the most. Indeed, Atlanta beat New York twice in their first-round series and went up 2-1 before getting thoroughly pummeled and losing in six games. The only team to beat the NBA champions twice this postseason. After losing Game 3 to the Hawks, the Knicks would not lose another game until Game 3 of the NBA Finals. Something clicked for New York in Game 4 for head coach Mike Brown’s team, and they never looked back.

But there are lessons to be had from the Knicks’ title run for Atlanta. One includes the Knicks, and last year’s Eastern Conference champion, the Indiana Pacers, and their best players: Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton. The latter was named a third-team All-NBA player in 2024-25, and yet, Indiana pushed the Oklahoma City Thunder to seven games in last year’s NBA Finals. Brunson, this year’s NBA Finals MVP, has been named a second-team All-NBA player the past three seasons. Even sweeter for Brunson, he was able to knock out both Cade Cunningham’s Detroit Pistons and Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs during his all-time great playoff run, both of whom were named first-team (and first-time) All-NBA players for this season. Neither Brunson nor Haliburton has ever been voted a first-team All-NBA player in their NBA careers, and yet, it hasn’t mattered in the slightest as both have led their teams to the NBA Finals in back-to-back seasons.

This relates to Atlanta in two ways.

First, there is a lot of debate about who Atlanta Hawks President of Basketball Operations Onsi Saleh should take with the No. 8 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. There should be a litany of intriguing guards, and one gigantic big, available when the Hawks make their selection later this month. While all are interesting and talented, none are projected to have the upside or intrigue of AJ Dybantsa or Darryn Peterson. However, Brunson was a second-round selection by the Dallas Mavericks. Haliburton was drafted 12th overall by the Sacramento Kings. Donovan Mitchell, who was a first-team All-NBA player last year and a second-team All-NBA player this year, went 13th in the 2017 NBA Draft. Jamal Murray, who played a gigantic role for the Denver Nuggets’ championship in 2023, went 7th overall in the 2016 NBA Draft. Point being, whether it’s Mikel Brown Jr., Keaton Wagler, Darius Acuff Jr., or Kingston Flemings, if Atlanta takes a guard at No. 8 rather than No. 1 or No. 2, the Hawks could still find a future All-NBA player in that spot.

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Secondly, both the Knicks and the Pacers knew what they had in Brunson and Haliburton and went for it. New York made bold trades for both Towns and Bridges in a commendable effort to surround Brunson with the best pieces possible to try and win a championship during his prime. Indiana traded for Pascal Siakam. Both had two quality bigs who flourished in their roles, Towns and Robinson for New York, and Myles Turner and Thomas Bryant for Indiana. They were Super Teams, but with an emphasis on the ‘team’ part. The New York and Indiana front offices just built two fantastic teams that proved to complement their star lead guards.

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For Atlanta, do you look at the success of just building around Your Guy, even if you’re not certain they’ll ever be top-5 or even top-10 players in the Association, and change gears with Jalen Johnson? More specifically, with Johnson turning 25 in December, do you look to take guys at No. 8 and No. 23 who you feel can best supercharge the roster around your own third-team All-NBA player? Johnson might not be a lead guard like Brunson or Haliburton, but he is a point forward poised to become a multi-time All-NBA player who just had a 23/10/8 season in his breakout year. For Saleh, has Johnson shown you enough to push you towards building the best possible contender around a player with Johnson’s skillset? Ultimately, should the focus in Atlanta for the next two to three seasons be defined by what Johnson can ultimately be and by what Saleh concoction of role players he can ultimately surround his do-it-all forward with?

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With eight different champions across eight seasons, parity is at an all-time high in the NBA. If you’re Atlanta, you have a franchise cornerstone who may not be a perennial first-team All-NBA player like Shai-Gilgeous Alexander or Wembanyama. However, he could be like a Brunson or a Haliburton, a perennial second- or third-team All-NBA player. We came very close to those two guys winning it all the last two seasons in the NBA.

The Hawks were 27-16 after dealing former franchise cornerstone Trae Young to the Washington Wizards this season. From February 1 to the end of the regular season, the Hawks were 6th in the NBA in point differential, one spot ahead of the Knicks, per CleaningTheGlass. From the tenth of February to the end of the regular season, the Hawks were 3rd in point differential.

That’s pretty, pretty good.

Atlanta’s current roster makeup is both strong and intriguing. They have big offseason decisions to make on CJ McCollum, Jonathan Kuminga, Zaccharie Risacher, among a few others, but Atlanta’s core of Johnson, Dyson Daniels, and Oneyaka Okongwu is a solid foundation. Quin Snyder is a good NBA head coach, and the team just locked him up to a multi-year extension. Perhaps Saleh packages No. 8 and No. 23 to move up. Perhaps Year 2 Asa Newell is a helpful rotation big next year who provides a different and effective look for opposing bigs. Perhaps Kuminga, after a full offseason with the team, takes a big step next year.

The Hawks proved to be an excellent basketball team from February on this year. While a lot of fans might think the Hawks are still looking for their guy to guide them to the NBA Finals, he might already be on the roster in Johnson, who might already be the best overall player, or certainly has the highest upside, for the franchise since Dominque Wilkins. Atlanta, like New York and Indiana, might already have its overlooked star who can ultimately guide the franchise to where they want to go. The Knicks and Pacers built around Their Guy in this era of extreme parity at the top. Will the Hawks do the same around Their Guy?

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The North Dakota State Bison and the Sacramento State Hornets will play in the FBS this fall. With their arrival, the FBS now has 138 teams to account for this upcoming season. The ethos of this newsletter is that it is for sports fans who want to know a little about a lot. With so many teams, and so little time, who could blame you if you might have missed one of the best stories in college football last season – Wake Forest won nine games under first-year head football coach Jake Dickert.

Before the season, FanDuel placed the Demon Deacons’ betting odds win total at 4.5 wins. It was the second-lowest win-total mark in the ACC – Stanford had the betting win total in the conference at 3.5 wins. The latter went 4-8 and was one of the worst teams in the conference. The former went 9-4 and was one of the best teams in the conference. The Demon Deacons were second in the conference in limiting touchdowns once opposing offenses got into the Red Zone. Wake Forest finished 18th in the FBS in DFEI, per BCFToys. Along that same line, the Demon Deacons nearly won double-digit games with an offense that finished 90th in FBS in OFEI, per BCFToys.

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First-year head coach Jake Dickert has now won a combined 17 games across his last two seasons at Washington State and Wake Forest. Interestingly enough, he has proven to have a knack for winning in two vastly different ways. In 2024, with star quarterback John Mateer under center, the Cougars won eight games, led by their offense, and finished 38th in OFEI, while the DFEI was 89th. The latter stat, DFEI, was one spot better than the 2025 Demon Deacon offense.

Dickert’s starting quarterback in 2025, the well-traveled Robbie Ashford, finished 15th in QBR in the ACC, 105th among qualified FBS passers overall. And Dickert’s Deacons were still a very questionable late-game call against Georgia Tech away from finishing the season with double-digit wins.

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Dickert’s presumed starting quarterback in 2026 is Gio Lopez, a North Carolina and South Alabama transfer, who reunites with his former offensive coordinator, Rob Ezell, from their time in Mobile, after a disastrous one-year pit stop in Chapel Hill last season. Interestingly enough, Lopez finished one spot ahead of Ashford in QBR last season. There are a lot of reasons for optimism as it pertains to Ezell reuniting with Lopez, as the latter posted the third-best QBR in the SunBelt in 2024. Lopez was second in EPA among qualified QBs in the SunBelt, too. A bounce-back season for Lopez with Ezell is certainly in the cards and could lead to another fun season of Demon Deacon football in Winston-Salem this fall.

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It was an odd year for the four North Carolina schools in the ACC. Duke finished the season with nine wins and won the ACC, but missed out on the College Football Playoff as a P4 conference champion. (They then lost their star quarterback, Darian Mensah, to the lone ACC team that made the CFP, Miami, where the Blue Devils’ current head football coach, Manny Diaz, was last a head football coach at. Phew.) Bill Belichick made his debut, and the Tar Heels went 4-8 in a brutal Year 1 for perhaps the greatest NFL head coach of all time. NC State bounced back from an out-of-character disastrous 2024 campaign, in which the Wolfpack went 6-7 and finished 15th in the ACC in defense, and developed and then retained its star quarterback, CJ Bailey, for at least one more season. You could also tell me that all four North Carolina programs feel most like 8-4 teams in 2026, and that would seem about right.

There are all sorts of intertwining storylines between these four schools. The Demon Deacons added the Tar Heels’ starting quarterback from last year. The Wolfpack, not the Blue Devils, returns its star quarterback from a season ago. The latter lost its star quarterback to Miami, where the former star quarterback starred in high school. The pressure is on Belichick’s Tar Heels to go bowling in 2026, while Dickert’s Demon Deacons are playing with house money after winning nine games last year when the program won a combined eight games the previous two seasons. Three of the four programs will start transfer quarterbacks in their first season at their new school, with NC State being the lone exception. Bailey at NC State is the best bet to be the best of the bunch this fall, but there is all sorts of intrigue around Lopez and Ezell, Billy Edwards Jr. and Bobby Petrino, and even Walter Eget and Jonathan Brewer. We know Kurt Roper and Bailey work — the latter was 3rd among ACC quarterbacks in passer rating last season, with only Mensah and Carson Beck ahead of him. There could be fun stories galore for all four of these programs on offense in 2026.

But I think Wake Forest was the best story of the bunch last year, and very well could be the best story of the bunch this year.

However, because there are so many great stories in the sport, particularly in their own conference with the Hurricanes’ CFP run, Clemson and Florida State’s continued decline, Virginia and Duke’s surprising surge, it was only natural to overlook Dickert and his Demon Deacons. Nobody thought that the ACC championship would pit the Cavaliers against the Blue Devils, and most folks didn’t think Wake Forest would be dangerously close to ten wins in Dickert’s first season in Winston-Salem.

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Could Dickert’s Year 2 surprise at Wake Forest be a trip to the 2026 ACC title game? It’s certainly possible because in the current makeup of the ACC, anything and everything is possible for so many different teams, it seems. If it were to happen, don’t be surprised that it was Dickert, who has won the last two seasons consistently, even with extreme deficiencies on one side of the ball, who was the head coach that pulled it off.

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It’s the middle of June as I type this, which means it’s that time of the year when I might write a piece with the 3 Thoughts On Tennessee’s Early Game Time Windows prompt. It’s a bit too early for some in-depth Tennessee football writing that I’m sure to do in the months to come. It’s the perfect time to write a piece, I think, about things like Tennessee football kickoff times for the upcoming season.

So, let’s dive into my midsummer thoughts on the matter of Tennessee football kickoff windows for the upcoming college football season.

Favorite Window: Texas at Noon EST

This is where I admit what I suppose might be a bit of a hot take for college football fans: I much prefer Tennessee playing at 12:00 PM EST over playing at 8:00 PM EST. Generally speaking, of course. Night games in Neyland are a delight, but give me two of those each season and more 3:30 PM EST and 12:00 PM EST kicks. I never want night games in Neyland Stadium to not feel special.

Football Saturdays, when your team doesn’t kick off until 8:00 PM EST, can make the day drag. If it’s a huge game, like a night game in The Swamp, the all-day anxiety in the lead up to the game is unpleasant, and that’s putting it mildly. To be clear, 3:30 PM EST is the sweet spot, particularly as we get later into the season and the sun goes down for the second halves of big-time ball games.

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With that all being said, I like that Tennessee will play Texas early. The night games you have to have on this schedule inside Neyland Stadium are both easy and obvious: It’s Kentucky for the Dark Mode game on November 7, and it’s LSU for the Lane Kiffin Return game two weeks later. You could sell me on Auburn for the Alex Golesh Return game being a better night-game fit than Texas, too.

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I understand it’s a Manning playing for the opposing team in Neyland, and that the Longhorns have the best roster on paper in the SEC this season. I get all of that, but I like the idea of kicking this thing off at noon. The Vols will already be tasked with winning on the road against a formidable P4 team, either with a redshirt freshman or true freshman quarterback under center, in Week 2 on The Flats versus Georgia Tech.

I also like the thought of George MacIntyre or Faizon Brandon having less time that Saturday to think about their first start in the SEC against the Texas Longhorns. Remember, Texas head football coach Steve Sarkisian’s team kicked off at 11:00 AM central in Columbus in Week 2 last year and lost 14-7 against a redshirt freshman former blue-chip quarterback, Julian Sayin, in the first big start of his college career for Ohio State. Tennessee will play many games between 3:30 and 8:00 PM EST this fall, so an odd noon spot for this game is just fine.

Least Favorite Window: Furman at 3:30 PM EST

You could not drag me kicking and screaming to this game on this day at this time. The first game of the season will likely be a scorcher in Knoxville at 3:30 PM EST on Sep. 5 against the Paladins. If there were a way to ensure that Tennessee’s buy-game openers only took place on Thursday night, under the lights in Neyland Stadium, if I were athletic director Danny White, I would do it in a heartbeat. I’ve been to two of those, one against Bowling Green in 2021 and one against Ball State in 2022. The Thursday night opener is a delight. The Sports Renaissance Woman and I would go to them every year if it were a yearly occurrence, no question. It frees your Saturday up to watch all the games you want to watch without having to keep the main TV on the Vols’ drubbing the poor Paladins across a four-hour slog. There is no doubt that Furman at 3:30 in Week 1 is the worst game time window for Tennessee this fall.

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Sneaky Great Windows: South Carolina at 3:30-4:30 PM EST, and Arkansas at either 3:30-4:30 PM EST or 6:00-8:00 PM EST

If I could only use one word to describe Tennessee’s 2026 football schedule, I would say that it’s ‘arduous’. I would not have used that word to describe Tennessee’s 2025 or 2024 football schedule. I would probably use the word ‘fortunate’ to describe those two Tennessee football schedules. Tennessee will have to scratch and claw its way to eight or nine wins this season, with a true freshman or redshirt freshman at quarterback. If Tennessee wins eight games this year, it’s a success. If they win nine, it might be head football coach Josh Heupel’s best coaching job in his six years on Rocky Top. If they win ten, you, the Tennessee football fan reading this, need to snap out of it entirely and remove those orange-tinted glasses.

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The march to eight or nine wins has so much to do with how the Vols play on the road in Fayetteville and in Columbia. The last time the Vols played the Razorbacks on the road, they lost and lost in quite a frustrating fashion. The last time the Vols played the Gamecocks on the road, they lost and lost in quite stunning fashion. Tennessee hasn’t won at Arkansas since 2001 and has lost four of its last five meetings against the Hawgs overall. Tennessee hasn’t won at South Carolina since 2020 and has lost three of their last four meetings against the Gamecocks on the road overall.

Tennessee will get South Carolina in the afternoon, which could prove to be huge. If the Vols can get Arkansas in the afternoon, too, that would be the kind of two-game break the team, and its freshman quarterback, could really need to win a 50-50 SEC game on the road. If Tennessee finishes the season with nine wins, I would be willing to bet they lucked out with both of these conference games falling in the afternoon rather than under the lights on the road.

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Fernando Mendoza was the best quarterback in the Big Ten last season. He was the best quarterback in the FBS. He won the Heisman trophy. He led the Indiana Hoosiers to a national championship. He was then drafted No. 1 overall in the 2026 NFL Draft by the Las Vegas Raiders. Mendoza led, without a doubt, one of the most impressive and stunning college football national championship teams of all time. However, this time last year, nobody saw any of that coming. That not even the most clairvoyant college football fans and analysts alike did not see any of it coming is one of the many things that makes sports great, how unpredictable all of this can still be, even with how much information we all have at our disposal.

This is why I have been thinking a lot about CBS Sports’ Mike Renner’s Way-Too-Early 2027 NFL Mock Draft, which he released last month.

It has the three usual suspects at the top – Arch Manning, Jeremiah Smith, and Dante Moore. It’s a pretty safe bet as we sit here in mid-June that these three collegiate phenoms will hear their name called in the first three picks, in some order, next April. Three stars on three different teams, each with national championship expectations this fall. These three are the best mid-June guesses as to who takes home the Heisman trophy next season, too.

And yet, those three stars are not the reason Renner’s mid-May mock has continued to rattle around my brain over the course of the last month. It was actually the player listed right after those usual suspects. It was Drake Lindsey, the starting quarterback at Minnesota, going No. 4 to the Cleveland Browns. In what is shaping up to be an all-time great year for an NFL team to need a franchise quarterback, Renner mocked Lindsey ahead of South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers, Miami’s Darian Mensah, Notre Dame’s CJ Carr, NC State’s CJ Bailey, Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss, Ohio State’s Julian Sayin, USC’s Jayden Mavaia, and the list goes on and on. There are so many potential big-time quarterbacks, depending on how their 2026 season unfolds, who could go early in a loaded 2027 NFL Draft.

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Lindsey to the Browns at No. 4 is the good stuff.

The Golden Gophers haven’t had a player taken that high in the draft since defensive tackle Carl Eller went No. 6 overall in 1964. The Gophers haven’t had a quarterback drafted since Craig Curry was drafted by the Miami Dolphins in 1972, who took him in the eighth round. The Gophers have developed several first-rounders in my lifetime, including Rashad Bateman, Laurence Maroney, Willie Middlebrooks, along with some other big-time guys like Marion Barber III, Antoine Winfield Jr., Boye Mafe, Eric Decker, et cetera. The Minnesota Golden Gophers have been a solid program for most of my time on this planet.

There is just no historical precedent for a Minnesota quarterback going No. 4 overall.

The former three-star recruit is listed at 6’5” and 230 lbs. As a redshirt freshman last season under the perpetually underrated PJ Fleck, he started all thirteen games for Minnesota. He guided the Gophers to an 8-5 final record, the most wins ever by a freshman quarterback at Minnesota. In six of his final seven games last season, Lindsey didn’t throw a single interception.

It’s hard to believe Fleck has already been at Minnesota for a decade. In that time, he’s quietly been extremely successful. He had an 11-win season in 2019. He’s won eight or nine games in four of the last five seasons. He’s built a sky-high floor for most Gopher teams under his watch in the Big Ten.

Sure, there was a lot of mystery and intrigue about Max Brosmer when he transferred in from New Hampshire, and Tanner Morgan was perfectly solid for several seasons. However, a 6’5” quarterback with a cannon for an arm getting top-5 pick buzz in the NFL Draft is uncharted waters for this program under Fleck and for Minnesota football.

Minnesota hasn’t been ranked since the 2022-23 college football season. Their preseason betting win total, per FanDuel, sits at 6.5 wins as of this writing. Minnesota lost its best player to Oregon in safety, and the former No. 1 overall player in the state of Minnesota as a prep player, Koi Perich. As I already wrote in this very piece, though, even with the loss of Perich, that betting win total seems low, especially when you take into account Fleck’s track record. If Lindsey is anywhere close to being worth the No. 4 overall pick in the 2027 NFL Draft, the Gophers are going to win eight or more games.

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They do return Darius Taylor at tailback, who rushed for over 100 yards in his final two games last season. He’s averaged nearly 5 yards per carry across three seasons. They brought in former blue-chip offensive tackle Bennett Warren from Tennessee. They took a flyer on another former blue-chip wideout in Perry Thompson from Auburn. Per ESPN’s Bill Connelly, the Gophers are No. 7 in FBS in returning production, borderline top-10 in both offense and defense. Simply put, there is a lot to like about Minnesota, before you even throw in a third-year quarterback with thirteen starts under his belt getting high first-round buzz.

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I don’t have any idea if Lindsey will end up being the No. 4 pick in the 2027 NFL Draft, but if he does, I do wonder what kind of season Minnesota will have as a result. Does Lindsey guide the Gophers to their first College Football Playoff appearance? Does that brutal 6.1 YPA inch closer to 9.1 in a pivotal draft year for Lindsey? It’s a sneaky huge year for offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Greg Harbaugh Jr. Minnesota gets Michigan, Mississippi State, Iowa, UCLA, and Northwestern at home. Could they steal one or two in Happy Valley, Seattle, or Madison?

I don’t know.

Still, I think I know the difference between the expected eight-ish wins and ten-ish wins is what Lindsey ultimately develops in his second year as QB1 for the Gophers. I love the boldness of Lindsey at No. 4 by Renner, and I love what that could mean for the Minnesota football program if he plays up to that billing this fall.

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I’ve grown accustomed to watching most sporting events a certain way. To write and podcast about sports, I have, rather, I get to watch a lot of sports. The thing is, though, that I don’t watch most sports live.

I love to read, I love to write, I love to walk, and, man, I love to watch my sports games after they’ve been recorded. I can fast-forward through commercials and fast-forward through halftime. It’s delightful, and it’s the overwhelming winner, for me, as to how I prefer to watch my sports.

Except, it does not work that way during football season. I watch most of my football games live. I have to watch most of my games live. Every weekend, I watch the Tennessee Volunteers and Atlanta Falcons live, and mostly every other college football and NFL game that I’m fascinated by the same way – live.

At 35 years old, football is the last sport standing that I will continue to watch live consistently. I love basketball, baseball, et cetera, but I love burning through an Atlanta Hawks game in two hours and continuing with my day or evening. When my wife and I vacationed in Maui a couple of summers ago, one of my first thoughts was how perfect the time zone difference was for sports fans, particularly retired sports fans. We were six hours behind, and man, I’d love to knock out the forthcoming Falcons game heartbreak before I’ve had my third cup of coffee.

Alas, that is not how things work back in East Tennessee. Indeed, the last Tennessee football game I missed live was against Akron in 2022 and for good reason – I married my lovely wife that third Saturday in September. Part of the reason football stands alone, particularly the Vols and the Falcons, is how impossible it is to avoid spoilers. If I don’t watch the football games I want to watch live, then and there, man, it is hard in 2026 to avoid the scores before I settle in and watch the taped game. I am in a couple of different group chats, and it is pretty dang hard to keep from reading through them before I’ve watched the game they’ve all spent the last several hours reacting to.

I also do enjoy participating in those group chats during the games, as it adds another fun element to the game while I take my notes on my trusted yellow Legal pad. The trade-off is so many additional commercials, instant replays, halftime shows, et cetera, that I breeze through the rest of the sports calendar that I have no choice but to sit through in the fall during football season. (But, man, it would be nice if most Tennessee football games could be closer to two-hour events than four-hour events. College football games, and the closing minutes to most college basketball games, are far too long.)

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I don’t have this problem for most other sporting events, outside of watching the NBA on Peacock, where watching recorded games, or even starting a game that already started from the beginning, is not a thing, somehow. (Watching Tennessee baseball games on ESPN+ behind or taped can also be an adventure.) I watch the Hawks, the Atlanta Braves, the NBA, the NHL Playoffs, and every other sporting event that I’m interested in on delay or already recorded. It’s a great way for a sportswriter who watches a lot of sports to live.

This is just not how it works during football season, but I love football season. I love football Saturdays in the South, even more so since I moved to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee for graduate school nearly six years ago. In a way, I think watching most everything else after the fact has made football season more fun. I never feel like an Atlanta Hawks season or a Tennessee baseball season flies by, but there hasn’t been a year that an Atlanta Falcons season or a Tennessee football season hasn’t felt like it has flown by. There are just over a handful of games played in Neyland Stadium every year, and I appreciate every one of them the best way I know how at this time in my life – I watch them all live.

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But it takes some getting used to. I really love watching my sports games after the fact, with no spoilers, of course. I love efficiently moving through a game and having more time to hang out with my wife and read my books. I love sports, and I love watching them, but I don’t love watching them live, for most of the year, anyway. Football season is different. High school football, college football, and the NFL, it’s all the same to me – I watch the games I want to watch live.

We’ve got a little over a couple of months to go until I transition into being a Live Sports Guy again. Late August and early September will be here before I know it, and my time as a Taped Sports Guy will be pushed aside for a while. (Outside of the Braves and the MLB postseason, of course.) Still, I’ve come to love and appreciate both times of the year in the sports calendar. I love watching most of my sports games on delay, and I do envy the sports fans on Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, but I do love watching football live, too, ven if I’m never really ready for it.

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Rutgers joined the Big Ten in 2014. Since then, the Scarlet Knights have won zero games against ranked opponents. That’s over a decade of games since becoming a Power 4 football program with zero wins against a team ranked inside the AP Top 25. That’s a really long time for a fanbase to watch their team not win a big game. A really long time. It seems especially implausible with Rutgers in the Power 2.

Rutgers won eight games in their first season in the Big Ten in 2014 under former head coach Kyle Flood and hasn’t reached that eight-game threshold of victories since. It hasn’t been a disaster – Rutgers has gone bowling in two out of the last three seasons, but is that enough for the Scarlet Knight fanbase in 2026 and beyond? When you look at Rutgers’ 2026 football schedule, can you identify the most realistic path to ending their ranked-win drought? At Penn State on Nov. 21? USC at home in Week 3? Nebraska at home in Week 14? I don’t have the answer, but as every other fan of an NL East team not named the Atlanta Braves told themselves for much of the ‘90s and early 2000s, they can’t win the division every year, well, forever, right?

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One of my favorite college football podcasts, CBS Sports’ Cover 3, co-host Bud Elliott has this saying when it comes to matters like Rutgers, Maryland, or Nebraska in the Big Ten. His phrase is, “Take the checks, take the losses.” He’s right, whether it’s about Arkansas or Mississippi State in the SEC or Rutgers or Maryland in the Big Ten. From 2006-2009, Rutgers won an average of nine games a year in the Big East. The school has not won nine games once since joining the Big Ten. The Hawgs and Bulldogs aren’t anywhere close to winning the SEC, just like the Scarlet Knights and Terrapins aren’t anywhere close to winning the Big Ten. With the Big Ten being more top-heavy than the SEC, the prospect of a Rutgers or Maryland ever breaking through seems even more improbable than an Arkansas or Mississippi State doing so. Sure, the four schools are in the Power 2, ostensibly a great place to be in college football, but would Rutgers and Maryland not have more fun playing football in the ACC, or Arkansas and Mississippi State playing football in the Big 12?

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Before joining the Big East in 1991, the Scarlet Knights were an independent FBS program. They didn’t win big during that era of Rutgers football, but they did beat Penn State in 1988. In the 1970s, under Frank Burns, a former Rutgers quarterback himself, the Scarlet Knights won a lot, including an 11-0 season in which they finished ranked No. 17 in both the AP Poll and the Coaches Poll. A double-digit win season is plausible for Rutgers as an independent, but implausible as a Big Ten member.

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Former UConn head football coach Jim Mora, now at Colorado State, had similar success coaching the independent Huskies the last few years. Mora took the Huskies to three bowl games in the last four years. He won nine games in back-to-back seasons. Fan attendance is going in the right direction. The last time UConn won nine games was under Randy Edsall, back in 2007, when they were still in the Big East. Then Edsall left, the school joined the AAC, and they wandered the wilderness for years and years. If you were to poll the average UConn fan about the last two seasons under Mora, the feedback should be overwhelmingly positive, right? They beat the ACC champions in late November. They beat Boston College on the road, and, well, they won nine games. UConn football over the last couple of seasons has been a great story. Rutgers could be a great story as an FBS independent, too.

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If you’re a Rutgers fan, with over a decade of evidence now, how could you not want to be in UConn’s shoes, as an independent for football and in the Big East for basketball? That’d be the dream in 2026, right? A future football schedule that could include some combination of UConn, Delaware, Temple, Boston College, Syracuse, UMass, Pittsburgh, and maybe even Notre Dame would be a whole lot more interesting for a Rutgers football fan, right? You could go into most Saturdays with both the hope and the expectation of winning lots of football games. With the status quo, you hope you have Maryland and Purdue on the schedule. You hope, at some point, like Montreal Expos or Florida Marlins fans hoped in the early-to-mid-2000s, that this can’t go on forever. That the Braves can’t win the NL East every year, and Rutgers can’t lose to every ranked team they face every year. Everything ends at some point, but is that this year for Scarlet Knights football fans? I don’t know, but I do know that I have seen what UConn has done as an FBS independent program, and from the outside, it seems like a much better fan experience than being a Rutgers or Maryland in the Big Ten.

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A few weeks ago, I came across a very great creation that I now read through every morning as part of my daily routine. Indeed, Boxscore.email is one of the easiest choices a sports fan can make to subscribe. I open my email, find Boxscore, click to open it in a new tab, and voila, a delightful deep dive into the box scores from last night’s games in Major League Baseball. It’s both simple and perfect. This creation doesn’t just include the box scores, either, as it also keeps you up-to-date on the AL and NL leaders in batting average, home runs, wins, ERA, and whatnot. It’s a perfect nostalgic creation that I hope hangs around forever and ever.

Naturally, though, with this kind of email newsletter, you start to notice some familiar faces on the leaderboard categories. For the last couple of days, I’ve noticed I’ve jotted them down as the Marlins Boxscore Guys in my brain as I read through the NL individual leaders in those aforementioned statistics. There are four excellent players who I have come to expect to see every morning in three different categories: 1) Otto Lopez and Xavier Edwards in batting average, 2) Liam Hicks in runs batted in, and 3) Jakob Marsee in stolen bases.

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The Marlins are 27-34 with a -25 run differential as of this Tuesday morning. The NL Central features five teams, all of which currently have winning records. The NL West has three teams, the NL East has three teams, too, with winning records. The Fish are, really, on the outside looking on the outside looking in when it comes to their playoff chances in early June. The wins are not there for Miami, at least not yet, but they are improved, and if you are a subscriber to the Boxscore email newsletter, you get a glimpse of the interesting, productive players the team employs this season.

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It’s a bit funny that both Florida teams have a player leading their respective League in batting average. In the AL, it’s Yandy Diaz of the Tampa Bay Rays. In the NL, it’s Lopez for the Marlins. The Rays are 15 games over .500 and only have nine more total hits than the Marlins this season. The Rays and Marlins are 27th and 28th in home runs, respectively. With a former longtime Tampa Bay Rays front office executive, Peter Bendix, leading the Miami front office, these similarities should probably not come as a surprise. The wins have just followed the Rays more than the Marlins to this point in the season. That’s baseball.

Lopez and Edwards are having fantastic seasons, though. The former leads the NL in average at .326. It’s also a huge bounce-back start for Lopez, as he hit .246 last year. He’s never had a WRC+ over 100, and that number sits at 132 in early June. With his .381 BABIP, perhaps Lopez doesn’t hold onto the NL lead in batting average, but he also might. And if he doesn’t, another Marlin, Edwards, might be the one to surpass him.

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Edwards is having an even better year than Lopez. Both are in their mid-20s, and both are hitting consistently atop the Miami batting order. Edwards has a 147 WRC+ and came into the season with a Fangraphs ZIPS projection of 113. His K% is the lowest it’s been in his young MLB career. You know he’s hitting for average if you’re a Marlins fan or a subscriber to the Boxscore email newsletter, and he also kinda did all of this two years ago. If you’re a Lopez long-term skeptic, consider that Edwards had a BABIP of .398 in 2024, although that included 303 total at-bats. He did finish third in all of MLB in singles last season, though. Imagine the RBIs with a Matt Olson or Drake Baldwin hitting behind Edwards and Lopez every day in that Miami lineup?

Goodness.

Speaking of RBIs, Liam Hicks. Another Marlins Boxscore Guy mainstay. Hicks is third in the NL in RBIs, trailing only Washington’s CJ Abrams and Los Angeles’ Andy Pages. Hicks, like Edwards and Lopez, is also in his mid-20s and has a WRC+ above 125. He also leads the team in home runs with 12. In his second season in Miami, Hicks is one RBI short of matching his season total last season in 167 fewer plate appearances. He’s surpassed the vast majority of his preseason ZIPS projections and is the lone Marlin to have double-digit dingers this season. In fact, Edwards is behind with sixth, which should give non-Marlins fans an idea of the kind of power that’s typically included in a Marlin lineup card.

Finally, Marsee makes the cut. He, along with Lopez, Edwards, and Hicks, has been one of the four best Miami hitters to this point in the season. Why Marsee is a Marlins Boxscore Guy, though, is all of those stolen bases he’s successfully nabbed. On April 7th, he swiped four stolen bases in one game. He’s in the 89th percentile in baserunning, per Baseball Savant. He’s an odd player, though, as he’s hitting .190, but he is also in the 82nd percentile in BB%. He doesn’t hit for power, he doesn’t hit for average, but, man, when he gets on base, he makes the most of his opportunities. Ultimately, in combination with his great defense, he’s what baseball fans would love their nine-hole hitter to be – a Stolen Base Guy with an above-average glove.

So these are the Marlins Boxscore Guys. Every morning, they’re there. You probably won’t see them on TBS in October, but you’ll see them in my favorite baseball morning email newsletter. Lopez, Edwards, Hicks, and Marsee are different players who have provided different kinds of value to the Marlins this season. Even though the wins haven’t been there like they have for their fellow rebuilding NL East foe, the Washington Nationals, the Marlins Boxscore Guys have produced and should continue to produce. That’s something for Miami fans dreaming of postseason baseball in 2026, isn’t it?

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Giannis Antetokounmpo might be on the move this summer. Indeed, after thirteen seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks, the former two-time MVP and ten-time NBA All-Star might be wearing a different uniform for the first time in his Hall-of-Fame career next season. Giannis, who finished in the top six in MVP voting for seven consecutive seasons before this season, is still a top-five talent in the League when healthy. With Giannis turning 32 in December, it’s fair to start wondering a bit about his durability moving forward after he played in just 36 games this past season, the fewest amount of games he had ever played in his NBA career. What interests me most about Giannis this summer, though, is that if the Bucks do in fact trade him, he reportedly would like to stay in the Eastern Conference.

That would be incredibly wise for Giannis. Just take a gander at the heavyweight slugfest that is the Oklahoma City Thunder versus the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals. That series has now reached a winner-take-all Game 7 for a chance to face the Eastern Conference champion New York Knicks, who have won eleven straight playoff games. Two things can be true for New York: 1) They are an elite basketball team that has consistently throttled their competition this postseason, who can also absolutely win the title, and 2) They have had an easier road to the Finals than, say, the Spurs, if they win Game 7 in Oklahoma City. Even with Nikola Jokic in his prime, the Denver Nuggets haven’t reached the Conference Finals since 2023. After reaching the Western Conference Finals two years in a row, Anthony Edwards and the Minnesota Timberwolves were bounced by the Spurs in the Conference Semifinals this season.

It’s different out West.

Whichever Eastern Conference team trades for Giannis will have a great shot to make the Finals next year. You might not say that if a team like the Golden State Warriors, Portland Trail Blazers, or either of the two Los Angeles teams out West traded for the 2021 NBA champion this summer. The Thunder and the Spurs are not going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. They’re younger, deeper, and are armed with a treasure trove of future draft picks and roster flexibility as they try to keep their contention window open for as long as possible around their superstars.

In the East, the Detroit Pistons could be a six-seed next season, and it wouldn’t be all that shocking. What does Jaylen Brown’s future look like in Boston? What does Tyrese Haliburton look like coming off the torn Achilles tendon he suffered in the NBA Finals last season for the Indiana Pacers? Will the Knicks have the same good fortune of good health next season, too?

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If the Celtics, the Miami Heat, the Toronto Raptors, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or even the Orlando Magic were to trade for Giannis this summer, you should not be surprised if that’s the team that reaches the NBA Finals out of the East next season. Even with his forgettable, injury-riddled season this year, Giannis averaged 28/10/8 while attempting just under ten free throws a game. None of the teams in the East that have the assets to swing a deal for Giannis should overthink any of this. If you can trade for Giannis this summer, you should try and trade for Giannis this summer – but this only applies to teams in the East.

There has been some selective amnesia when it comes to the Heat in the Playoffs of late. Sure, Erik Spoelstra’s team has been a Play-In team for four consecutive seasons, but they also reached the NBA Finals as the eighth seed in one of those seasons. This is not the Atlanta Hawks we’re talking about here. Before this season, the Heat had reached the Conference Finals in three of the last six seasons. If the Heat is the team that ultimately trades for Giannis, would it not be expected for the team to find similar success over a six-year stretch that concludes Antetokounmpo’s prime?

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With Boston, it’s similar in that you should not overthink it, even if it required sending Brown to Milwaukee in the deal. You won a championship with Brown and Tatum. There is nothing left to prove there – the duo won and won a lot. The folks who didn’t believe in that wing tandem were proven wrong. With the NBA having a different champion every year for the past seven years, which is uncharted waters for the League historically, there are no guarantees that Brown and Tatum would ever bring the city of Boston another ring – but Giannis and Tatum might. Like Miami, there is no downside to trading for Giannis. In the East, you take that swing ten out of ten times.

It’s the Magic that entices me the most, though, for Giannis. The history between the Orlando front office and Giannis is interesting. Who Orlando would have to give up in the deal is interesting. Orlando went up 3-1 on the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. The Magic haven’t reached the Conference Semifinals since 2010. We’re a few years away from nearly two decades of Magic postseason dread. The franchise got the No. 1 pick. They took the big swing and traded for a big-time shooting wing. They have drafted well and are a team that every NBA fan looks at and says, “Wow, they have a lot of guys on this team that I like,” and yet, none of it has translated into any postseason success whatsoever. I love the idea of the Magic usurping their in-state rival, the Heat, with a better trade package to Milwaukee. Giannis in Orlando isn’t the postseason slam dunk that it would be in Miami or Boston. (The team doesn’t even have a head coach right now.) Nobody thought the Pistons would win sixty games this year or the Pacers would reach the Finals last year. Unlike the West, the East is always open, even for the Magic.

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We shall see where Giannis ultimately lands this summer. If the reporting is accurate and Giannis would prefer to remain in the East, it would make the most basketball sense. If healthy, he would be in a position to play in a lot more meaningful postseason games than if he were to try and make it all work out west. Guys like Jokic, Edwards, Luka Doncic, and Kevin Durant are trapped. The Spurs and Thunder are two Death Stars atop the same conference. Who knows with the East? Who knows any year with the East? So if you’re Giannis, why would you ever leave? Life is good for a top-5 player in the East, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.

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It is very fitting that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish only trail the Ohio State Buckeyes on FanDuel for the best national championship odds for the upcoming college football season. It would not be a surprise at all if the two programs met in the College Football Playoff National Championship game this season. Again. The two teams are loaded on both sides of the ball, and each has a quarterback who very well could win the Heisman trophy this fall. The Irish have won fewer than 10 games just once since the start of the 2017 season, while the Buckeyes have won fewer than 10 games, pandemic-shortened season aside, just once over the last twenty years. What I wonder, though, particularly this upcoming season, for the Notre Dame faithful, is how much fun this fanbase can really have before the calendar flips to December?

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Last season, Georgia Bulldogs fans finally had the home schedule they dreamed of with Texas, Alabama, and Ole Miss all traveling to Athens for a road contest inside Sanford Stadium. Before the Bulldogs’ home loss against the Crimson Tide, head football coach Kirby Smart’s team had won thirty-three straight ball games at home. Even before the 2025 season kicked off, you looked at Georgia’s home slate of games and knew there was a strong possibility that the Bulldogs’ incredible home winning streak would end, but that’s what made the schedule so exciting for that fanbase. For the first time in years, there was a real chance they could walk out of Sanford Stadium following a Georgia loss. That’s what makes a great conference schedule, particularly at home, so much fun – a great schedule doesn’t necessarily mean a great result for your team.

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This season, Tennessee’s home schedule is extremely enticing. Texas, Auburn, LSU, and Alabama will travel to Neyland Stadium to face the Volunteers. With a freshman or redshirt freshman under center, I think every Vols fan would happily take a 2-2 split, with victories over the Bayou Bengals and Crimson Tide being the preferred two wins. Sure, the schedule is more arduous than what Tennessee had on the docket in 2025 and 2024, but as much as the powers that be try to fight it, the regular season is what makes this sport great. Huge games on college campuses. The more big games on your favorite school’s campus come with a price, though, and that is more losses, if you’re a glass-half-empty person. It can also come with more wins if you’re a glass-half-full person. I don’t know how many of those huge home games the Vols will win this fall, but I do know how electric the lead-up to each of them will be this fall, and, wouldn’t you know it, I’m way too ready to start next season, and it’s still just the latter part of May.

Ohio State fans haven’t experienced this for a long time. Notre Dame fans are experiencing it now. On one hand, it has to be a comforting feeling to have such a high floor every season, regardless of how many players from last year’s team move on to the NFL. On the other hand, doesn’t it kind of stink to know how high a floor your team has every season? With longtime rival USC off the schedule, Notre Dame has one big game at home this fall against the Miami Hurricanes, and that game doesn’t take place until November 7. It should be a fantastic game at a fantastic venue with a whole lot of extra juice after last season’s CFP last-one-in drama between the two schools.

But that’s it.

Wisconsin, Rice, Michigan State, Stanford, Boston College, and SMU are the remaining home games. Part of that is not their fault, of course, with both the Badgers and Spartans currently in rough patches for their storied programs, but which game outside of Miami are you really fired up about as a Fighting Irish fan this fall? This is what Georgia fans felt for years before last season’s home slate. I imagine it’s what Ohio State fans have felt for many years. Although the Buckeyes schedule, particularly early, is as dangerous as it’s been in the regular season in a long time. Ohio State has to play at Texas, Iowa, Indiana, and USC, along with home dates against Oregon, Illinois, and Michigan. There are more potential land mines on this schedule than there have been in a long time for the Buckeyes.

There aren’t many potential land mines on Notre Dame’s schedule. The Fighting Irish will play the four ACC schools with the worst projected conference championship betting odds this fall – North Carolina, Stanford, Boston College, and Syracuse. They will not travel to USC. Their biggest test, in a battle of national championship runner-ups the last two seasons, is in South Bend. There are no preseason CFP locks in college football, but the combination of Notre Dame’s talent, coaching staff, and schedule is as close as anyone in the sport this season.

But it’s the kind of season that if you’re a fan, you want to fast-forward to December. Texas could win it all, and they’re all-in, but their schedule is tough. Oregon has Michigan and Ohio State back-to-back. Indiana is as close as any contender to Notre Dame’s, but all this winning is so new that I don’t imagine the cupcake schedule is all that bothersome for Hoosier fans, at least for now.

Until that ostensibly inevitable CFP expansion, the regular season is still the most special part of the sport, but there is nothing special about Notre Dame’s regular schedule this fall. It’s the opposite. But head football coach Marcus Freeman’s team could win it all. The Hoosiers went undefeated with a similar schedule last year, and the Fighting Irish could do it this season, something Notre Dame hasn’t done in my lifetime. All of that is well and good, but I don’t think it’s fun or healthy to want to fast-forward your team’s regular season for a couple of postseason games on neutral sites. Do Notre Dame fans share this perspective? I don’t know, but I do know that I hope it never feels this way at Tennessee in late May.

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It was a very successful season for both the Detroit Pistons and the Atlanta Hawks in 2025-26. I don’t suspect it would be a surprise to anyone if they both won 50-plus games next season. Both franchises are in a great position to win many basketball games over the next couple of seasons with at least one certified star player in Cade Cunningham and Jalen Johnson, respectively. Two stars that fans of both franchises should be delighted to watch lead their basketball team for a long time. They also have one other interesting thing in common right now — both franchises used a top-5 pick on a wing in the 2024 NBA Draft that fell out of the rotation down the stretch this season. Those two players, Zaccharie Risacher, who the Hawks selected at No. 1 overall, and Ron Holland II, who the Pistons selected at No. 5 overall, are suddenly on the outside looking in on two franchises that are trying to become real, bona fide championship contenders.

For the Hawks, the Risacher dilemma stings a bit more. Frankly, it has to sting more with Hawks taking Risacher at No. 1 overall, weak class or not. Atlanta lucked their way into the No. 1 overall pick between Victor Wembanyama and Cooper Flagg draft classes. It’s not Atlanta’s fault, but it doesn’t make it sting any less.

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The Pistons missed at No. 5, No. 7, and No. 15 in recent years, but their No. 1 overall pick is already a top-10 player in the NBA. Detroit also lucked out in having the No. 1 overall pick in a draft where the No. 1 overall pick was obvious.

The Hawks took a player at No. 20 overall a few years prior and have developed him into a star who joined a select few to put up the kind of numbers he did in his first All-Star season in Atlanta. Different paths for both franchises to find their franchise cornerstone, but both drafted and developed their best player.

Time is more on Atlanta’s side, though, as the Pistons were the best regular-season team in the East this season. The timeline in the Motor City has sped up. There is a lot more pressure to win now in Detroit than there is to win now in Atlanta. Similar to the angst of whiffing on the No. 1 overall pick, there is a lot of angst that follows being the No. 1 seed in your conference and not even advancing to the conference finals. (Not to mention narrowly avoiding a first-round upset to an eight-seed, too.)

The Pistons have huge offseason decisions to make on their core guys in Jalen Duren, Ausar Thompson, among several other key players, while the Hawks have already locked up their key core guys in Johnson, Dyson Daniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and Oneyka Okongwu. Sure, they have to decide on what to do with guys like Jonathan Kuminga, Corey Kispert, CJ McCollum, Buddy Hield, and Jock Landale. Most of those are big decisions for Atlanta, yes, but you could argue that the electric run of wins and fun from the middle of February onward bought the franchise a lot of grace, even with the brutal demise at the hands of the New York Knicks in their first-round series. The Hawks were a delightful underdog story this season in the East after the Trae Young and Kristaps Porzingis trades, while the Pistons looked like Goliath, only to be eliminated in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.

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It’s not as though the Hawks don’t have any big decisions of their own to make this summer. Atlanta has the No. 8 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, and it would be an upset if the franchise did not take a guard or a big man with the selection if they stay at that spot. The last time we saw Atlanta, they averaged 88 points per 100 possessions in their blowout elimination loss to the Knicks, per CleaningTheGlass. Their offense, particularly in the halfcourt, got away from them after Game 3. While it was a jarring way for the Hawks to be eliminated at the time, New York is up 2-0 on the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals as of this writing and has won nine-straight playoff games. That first-round exit, as painful as it was, proved to be perfectly reasonable.

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To advance further in the postseason next year, Atlanta has to get bigger to help Okongwu, and perhaps that includes Michigan’s Aday Mara and his outrageous wingspan at No. 8. They also need their first-round pick from a season ago, Asa Newell, to become a factor, too. The Hawks have a long offseason ahead of them, but as thin as the frontcourt was down the stretch for Atlanta, the depth there could be flipped in quite a hurry. Mouhamed Gueye is in the final year of his deal, and Atlanta has a team-option decision to make on him, but you hope that’s picked up, and then see where things are next summer. He’s a plus-defender and a winning player for Atlanta. Landale proved to be a welcome late-season addition and provided another look inside for Snyder. His absence was felt majorly in that series against the Knicks. Okongwu is a fantastic player on a fantastic contract. That’s several different bigs with several different skillsets for Snyder to mix and match next season. It doesn’t mean Atlanta will be able to have quite that much depth, and we’ll see what they do at No. 8, but there are lots of reasons for optimism to help support Okongwu and prevent the Hawks from finding themselves in a situation inside as they did against New York this postseason.

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The Pistons have to pay Duren this summer. Tobias Harris is an unrestricted free agent. They’ve got fine rotation bigs Isaiah Stewart and Paul Reed under contract for next season, but Detroit, like Atlanta, is in a position where finding the right amount of shooting and defense to advance further in the postseason is quite complicated. Thompson and Duren are both tremendous players, but can they both be in Detroit’s best five-man lineups that advance to the NBA Finals? Do they prioritize selling high on one of those two guys to find Cunningham a veteran All-Star or borderline All-Star as the Robin to his Batman? What we know is the Pistons are a great team now with a top-10 player, well, now. Do they roll the dice with Thompson and Duren developing more offensively to make it all work with Cunningham and company?

I wonder if the same angst is shared by the Atlanta front office when it comes to Kuminga and Risacher, particularly due to the unique kind of all-around awesome player that Daniels is. The Great Barrier Thief is, admittedly, my favorite player on this team and an absolute delight to watch with the ball and without it. He is a winning player in so many ways, as evidenced by his +10.8 rating per 100 possessions, behind only McCollum at 10.9. (It should be noted that McCollum did play around 1,400 fewer minutes with the team than Daniels did last season after being acquired by the team in the Trae Young trade with the Washington Wizards.) He is a critical core piece, and while his three-point shooting improved a bit down the stretch – he shot 3-of-7 from deep in the final two games against the Knicks – you can’t bet on a major leap forward in the long-distance shooting department for a player like Daniels with just how bad it was over a huge sample size this season. You live with that, though, because he is an excellent driver, finisher, defender, and passer. It just means that Kuminga and Risacher have to be reliable threats from deep. More is on everyone else’s plate offensively, particularly Risacher and Kuminga. It means Risacher has to give you more, or it means Kuminga has to give you more, particularly in the postseason when things slow down, and the Hawks can’t crush teams in transition nearly as often.

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It would not be a surprise for Risacher and Holland II to play in the NBA for many years to come, but most of those years may not be with the team that drafted them. If the Hawks decline Kuminga’s team option, but then elect to re-sign him to a long-term extension, that probably does not bode well for Risacher’s long-term future in Atlanta. Or maybe they find a taker for Kispert’s contract this summer, and the team kicks the can down the road on having to decide between Kuminga and Risacher. If the Pistons envision Thompson and Duren as part of their long-term core with Cunningham, how does Holland II still fit into those plans after shooting under 25 percent from deep in his first two seasons in Detroit?

The Hawks and the Pistons are two teams in the East trying to become what the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks have been the last two seasons. Two teams that have the right combination of offense and defense to be considered bona fide contenders. To get there, they will have to make tougher, faster decisions on players like Holland II and Risacher. The Wizards can wait on Alex Sarr. The Utah Jazz can wait on Ace Bailey. The Hawks and Pistons can’t wait for Risacher and Holland II.

With Daniels and Thompson, does that cancel out Risacher and Holland II? Do they have to move them now rather than risk another season where they aren’t mainstays in the rotation on two teams trying to compete at the top of the East? What the Pistons and Hawks resolve to do with both former lottery picks will be fascinating nonetheless. The teams have done so many things right, particularly on the margins, of late, and have a strong foundation. Now, though, to get to that next level, it’s almost a game of Jenga, where one bad decision here on one of these guys could bring the whole thing tumbling down.

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Matt Ryan is the President of Football for the Atlanta Falcons. He also happens to be the best quarterback in franchise history. Below Ryan, it’s either Michael Vick or Steve Bartkowski. What the latter two have in common, outside of being great quarterbacks for the franchise, is that they both went No. 1 overall in the NFL Draft in their respective classes. The aforementioned Ryan went No. 3 overall. All three were the first quarterbacks off the board in their respective drafts.

Atlanta’s current franchise quarterback hopeful, Michael Penix Jr., was the fourth quarterback taken in the 2024 NFL Draft. The three quarterbacks taken before him, Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, and Drake Maye, have each already proven they’re franchise quarterbacks, and each has already made the postseason, with the latter leading his team to the Super Bowl this past season.

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The Falcons have not hosted a playoff game in the no-longer-new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and have the second-longest playoff drought in the NFL at eight seasons overall. The quickest way to resolve that embarrassing mark for the franchise is to get the quarterback position right. With Penix Jr. coming off yet another knee injury and the team signing Tua Tagovailoa as insurance, I can’t help but wonder where Ryan is when it comes to the most important position in football with the Atlanta Falcons, a position he knows and understands better than anyone in that building.

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Ryan, along with new general manager Ian Cunningham, did not draft Penix Jr. Along with the two new leaders in the Falcons’ front office, the team has a new head coach and new offensive staff underneath Kevin Stefanski. In college football, the term Year 0 is used frequently. For instance, with the amount of roster turnover and looming sanctions at Tennessee when Josh Heupel first arrived in Knoxville, it was understood the 2021 season was an evaluation year – a year to reset the deck. Year 0, not Year 1. With how the Falcons have operated in free agency thus far, it certainly does look like an evaluation and reset year is what’s on the menu for the Falcons in 2026, and for good reason. If Ryan, Cunningham, and Stefanski tie themselves to Penix Jr., and that decision proves to extend the team’s playoff drought to double-digit seasons, that’s a huge problem for the trio.

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Former longtime Atlanta Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff, who has now become vastly underrated by the fanbase over the last six years, used his first selection on Ryan in the 2008 NFL Draft. He led the franchise for over a decade in large part because he got the quarterback right right away in Atlanta. Ryan and Cunningham did not use their first selection as top decision-makers for the franchise in 2026 on a quarterback – the team did not even have a first-round pick this season after the previous administration traded back into the first round last year for Tennessee LEO James Pearce Jr. 2026 was also one of the weaker quarterback drafts with just two quarterbacks taken in the first round and just one taken in the top-10, Fernando Mendoza, who went No. 1 overall to the Las Vegas Raiders. However, Atlanta has its first-round pick in the 2027 NFL Draft. Next year’s draft is one that analysts believe to be loaded at the quarterback position, headlined by Texas’ Arch Manning.

The trio of Ryan, Cunningham, and Stefanski has all seen what happens when your team takes the first quarterback off the board in any particular draft. Ryan saw the longterm success he had with the franchise after being taken No. 3 overall and the first quarterback off the board in 2008. Cunningham was with the Bears when they selected Caleb Williams No. 1 overall. Stefanski, who won Coach of the Year twice during his tenure in Cleveland, was most successful with a quarterback the Browns took No. 1 overall in Baker Mayfield. Kind of like the NBA, where the San Antonio Spurs look like they’re headed towards another long-term all-time great run with former No. 1 overall pick Victor Wembanyama. The Detroit Pistons broke through this season, a season where their best player, Cade Cunningham, a former No. 1 overall pick, broke through as a top-10 guy in the League. Sometimes, you just need a little luck and the best bets to become stars become, well, stars.

For the Falcons to get there, the 2026 season has to be different, and not just the uniforms. The seemingly never-ending march to eight or nine wins has to cease. It’ll be painful to have to invest another first-round pick on a quarterback in 2027 after just doing so in 2024, along with the Kirk Cousins debacle, but none of that is on this current administration. What this administration has to do is reset the rookie quarterback contract clock in 2027. What they can’t do is stumble their way into eight or nine wins again with up-and-down play from Penix Jr.

But I wonder if Ryan sees it that way? Has he seen enough in the previous two years watching from afar to believe Penix Jr. can be the franchise quarterback former general manager Terry Fontenot thought he was getting two years ago? Or does he, along with Cunningham and Stefanski, look at the 2027 quarterback class and believe 2026 needs to be a Take Your Medicine year?

This season and the next are so critical to building out something that works long-term in Atlanta. The Falcons have won seven or eight games in seven of the last eight seasons. It’s a ride every Atlanta fan desperately wants to get off. I suspect more fans than not, like a lot of Steelers fans, would gladly take a rough step-back year if it meant taking potentially the top quarterback in next year’s class.

The last time the Falcons won four games or fewer, they took a tight end at No. 4 in what turned out to be a disastrous quarterback class. Still, the first quarterback taken in that draft worked out – Trevor Lawrence to the Jacksonville Jaguars at No. 1 overall. The Falcons went 4-12 the season before they took Michael Vick No. 1 overall. The Falcons went 4-12 the season before they took Matt Ryan No. 1 overall. Perhaps it’s time for the Falcons to go 4-12, er, 4-13, this year.

I wonder if Ryan, Cunningham, and Stefanski look at it through a similar lens? It’s better to rip the Band-Aid off early in a new tenure when hope and optimism are at their highest. Stefanski got Mayfield early. Ben Johnson got Williams early. Dimitroff got Ryan early. Will Ryan, Cunningham, and Stefanski follow what worked in the past? Or will they try to make it work through the middle, a path that has failed the franchise for nearly a decade now? I don’t have the answer, but I hope Ryan does because his long-term future in Atlanta, along with Cunningham and Stefanski, will depend on it.

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It was not that long ago that Florida State head football coach Mike Norvell was on top of the college football coaching landscape. Following the 2023-24 college football season, Norvell was not only reportedly in the mix to replace the greatest college football coach of all time, Nick Saban, at the University of Alabama, one of the greatest college football programs of all time, but he also had just gone 23-4 across two seasons in Tallahassee. It was understood at the time that Norvell was one of the best head coaches in the sport. (The same was true around that time for Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell, just a year early, but that’s a story for another day.) Now, from the outside looking in, it seems like the end of the line for Norvell at Florida State is as close as it’s ever been. Can you imagine telling a Florida State fan after the 2023-24 season everything that happened the following two seasons, actually, well, you know, happened?

At the time, Norvell not leaving Florida State for Alabama felt like a major win for the Seminoles. He even won the Bear Bryant Coach of the Year honor that same offseason. He won ACC Coach of the Year, something a Florida State head football coach had not done since Bowden won the award in 1997. It was all going great until it wasn’t. The contract extension to keep Norvell at Florida State long-term was massive, yes, but the huge financial commitment ostensibly signaled that the Seminoles, like where rival Miami is now with Mario Cristobal, were back.

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Flash forward two offseasons later, and Florida State is now coming off back-to-back seasons in which it went a combined 7-17, which included a brutal 2-10 blemish in the 2024 season, the school’s fewest amount of wins since the 1974 season, long before the school joined the ACC. In my 35 years of watching, writing, and reading about sports on this planet, the drastic pendulum swing between the 2023 Florida State Seminoles and the 2024 Florida State Seminoles might take the cake as the biggest head-scratching surprise. It was a disaster of a season in every respect, and this was a program exactly one year prior that could have very well won the national championship had its star quarterback not gotten injured and lost for the season.

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Last season, Norvell and the Seminoles got the train back on the track, at least a tad. The offseason hirings of Tony White to call the defense and Gus Malzahn to call the offense were both interesting and wise. The former is back for Year 2, while the latter rode off into the sunset as one of the best offensive minds this sport has seen this century. Although it was ultimately Washington’s Kalen DeBoer who replaced Saban at Alabama, it was Norvell who beat DeBoer in Tallahassee to kick off last season in a stunning upset. It was one of the best college football moments in the regular season last season. The ‘Noles smashed a nine-win Wake Forest team at the Doak. They lost a one-score game to the National Championship runner-up in Miami. They also lost to a dreadful Stanford team on the road. They got blown out in Gainesville against an interim Florida head football coach to conclude the season. All in all, it was a mixed bag for Norvell and the Seminoles.

2026 will be Norvell’s third season since the special 2023-24 campaign at Florida State. With all the changes to the sport, particularly NIL, it’s never been harder to gauge how good or bad a job any coach is doing right now. Did Fickell, who made the College Football Playoff as a G5 head football coach before expansion to twelve teams at Cincinnati, forget how to coach once he got to Madison? Did Mike Gundy or Dabo Swinney, two of the best coaches the sport has seen this century, forget how to coach the last couple of seasons in Stillwater or at Clemson? Norvell has seen the most drastic swings in Tallahassee, but had he been named the successor to Saban at Alabama, what are people saying about the guy who still maintains an overall head coaching record of 76-49? Was the guy who was regarded as a top-5 head coach in all of college football now one of the worst in the P4 two years later?

It all just doesn’t compute.

We’ll never know the answer to the question of how Norvell would have fared the last two seasons in Tuscaloosa. What we do know, though, is that Norvell’s comments at the ACC Spring Meetings were hopeful. With Malzhan’s retirement this offseason, Norvell will be calling plays for the Seminoles this fall. Norvell spoke about the upcoming season and reportedly said, “I expect this year to be the best year of his life.” This perspective is both a bit fascinating and a bit inspiring. The results of the last two seasons have put Norvell in what seems to be a perilous place going into this season. And yet, Norvell is seemingly choosing to take the last two years in stride and ride into the 2026 season with optimism and belief.

I don’t pretend to have any idea how successful the Florida State offense will be with Norvell calling plays and Ashton Daniels under center. However, I do know that I hope it works out for Norvell and for Daniels, the latter of whom has been in some truly awful offensive situations the last couple of seasons at Auburn and Stanford, respectively. The same was true last season when Malzahn and Norvell got the band back together and rolled with former Ware County great Thomas Castellanos under center.

I believe that Norvell is still a great head football coach. Maybe he reminds people of that this season in Tallahassee, or maybe he reminds people of that at his next stop, like Dan Mullen reminded folks in Las Vegas this past season. Norvell’s attitude is the right one to have, and his decision to bet on himself this fall and do so with both hope and joy after how much has gone wrong since that magical 2023 season is one of the best offseason storylines of the 2026 college football season.

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It’s the middle of May, and we do not know who will be under center against Furman to open the 2026 college football season for the Tennessee Volunteers. The same was true this time last year, too, after Nico Iamaleava’s sudden spring departure and Joey Aguilar’s late-spring arrival. In a perfect football world, you would prefer to know who will be your team’s starting quarterback sooner rather than later. However, as you saw with Tennessee’s offense last season, particularly out of the gate, the musical chairs at quarterback turned out to be a nothing burger for the Vols. Perhaps once the George MacIntyre vs. Faizon Brandon quarterback battle is settled, I’ll look back this time next year and write something similar. Sticking with this upcoming season, though, I do wonder how much I will end up writing about the quarterback play this fall for the Tennessee Volunteers.

If you’re a glass-half-full person, the offensive line is where you look first to make the case that the quarterback play of either MacIntyre or Brandon will be just fine this upcoming season. You feel good about David Sanders going into his first full season as Tennessee’s left tackle, and the hit-rate for blue-chippers at this premium position of late. Tennessee also returns Sam Pendleton, their starting center last season. They return Wendell Moe Jr., their starting left guard last season. They return Jesse Perry, their starting right tackle and, at times, right guard last season, and they return Sham Umarov, who started 10 games at left guard for the Vols last season. Outside of the departure of last year’s starting left tackle, Lance Heard, who transferred to Kentucky this offseason, the Vols are bringing a whole lot of production and snaps back to protect MacIntyre or Brandon this season.

The difference in playmakers out wide and at tight end will also be vastly different for MacIntyre or Brandon than it was for Iamaleava as a redshirt freshman in 2024, not to mention the offensive scheme changes. One of the most fascinating developments will be Tennessee’s projected top-two tight ends, Ethan Davis and DaSaahn Brame, and how big a role they play in the passing game as a reliable safety valve for Tennessee’s quarterback. Under Josh Heupel, the Vols have not had this much receiving upside at tight end. We saw in the NFL Draft this year, and with the Los Angeles Rams last year, that 13 personnel is all the rage in 2026, so it’s fair to wonder how much Heupel and his staff utilize the two extremely talented playmakers this fall. If you’re MacIntyre or Brandon, you have to be excited about the playmaking potential of Tennessee’s top two tight ends before even getting into the wide receiver spot.

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Speaking of the wideouts, Tennessee’s two breakout wideouts, Braylon Staley and Mike Matthews, are back. Now, who takes Chris Brazzell II’s place as the third starter will be interesting to see play out over the next few months. It could be Radarious Jackson, Travis Smith Jr., or Tristen Keys. Whatever combination wide receivers coach Kelsey Pope elects to roll with this fall, the Vols will have former four or five-star options in every combination he uses until he finds his best three. It’s another great development for a young quarterback to walk into.

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Tennessee might even have an award-winner at tailback in DeSean Bishop. The former Karns star was a Second-Team All-SEC player for Tennessee last year. He rushed for over 1,000 yards to keep that Volunteer running back streak alive. He averaged nearly six yards per carry in his first full season as the Vols’ lead tailback. Bishop might not be as explosive as former Tennessee star Dylan Sampson, but he could be just as valuable. Like Sampson significantly helped Iamaleava in 2024, Bishop should provide similar consistency and stability to help MacIntyre or Brandon.

I suspect the defense, particularly the front seven, will be the dominant talking point this fall, not the quarterback once a starter is named for the latter. There are too many positive and safe indicators around them not to expect the offense to be just fine for the majority of the season.

With the change at defensive coordinator from Tim Banks to Jim Knowles, the latter a championship-winning coach who completely stifled Tennessee’s offense in the first round of the 2024-25 College Football Playoff in Columbus, and a young quarterback under center, the Vols need the defense to be a whole lot better than it was in 2025 because the offense isn’t likely to be better, or as explosive vertically, as it was in 2025.

There is uncertainty at LEO. Former blue-chippers Caleb Herring and Jordan Ross transferred to rival SEC programs. Joshua Josephs was drafted in the fifth round by the Washington Commanders. Chaz Coleman, Tennessee’s big splash at LEO out of Penn State, is the biggest unknown on the defense. If he’s not a factor, and Tennessee’s pass-rush is non-existent in conference play, that’ll matter a whole lot more than who is under center for the Vols.

At linebacker, Tennessee has lots of talent, but lots of unproven talent behind Arion Carter and Amare Campbell. If the spring transfer portal window were still a thing, I do wonder how much movement there would have been at this position and at LEO. The Vols have more than enough capable bodies at linebacker, but might not have nearly enough off the edge. You can never have enough pass-rushers off the edge, but we will find out this fall if you can have too many linebackers. Just how realistic is it for linebackers coach William Inge to be able to rotate so many talented blue-chippers with two veteran leaders like Carter and Campbell at the top? It’s a good problem to have in mid-May, but that might not be the case in mid-October if the Vols’ defense can’t get off the field on third down because the pass rush can’t get home consistently.

In the secondary, Tennessee could have its best overall unit to this point in the Heupel era in Knoxville. You feel pretty set there, particularly with how productive and how experienced the vast majority of the transfer portal additions they made in this position room are. Tennessee really needs Daevin Hobbs to get healthy and stay healthy along the defensive interior. They need Coleman to be a factor off the edge. They need Ethan Utley and Isaiah Campbell to take a step. They need Marion Dye and Tyree Weathersby to be anchors at defensive end. I’m not in the business of doubting Tennessee defensive line coach Rodney Garner, but how the defensive line performs figures to be a much larger season-long talking point than how the quarterback performs. The floor of Garner and new LEO coach Andrew Jackson’s defensive line is uncharacteristically uncertain. Football is a team game, and the Vols averaged 1.80 sacks per game in their five losses last season and 3.5 sacks per game in their wins.

Yes, quarterback is the most important position in the game, but as everything stands right now for Tennessee, the best bet for the biggest talking point all year for the Vols will not be MacIntyre or Brandon – it will be Tennessee’s defensive line, as their productivity will be the biggest needle-mover in wins and losses all season long.

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Before Sunday afternoon’s NBA Draft Lottery event, the Atlanta Hawks had the best odds at landing the No. 8 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. After leaving Sunday afternoon’s NBA Draft Lottery event, the Hawks landed the No. 8 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.

It’s an undeniable bummer for Hawks fans, but it wasn’t a devastating development Sunday afternoon like it was for the Indiana Pacers or the Brooklyn Nets.

There is plenty of time to write about who the Hawks should target with the No. 8 overall pick, but for now, I thought it’d be best to simply write my three biggest reaction thoughts coming out of Sunday afternoon’s developments.

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Let’s start with the biggest positive: the reason the Hawks were even in a position to be drafting this high after winning 47 games this season is that Hawks general manager Onsi Saleh fleeced the New Orleans Pelicans front office a season ago in a trade that ultimately netted the Hawks Asa Newell and the better of the Pels and Milwaukee Bucks pick in this year’s draft for the latter to move from pick no. 23 to pick no. 13 and take Derik Queen.

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There were no guarantees where that NBA lottery pick would ultimately land for the Hawks, though. The Hawks prepared for this opportunity to capitalize on a bit of lottery luck, were it to find them this year. Their process for the last year has been sound: trading Trae Young, trading the No. 13 pick for No. 23 and a 2026 unprotected lottery pick, acquiring Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Kristaps Porzingis, and re-signing Dyson Daniels to a team-friendly extension. All of which were very smart moves in Saleh’s first season as the lead decision-maker for the Hawks.

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It’s not Saleh’s or the Hawks’ fault that their lottery luck came in perhaps the worst year possible this century. Obviously, sneaking into the No. 1 overall pick in 2026 rather than 2024 would have been the preferred result for the Hawks, but that is not what happened.

Saleh, who just finished as a runner-up for the NBA Executive of the Year award, has hit a lot more than he has missed in his first season. His trade with the Pelicans last summer was a great one, even with the pick ultimately landing at No. 8. Both things can be true.

Second, with the eighth pick, the Hawks will need to take a lead ballhandler to eventually replace CJ McCollum or a big man to share minutes with Oneyka Okongwu. It’s early, but the NBA Draft Knowers seem to be mocking former Louisville one-and-done guard Mikel Brown Jr. to the Hawks, which makes a bunch of sense. The most realistic options seem to be some combination of Houston guard Kingston Flemings, Michigan big Aday Mara, fellow Michigan big Yaxel Lendeborg, Tennessee wing Nate Ament, and Arizona wing Brayden Burries.

The most important thing is that the Hawks will be able to add a really good prospect at No. 8 who can help them in one of those two ways. The absence of Porzingis for much of the regular season was a major problem for Atlanta, and the same was true with the absence of Jock Londale in the team’s first-round series with the New York Knicks. McCollum was a key part of Atlanta’s dominant five-man starting lineup down the stretch of the regular season. His struggles in the series against the Knicks also shone a bright light on what Atlanta needed help with going into next season. In a perfect offseason, McCollum returns and Londale returns, as both proved to be fantastic fits for head coach Quin Snyder’s team. They just need additional reinforcements. Perhaps that’s just a year older Asa Newell inside and a guard like Flemings or Brown Jr.?

That’s why an Ament or a Burries would be harder to see than a Flemings, Brown Jr., or Mara. Atlanta already has a logjam of unproven long-term answers there between Zaccharie Risacher and Jonathan Kuminga, along with Corey Kispert’s contract. You also learned that Dyson Daniels, who does everything well except shoot threes, and Alexander-Walker, who just won Most Improved Player of the Year, are two core guys on great contracts with the team, along with Johnson and Okongwu. If Saleh strictly goes best player available at No. 8 and on Atlanta’s board that player happens to be another wing, I would understand making the selection. However, it would also really complicate things with the roster, particularly in that one area.

Lastly, there is a bit of additional pressure on Saleh here. With Atlanta winning 47 games a season ago and a large portion of their core locked up on fantastic contracts for the next several seasons, this could be the last time Atlanta is drafting this high for a while, even with the pending NBA Lottery reform. (Unless New Orleans or Sacramento calls, then you never know.) Whether it’s Brown Jr., Flemings, or Mara, or whoever, they really need to hit. With the uncertainty surrounding what Risacher is or can still be going into Year 3, it’d be huge for the franchise if they can add one more key high-lottery piece to their young, fun core of players in Johnson, Daniels, Okongwu, and Alexander-Walker. If you nail this pick, you worry about what Kuminga or Risacher are or could still become less. You’ve just got to nail this pick because Atlanta is very close to another run of sustained success if the team can find one more long-term answer at No. 8 to pair with that five-man lineup that was a +21.4 per 100 possessions last season.

It can happen.

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With spring practice in the rearview mirror, I’m going around the country to write about a couple of different teams in each conference that are most interesting to me right now.

We’ll start in the SEC, where the Oklahoma Sooners and the Florida Gators are the two most interesting teams in the conference this season.

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This time last year, much of the preseason conversation about the Gators and the Sooners revolved around three things: 1) Both had the toughest schedule in all of college football, 2) Both head coaches were on the hot seat, and 3) Both had the potential to make the College Football Playoff. The Sooners made the CFP, while the Gators crashed and burned, fired their head football coach, Billy Napier, and lost former five-star recruit quarterback DJ Lagway to the transfer portal.

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Enter Jon Sumrall, the new head football coach at Florida. Like Brent Venables at Oklahoma, he, too, made the CFP last season with his Tulane squad that won the AAC and 11 games overall. Across his four seasons as a head coach at Troy and Tulane, he’s 43-12. He’s never lost more than one conference game in any of those four seasons. Interestingly enough, Napier also arrived in Gainesville with four years of head coaching experience and a nearly identical record at 40-12. Will things be different for Sumrall in Gator Country?

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His coordinator hires were a good start, on both sides of the ball. With Kentucky moving on from Mike Stoops, longtime defensive coordinator Brad White, with whom Sumrall was co-DC in 2021 in Lexington, became available. Together, White and Sumrall coached a Kentucky defense that finished 26th in all of FBS in scoring defense and 4th in the SEC. The Gators have finished inside the top-10 in the SEC in scoring defense once since the start of the 2021 season, and it was 10th in 2022. On offense, stealing Buster Faulkner away from The Flats could prove to be one of the best coordinator hires of the offseason in all of college football. Former Georgia Tech quarterback Haynes King flourished under the former Parkview star quarterback’s tutelage. If Georgia Tech transfer quarterback Aaron Philo can come close to replicating what King did, just on the ground, where the Jackets were 8th in FBS in yards per carry, the combination of the former Prince Avenue Christian star and Jadan Baugh could be devastating for opposing defenses.

For Oklahoma, the Sooners made the CFP last season. They beat Josh Heupel and Tennessee inside Neyland Stadium. They beat Alabama again, this time on the road in the regular season. (Although they did lose to the Crimson Tide in their CFP rematch in Norman a month later.) Brent Venables led a defense that ranked first in the SEC and fifth nationally in DFEI, per BCFToys. The problem, though, was that while the Sooners’ defense was championship-esque, the offense was nowhere close. Oklahoma was 117th in rushing yards per game last year. They were 84th in points scored per offensive drive, per BCFToys. In November, the Sooners were 91st in passing yards per game. The stark contrast between Venables’ defense and first-year Oklahoma offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle’s offense was plainly evident week in and week out. And yet, they still won double-digit games and hosted a CFP game.

All eyes will be on John Mateer because all eyes are always on the quarterback. We all get it, but part of the reason Mateer and that Sooners’ offense a year ago was hamstrung in the passing game was injuries, yes, which has been the case the last two years in Norman, but also Deion Burks going scoreless between Game 3 and Game 11. Mateer’s favorite target, Isaiah Sategna, is back and pushed for 1,000 yards receiving last year. Around him, the Sooners added Trell Harris from Virginia and Parker Livingstone from Texas. The latter was extremely productive and available in Austin a season ago. The former had two games in which he went over 140 yards receiving and was a chunk-play assassin for a Virginia team that won double-digit games and reached the ACC championship. Surrounding Sategna with Harris and Livingstone may not be the flashiest wide receiver trio in the SEC. Still, it could be one of the safest in the production department, which is ultimately all that matters anyway.

Whether it’s Philo or Tramell Jones Jr. under center at Florida, they’ll have talent out wide to work with, too. Similar to Oklahoma, there is just a whole lot to like in the top three with Eric Singleton Jr., Dallas Wilson, and Vernell Brown III. Singleton Jr. has two years of proven production in Faulkner’s system, dating back to his days at Georgia Tech. Brown III flashed as a YAC machine last year, too. Wilson has the highest upside of the group as a former five-star wideout. In his four games played last year, Wilson reeled in three touchdowns. He nabbed two and accumulated 111 yards and six receptions in the Gators’ win over Texas. He’s got to stay healthy, but like Oklahoma, the wideout trio in Gainesville has a lot to like.

What also works in both schools’ favor, outside of a more manageable schedule than a year ago, is that both are flying under the radar a bit in the SEC. For Oklahoma, its arch-rival Texas, is all-in once again, and all eyes are on Steve Sarkisian’s team in Austin. That’s where you want to be if you’re Venables and the Sooners in Mid-May. For Florida, LSU is the school with the new head coach and sky-high expectations.

The Gators had those expectations coming into last year. Sumrall is in a great spot to overachieve and flash a bright future in Gainesville, particularly with Philo and Baugh on the ground and a much-improved defense. Sumrall starting off his Florida tenure with its 2026 football schedule rather than its 2025 football schedule could also prove to be one of the more important first-year developments in the SEC. The path to eight or nine wins is there for the Gators.

The path to nine or ten wins is there for the Sooners, if they can survive a brutal September. They get Texas coming out of a bye week, and the Sooners have the kind of schedule where it could go on a run from Mid-October onward.

It might not all happen for the Gators and the Sooners this season, but it could, and it makes them two of the most interesting teams in the SEC.

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