Football

During his 2022 Senate campaign, former NFL running back Herschel Walker said he graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in criminal justice. Like many things said during the campaign, however, this turned out not to be true: Walker had dropped out his junior year to pursue professional football. But now the NFL star is back in class.  Walker first registered for summer classes at UGA last year after losing his Senate race, and according to a recent post on #redcupgeorgia, he’s still hitting the books. A picture from the account shows the sixty-two-year old Senate hopeful turned student sitting in a classroom surrounded by his much younger peers.  https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1782512683742310550?

Fans of the NFL’s thirty-two teams don’t agree on much. You’ll get a broad range of opinions on who the best and worst teams are, who should be the league MVP, who should be the first pick in the next draft and a host of other football questions. But there is broad agreement on one thing: NFL officiating stinks worse than maggot-infested roadkill and the league has no plan to fix it. PolitiFact might brand me a conspiracy theorist for this opinion, but, like many other football fans who think their teams never get the pivotal calls, I’m pretty sure the league is committed to preventing my beloved Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl. Take one game we played against the Eagles this year, for example.

“Where does it stop?” Andy Reid was griping about the NFL’s new kickoff rule. This year, for the first time, players can call for a fair catch on kickoffs short of the end zone, with the play considered a touchback and the ball coming out to the twenty-five-yard line. The rule is meant to reduce concussions on kickoff returns — the most hazardous play in the game, with players often colliding at top speed. “We’ll see how this goes,” said Reid, head coach of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. But he had his doubts. Reid sees kickoffs as a significant “piece” of hard-hitting NFL action. “You don’t want to take too many pieces away, or you’ll be playing flag football.” Travis Kelce went further.

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.

A new football season has fans reaching for their wallets and e-wallets. Americans now bet more than $100 billion a year on the NFL through legal sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings. Illegal gambling adds billions more. According to the American Gaming Association, 73.5 million bettors will make an NFL wager this year. Fifty million of us have skin in the game thanks to fantasy football teams that pay off in cash and bragging rights. Until recently, the men who run pro sports pretended that fans loved the Lions, Bengals and Bears out of sheer team spirit and a love of tailgating.

Deion “Prime Time” Sanders is not a household name. The reserved and introverted former NFL and MLB player has long avoided the spotlight, the media and shit-talking in general. This approach served him well during his first few phases of his life, allowing him quietly to find his way into the College Football Hall of Fame, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and to fat stacks of cash. After retiring from baseball and then from football, as he played both concurrently for much of his career, he decided to start building some name recognition for what has become his next act — coaching. He started small, quietly serving as head coach for his own Prime Prep Academy, a collection of charter schools in Texas.