Page S15From§Each · the Sports book27 September to 28 September 2026
Sports
By GusThe Sports Desk · the wee small hours edition, 27 September 2026
This reporter finds himself, as so often, chronicling supreme institutional calm. Manchester City's chairman, per CBS Sports on September 26th, remains confident of their club's innocence after an independent panel ruled on 115 financial charges. This reporter presumes the charges amount to unpaid parking tickets, and expects an apology by Tuesday.
TRUDY: Sugar, CBS Sports never said "parking ticket." It reported potential sanctions ranging from heavy points deductions to outright expulsion and stripped titles. That is not a citation. That is the death penalty with a scoreboard.
This reporter notes the gals back home are surely keeping their own score, filing paperwork while the men in blazers argue finance.
TRUDY: The women in Manchester run banks, courts and this desk's fact-checking. None of them need your permission slip.
TRUDY: The year was 2022. City won that fourth title in five years, sixth overall, with a 3–2 comeback over Aston Villa on the final day, finishing on 93 points, one ahead of Liverpool.
What this reporter finds remarkable is the timing: the rules violations under review sit beneath the trophy case those seasons built.
TRUDY: "Whatsoever" is your word. CBS Sports reports only that the panel ruled on 115 financial charges spanning the years that produced those titles, and that the coming appeal will decide how much of that trophy case survives.
This reporter is reminded of the last time England's giants faced consequences of their own making: in April 2021, City and five fellow clubs launched the European Super League, only to abandon it days later once the football world objected.
TRUDY: The BBC and the Daily Express date the withdrawal to April 20th, 2021 — all six clubs pulled out after backlash from UEFA, FIFA, the national associations and, in the record's words, "football fans alike."
HOTMIC: Somebody explain why six billion-dollar clubs folded their Super League the moment UEFA, FIFA, the federations and the fans turned on it in April 2021, while one of them is still contesting a 115-charge ruling in September 2026. The Premier League moves at wire speed against public relations and at geological speed against its own accounting. Get me the political desk. Who do these regulators answer to?
TRUDY: That's a hot mic talking, not a football column, but the calendar checks out — the Super League collapsed in April 2021 under backlash from UEFA, FIFA and the national federations, while the case against City is only now, in September 2026, producing a 115-charge ruling, per CBS Sports. Go lie down, Gus.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the sunrise edition, 27 September 2026
This reporter watched Ohio State open the season against Ball State on September 5th, a get-right game before the real schedule started, and by the time Jeremiah Smith finished torching Illinois on Saturday for four touchdowns and 217 yards, this reporter felt vindicated for circling the kid's name back in the spring.
TRUDY: He tied it, not broke it, and it's not an NCAA record — it's Ohio State's own single-game touchdown mark, four scores, matched Saturday against Illinois to go with the 217 yards. Fox News printed the number. You supplied the history.
The computers agree, incidentally.
TRUDY: Twice, Gus. CBS called it "proven" for Texas in Week 2 and Kent State in Week 3 — that's the receipt. The opener against Ball State was the Post printing a channel listing, no model, no proof claimed. Take the nap before you recount.
Whatever it watched, the machine watched Smith become the Heisman front-runner Saturday, and this reporter is ready to say the award is his to lose, the way the gals used to say a fella had the corner office locked up before the meeting even started.
TRUDY: Nobody's saying "the gals" anymore, sugar, and nobody needs to — Fox already gave you the number that does the locking up: four touchdowns, 217 yards, one afternoon. Sit the rest of this quarter out.
Two headlines calling the same model "proven" back-to-back weeks is this reporter's idea of a batting average, and if CBS prints the word again before bowl season, this reporter will reprint it first.
HOTMIC: A network that brands its own prediction model "proven" twice in three weeks without ever publishing its record on the team in question is running an advertisement, not a forecast, and it does so under the same corporate roof that sells the audience the box score it never prints. This reporter would like the political desk to ask why a self-graded model gets to keep the word "proven" in the headline at all. Send this to the political desk.
TRUDY: That's a manifesto, Gus, not a football correction, and it's not why the mic was on. But he's not wrong nobody's shown their work — CBS ran "proven" on September 10th for Texas and again September 18th for Kent State, neither time printing how the model did the week before. That's the whole receipt.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the breakfast edition, 27 September 2026
The top-ranked Texas Longhorns walked into Neyland Stadium on Saturday and silenced it, which is no small errand in Tennessee. Colin Simmons put the quarterback on the ground four times. Raleek Brown found the end zone. Texas escaped, and it was thrilling.
TRUDY: Five sacks, Gus. Fox counted them Saturday, and Raleek Brown scored twice, not once. The man had a two-touchdown afternoon and you handed him a participation ribbon.
In the stands sat the President of the United States, vouching for the Protect College Sports Act. He said, while attending the game, that "we actually had 78 votes, if you can believe it," and called Speaker Mike Johnson fantastic.
TRUDY: Sixty, sugar. Ted Cruz said it himself on the fourteenth: the goal was "not just to squeak by with 60 votes." And that arithmetic is untested. The Examiner reported on the twelfth that the cloture vote was delayed by the August recess, and The Hill puts Saturday's trip ahead of the senators' last chance before the lame duck.
The bill has had its television run. Senator Cruz carried it onto ESPN's College GameDay this month, before a crowd this reporter would call spirited, sitting for an interview with Kirk Herbstreit. The president had not taken in a college game since January of 2025, when Miami took the championship from Indiana. Trudy, the young lady at the next desk who keeps my files so tidy, has the particulars.
TRUDY: Rece Davis did that interview — Examiner, the twelfth — and "raucous" was their word for the gathering. January of this year, and Indiana beat Miami: The Hill, the twenty-third, and it was his first college game since. I keep my own files. Go take the nap.
Ahead of the senators' last chance, then, a sideline became a whip operation, and the wheels went up for Washington on Saturday afternoon. Senator Cruz has the celebration booked already: he wants the bill signed live on College GameDay once it passes. This reporter has covered signing ceremonies. Never one with a pregame show.
TRUDY: The Hill, the fourteenth — and it says plainly what the bill is for: "the big business of college sports." The country learned he was flying to Knoxville from OutKick founder Clay Travis before the White House confirmed it, per the Examiner on the twenty-fourth. When the sports-media man breaks the legislation, the legislation is a broadcast. Try those mushrooms they sell for the memory.
HOTMIC: Get me the political desk. The president spent a Saturday inside Neyland Stadium working a football crowd for a bill the Senate has not passed, and the same live file that logged his return to the White House logged Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, rejected. The chamber took August and the cloture vote slid with it, and the last chance is still sitting in front of them. A senator wants the signature staged on a Saturday-morning television program. That is not a legislature. That is an affiliate.
TRUDY: Gus, the mic was live, the booth heard you, and you just called the United States Senate a television affiliate on the air. Now — The Hill's Saturday file carries both the return from Knoxville and Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait rejected, and the Examiner has the cloture vote delayed by the August recess, with the senators' last chance still ahead of them.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the breakfast edition, 27 September 2026
GUS: Ladies and gentlemen, this reporter has the whole week's tape. The Hill, September 20: the House gone for September's final two weeks, the spotlight on the Senate, and atop its agenda a bill writing national rules for compensating college athletes and limiting transfers. Introduced in March. A measure like that deserved a closing argument. It got an aircraft.
TRUDY: Aircraft later, paperwork now. The Washington Examiner, Saturday: the Protect College Sports Act was introduced in May, and Monday's expected passage would be the furthest a collegiate sports bill has ever gotten in Congress. Furthest ever, Gus.
GUS: On Saturday, September 12, Senator Ted Cruz carried the bill onto ESPN's College GameDay before what the Examiner called a raucous gathering, its closure vote delayed by the August recess. Monday he told reporters his goal was to squeak by with sixty votes. Tuesday the Senate voted to advance it.
TRUDY: Read the quote instead of paraphrasing it. The Hill, September 14: "Our goal from the beginning was not just to squeak by with 60 votes but to get a big" — and in the same breath the senator said he'd like the President to sign it live on College GameDay. Kirk Herbstreit told reporters that Friday, "We had him on because they were going to be voting this week." That's a television window, sugar, not a whip count.
GUS: Wednesday, September 23, the White House confirmed to The Hill that the President would attend Texas–Tennessee in Knoxville, his first college football game since January's College Football Playoff National Championship, where Miami defeated Indiana. Thursday the Examiner had the itinerary, reported by OutKick founder Clay Travis, and the purpose: the continued push for passage. Knoxville prepared: gates open early, a third off the beer, a kindness to the gals working concessions.
TRUDY: Reverse the teams — The Hill says Indiana defeated Miami. And the discount was fifty percent. Fox has the gates opening early with 50% off beer, and the New York Post called it an unusual alcohol tactic to get fans there early. Half price is no kindness to the women working those taps. It's a longer line at the same wage.
GUS: Saturday delivered. The New York Post called the flyover majestic; Fox had the new-look Air Force One over a roaring stadium. From the stands the President vouched for the bill — "Bipartisanship for the first time in a while" — and said, "Mike Johnson's fantastic. And we actually had 78 votes, if you can believe it." The broadcast carrying it, per the Post, dissolved into a static-filled mess.
TRUDY: The audio failed; the crowd held. Texas escaped Neyland anyway, Colin Simmons with five sacks and Raleek Brown scoring twice, per Fox. I read the Knoxville wire from the flyover to the final gun. Not one dispatch records a senator changing.
GUS: One more Tennessee dispatch. Wednesday, former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher, who won August's primary running as a "Pro-Trump" candidate while Rep. Andy Ogles held the President's endorsement, took the Pro-Trump line out of his slogan.
TRUDY: So a stadium in Tennessee roared at him the same week a Republican in a deep-red Tennessee seat took his name off his own slogan, per the Examiner's Wednesday exclusive. One of those is a receipt. Go lie down, Gus, before that microphone gets hot.
HOTMIC: Put me on the political desk, because here is what that stadium was rented to sell. The top item on the Senate's calendar for the two weeks the House is gone is, per NBC, an NCAA-backed bill setting federal guidelines for the athletes. The Nation ran it Friday: the bill threatens athletes' labor rights. The labor rules get sold from the fifty-yard line, and the man in the upper deck pays half price for the beer that seated him in time to cheer.
TRUDY: Gus, you are a sportscaster hollering labor law into a live microphone. The receipts: NBC, September 15, calls it NCAA-backed and bipartisan, and Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation on September 18 that it threatens athletes' labor rights. You're right, and the vote is Monday.
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By SalStaff Writer · the noon edition, 27 September 2026
On Tuesday, Amnesty International's Europe director, Steve Cockburn, called Israel's continued participation in the UEFA Nations League "unconscionable," pointing to what Amnesty says is the Israeli football association's ongoing support for the occupation. That was the state of the record five days before Ireland was scheduled to take the pitch against Israel.
By Sunday the question had moved from a human-rights office in Europe to the Irish government itself. Prime Minister Micheál Martin was asked directly about antisemitism in Ireland, and he rejected the claim. Whatever the fair reading of the country's record, the prime minister's answer was flat: no problem here.
The same day, in the same country, a different institution was not so sure. Ireland's national soccer team, under manager Heimir Hallgrimsson, was working through selection issues that came down to a vote: whether to play the fixture at all. This is not a routine team meeting.
The players voted to go ahead. But "go ahead" came with a condition attached, the kind of condition a team doesn't attach to a game it considers ordinary. Every player would wear a black armband, described in their own words as being worn "in recognition of all lives lost" in Gaza. The match was played, on schedule, with the armbands on.
Line those two Sunday events up next to each other and you get the whole story without adding a word to either one. A head of government says the country has no antisemitism problem. His own national team, that same day, cannot agree among itself whether to take the field against Israel without first taking a vote and then marking its sleeves for the dead in Gaza. One of those is a denial. The other is a count of hands. The count is the one that had to happen before anyone could take the pitch.
Nobody in this story is accused of anything. The prime minister answered a question he was asked. The players answered one nobody had to ask them, because they asked it of themselves. That's the tell. When the people closest to the fixture feel the need to vote on playing it, and then to wear something for the dead once they've decided to, the flat denial issued the same morning starts to look less like an assessment and more like a hope.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the matinee edition, 27 September 2026
GUS: This reporter has tracked the Protect College Sports Act since September 12, when Senator Ted Cruz carried it onto ESPN's College GameDay before what the Washington Examiner called a raucous gathering — the young men and women in the student section, this reporter presumes, cheering for cloture.
TRUDY: Presume less, Gus. The Examiner's account has Cruz working that crowd for the bill; the students came for Rece Davis and the pregame show, not a floor debate.
GUS: Two days later, on September 14, Cruz told reporters he wanted President Trump to sign the finished bill live on GameDay, and that the goal was not to squeak by — his words — with sixty votes.
TRUDY: Hold that number, Gus. Sixty is the floor Cruz set for himself, not the floor the Constitution requires to pass a bill — The Hill, September 14.
GUS: The ledger added a flyover on September 26: Air Force One over Neyland Stadium before Texas and Tennessee kicked off, the president in the stands, and, by this reporter's notes, Tennessee's freshman quarterback outdueling the Texas defense.
TRUDY: Read your own wire, sugar. Outkick's headline: "Texas defense rocks Tennessee freshman QB" in a Texas win. Go lie down before you file the score backward twice.
GUS: Which brings the ledger to Sunday, one day out from Monday's floor vote: NPR reporting that a handful of former college athletes, now senators on both sides of the aisle, hold an extra say over the bill's fate.
TRUDY: That's the sentence, Gus — "an extra say," not "the final say." Ninety-nine other senators still vote Monday, whatever the president did in the stands Saturday.
GUS: Those former players, not the man who flew over the stadium, now field the question of whether a bill meant to protect college sports needs protecting from him — a bill, this reporter notes, that needs only a simple Senate majority, fifty-one votes, to reach the president's desk.
TRUDY: Fifty-one passes a resolution naming a post office, Gus. Cruz put the real number on the record himself, September 14: sixty votes was the floor he wanted cleared, not squeaked by.
HOTMIC: a senator who makes the man in the stands the story, not the bill, already knows what a party does with that independence. Somebody get me the political desk before Monday.
TRUDY: Mic's hot again, Gus, and that's no talking point — that's a threat. It also happens to be exactly right: Kentucky already ran it, October 2025 to May 19, 2026, thirty-seven million dollars by July 17, the most expensive House primary on record, and Thomas Massie lost fifty-five to forty-five anyway.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the early bird edition, 27 September 2026
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear vetoed his state's transgender athletes ban and told the RNC piling on him that his party never throws — doesn't, rather, throw anybody under the bus. Never is my word, not his; the governor's is the more careful one, and on the specific fact of his own veto, it holds. He kept it. That much of the defense is not in dispute.
The rest of the sentence has a calendar problem, and the calendar starts in Texas. On September 9th, Paxton, still sitting as attorney general, put his name on a release handing out more than 7 million eggs from a legal settlement. The next poll, September 10th, had Talarico four points up. That same day, Talarico told The Hill he opposes transgender athletes in girls' sports "if it endangers safety or fairness" — a Democrat closing a Senate race, finding his own qualifier.
Twelve days later, on September 22nd, the Washington Examiner reported the qualifier wasn't his alone. Democratic House candidates nationwide were telling voters on TV screens that they agreed with Republicans on keeping transgender athletes out of girls' sports and giving parents more control — the same candidates whose votes, cast as state or local legislators, said otherwise. The reporting didn't call it a reversal. It ran the voting records next to the ads and let the two disagree.
So the defense I'd like to make — that this is one governor, one veto, one honest sentence — doesn't survive contact with September 22nd. It isn't that Beshear misspoke about Kentucky. It's that the bus he says his party doesn't drive was already moving, five days before he reached the podium, with his own candidates at the wheel in states he doesn't govern.
The rider is a Minnesota softball player who wrote about losing her state championship semifinal to a team fielding a transgender pitcher, and about refusing to lose her voice next. She isn't on any ballot. She doesn't get a TV ad or a veto with her name on it. She gets the outcome the qualifiers exist to manage, and the sentence built to cover it — his party doesn't throw anybody under the bus — was true right up until the record was checked.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the milkman edition, 28 September 2026
GUS: This reporter resumes the broadcast where Saturday's tape ended. Rewind to September 12: Senator Ted Cruz carried the Protect College Sports Act onto ABC's College GameDay, facing what the Washington Examiner called a raucous crowd there for kickoff, not cloture.
TRUDY: ESPN's, not ABC's — the Examiner, September 12. Get the network right before the Senate.
GUS: Two days on, September 14, Cruz told reporters his sights sat past a bare majority — something near forty votes, this reporter recalls, enough to squeak by.
TRUDY: Sixty, not forty. The Hill quotes him directly, September 14: "not just to squeak by with 60 votes but to get a big number." Twenty votes is a different bill.
GUS: By September 21, The Hill reported the measure — introduced in May, championed by Cruz and Senator Maria Cantwell, bless her, minding the aisle's other end — stood primed to clear the Senate that week, the House recess leaving its fall reception in doubt.
TRUDY: "Bless her" is a benediction, sugar, not a title. The Hill names Cantwell co-champion, same sentence as Cruz. Leave the blessing in the pew.
TRUDY: Nothing "merely" about a president scheduling a stadium visit around a bill he's pushing, same Examiner report, September 24. Take your nap before the next paragraph.
GUS: Now, this reporter's actual assignment. NPR reported Sunday, September 27, the Act sitting on the brink of Senate passage, with a number of former college athletes turned senators, both parties, holding what NPR called an extra say — their playing days apparently qualifying them to referee a business worth billions.
TRUDY: NPR's word was "seat," not "referee" — September 27, nothing about officiating. Every senator casts one vote; a handful just remember two-a-days. Might be time for the mushrooms, for the memory.
HOTMIC: This reporter has watched enough legislative theater to know when a bill's signing gets built around a football pregame show instead of the other way around. Cruz asked, on the record, for the President to sign this act live on ESPN's GameDay once it passes — The Hill, September 14. A quorum call has become a lead-in. Somebody get the political desk on the line, because this reporter can count the committee hearings that drew that production budget, and the count is small.
TRUDY: Save the crusade for the political desk; this is the sports page. But you're right — Cruz did ask, on the record, for exactly that signing, The Hill, September 14.
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