ESPN

Sports media can’t stop complaining about Louisiana State University’s new head football coach, Lane Kiffin. A cliché tells us what’s really going on here: they hate him cause they ain’t him.   Kiffin spent the last five years resurrecting Ole Miss’s once-mediocre football program. The Rebels are currently 11-1, ranked sixth in the AP poll and have almost certainly secured a playoff spot. But that didn’t stop Kiffin this morning from getting on a plane bound for the swampy fields of Baton Rouge, home of the most attractive coaching vacancy in a year filled with big openings.“After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU,” Kiffin said in a statement.

Until this week, NFL RedZone stood alone as an untainted representation of hyper fandom in the sports television arena, in the midst of what Cory Doctorow labeled the "enshittification" of everything. The channel, exclusive to NFL Sundays, promised every highlight, every score and what narrator and host Scott Hanson branded “seven hours of commercial-free football”. For the multitude of Americans who lacked the funds to pay for all the games on Sunday Ticket, or an at-home assemblage of televisions to create their own octo-box, RedZone was the perfect compliment to your main game – a running second screen of every big play, with the fantasy and gambling information to boot.

From his lofty BBC and ESPN perches at Wimbledon, John McEnroe is agitating people… again.In particular, he has irked Sally Jenkins from the Washington Post who has accused him of “belching up words” in a diatribe column dedicated to removing him from TV.This, however, only goes to prove that McEnroe can still move the needle. As he should. It is the McEnroe way. Dare I say, it’s the American way – brash, loud, and a bit erroneously confident.Sure, McEnroe mispronounced names this tournament, notably calling Hungarian Marton Fucsovics, “Fuskovitz,” or “Fuksovitz,” in a third round loss to American Ben Shelton. He didn’t fare much better with 26th ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas in this year’s Australian Open.

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.