Sports

Robert Kraft’s candidacy for the Pro Football Hall of Fame has become a sort of annual tradition throughout New England, not unlike Opening Day at Fenway Park and Marathon Monday.

And now, thanks to Don Van Natta Jr.’s exhaustively reported piece at ESPN, the entire world of football has been invited to ponder the mystery of why Kraft has been sitting by the phone all these years, waiting for that life-changing call from Canton, Ohio.

Does Kraft belong in the Hall of Fame?

Of course he does.

Let’s get this out of the way: He should have been inducted years ago. As I’ve written before, Kraft would possess Canton bona fides even if the six Super Bowl championships were removed from his resume. Kraft’s business acumen, combined with sturdy Boston roots, his status as a longtime Patriots season ticket holder and a lingering nostalgia for the old Boston Braves baseball team that moved to Milwaukee when he was just 11 years old, inspired him to buy the team lest it be whisked off to St. Louis by the previous owner, the late James Busch Orthwein. Remember, ground was broken for what would be the privately funded Gillette Stadium in the spring of 2000 before Bill Belichick ever coached a game for the Patriots, before Tom Brady threw his first NFL pass.

No need to revisit all that. A better question for today is why we’re even having this discussion. The easy answer is because of the Van Natta Jr. piece, which oozes with backroom lobbying, petty jealousies and a depth chart of owners who’ve already been enshrined. But we’re also talking about it because that’s precisely what the NFL wants, thanks to what I like to call the Owner Glorification Project, which is ceaseless and well-crafted.

The NFL’s marketing department is a franchise unto itself, and over the years it’s been a bigger winner than the Patriots, Cowboys and Steelers combined. Everything from the scouting combine to the schedule release has been turned into must-see TV. And whereas the draft was once just a bunch of guys locked away in a hotel function room, now it’s a glitzy prime-time event that doesn’t begin until after a famous performer has belted out the national anthem.

No, the NFL didn’t draw it up so that on a sunny September morning we’d be debating why Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is in the Hall of Fame and why Robert Kraft is not. And yet here we are.

The NFL is in the business of selling football. But like any successful retail establishment, its shelves are stocked with an array of products. It markets its players, its coaches … and, yes, absolutely, its owners. The telecasts of most games are barely underway when we get the obligatory shot of the owner’s box, often accompanied by a glowing testimonial from the play-by-play barker. It seems every touchdown includes a quick cutaway shot of the owner. When the clock is winding down and victory is assured, we get another cutaway shot.

This doesn’t happen in the other sports. Anyway, not to the degree it happens in the NFL. There are exceptions, of course. There’s Mark Cuban in the NBA, but, come on, those high-rollers have floor seats. You can’t not see them. The late George Steinbrenner, longtime owner of the Yankees, also comes to mind. His reckless trades, his obsession with being on the back page of the New York tabloids, his endless battles with manager Billy Martin transformed him into a media star. He hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He did a Miller Lite ad. (With Billy Martin, of course.) He was a parodied fixture on “Seinfeld.” God rest him, George was fun.

The NFL’s Owner Glorification Project has been going on for years. The first time it really hit me in the face, and with a frying pan, was Dec. 3, 2007, when the 11-0 Patriots played the Baltimore Ravens in an edition of “Monday Night Football” at M&T Bank Stadium. It looked like the 4-7 Ravens were going to pull off an upset, which would have ended New England’s bid for an undefeated season.

All seemed lost for the Patriots late in the fourth quarter, and yet they emerged with a 27-24 victory — partly because the Ravens unraveled but also because Brady and Belichick were in their prime. But as ESPN would have us believe, the Pats also had a secret weapon: Robert Kraft.

Let’s break down the tape, beginning with 2:22 remaining. Brady picked up 2 yards for a first down at the Baltimore 39, and that’s when we got a cutaway shot of Kraft in the owner’s box, looking rather splendid in a dark suit, yellow tie and his customary powder blue shirt with white collar.

We do not get a cutaway shot of Kraft following Brady’s incomplete pass to tight end Ben Watson leading into the two-minute warning, but it was right back to the owner’s box after Brady, under pressure, threw the ball away.

Brady then connected with Kevin Faulk for 9 yards, setting up a fourth-and-1 at the Baltimore 30. It’s here that Brady was stopped short of a first down, but it’s also here that the play was nullified after it was revealed that the Ravens, in the person of defensive coordinator Rex Ryan, called for a timeout before the ball was snapped. The Pats then got pushed back 5 yards on a false start, but Brady saved the day with a 12-yard run. Cutaway shot of Kraft!

The Pats picked up an additional 5 yards due to an illegal contact call on the Ravens’ Samari Rolle, and then it was Faulk up the middle for 5 yards to the Baltimore 13 with 1:06 remaining. Next, Brady threw a short pass that was batted into the air but fell incomplete. Under pressure in his next pass attempt, Brady threw a short pass to nobody. We then got our fourth cutaway shot of Kraft, with Mike Tirico telling viewers, “So Bob Kraft, the owner, who’s put together the Bill Belichick masterpiece plan, executed to perfection on the field by Brady, who’s having his toughest night of the season …”

So Kraft was part of the game now. He was doing the thinking, fighting for the fans. His fight was your fight.

On fourth-and-5 at the Baltimore 13 with 55 seconds remaining, Brady’s short pass to Watson was incomplete. But look, a holding call on the Ravens’ Jamaine Winborne! Gifted yet another first down, the Patriots took the lead on Brady’s 8-yard touchdown pass to Jabar Gaffney, followed by a quick cutaway to Kraft with his hands clasped together.

Tirico: “26-24, and Kraft is thinking, did he get inbounds with possession …”

Gaffney did get in-bounds with possession. Touchdown. Extra point by Stephen Gostkowski. Next thing you know, Robert Kraft is on the field for the game’s last seconds, as evidenced by cutaway shot No. 6. The Ravens mounted a last-ditch effort. Kyle Boller’s Hail Mary to Mark Clayton was complete at the 3-yard line but with no time on the clock. Patriots 27, Ravens 24. And six cutaway shots of the owner over the last 2 minutes, 22 seconds.

It’s fine that the NFL wants to promote its owners, from what they’ve done to build their teams to what they’ve contributed in the community. And Kraft, as much as anybody, has been a longtime philanthropic good-deed doer. No debate there.

But the NFL has puffed up its owners to a degree that it’s as if they’re on a par with the players and coaches. It’s enough to make one wonder if they all believe they should be in the Hall of Fame.

(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)

For 14 seconds, Jordan Chiles paused and looked down to collect her thoughts and emotions.

The question — about what Chiles felt she lost when the International Olympic Committee stripped her of her bronze medal in the Olympic women’s gymnastics floor exercise — forced her to stop mid-answer. The audience at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York applauded her as she regrouped and held the microphone back up to her mouth.

Holding back tears, Chiles said she lost more than a bronze medal through the controversy that dominated the end of last month’s Paris Games. The controversy “wasn’t about the medal,” she said, but other realities that made her feel “stripped.”

“The biggest thing that was taken from me was the recognition of who I was, not just my sport, but the person I am,” Chiles said.

“It’s about my skin color,” Chiles added. “It’s about the fact there were things that have led up to this position of being an athlete.”

The on-stage interview Wednesday — which occurred before Chiles appeared at MTV’s Video Music Awards at night — marked the gymnast’s most extensive comments since the IOC said it would reallocate Chiles’ bronze to Romania’s Ana Bărbosu following an appeal by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation.

At the floor final on Aug. 5, Chiles originally finished fifth but rose to third after her coach, Cecile Landi, submitted a successful inquiry to raise her score by one-tenth of a point. Five days later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Landi’s inquiry should be invalidated because it came four seconds after the one-minute window for such an appeal. After the ruling, the International Gymnastics Federation dropped Chiles to fifth, and the IOC reallocated the medal. USA Gymnastics has said it is appealing the CAS decision to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.

Chiles said she felt “left in the dark” and unsupported during the controversy. She felt her voice wasn’t heard during the appeal process and compared her emotions to 2018, when she said an emotionally and verbally abusive coach caused her to lose her love for gymnastics.

“No one was listening to the fact that there are things that we have in place,” Chiles said. “There are things that we have that should’ve been seen but weren’t taken for realization.”

“The biggest thing that was taken from me was the recognition of who I was, not just my sport, but the person I am.”

Olympic Gymnast @ChilesJordan spoke with @MoiraForbes about being stripped of her bronze medal at the 2024 #PowerWomensSummit. https://t.co/gRF3MBW6J9 pic.twitter.com/Fjett19aDY

— ForbesWomen (@ForbesWomen) September 11, 2024

USA Gymnastics has argued that it has video evidence showing Landi made the appeal 47 seconds after Chiles’ score was posted, 13 seconds before the inquiry window closed, and that it did not have enough time to properly make its case to CAS.

Chiles previously referred to the decision as “unjust.”

“(It) comes as a significant blow, not just to me, but to everyone who has championed my journey,” Chiles said in a post on X on Aug. 15. “To add to the heartbreak, the unprompted racially driven attacks on social media are wrong and extremely hurtful.”

Almost a month later, Chiles maintains that she and her coach followed the rules and did “everything that was totally and completely right” in the floor exercise competition.

“I made history and I will always continue to make history,” said Chiles, who won gold in the Olympic women’s team competition.

Chiles, who will return to UCLA for the upcoming college gymnastics season, received a bronze clock at the VMAs as a gift from Flavor Flav, who promised to make her one after her medal was stripped.

Chiles receives a bronze clock from Flavor Flav on Wednesday. (Noam Galai / Getty Images for MTV)

Required reading

(Photo: Steven Ferdman / Getty Images)

LAS VEGAS — Four of the past five Stanley Cup championship teams have come from states that don’t collect state income taxes — and seven of the past 10 finalists.

Those runs, by the Florida Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars, have understandably sparked a debate over whether the teams involved have an unfair advantage in signing players at below-market rates.

In many cases, players signing in those states — Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Nevada and Washington are among the states that deduct no further income tax than the federal taxes — would lose millions of dollars over the lives of their contracts if they played north of the border or in high-income-tax states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

The NHL is keeping an eye on the situation.

In a recent poll of fans by The Athletic, 84.6 percent of 14,066 respondents felt that teams in no-state-income-tax states have an advantage. Of that, 42.8 percent feel changes need to be made to even the playing field, 41.5 percent feel it’s not a significant enough advantage to warrant complex changes and 14.7 percent feel the issue is overblown.

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“It’s an issue that comes up from time to time in our room at the board level and general managers level,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said last month at the NHL’s European player media tour in Prague. “There are no easy fixes. It’s not like we can just pick from Column A and fix the problem overnight. Players make decisions on where they want to play for a variety of reasons. Their bottom line is one of them, but the quality of life and the communities they live in is probably more important.”

Daly echoed that sentiment Tuesday at the NHL’s North American player media tour in Las Vegas. He said while it’s too early to determine if this is something that may have to be addressed, he has talked to the NHL Players’ Association about the subject and the mutual feeling is that leveling the playing field would be too complicated.

For instance, even if the league systematically adjusted the cap ceiling for teams in no-state-income-tax states, what would happen if a player was traded or sent to the minors? Also, if it was deemed that a player was willing to sign a “hometown discount” contract at lower than what he could have received elsewhere, how problematic would it be to try to determine how much of a discount they took?

The NHLPA, so far, doesn’t see this as much of a problem. Executive director Marty Walsh met with the two dozen players who attended the media tour in Prague and explained this would be a complicated issue to fix. Plus, they don’t see this being a debate in other leagues.

As Daly said, “This is not new. This has all existed over the course of time.”

But some players do see a need for action.

“They have to find a way to tweak it, honestly,” Ottawa Senators forward Shane Pinto said Tuesday. “If you look at all these free agents, you don’t blame them for going down south. It’s just what it is, and it’s best for their families and taxes and lifestyle-wise. But I do think they have to find a way, especially for the Canadian teams. They’ve got to overpay guys to come to Canada every time, and that messes up with the cap. I think they do have to find a way to try to just even it out.

“I know it’s not easy because it’s been like that forever, but I think it’d be nice to have an even playing field.”

To be fair, few were complaining about the lack of state income taxes in Florida when the Tampa Bay Lightning were a doormat in the 1990s. Few brought this up when the Florida Panthers didn’t make the playoffs from 2000 to 2011 and didn’t advance past the first round from 1996 to 2022.

“I think every place certainly has its advantages, whether it’s (lifestyle), and taxes is certainly a part of it,” said Nashville Predators star Filip Forsberg, whose no-state-income-tax team had a banner summer by signing Juuse Saros to an eight-year extension and Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei to contracts totaling more than $166 million. “At the end of the day, that does play quite a bit of difference on our salary. It’s a fair point. I’m not disagreeing with it.

“It’s above my pay grade whether to decide if it’s right or wrong.”

Defenseman MacKenzie Weegar signed an eight-year, $50 million contract with the Calgary Flames in 2022. He previously played in Florida, acquired along with Jonathan Huberdeau in the Matthew Tkachuk blockbuster.

Alberta has a relatively low income-tax rate among Canadian provinces. Still, according to the Turbo Tax and Smart Asset websites, Weegar would be making approximately $950,000 more on his current $6.25 million a year contract if he were being paid in Florida.

He’s not bothered by that. But he does think it’d be nice if the league and players’ union could find a mechanism to even things out in the next collective bargaining agreement.

“You definitely feel like it might pull some other guys down south to those teams,” Weegar said Wednesday. “So there could be something in the next CBA to work something out. But ultimately, the Tampas, Florida, you look at Nashville, the teams are winning. That’s what really pulls people in. The New Yorks and Calgary, if we start winning, nobody really cares about taxes.

“The contracts are already big enough. You don’t really notice the tax too, too much. You still living pretty comfortably. So I’d say, start winning, you’ll get your guys to come in, and your free agents that want to play there.”

Like Stamkos and Marchessault going from Tampa Bay and Las Vegas, respectively, to Nashville, defenseman Brandon Montour went from no-state-income-tax state to no-state-income-tax state. A day after celebrating winning the Stanley Cup during a parade on A1A in Ft. Lauderdale, Montour signed a seven-year, $50 million contract with the Seattle Kraken.

He said taxes were not the predominant reason in his decision.

“You can’t say money’s not a factor,” Montour said Wednesday. “But for me, that wasn’t what we were chasing. We had places that were the highest tax that we were considering, as well. I played in California. I played in New York. Obviously, the paychecks look a little nicer when you’re in Florida and Seattle. But it wasn’t a thing that we were focused on.

“It was trying to find something for our lifestyle and our family to set a spot and call home.”

Montour tried to grasp how the league and union could even address the situation.

“What do you do, like take a percentage off the cap?” he said. “Like if Florida signed somebody that was 10 million bucks, they’d take a percentage or 2 percent off the cap or something? I don’t really know what they would possibly be able to do.”

Montour said every player has different reasons to sign in different places, and there are many high-income-tax areas that are appealing. He thinks this is only a debate because these teams are in a cycle of winning.

“There are just too many variables to really control,” Daly said, “including the fact that there are some markets that are very highly desirable for players that have kind of the highest tax rates in the world. Yet there are other opportunities, other things, that make those markets attractive to players.

“So I just think there’s so much that goes into the equation of where a player wants to play, what he’s willing to take to play there. And a lot of that has to do with team chemistry and how teams are constructed and how the player sees himself fitting into the team in terms of their needs. And so to account for all those variables, I think it’ll be a very difficult exercise.

“Having said that, obviously there’s chatter out there, specifically in the Canadian media, that the Canadian franchises are disadvantaged. We take that chatter seriously and we always look for ways to make the system better. I just don’t have any obvious answers to it.”

Daly was asked if he could envision a scenario where teams in Florida, Vegas, Nashville, Dallas or Seattle have a lower cap ceiling than other teams. He said, “I don’t think we could ever have a different cap for different teams, even though we kind of do in some respects with respect to how the CBA works and bonus overages and the like. So I suppose maybe there’s a formula that you could think of that way.

“I have other ideas that I put ahead of that one.”

Asked if he’d share those, Daly laughed: “No.”

“Look, there are some crude ways you can try to make adjustments to account for it,” Daly said. “I don’t think this issue is the level of kind of trying to push something through, particularly without really giving it some advanced, thorough thought and running it through all the potential channels. I think sometimes when you rush to do something based on chatter, you kind of step into a hole sometimes and the unintended consequences kind of bear their heads.

“We’ll continue to monitor it. If we can make it better, we will. I mean, I could get proven wrong on that. If we have the next 10 years similar to the last five, then maybe it’s something that needs to be addressed. But at this stage, on the basis of a couple summers, I’m not really running to get there.”

That’s fine with Radko Gudas.

The Anaheim Ducks defenseman pays 13 percent in state income taxes in California, compared to zero percent when he played with the Panthers. Yet, Gudas said succinctly, “I don’t think the NHL should be stepping into tax problems.”

(Photo of Matthew Tkachuk at the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup rally: Rich Storry / Getty Images)

At first, his screams were met with silence. Stunned silence, really.

This rookie was standing there, two weeks into his NFL career, moments after a humiliating loss at home, and he was calling out … the entire team?

“Where my leaders at?!?” C.J. Stroud shouted, grabbing the attention of everyone inside the home locker room at NRG Stadium. “I need some leaders! Right now! Where they at? Speak up!”

The Texans were 0-2. They’d just been routed at home by the Colts. They hadn’t won more than four games in three years. “We got waxed that day,” remembers tight end Brevin Jordan, “and we all had the same question, like, ‘Are we gonna have one those seasons again?’”

Stroud was livid, not merely at the loss but at the fact that he was the only one willing to step up and say something about it.

This was last September, six weeks before Stroud would throw for more passing yards in a game than any rookie ever, four months before he’d become the youngest quarterback in NFL history to win a playoff game. This was before belief in Houston really started to build, before the rest of the league started to realize this team wasn’t just coming — it was coming fast.

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Few inside the building saw a turnaround happening this quickly or this dramatically. But the margins are painfully small in the NFL, and sometimes seasons come down to little moments, like when a rookie punctures the silence of a somber locker room and changes how his teammates see him — and themselves.

“Some people needed to be called out. The captains needed to be called out,” says defensive end Will Anderson Jr., like Stroud a rookie captain at the time.

Jimmie Ward, a veteran safety who’d come over from San Francisco that spring, sat at his stall that afternoon and watched from across the room. He was injured and didn’t play in the loss; in his mind, it didn’t feel right to rip into his new teammates, not with him in street clothes and them in shoulder pads.

When Stroud was finished, Ward walked up to him.

“You’re a rookie,” he told him, “and that took some balls.”

The Texans were learning the kid who oozed California cool also had what Ward calls “this asshole side to him.” They won their next two games by 44 points.

It’s early August. On a high school field outside of Cleveland, a half hour after a training camp practice has wrapped and two days before the Texans face the Steelers in a preseason game, Nico Collins is wearing out the JUGS machine. Most of his teammates have boarded the bus and headed back to the hotel. A few linger on the sideline. Collins works alone.

The fourth-year wideout is eight feet from the machine, jogging in place, waiting for a football to be fired. Snap. He snares it with one hand. These are coming out hot. Snap. He grabs another, then taps his feet down, like he’s inches from the sideline. He adds to the total in his head. He’s nearing 20 without a drop. Snap.

What looks ridiculously difficult — what is ridiculously difficult — Collins wants to turn into second nature.

“Man,” he says a few moments later, shaking his head, “C.J. was on us today.”

It was a sloppy practice. The offense looked awful. Stroud missed throws and threw picks. Receivers broke off some routes early, others too late. The defense dominated, then gloated. At one point, after he was intercepted along the sideline, Stroud slammed his towel to the ground in disgust. Then he called his unit together.

“Slow it down!” Collins remembers Stroud screaming in the huddle. “How many times have we run this play? How many times?

“Now lock in.”

That’s the side to the young quarterback teammates hadn’t seen until his eruption after the early-season loss to the Colts last year. Stroud’s soft-spoken, laid-back persona belies an edge he’s always played with — and now leads with. He doesn’t unleash it often, preferring to pick his spots. But when he does, teammates feel the fire. Quarterbacks don’t get far in this league being polite.

“Oh, he’ll snap at us,” Collins says. “Way more than you think.”

“At practice you see glimpses of it,” new Texans receiver Stefon Diggs says of C.J. Stroud. “But come game time, he’s the real deal.” (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)

Stroud made it a point last summer to work quietly and earn the locker room’s respect. He was a rookie. He knew his place. Then the Texans stumbled to 0-2, and what irritated Stroud most during that loss to the Colts was how quiet the huddles were. When the team gathered before kickoff, he was the only one who said anything. When they did so again after halftime, same thing. So after coach DeMeco Ryans finished in the locker room, Stroud unloaded on them.

He knew he couldn’t be the only voice.

“Look, C.J.’s a great dude, all the guys like him, but there’s just enough prick to him, you know what I mean? He’s got some dog in him,” says Texans defensive coordinator Matt Burke. “We’ve all been on teams where the quarterback is separate from the rest of the group — he sorta does his own thing, and when he gets on guys, no one really listens, right? But when you’ve got a guy who’s got some s— about him, the team responds.”

Wideout Stefon Diggs, the team’s marquee offseason acquisition, felt it during Sunday’s season opener in Indianapolis. “At practice you see glimpses of it,” Diggs said after catching two touchdowns. “He’ll sprinkle a little emotion on you, he’ll get on you a little bit. But come game time, he’s the real deal.”

That intensity, Diggs said, is essential. Everyone on the offense knows what the expectation is, full stop. Stroud demands it.

“He makes it easy to be a receiver,” Diggs added.

Diggs’ arrival this spring via trade with the Bills, plus the additions of running back Joe Mixon and defensive end Danielle Hunter, made it clear: the Texans are going for it. Last season’s 10-7 regular season and surprise run to the divisional round of the playoffs was enough to scrap the slog of a long rebuild.

The window had opened. They weren’t going to wait. With Stroud still on his rookie contract, Houston wants to take its shot in the crowded AFC.

The QB opened training camp in late July welcoming the hype, mindful that the spotlight shines most on the teams that matter. “Pressure is a privilege,” Stroud likes to say, and it’s something he learned from his time at Ohio State. The Buckeyes would get every team’s best shot every single week. He knows Houston isn’t sneaking up on anyone in 2024.

And with that comes the burden of expectation, something that’s buried teams before them, teams that thought they were ready to contend only to find out the hard way they weren’t even close. “We have that big red target on our back,” Stroud says. “That’s something we didn’t have last year.”

Last season, Houston didn’t have a single regular-season game scheduled for a national television window; this year the Texans are slated for five, including a marquee Christmas Day matchup with the Ravens, the team that bounced them from the playoffs in January. Season tickets sold out by July, a first for the franchise in five years. Entering Week 1, only five teams had better Super Bowl odds. Stroud currently has the fourth-shortest odds for MVP.

So much has changed for this city, this franchise and this quarterback in 12 short months.

“It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be harder,” Stroud says. “That’s how you should want it.”

It started Sunday in Indianapolis. The Colts were desperate to steal this one — they haven’t won a Week 1 game since 2013 and haven’t won an AFC South title since 2014. At the moment, Houston remains Indy’s biggest roadblock.

In the first quarter, the Colts’ Anthony Richardson made the throw of the game, maybe the year.

With two minutes left in the fourth, Stroud made the throw that won it.

A false start turned a third-and-6 into a third-and-11. Leading by two, the Texans needed a conversion to prevent Richardson from getting another chance. After the snap, Collins peeled toward the sideline, blanketed by Colts’ corner Jaylon Jones.

If there was a window, Stroud might’ve been the only person inside Lucas Oil Stadium to see it. The coverage was superb.

Stroud fired. Jones got a finger on it. Collins kept his concentration — the byproduct of all those reps on the JUGS machine — and somehow snagged it. Then he got a foot down. Then a knee. The ridiculously difficult had become second nature.

One Mixon run later, it was over. After the 29-27 win, Stroud was asked about the completion to Collins. How in the world did he fit it in there?

He smiled. Then he repeated an old quote Peyton Manning used to say all the time.

“There’s no defense for the perfect throw.”

Nico Collins’ third-down sideline catch all but sealed the Texans’ victory over the Colts. (Christine Tannous / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

Nine months ago, after their divisional playoff game in Baltimore, Stroud stood before a lectern on the bottom floor of M&T Bank Stadium, wearing a sweatsuit, beanie and Asics running shoes. It was his first lesson about how punishing postseason football can be. A tie game at the half had ballooned into a 34-10 Ravens’ triumph.

One minute, the game’s tight. The next, you’re getting steamrolled out of the stadium.

“It’s tough getting embarrassed like that,” Stroud said.

His face told the story. He was drained.

“I’ve been going hard since I was like 12 years old,” he said. “AAU tournaments. Baseball. Football. 7-on-7. High school. It’s been a blessing. It’s been a ball. I’m 22 years old, and this is my first time ever having freedom away from school, away from college.”

The climb was so quick, so consuming, that he’d never taken a minute to breathe. That cramped apartment 40 miles east of Los Angeles that Stroud lived in with his mom and siblings, where he cried after getting his first Division 1 offer, still feels like yesterday. Then came Ohio State. The draft. The S2 drama. Training camp. The season. And now, at just 22 years old, he was already one of the young faces of the league, the quarterback some were starting to think might be good enough to do what Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson so far haven’t. That is, beat Patrick Mahomes in the playoffs.

But first, before the rest of his career could start, Stroud needed to get away. So he did. He played in the Pro Bowl. He swung by media row at the Super Bowl and broke down his own film. He hopped on podcasts. He taught football to high schoolers in China as part of an Asian tour with Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons, threw out the first pitch before a baseball game in Japan, then trained with — well, sort of trained with — sumo wrestlers.

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By the spring, Stroud couldn’t help himself: he was lighting up the text thread again, the same one he used to send teammates film clips last season. Pretty soon, the Texans’ skill position players, including Diggs, were meeting up for throwing sessions. In Los Angeles. In Miami. Finally, in Houston.

“Come on, you know who planned those,” says receiver Tank Dell. “Of course 7 did.”

Burke, the Texans’ DC, felt Stroud’s urgency and inquisitiveness after all of one practice last year. After Stroud threw his first pick, he hunted down Burke after the workout and asked him to explain how he’d disguised the coverage. The QB didn’t wanna get beat on that play again. Burke was floored. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’” he says. “You love that. That piece of it, that desire to learn that stuff, that’s so important.”

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Hunter, the veteran defensive end who arrived via free agency this spring, has spent nine seasons chasing quarterbacks in this league. What struck him during training camp was Stroud’s unflappability in the pocket. He’d tick through his reads without hurrying, without letting panic — a weakness game-wreckers like Hunter prey on — set in.

“He just doesn’t fold under pressure, when guys are coming,” Hunter says. “If it’s not there, he doesn’t try to do Superman stuff. You know how big that is for a guy his age?”

Thing is: Stroud can do Superman stuff. He won Offensive Rookie of the Year doing Superman stuff. Richardson’s stunning 60-yard bomb on Sunday overshadowed a 55-yard second-quarter beauty from Stroud to Collins that, per Next Gen Stats, was the most improbable completion of Stroud’s young career. Two Colts defenders were within a yard of Collins when the ball arrived.

CJ STROUD DEEP TO NICO COLLINS FOR 55 YARDS.

📺: #HOUvsIND on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/pIG9hzf0CD

— NFL (@NFL) September 8, 2024

Stroud found the window. Somehow. When it comes to deep balls, few QBs in the league are better.

“It just seems so natural, so easy for him,” Collins says of his quarterback.

“It may seem easy, but it’s not,” Stroud says.

And it won’t be anytime soon. Stroud knows the innocence of his rookie season is gone. Now he needs to win. The Texans’ first primetime game of 2024 arrives Sunday night against the Bears, and with it, another test to see if they’re ready to meet the moment. The quarterback, too.

Stroud seems to relish it, always returning to that word of his: pressure. He refuses to see it as a negative. His story tells us he never has.

“We love that pressure, and we want that pressure,” he says. “There’s no real reward if there’s no pressure.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Tim Warner / Getty Images)

CHICAGO — Seventy times a year, Barry Antoniazzi tosses on his black No. 27 jersey with “Bagodonuts” stitched onto the back, dons a firefighter helmet covered in Chicago White Sox pins and walks a block and a half to his baseball sanctuary.

Antoniazzi grew tired of paying for parking at Guaranteed Rate Field, so 11 years ago, he moved to W. 35th Street and S. Parnell Avenue where, in a normal year, he can hear celebratory postgame fireworks from his residence.

This is, of course, no normal year, and the skies over the ballpark are quiet nearly every night. The White Sox haven’t won a home game in more than a month, and stand on the doorstep of undesirable history as they limp toward the 1962 New York Mets’ record of 120 losses.

And yet, Antoniazzi’s faith in the franchise hasn’t wavered, even though his house of worship has become a house of horrors that has hosted one defeat after another. On Tuesday, Antoniazzi, a paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department, watched his beloved, beleaguered club drop its 26th game in 27 attempts at home. Just as no two snowflakes are exactly alike, the White Sox have repeatedly found new and increasingly painful ways to lose in a season that has felt like one long, extraordinary blizzard on the South Side.

On Monday, Cleveland Guardians rookie spot starter Joey Cantillo retired the first 20 hitters he faced. On Tuesday, a line drive to the thigh knocked out Guardians starter Ben Lively after two innings, but the team’s bullpen covered the last seven frames to seal a shutout. On Wednesday, Lane Thomas delivered a pair of two-run infield singles to fuel a Cleveland sweep.

Antoniazzi traveled to San Francisco last month to complete his mission of watching the White Sox in all 30 ballparks. He’s drawn to Guaranteed Rate Field for the chance at seeing something new — he’s never witnessed a no-hitter in person, for instance — and to support a team he insists can only go up from here.

“We’re not going to be this bad forever,” he said. “We’re going to get better. So when we do get good, I can say, ‘I stuck with them through thick and thin.’ That’s what keeps me coming back.”

Antoniazzi is not alone in his loyalty; some of the few thousand fans in attendance each night are true diehards, willing to stick with their team even as it careens towards the worst season in baseball history. But what inspires others to pass through the turnstiles? Why do they choose to devote several hours to watching a predictable ending unfold on the diamond instead of, say, cruising along the Chicago River on an architectural boat tour, or riding the Centennial Wheel at Navy Pier, or watching pennant races play out on the TVs at Timothy O’Toole’s Pub, or shopping on Michigan Avenue, or even just lounging on the living room sofa?

The White Sox sold 11,429 tickets for Monday’s game, though the true attendance count appeared to be less than half of that. There was a slight uptick Tuesday, maybe because of a $5 beer promotion or because fans wanted to snatch up some of the last Campfire Milkshakes of the season. Or there’s another reason, one that has grown in importance as this impressively bad season has worn on: witnessing the train wreck, one loss at a time.

“We’re here to see them make history,” as one fan put it.

For others, the wins and losses don’t particularly matter. Many attendees were in town for business, and had a night to spare and a couple beers to guzzle. Brent Poole, from near Winnipeg, said he consumed the best hot dog of his life at Tuesday’s game. As they weaved through the concourse in center field, Poole and Russ Palm studied the statues of Charles A. Comiskey, Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox. Poole hadn’t visited the stadium in 25 years; it was Palm’s first visit.

“Even though people aren’t here,” Palm said, “it’s still fun to come see this. Every park is different.”

The Campfire Milkshake has been one of the few bright spots in the 2024 White Sox season. (Matt Dirksen / Getty Images)

Dan Murby traveled to Chicago from Boston this week for work, and since he’s already attended a Bulls game and a Blackhawks game — and since the Cubs were on the road — he spent Tuesday night leaning against a right-field drink rail as the White Sox sputtered toward their 113th loss. Dylan Jones and Gavin Orr, in town for the International Manufacturing Technology Show, hail from upstate New York, where, Jones said, “There’s nothing near us.” Jones visits Chicago every other year, and he tries to attend a White Sox game on each trip, no matter the team’s standing.

“I’m not even a baseball fan,” Jones said. “I just like some entertainment.”

One couple, with their wedding scheduled for Sept. 26, opted to treat Monday’s contest — their first baseball game — as a “first of firsts to start off our life together.”

If their union can survive the 2024 White Sox, it can persevere through anything.

The small crowds make the scene almost eerie at times. As a concessionaire pushed an ice cream cart around the concourse on Monday, he sounded a bell that echoed throughout the venue. After a harmless Guardians groundout or a first-pitch strike by a Chicago pitcher, one could identify a fan’s individual claps from several sections away.

On Monday, one fan, staring out at a sea of empty forest-green seats, texted a buddy that he’s seen “livelier wakes on a Monday night.” That morbid feeling can take its toll. Out in center field, a middle-aged man stood behind a thigh-high railing, watching loss No. 112 because a friend gifted him four tickets, and so he took his son and his son’s two friends. When asked how long he has been a White Sox fan, the pain in his voice was palpable as he lamented, “My whole life.”

At least on this night, in this place, he had company in that.

“We’re at rock bottom right now,” said Nate Lutzow, who spent his 24th birthday at the ballpark on Tuesday. “I wish the team was better. That’d push me to be here more.”

Still, there are silver linings. Some parents capitalized on the small crowds to take their children to their first game without having to navigate a chaotic scene with a toddler. Some took the opportunity to check the ballpark off their list in their bid to experience all 30 venues. A Philadelphian used his daughter’s relocation to Chicago as an excuse to see his 27th ballpark. A trio of New Yorkers spent last weekend taking in the Yankees-Cubs series at Wrigley Field and stuck around an extra day to catch the other team in town. One Clevelander donned a white Steven Kwan jersey and a black White Sox hat at Monday’s game, since he purchases a cap at every ballpark he visits.

Plenty of Guardians fans either made the 55-minute flight or the five-hour drive west past windmills and RV company billboards or happen to reside in the Windy City. Visiting fan takeovers have become the norm as the season has progressed.

Chris Ramos walks with his brother, Pat, and their friend, Jacob Swartley, to Guaranteed Rate Field for every game. They were running late for an Aug. 31 affair against the Mets, and as they approached the entrance, they heard an eruption of cheers from the crowd.

“We’re like, ‘Oh, what happened?’” Ramos said. “Look at the phone. Pete Alonso home run.”

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders lost 134 games, but most still consider the 1962 Mets and their 120 losses to be the record the White Sox are chasing. (Quinn Harris / Getty Images)

The diehards have certainly been tested this season. Randy Johnson attended games at Comiskey Park with his grandparents. He has bricks and seats from the old building, baseballs autographed by Frank Thomas and battle scars from decades as a White Sox fan. He made his friend, who has a Cubs tattoo on his right forearm, wear a White Sox jersey to Tuesday’s game.

“You get to see the Sox play,” Johnson said. “We’re South Siders. Win or lose, it’s the place to be.”

Swartley and the Ramos brothers have occupied seats in the right-field corner at nearly every game for more than a decade. They launched a blog, “From The 108,” in 2016 and a podcast two years later. They’re as invested in the club as anyone.

“Other years, when the expectations were actually there,” Swartley said, “were much sadder than this year.”

Still, there have been games this year in which the team’s pitifulness has threatened their motivation. Pat lives three blocks from the ballpark, but he couldn’t convince himself to ditch his couch Monday night.

“It’s tough to get out of the house on a Monday night,” Chris said, “and then to see these guys? Even us, who try to come to so many games, we’re like, ‘Ehh, not tonight.’ I could totally understand why someone who has to make even a 15-minute drive here would go, ‘Nah, not until they show me something.’”

The three friends debated the worst-case scenario for the White Sox over the final few weeks of this wretched regular season. The club figures to soar past that record mark of 120 losses.

“At this point, why not?” Pat said. “We came this far.”

“I think it would be more brutal to lose 119,” his brother countered.

“They’d need to get on a heater for that to happen,” Pat said, “so it’d be fun for a little bit.”

“They’d have to rip off 10 wins in a row,” Chris added.

Pat pointed out that their season-long winning streak is four games.

“But they’ve had many 10-game losing streaks,” Pat said.

“As much as we enjoy coming to the ballpark,” Chris said, “I think the three of us are pretty much ready for this year to be over.”

It has been a season like few fanbases have ever endured, challenging the level of commitment of anyone who frequents Guaranteed Rate Field.

“I know we’re terrible this year,” Antoniazzi said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that I love baseball. I love the White Sox.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Quinn Harris/Getty Images; Joseph Weiser/Icon Sportswire)

On a practice field on the outskirts of a thousand-year-old city, Jim Davis handed the high school freshman a football and told him his objective. It was to impress upon the senior linebacker waiting on the other side of the offensive line that this new member of the Naples Wildcats was not going to be wrestled to the grass without a fight. Ashton Jeanty nodded and eagerly waited for the snap.

“Ashton chose a hole, went through it and he, excuse my French, put the kid right on his ass,” said Davis, head coach of the Wildcats. “Until you see a kid take that first hit, you never know. That first hit alleviated any doubts.”

Before Jeanty introduced himself to the country with his imposing and relentless running style that has made him an early Heisman Trophy front-runner at Boise State, he was a newbie on the football team at a U.S. Naval Support base in the ancient town of Aversa, Italy, 15 miles north of Naples. His father, Harry, who served in the Navy as a commanding officer, was relocated there prior to the start of Ashton’s seventh-grade year. It was there in a town known for producing some of Italy’s best buffalo mozzarella, sparkling white wine and its abundance of Catholic churches that Jeanty took his first real steps toward stardom.

“Over there,” Harry Jeanty said, “Ashton was in heaven.”

Ashton Jeanty (center) played football in Italy before his family moved to Texas. (Courtesy of Jim Davis)

Through the first two weeks of the 2024 season, Jeanty leads the nation in yards rushing (459), rushing touchdowns (nine) and forced missed tackles (22). A week after his head-turning 267-yard, six-touchdown performance at Georgia Southern, Jeanty followed it up by punishing an Oregon defense many considered among the best in the country for 192 yards and three touchdowns in a 37-34 near upset that came down to a last-second made field goal by Oregon.

Jeanty had the most rushing yards by a visiting player at Autzen Stadium since Washington’s Myles Gaskin in 2016. The loss hasn’t deterred Boise State’s star from the belief he has in his team’s heights this year.

“We’ve got one of the best teams in the country,” Jeanty said postgame. “We fell short, but whoever we play from here on out these next 10 games, we’re going to dominate.”

#RB1 Ashton Jeanty currently leads the FBS in…

Rushing yards: 459
Rushing TDs: 9
Forced missed tackles: 22 pic.twitter.com/uRJyGNMhmG

— Dane Brugler (@dpbrugler) September 9, 2024

Jeanty, like he did on that poor senior linebacker way back when, runs through whatever lies ahead of him. Oftentimes, he just pings off confused defenders who can’t match his downhill power and keeps motoring ahead. At 5 feet 9 and 215 pounds, the junior running back is not only absurdly strong — he can squat 600 pounds — but he has been timed at hitting 22.5 mph in games. He is considered the No. 1 running back prospect for the 2025 NFL Draft by The Athletic’s draft expert Dane Brugler.

Brugler appropriately wrote in his scouting report: “The man hates to be tackled.”

Yeah, that about sums him up. At least on the field. His path to becoming the next great Boise State running back and one of the country’s best players did not start with him being hyped by recruiting services nationwide at a young age.

The Naples Wildcats had to take a nine-hour bus ride to face the closest team, at an Air Force base in Aviano at the foot of the Dolomite mountain range. There were trips to play on an Army base near Venice. They flew commercially to Rota, Spain, to play the team on the Naval base there. And one game featured an 18-hour bus ride to Spangdahlem, Germany. They’d typically sleep on the gymnasium floor on Friday nights before playing on Saturday and eventually the long journey back to southern Italy.

Davis said his roster size each year is usually around 30 tops, so everyone is playing offense and defense. Jeanty played everywhere and was in a class all his own even as a freshman. But prior to the start of his sophomore year in 2019, the family found out it was moving stateside to the greater Dallas area.

“My wife immediately said, ‘Oh, that’s a shame you’re losing him!’” Davis recalled, “And I said, ‘No, he needs to go back and get exposed.’”

That June, Lone Star High School coach Jeff Rayburn received two emails informing him that a new student and potential addition to the team was en route from Italy to the school in Frisco, Texas. That was a first.

“We didn’t know anything about him,” Rayburn said, “but when he showed up, we found out real quick.”

Jeanty joined a Lone Star team filled with star talent including future NFL players like Marvin Mims Jr. and Jaylan Ford. His sophomore year, he played wherever Rayburn’s staff needed him to, from safety to linebacker to slot receiver to defensive end. As a junior, he split running back reps with Jaden Nixon, who went on to play at Oklahoma State before transferring to Western Michigan. And Jeanty often terrorized defenses as a slot receiver with his elusiveness. When Jeanty’s senior season rolled around, he finally became RB1 at Lone Star. And from there he asserted himself.

Jeanty accounted for 41 total touchdowns in 12 games his senior year. He rushed for 1,843 yards on 229 carries, averaging 8 yards per carry. He owned Class 5A football in Texas, but blue-blood offers weren’t exactly rolling in. Boise State offered him in May 2021. Prior to that featured offers from the likes of Navy, Dartmouth, Cal, New Mexico and Penn. The only in-state schools to offer Jeanty were Texas State, Sam Houston State and North Texas.

“Nowadays the way recruiting is, if you’re not being committed as a junior, the Texases, Alabamas, Georgias, they’ve already pinpointed who they wanted to take,” Rayburn said. “I think if Ashton would’ve played running back full time as a junior, he wouldn’t have ended up at Boise. I think he would’ve ended up at a Power 4 school.”

Jeanty committed to Boise State the fall of his senior season. And once he got to Boise the following year, he immediately made an impact, rushing for 821 yards and seven touchdowns as a freshman in 2022 backing up incumbent George Holani. Then came the sophomore leap as Jeanty established himself as one of the breakout players of the season a year ago, rushing for 1,347 yards and 14 touchdowns despite missing two games to injury.

The Broncos won the Mountain West Conference title last year but only after dealing with the late-season dismissal of head coach Andy Avalos in November. Three weeks later, they were in Las Vegas hoisting the MWC trophy after beating UNLV 44-20. Jeanty had a game-high 153 yards.

But even before the blue and orange confetti fell inside Allegiant Stadium, Boise State was in a battle to keep its star happy at home.

“Before we win the MWC championship game, the amount of influx with illegal tampering with Ashton, to his family, to him, to position coaches, head coaches calling him … he was getting bombarded,” Boise State coach Spencer Danielson said. “He was like, ‘Coach, I want to be here. I want to be part of this family and help this team win games. This is where I committed to coming out of high school, this is what I’m about.’ And he hasn’t looked back since.”

Asked to clarify just how many teams came calling, Jeanty laughed: “Nah, but we’ll just say it was a lot.”

Harry Jeanty said the attention was overwhelming, but also expected.

“I guess the norm now is people have a tendency to jump where the money is. Is that making sense for them? Probably,” he said. “But for Ashton, I’ve always told him to stay humble, work hard and everything else will fall into place. It makes sense for him to be at Boise because, look, somebody can offer you whatever amount of money — and there were a lot of offers out there — you could take those offers, but when you get on campus, do you really know what’s going to happen?”

It didn’t stop with Jeanty and his family, either.

“I got plenty of phone calls about trying to get Ashton out of there and people were telling me they were offering him this, that or the other,” Rayburn said.

What coaches who drooled over the idea of Jeanty in their backfield didn’t understand is that the military kid who bounced around Virginia, Florida, Texas and even Italy had finally found a place he called a home.

“The love for my team and for this program, that’s what keeping me here,” he said. “The people in this city. Nothing beats what I have here at Boise State. No amount of money can outweigh that.”

Money doesn’t hurt, though. Boise-area sports radio host Mike Prater reported three days after the MWC title win that Jeanty received a new name, image and likeness deal that included $300,000, housing and a car to stay in blue.

“I was glad to see they’d done that because, obviously, Ashton deserved every penny that they presented to him because he would’ve gotten at least three or four times more elsewhere,” Harry Jeanty said. “But it’s not all about the money. It’s about Ashton being in the right place and being able to make a difference.”

Danielson confirmed that Jeanty was getting offered “substantially more” to leave. He chose to stay, which once again made the Broncos a team to beat in the MWC and a dark-horse candidate to make a run to the new 12-team College Football Playoff.

“The people here have embraced him,” Danielson said. “Ashton Jeanty’s a household name here for the rest of his life.”

And the word is out to the rest of the country, too.

To be worthy of the #HEI2MAN, you have to be #BuiltDifferenthttps://t.co/2fDkCvClio#BleedBlue pic.twitter.com/RgfmK1rZ6h

— Boise State Football (@BroncoSportsFB) August 28, 2024

Jeanty’s stunning start came on the heels of a Boise State Heisman campaign that kicked off earlier than most Aug. 28. The athletic department knew it had to get Jeanty’s name out there early as a Group of 5 school whose star could get lost in the Heisman haze come October or November. It won’t be easy to continue to keep the nation’s attention, but if the numbers continue, the sport will have no choice.

Alabama’s Derrick Henry was the last running back to win the trophy in 2015. The last time a G5 player was invited to New York City as a Heisman Trophy finalist was 2013 when Northern Illinois QB Jordan Lynch was on the list.

His nine rushing touchdowns are the most of any FBS player through the first two weeks of the season since Ricky Williams at Texas in 1998 — the same year Williams went on to lift the Heisman. Jeanty is not afraid of any sort of jinx. Quite the opposite, in fact. He welcomes the hype machine he now powers with his stout frame.

In the end zone, which he got to know so well at Georgia Southern in the season opener, Jeanty lifted his right leg and stuck out his right arm and hit the first Heisman pose of the season. There will certainly be more in the coming weeks if he keeps running through whatever is in front of him.

(Photo: Tom Hauck / Getty Images)

Caitlin Clark: Raising the Game

A commemoration of Caitlin Clark’s meteoric career at Iowa and evaluation of the start of her WNBA rookie season.

A commemoration of Caitlin Clark’s meteoric career at Iowa and evaluation of the start of her WNBA rookie season.

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During a hellacious stretch to begin the regular season, as Indiana played 11 games in 20 days — six of them against semifinalists in the 2023 postseason — Fever coach Christie Sides tried to find the silver linings. Even before Indiana had broken through to win one game, Sides took the long view, believing the struggles early would bear fruit later.

“We’ve gotten punched, and we’ve had to grow up really fast,” Sides said in May. “We’re having a good time trying to get to that point, and when we do, these guys are going to start clicking, and that’s when it’s going to be fun.”

Sides’ sentiments were prescient, as the Fever have swiftly put the troubles of May in the rearview. To say that Indiana is now clicking would be an understatement — this is one of the best teams in the WNBA since the Olympic break with no signs of slowing down as the playoffs near. The Fever are 8-3 in their last 11 games with two losses to the Minnesota Lynx and another to the Las Vegas Aces, who they play again Friday. They entered Wednesday night’s game with the third-best offensive rating in the league behind New York and Las Vegas and the best (110.4 points per 100 possessions) during the second half of the season.

WE’RE IN.

we have officially clinched a spot in the 2024 @WNBA playoffs 🔥

📝 https://t.co/lmq97tihkJ pic.twitter.com/xK8Tg9izY4

— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) September 4, 2024

The easing of the schedule has played a part in Indiana’s success, as did the month off when 11 of the team’s 12 players were in market to finally develop some chemistry after the shortest preseason training camp in league history. But a lot more has gone into the Fever rocketing up the WNBA standings and becoming the team no one wants to face in the postseason.

Here are four ways (with stats entering Wednesday’s games) that the Fever have pulled it off.

Let’s start with the obvious change from May to September: Clark is a significantly improved player. The numbers tell a powerful story: She’s averaging 24.7 points, 5.8 rebounds and 9.3 assists since the break, compared to 17.1/5.8/8.2 prior. But there is more to it. She has become more patient with traps and isn’t turning the ball over as frequently on blitzes, which has neutralized the effectiveness of that defensive strategy against Indiana. She can string out the defense and make passes over the top rather than playing herself into a corner.

Clark has become physically stronger as the year has worn on. That enables her to drive to the basket and finish through traffic when defenders shade her to one side, and she’s making 3.5 percent more of her shot attempts in the restricted area. The added strength also means her jumper has become more consistent. No team was ever willingly surrendering 3-pointers to Clark at any point, but that’s become an especially bad proposition when she’s shooting 39 percent from distance since the start of August.

Multiple adjustments were made up and down the roster, but nothing as significant as Clark morphing into one of the best players in basketball.

“She plays with great pace, she plays with a great tempo, she is an elite passer,” Los Angeles coach Curt Miller said after the Sparks were the latest team the Fever avenged an earlier loss against. “Everyone talks about the logo 3s. To me, what that does is — she’s got incredible range — but it just opens up the floor for everybody else. That logo range opens up the floor. So you always, always have to be guarding her and you always have to be giving her attention. She’s really special.”

The fulcrum of the Fever offense entering 2024 was thought to be the pick-and-roll between Clark and Boston. But to start the year, most of Clark’s passes led to post-ups, and it felt like the two No. 1 picks were operating at different paces.

Credit to Boston, as the reigning rookie of the year adapted her style of play to favor Clark. In 2023, 39.2 percent of Boston’s offensive possessions came on post-ups and 11.3 percent as a roller. Now those figures are 29.1 and 19.1 (leading into Wednesday’s game) as she shifts toward Clark’s bread and butter of pick-and-roll. With her new point guard, that means setting screens high and catching the ball at the free-throw line on the roll. From there, Boston has become a more adept decision-maker, able to survey the court for the next open player and knowing when to play the ball back to Clark or take her defender off the bounce.

“I’m feeling pretty comfortable (in the short roll),” Boston said. “Being able to take that shot, that’s going to be important versus continuously going down and banging all the time.”

Boston has shifted her offensive game in other subtle ways. She has added more cuts to her repertoire as she’s moving off the ball to capitalize on the attention paid to the Fever point guard, rather than just setting up shop with her back to the basket, even though she’s the recipient of some of the best entry passes in the league. Boston has also upped her individual pace by about 3.5 possessions per 40 minutes. Playing with Clark means running the floor, and Boston has to play in transition more if they’re going to share the court.

3. Healthy Kelsey Mitchell pairs perfectly with Clark

An ankle injury forced Mitchell to miss the preseason and come off the bench during the first two games of the season, which limited the amount of time she spent with Clark on the court. In May, the backcourt duo played together for 23.9 minutes per game. That figure rose to 27.7 in June, then 33.6 in July and 36.6 shared minutes in September. For all of the talk about Clark succeeding with a frontcourt pick-and-roll partner or a rim-running threat like NaLyssa Smith, Mitchell has been the rookie’s true offensive soulmate.

Whether it’s Mitchell sprinting the floor on fast breaks, or even after made baskets, or faking her defenders with strongside baseline cuts, she is always creating openings for Clark with her speed — that simply wasn’t possible with a balky ankle. Now the Fever can unleash Mitchell in space, and they’re putting her in various screening actions in the half court as well. Mitchell often screens for Clark on the perimeter before a big comes to initiate a pick-and-roll, which scrambles the defensive assignments. Indiana will also run Mitchell off of staggers and pindowns, the constant motion allowing Clark to find openings in the defense.

“She’s one of those players where her IQ is going to take us a lot of places,” Mitchell said about Clark, “so you’ve got to figure out where you fit in, knowing how to read and adjust off of her.”

Given the amount of time they spend together on the court, the statistics Mitchell has accumulated when she plays without Clark are negligible. But compared to 2023, when Mitchell was playing with largely the same roster except for Clark, the two-time All-Star is averaging more points in fewer minutes and a higher true-shooting percentage. Since the Olympic break, she’s the second-leading scorer in the league behind A’ja Wilson with 24.9 points per game while shooting 49.7 percent from the field. Maximizing their minutes together has optimized the Fever’s offensive potential.

4. Settling on a rotation

One of Indiana’s main problems at the start of the season was the wrong players were on the court. During May, Kristy Wallace and Katie Lou Samuelson each averaged about 20 minutes while Lexie Hull saw the floor for fewer than 10 minutes per night. By August, Hull climbed up to 26.4 minutes per game, then 33 in September, fitting for the player who has the best on-off differential (plus-13.7 points per 100 possessions) on the team.

Clark’s initial struggles led Sides and her staff to over-index on ballhandling, with Wallace and Erica Wheeler getting more minutes to help Clark run the offense. But that was the wrong approach. Clark needed to find a rhythm, and that would come only with the ball in her hands. As her usage has increased throughout the season, she has become more effective, so Indiana switched to putting play-finishers around her. Mitchell is creating less and shooting more, as is Smith, and Hull either shoots off the catch or drives immediately. The bulk of the decision-making comes from Clark and Boston, simplifying the responsibilities of their teammates.

The Fever were blessed with generational star power in back-to-back drafts. It was only a matter of time until they figured out how to work together despite some initial discomfort. By clarifying the roles of the supporting cast, concentrating Boston on the short roll and letting Clark go full Iowa, they’ve supercharged their offense and turned around their season.

(Photo: Chet White / Getty Images)

This is an updated version of an article originally published in May 2024.

The biggest before-and-after moment in Aryna Sabalenka’s life came five years ago, when her father, Sergey, a former ice hockey player, died suddenly of meningitis at 43. She was 21 at the time.

There’s another moment, far less weighty, that changed the trajectory of Sabalenka’s tennis life.

It happened outside a stadium in the Canadian city of Toronto in August 2022, after a three-set loss to Coco Gauff in the round of 16 at the National Bank Open. 

Sabalenka served 18 double faults that day. The previous day, she had served 16 of them, in a match she won. The previous week, she had served 20 double faults in a quarter-final loss to Daria Kasatkina in San Jose, California, and 23 double faults in the match before that.

Her matches had become tennis car accidents. Her serve was gone.

Sabalenka preparing to serve against Gauff in 2022 (Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)

Sitting on the ground in Canada and crying, Sabalenka had reached breaking point. She had tried everything, she told her two main coaches, Jason Stacy and Anton Dubrov: countless hours with sports psychologists, visualization, endless practice. Nothing had worked.

That’s when Stacy, a high-performance expert with a background in mixed martial arts, laid into her. 

No, he said, you’re wrong. There was one thing she hadn’t done. It was the thing that terrified her, even more than double-faulting more than 20 times live on international television.

And then he challenged her, because if there was one thing he had learned about Sabalenka in their years working together, it’s that she never, ever, backs down from a challenge.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked her. “You know, you have to face this fear, period.”

Stacy was calling on her to do the scariest thing any athlete can face: scrapping a lifetime of learning and years of muscle memory to break it down and start again. He was asking her to raze her serve so she could rebuild it.

Remaking the serve is an isolating process (Andy Cheung/Getty Images)

“I was like, ‘Otherwise, why are we doing this?’. We’re done for the season, maybe next year. Just f**k this. Why are you doing this? Why? It’s stupid. Let’s just stop. We’re all going to stop. We already talked about it. We’re done. It’s finished,” Stacy recalled during an interview in Indian Wells, California, in March this year.

Sabalenka didn’t hesitate. 

OK, she told him, let’s do it.

Just over two years later, Sabalenka and her team were cradling the U.S. Open trophy in New York — the scene of another of Sabalenka’s worst moments, and another three-set loss to Coco Gauff. In the 2023 final, the Belarusian led by a set before wilting in the roar of 24,000 fans pulling for their favorite. A year later, first against Emma Navarro in the semifinal, and then Jessica Pegula in the final, Sabalenka said what she would say to the crowd on court after beating Navarro.

“Not this time, guys.”

The tennis serve is biomechanically complex, the only mandatory shot in the sport, and the most important. Double-faulting is disastrous when it happens, conceding a point for free in a contest where matches are often decided by just a few of them. But it’s also disastrous when serving is going well, or when winning comes easily. It gnaws into the psyche and infiltrates the muscle memory, which is bad enough, but then it does something else.

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It lies dormant. Serving is fine. Everything is fine. And then, suddenly, one serve goes long. Another goes in the net. ‘No big deal, one point, get it back.’ Another serve long and another in the net and then the player is broken and the game is over and they are sitting down at the chair wondering what on earth happened and how they can fix it and whether the match is already over and on and on and on.

It can be fixed — but the problem with tennis is that it doesn’t allow you much time to fix things. The schedule is relentless; the off-season lasts a matter of weeks. Players have to try to make changes on the fly or not at all. 

Fortunately for Sabalenka, in tears on the floor that day in Toronto, Stacy already had a plan and was already handing her his phone.

On the other end of the line was Gavin MacMillan, a Canadian former college tennis player who lives in South Africa and specializes in biomechanics. He was in California at the time. He had already seen videos of her serving.

MacMillan asked Sabalenka if she was all right. 

No, she said, she was not.

Sabalenka’s serve woes came to define her 2022 season (Elsa/Getty Images)

He told her that was understandable. “But I’m going to tell you, 100 percent this is not mental,” MacMillan recalled recently from his home in Pretoria, where he has trained some of the world’s top rugby players.

“I said, ‘Your serve mechanics are wrong and you need to change them’.”

Sabalenka asked if MacMillan could help her do that. He told her he was sure he could, and two days later they were on a tennis court in Cincinnati, Ohio.

MacMillan believes it’s harder to achieve excellence in tennis than in any other sport. You have to master at least seven different biomechanical motions — the serve, forehand and backhand volleys and groundstrokes, overheads, and both forehand and backhand returns. It requires speed and endurance, and the ability to adapt to constantly changing balls, courts and conditions. 

The Canadian can get very deep on the biomechanics of serving very quickly. His basic philosophy involves getting the arms, shoulders and spine in the right positions so the latter can get to a point of inflection and then snap up and through the ball. It’s a matter of geometry and physics, and Sabalenka’s math was all off. 

Her left hand was in the wrong position after she released the ball, which prevented her scapula (shoulder blade) from releasing and ended up pulling her down instead of helping her rise up. Also, she was pointing her racket at the back fence as she entered her motion, which prevented it from properly rotating up through the ball. 

“The game was over before she even started,” MacMillan said.

Sabalenka serving against Caroline Garcia after her sessions with MacMillan (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

He tried to keep the instructions simple. For three days, they did little else but serve. And there was good news — Sabalenka could make her body do what she wanted it to fairly quickly.

She hit four double faults in her next match and six in the one after that. Her third match produced 12, but she won anyway; then she lost in the semi-finals to a hot Caroline Garcia. It was still success. She had kept the double faults to single digits. She had made the semis. And more importantly, according to her team, she had stopped talking about the problem and actually tried to fix it.

“She kept asking, ‘What do I do?’,” Stacy said.

“But I’m like, ‘I don’t know right now. This isn’t about: this is the answer, here’s the magic pill’.

“I go, ‘There’s no answer right now. All this, all we’re doing right now, is trying to help figure out why the hell it is happening, helping you understand why it is and what it is, naming it almost, like putting it out there making it real, because right now it’s all in your head’.”

Now it was out of her head, the rest of Sabalenka’s tennis life could start.

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Too often in tennis, men, who dominate the coaching and training ranks, get credit for the success of women. That is not what Sabalenka’s story is about. Talk to Stacy, Dubrov and MacMillan even for a few minutes, and they will give Sabalenka all the credit for her success.

Dubrov is a 28-year-old former player who never got higher than world No. 1,935. He is far younger than most top coaches, and was just 25 when Sabalenka installed him to lead her team. Stacy, 50, is a martial arts specialist who found his way into tennis after spending several years as a homeless teenager, then as a trainer for combat fighters and the Seattle Sounders before they were an MLS team. MacMillan is better known for training rugby, football and baseball players than the elite of tennis.

Sabalenka with Dubrov (left) and Stacy (right) in 2021 (Robert Prange/Getty Images)

That’s not exactly the kind of tennis blue-blood often found at the top of the sport — and yet, it works, they say, because of three main qualities: their constant, open communication, Sabalenka’s intolerance of any talk that doesn’t feel honest and authentic, and their unceasing efforts to inject play into the work.

They plan practices, design workouts, and provide technical expertise, but she is the one who absorbs and applies it. She goes into battle alone.

She did it after her father died. She did it when her serve made her the subject of ridicule and derision. She has done it for the past two-and-a-half years, as the leaders of Russia and Belarus turn athletes from their countries into pariahs following the invasion of Ukraine. (Sabalenka, who lives in Miami, has called the war in Ukraine “stupid”.)

She did it following the sudden death in March of her ex-boyfriend, Konstantin Koltsov, a former professional ice hockey player. Koltsov fell from a balcony at the St Regis Bal Harbour Resort in Miami. Police have ruled the death a suicide. Although Sabalenka and Koltsov were no longer together, she called the death an “unthinkable tragedy” as she tried to find a balance between grieving and moving on with the rest of her life and a new relationship.

Sabalenka embraces friend Paola Badosa during the Miami Open, which started just after Koltsov’s death (Robert Prange/Getty Images)

Sabalenka is still quick to point out how much she relies on her team, an oddball bunch that also includes her hitting partner Andrei Vasilevski, a former Davis Cup player for Belarus. Her rituals of dancing on court with them, signing Stacy’s shaved head, and other japes have become part of her tennis identity as she has risen to be the indisputable second-best women’s player in the world. (Fulfilling this position behind Iga Swiatek is, as anyone who watches tennis knows, quite difficult.) 

“I would call them my family,” Sabalenka said of her team last week in Rome. “They’ve been there for me no matter what. I had so many tough life situations, and they were there for me, supporting me and doing everything for me. I’m trying to pay them back the same way. I’m always there for them. Whatever they need, I’m happy to help them.”

It’s been that way for a while now. In a sport where coaches and players play musical chairs, Sabalenka has been with the core of her crew for the better part of six years — and they prefer to do dances on TikTok rather than playing that game anyway.

Dubrov first saw Sabalenka during a junior European Cup competition when she was about 16. Like anyone else seeing her for the first time, he could not believe how hard she hit the ball. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my god’,” he said recently over coffee in Madrid. “It’s a winner or it’s an unforced error straight away, right? But the passion was unbelievable.”

Sabalenka representing Belarus in 2017 (Maxim Malinovsky/AFP via Getty Images)

Dubrov ended up on the other end of those shots before too long, as a hitting partner for the top junior women in Belarus. Then he joined Sabalenka as her full-time hitting partner. That is how he met Stacy, who was brought into the fold by Sabalenka’s former coach, Dimitry Tursunov. Stacy is a kind of father figure of the crew, which is a little odd, since his bald head and sunglasses-at-night look don’t exactly convey paternal vibes.

Dubrov said he didn’t really know what to expect from Stacy.

“Jujitsu guy, right?” Dubrov said.

In reality, he is a high-energy force who sees every problem as a challenge or an opportunity. He likes to talk through every obstacle, but not to just discuss it. He demands that Sabalenka is honest and aware of what’s happened before anything is done. That’s what happened outside that stadium in Toronto, but those conversations can still run and run.

Sabalenka can be funny and bubbly off the court but has a temper to match her athletic gifts on it, and an obduracy that follows her out of the tramlines too. When the stress ramped up, she would get so hot she could barely breathe or function, let alone serve. 

That is when it helps to have someone with a background in martial arts: a discipline in controlling your breathing and your emotions when you are facing someone beating the crap out of you.

Being honest and being aware has paid off.

Since the start of 2023, Sabalenka has won more Grand Slam titles than any other woman, including the world No. 1 Swiatek. She was the only woman last year to make the semifinals of all four Grand Slams. She is the only woman other than Swiatek to hold the No. 1 ranking since March of 2022, when Ash Barty retired. All this from a woman who served up 428 double faults in 55 matches in 2022 — 151 more than any other woman on the WTA Tour.

Swiatek, who has won four of the past five French Opens and is a clay-court savant, is undoubtedly the heavy favorite every time tennis heads into Roland Garros. But Sabalenka is not all that far behind, especially if the weather heats up, the air dries out and the ball starts flying off the red clay.

Women’s tennis was veering toward a triangular rivalry, with Elena Rybakina joining the top two, and Gauff banging on the door to make it a foursome.

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The heavyweight matchup of the moment, and never more so than since Sabalenka’s U.S. Open triumph, is Swiatek and Sabalenka. They have established a fiefdom of their own in the top two of the WTA rankings, and they contested both finals in Madrid and Rome, the two biggest clay tournaments of the year other than the French Open.

Swiatek was dominant in Rome, but Madrid seemed more like what is to come — matches decided by the narrowest of margins, a forehand that dives into the corner, a serve that nicks the outside of a line. Sabalenka was one point away from winning. Swiatek found a way.

In these contests, Dubrov says the goal is to help Sabalenka understand that she doesn’t have to hit beautiful, frozen-rope winners on every point. She can play a simple game, with simple tactics, adjust to whatever level she has on any given day, build points and be just a little bit better than her opponent.

Swiatek leads the duo’s head-to-head 8-3 (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

“Try to trust your strokes,” he says. “Trust that you can actually produce the point.”

The trick is learning to do that under stress. Dubrov imitates a drunken fan and screams insults at her during serving practice. His latest tactic is making her play for money during training. It’s intense, he says, not like a tournament, where if you win you get money and if you lose it costs you nothing but pride. In these games, if you lose, you pay, and Sabalenka hates both.

Sometimes, he makes her and Vasilevski play a set with a few thousand dollars on the line. Sometimes, she has to hit a certain number of consecutive serves or other shots through two cones, or she has to pay Dubrov $100. If she pulls it off, he has to pay her. He swears that those wager sets are the highest intensity levels he ever sees in a practice, so much so that it’s almost like the real thing.

This is where betting against Sabalenka can get truly dangerous, even if she considers you her family.

Before the summer season, Dubrov was down roughly $5,000 in the past six months.

(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)

The 50 NFL coaches and executives who voted in 2024 Quarterback Tiers did not for one second confuse the Miami Dolphins’ Tua Tagovailoa or the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Trevor Lawrence for the best QBs in the game.

They ranked Tagovailoa 15th and Lawrence 16th among 30 veterans at the position, placing them atop Tier 3 as win-with, not win-because-of quarterbacks. Good players. Promising. Not proven difference makers.

The balance sheet cannot distinguish them from future Hall of Famers.

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The $55 million-a-year contract extension Lawrence signed in the offseason made him the highest-paid quarterback in the league until Dak Prescott one-upped him over the weekend. The $53.1 million-a-year extension Tagovailoa signed has him solidly among the top five.

Awarding top-tier contracts to mid-tier quarterbacks wasn’t always as common.

From 2014 through ’22, Kirk Cousins was the only Tier 3 quarterback commanding contracts with average per year (APY) values worth at least 15 percent of the salary cap allotment for individual teams in the years the deals were signed. Cousins did it by reaching free agency, where he could solicit bids from desperate suitors.

Times have changed. In the last two years, the New York Giants (Daniel Jones), New Orleans Saints (Derek Carr), Jacksonville (Lawrence) and Miami (Tagovailoa) signed Tier 3 quarterbacks to extensions valued that high in relation to the cap. The deals for Lawrence and Tagovailoa carried APYs exceeding 20 percent of the cap.

The Giants, Jaguars and Dolphins all could have waited to see more from their QBs. Instead, they entered into expensive long-term relationships.

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“When people weren’t willing to make Daniel Jones play it out, that is when the world exploded,” a contract negotiator from an NFL team said. “We are not even talking Tua, who had huge production. We are talking Daniel Freaking Jones.”

It’s been a rough week for Jones, who tossed a pick-six interception during the Giants’ 28-6 defeat to the Minnesota Vikings. The point here is not to pile on. But at a time when more coaches can seemingly get great production from merely good quarterbacks, and when drafted quarterbacks enter the league on cost-controlled contracts, why are teams paying mid-tier veterans as if they were Patrick Mahomes?

“There has been such media pressure to just pay the guy,” a different negotiator said. “Way back, he wanted $2 million and you were offering $1.6 million. It made sense to say, ‘You know what, we ought to pay the guy — it’s not a big difference.’ But when you’re in the $50 million range and say, ‘Pay the guy,’ what does that mean? There has been groundswell of, ‘The market is the market’ and it is top of the market, even if you are not.”

The table below shows Cousins (shaded in red) as the only quarterback outside Tiers 1 and 2 whose APY represented at least a 15 percent share of the salary-cap allotment in the year of signing, from 2014-22. His three contracts with Minnesota all qualified during that nine-season window.

Cousins was the outlier, the rare veteran starting quarterback to reach the market. The remaining 24 deals in the table above went to quarterbacks voted into the top two tiers when the contracts were signed.

That is how life generally worked at the position, where Tier 1 and 2 quarterbacks are seen as the ones able to take their teams to Super Bowls without all-time great defenses on their side.

But as the table below shows, four of the 13 most recent qualifying contracts went to players seen by NFL coaches and executives as Tier 3 quarterbacks at the time of signing. That’s a shift.

“Quarterbacks used to get paid for winning Super Bowls, not for having good regular-season stats,” another team exec said. “It was Steve Young, Dan Marino, John Elway, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning. Then, all of a sudden, I think it started right around Matthew Stafford with the Lions (in 2013), where it suddenly became, ‘Next man up.’”

Stafford entered the league in 2009, two years before the league and its players reduced salaries for highly drafted rookies. That meant Stafford and the Lions were negotiating in 2013 from a high salary floor. Before that extension, the Green Bay Packers paid Aaron Rodgers near the top of the market in 2008, after Rodgers had started less than one-half season. Rodgers had sat on the bench behind future Hall of Famer Brett Favre for three seasons, so he was deeper into his rookie deal.

Teams today are entering into top-of-market extensions with quarterbacks on cheaper rookie deals. They are doing these extensions one or two years before the players have any shot at free agency, and when teams could use the franchise tag to buy even more time for evaluation.

Teams can justify the approach to some degree by claiming that the extension, when tacked onto an existing deal with years remaining, lets them divide the new total over a longer period of time, lowering the average while locking in terms before prices climb. But they are still frequently committing massive amounts of money to less-than-elite quarterbacks when they could have waited.

Looking at all 37 deals in the tables above reveals a blurring of the lines between Tier 2 and 3 quarterbacks. Some of the QBs voted into Tier 2 at various points — Jimmy Garoppolo and Jared Goff come to mind, with Tagoavailoa right behind them atop Tier 3 this year — have looked really good and really bad for reasons having more to do with coaching and surrounding personnel.

“You have the struggle of, ‘Is Tua good or is (Dolphins coach) Mike McDaniel pulling the stings?” one of the contract negotiations said. “The owner says, ‘Well, I don’t know the difference.’ You are scoring points.

“Most of the coaches and GMs haven’t won enough to be able to tell their owners, ‘You know what? Let’s reset.”

San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay and Philadelphia Eagles GM Howie Roseman had enough equity built up with ownership to move on from quarterbacks they had invested in heavily with massive contracts and/or expensive draft trades.

No one is saying the Dolphins should move on from Tagovailoa or the Jaguars should move on from Lawrence. But why couldn’t those teams push back on paying them at the top of the market? Why couldn’t they push for deals slotting those quarterbacks closer to where the league sees them?

“Tua has a sensational passing attack, a high level of success there,” one of the contract negotiators said. “Goff took Detroit, against a lot of people’s expectations, to the brink of the Super Bowl. I’m talking more about Derek Carr or Kirk Cousins, who have not had any real success in the playoffs and have not led Top 2-3 offenses.”

Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy peace between player and team, assuring that the quarterback will show up for training camp and participate. Tagovailoa and Green Bay’s Jordan Love reported for camp this summer, but withheld services until their extensions were signed. Their teams could have played hardball, but obviously did not see value in the fight.

For decision makers, telling ownership that the purported franchise quarterback is “the guy” and should be paid accordingly can feel safer than pointing out the quarterback’s limitations to save money. This could be especially true in an era when wealthier owners and ballooning salary caps have shaped a climate where teams are more willing to cut their losses, and where coaches might get only a couple of seasons to turn around a franchise.

“Everything in the NFL is about, ‘What helps me keep my job?’” one of the execs said. “It’s not about what is right. If I can pay a quarterback and two years from now move on and maybe not get blamed, that is better than going through a whole year of, ‘Are you going to pay him or not?’”

As the table below shows, the gap between Lawrence’s No. 16 ranking in 2024 Quarterback Tiers and his No. 2 APY represents the biggest deficit for any Tier 1-3 QB since 2014, the first year of QB Tiers. Tagovailoa just missed the cutoff this year with a minus-10 differential (No. 5 APY, No. 15 Tiers ranking).

The 49ers’ Brock Purdy, who is still playing on his seventh-round rookie contract, worth less than $1 million annually, represents the greatest surplus value since 2014 using this criteria. His No. 12 ranking in 2024 QB Tiers is 68 spots better than his No. 80 APY ranking among quarterbacks.

Under NFL labor rules, Purdy becomes eligible to negotiate a long-term extension after the current season. He is the league’s No. 1 statistical quarterback since 2022 in expected points added (EPA) per pass play, passer rating and yards per pass attempt.

Coaches and executives think Purdy is a great fit for the star-studded 49ers, and a good player. They question is: How well would he fare with an average cast around him, or without Shanahan designing the offense? Coaches and execs don’t think Purdy will ever be able to carry a team the way Mahomes or the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen can.

Recent history says none of that will matter when it comes time for a new contract. Purdy has already climbed into Tier 2, and he does not appear finished rising. The league will not blink if and when he passes Prescott or whoever else happens to be the NFL’s highest-paid quarterback at the time.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Ric Tapia and Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)