Page S17From§Each · the Sports book30 September to 3 October 2026
Sports
By GusThe Sports Desk · the milkman edition, 30 September 2026
GUS: This reporter has walked the tape. September 12: Senator Ted Cruz stands inside what the Washington Examiner calls a raucous gathering on ESPN's College GameDay, stumping for his bill.
TRUDY: Raucous, sure — but the same story says that closure vote was already delayed by the August recess. The crowd moved; the calendar didn't.
GUS: Two days later, Cruz tells The Hill he wants President Trump to sign it live on GameDay, and that the goal was squeaking by with sixty-seven votes.
TRUDY: Sixty, not sixty-seven, sugar. The Hill has him saying the plan wasn't to barely clear cloture's sixty — it was to beat it by plenty.
GUS: By the 15th, NBC has the Senate voting to advance an NCAA-backed, bipartisan bill setting federal rules for a fast-shifting sport.
TRUDY: NCAA-backed carries that whole sentence — a league writing its own guardrails rarely leads the news, but here it is.
GUS: That week, The Nation's Elie Mystal asks in print why a bill with the gal from Washington's name on it might threaten the athletes it claims to help.
TRUDY: Senator Maria Cantwell, Gus. Cosponsor of record, per Monday's Post. Mystal's question needs no nickname.
GUS: Eight days later, the President flies an Air Force One flyover into Texas–Tennessee, two days ahead of the real vote — this desk already filed that one.
TRUDY: And it held up: the vote he flew toward was the one Cruz had promised GameDay a signature for since the 14th.
GUS: Monday, the Post runs its kudos column: Cruz and Cantwell's bill finally through the Senate — a framework, this reporter figures, that's stood a full week.
TRUDY: Two days, not a week. Monday to Wednesday is forty-eight hours, and it isn't law yet — the President hasn't signed anything.
GUS: And today, per the Post: Keyshawn Hall, the high-scoring transfer who left Auburn for St. John's in late August, sues the NCAA for a sixth season on a four-year clock.
TRUDY: Fifth, not sixth. The NCAA clock runs four seasons across five years — Hall's suit asks one more year inside that five. Same week the Senate patted itself on the back for ending exactly this.
HOTMIC: This reporter needs the political desk: that same roundtable the Post applauds seats a team president, Randy Levine of the Yankees, writing labor rules for athletes he doesn't employ, over a bill The Nation flagged on the 18th as a threat to those athletes' labor rights. A business executive drafting rules for other people's unpaid work while those people fight for eligibility in federal court isn't a framework. It's a boardroom with a borrowed gavel.
TRUDY: Mic's hot, and the desk isn't opening tonight — go lie down. Check it first though: Levine's seat runs in Monday's own Post story, same sentence as the bill, and Mystal's labor piece beat the Senate's final vote by ten days. He's not wrong. Just due for that nap.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the noon edition, 1 October 2026
TRUDY: Gus, that is backwards. Hamilton called for leadership change, sure, but the wire quotes him calling Vasseur "the right guy" to take Ferrari forward. That's today's Morning Star. Try reading past the headline.
As for the championship math, this reporter calculates Hamilton trails points leader Kimi Antonelli by a slim thirteen points heading into this weekend's race in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, a deficit erased by one strong Sunday.
TRUDY: One hundred three points, sugar, not thirteen — same wire, same sentence. And it's not so simple as "the Gulf kingdom" either: the Morning Star lists this weekend's race as the "Bahrain Grand Prix," quotation marks and all, run in Malaysia. Somebody owes the desk an atlas.
Turn back the calendar to last month, when Hamilton rolled up to Ferrari's home paddock in a vintage nineteen-fifties racer, a grand entrance this reporter is certain capped off his record sixth win at Monza, first in the red of Ferrari.
TRUDY: Two things, Gus. That arrival was September third, and he drove up in a Ferrari F40, their eighties road car, not some fifties racer. And nothing was capped off — he was targeting that record sixth win, first as a Ferrari driver. Targeting. Not winning. Different verb entirely.
And targeting became triumph, this reporter can report, when first practice opened the following day and Hamilton topped the timing sheets, Ferrari's engine upgrade putting him well clear of teammate Charles Leclerc.
TRUDY: Backwards again. September fourth, first practice: Leclerc headed Hamilton, not the other way round, while that engine upgrade boosted the whole Ferrari team. You've now got the podium order wrong twice this column. Go lie down for ten minutes.
Ferrari will mark a practice lap as history. The sport itself has not changed the roster.
TRUDY: Gus, hang that mic up — that's a political desk problem, not a sports page problem. But since you put a number under it: the Morning Star had Hamilton racing into territory no one before him had reached, September third, the first Black driver aiming to win the Italian Grand Prix in Ferrari colors.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the wee small hours edition, 2 October 2026
This reporter congratulates Angel Reese, duly voted the WNBA's Defensive Player of the Year on what this desk is reliably informed were forty-one media ballots, a fine trophy for any young lady patrolling the paint in Atlanta.
TRUDY: Forty-six ballots, Gus, not forty-one — Fox News had the number October 1st, the same piece wondering whether the league was just rewarding its own hype. Get the box score before the bouquet.
The clock ran out on Caitlin Clark's season that same night in Indianapolis, where A'ja Wilson shut the door on the Fever to close the series.
TRUDY: Las Vegas, not Indianapolis — the Fever were the visitors. Wilson dropped 36, the final was 94 to 83, and Clark played through a bloodied mouth for eighteen points before the horn. Fox News had the dateline plain as day on October 2nd.
Only three weeks earlier the two of them had stood together at the FIBA World Cup insisting there was no feud to sell, a truce this reporter is delighted to report held.
TRUDY: September 10th, the Morning Star had the photo — both of them call the rivalry overblown. Worth asking who keeps selling it anyway.
Nine days before Las Vegas ended it, the Fever had put together their own statement, handing the league-best Minnesota Lynx their largest deficit of the season so far in the final home date, Clark flirting with a triple-double.
TRUDY: September 23rd, same building — the league's best team handed its largest deficit of the year, and the kid still flirting with a triple-double. That's a building you fill with hype, not against it.
TRUDY: Thirty and fourteen in July, thirty and fourteen in September, and forty-six people found improvement anyway. Go lie down, sugar.
HOTMIC: This reporter would like it noted, mic allegedly off, that the credentialed press corps drawing broadcast paychecks off these games is the same body filling out the ballots that crown its own awards, and this network does not call that a conflict of interest. A sports page grading its own homework is how campaign finance got its reputation in the first place, and this reporter is asking, plainly, for a transfer to the political desk before sundown.
TRUDY: Settle down about the conspiracy — nobody's grading homework in secret here. But you tripped into the real story: Fox News asked this exact question on October 1st, out loud, under its own byline — whether the WNBA's own media just rewarded the hype it keeps insisting it's trying to quiet.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the supper edition, 2 October 2026
GUS: There is a particular silence a chair makes when one man is not coming back to sit in it. For twelve seasons Tony Romo occupied the lead analyst's chair at CBS Sports, and on Friday the network announced, in that passive parliamentary language these institutions reserve for the guillotine, that the two parties have mutually agreed to part ways.
TRUDY: Nine seasons, Gus. Not twelve. The network said it itself in the statement the Guardian ran Friday, October 2: "We thank Tony for his contributions over the past nine years." You can do that one on the fingers you were issued.
GUS: The precipitating event was a traffic stop in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early days of June, after which the former Dallas quarterback was placed under arrest for operating a vehicle while under the influence. The gals down in research tell this reporter the file is a thick one.
TRUDY: Milwaukee, July 23. The Daily Caller put the date in its second line Friday. And the women in research have names and graduate degrees, and one of them laid that thick file on your desk at seven this morning, sugar, which is more than you did.
GUS: The contract was substantial, something on the order of $170 million across the decade, and substantial contracts have historically absorbed substantial embarrassments.
TRUDY: $180 million, Guardian, same story, same day. And it absorbed nothing. On September 1 the Post reported the blood-alcohol reading came back nearly double the legal limit, and the punishment in the same filing. That is the number that pulled the chair out from under the contract.
GUS: He apologized at length, speaking of an over-reliance on alcohol and tracing it, in part, to the multiple back surgeries he underwent as an active player. A candid and gentlemanly accounting, in this reporter's estimation, and the matter should rest there.
TRUDY: Ryan Leaf found one part of it less gentlemanly and said so in the Post on September 3: the part where the surgeries carry the weight. Leaf has standing on the subject. Take a nap before you promote an explanation to an exoneration.
GUS: And the ledger did not close with him. A young man's indiscretion out in California surfaced last spring, Keenan Allen, half a dozen indicators of intoxication, extremely slurred speech in the filing.
TRUDY: September 16, Gus, not last spring, and the arrest was the month before that, per the court filing the Post obtained. Fifteen days after Romo's reading went public, the same documents were being read about somebody else.
HOTMIC: We down? Good. Here is what I cannot say into a live one. The man told the country he leaned on alcohol in part because of the multiple back surgeries he took while he was an active player, and the institution's entire answer is a press release thanking him for nine years and wishing him the best. The employer priced the chair at $180 million and priced the back at a thank-you note. Put me on the political desk, Harold. I will do the full hour on who eats the cost of a body broken at work and who writes the parting statement.
TRUDY: Bellowing about the body ledger with the microphone hot is how a man gets transferred to the political desk by force instead of by request. He has the sequence right, though. The Post on September 1 has Romo tying the over-reliance to surgeries he had as an active player, and the Guardian has the network's whole reply: nine years, best wishes, Friday. Go home and take something for the memory.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the early evening edition, 2 October 2026
GUS: Ladies and gentlemen, this reporter was there in spirit: Saturday, September 26, the President stumped for the Protect College Sports Act from the stands in Austin, Air Force One buzzing the field as Texas took on Oklahoma.
TRUDY: The location was Knoxville, not Austin — the New York Post reported the President cheered at a University of Tennessee game, the flyover before kickoff, Texas visiting, not Oklahoma.
GUS: Four days later, Tuesday the 15th, the Senate passed the Act outright — introduced back in March, it sets pay rules, caps revenue sharing, and gives the NCAA's compensation fights a five-year statute of limitations.
TRUDY: Advanced, not passed — The Hill's own copy: the Senate only advanced it that Tuesday, with a five-year eligibility window, not a limitations clock, and antitrust protection for the NCAA built right in.
GUS: Passage came two weeks later, September 29th, when the Senate unanimously sent the Act through — the most lopsided vote in that chamber's history.
TRUDY: Unanimous it was not — The Hill calls it a sweeping bipartisan vote, no lopsided-history tally attached, and sweeping still falls shy of unanimous.
GUS: Friday brought the bill's first customers: a Texas Court of Appeals, this reporter is reliably informed, dissolved the injunction propping up the eligibility of Missouri's lone fifth-year star, Mark Mitchell.
TRUDY: Kentucky, not Texas — CBS Sports, Friday: the Kentucky Court of Appeals dissolved it, and Mitchell's hardly alone; the same ruling left several other fifth-year players in the identical limbo.
GUS: In this reporter's day a young man played his four years, hung up the jersey, and did not come asking Congress for a fifth season — and the young ladies never asked such consideration either.
TRUDY: Nobody asked for a blessing, sugar — the fifth year exists because that eligibility window is exactly what the Senate wrote into this bill two weeks before a Kentucky court took it back.
HOTMIC: Somebody cut this feed before air. The same bill that just left Mark Mitchell without a season also hands the NCAA, The Hill reported September 15, protection from antitrust lawsuits — Congress wrote legal immunity for the trade association and an injunction-shaped hole for the labor. A press office calls that reform. This reporter calls it liability insurance for a monopoly sold as a players' bill. Get me the political desk.
TRUDY: Desk's full, and you don't get to grandstand out of a correction — but you're not wrong on the receipt: The Hill, September 15, says the same bill protecting athletes also shields the NCAA from antitrust suits, and only one of those two protections survived Friday in Kentucky. Go lie down, and eat your mushrooms before next week's column — your memory's worse than the bill's follow-through.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the breakfast edition, 3 October 2026
TRUDY: Third season, sugar? CBS Sports has the Valkyries launching as a WNBA expansion club in 2025. This is only their second season, and it already includes their first playoff series win.
The gals showed real grit chasing down that deficit, scrapping the way this reporter's generation expected ladies' basketball to scrap back when the league still had to prove it belonged on the same broadcast schedule as the men.
TRUDY: "The gals" just won a playoff series as a one-year-old franchise. CBS Sports calls it exactly what it is — a first, full stop, no ladies' auxiliary qualifier required.
The dagger came late, Gabby Williams calmly burying the go-ahead seventeen-footer as Golden State held off Dallas for a 79-73 final that will be replayed on highlight reels for years.
TRUDY: Fox News has it 77-73, not 79. Williams's shot was plenty — Golden State didn't need the extra two points you just handed them.
This reporter notes the comeback bug is going around: Arch Manning and Texas erased a twenty-point deficit against Ohio State on September 13th in a fourth-quarter vanishing act of their own.
TRUDY: That one you got right — 23-3 is a twenty-point hole, same as the Fox headline said. Mark the calendar, it happens.
TRUDY: August 27th, same Fox wire. Good memory for once. Have a seat before the postgame.
HOTMIC: This reporter will say what the production truck isn't supposed to hear: a franchise that didn't exist until 2025 just outlasted a Mercury roster the wire itself calls struggling, and nobody in ownership has to explain what happens to the old markets once the investment money finds a shinier one. Send this reporter to the political desk before standards and practices gets back from lunch.
TRUDY: Mic's hot, genius, and nobody's reassigning you over a box score. Golden State is a 2025 expansion team that just won its first playoff series, and Fox News had the Mercury filed as struggling on August 27th — the facts clear you without the speech.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the noon edition, 3 October 2026
This reporter has run the videotape back eleven times, and this reporter will tell you what the press box in Blacksburg already knows: the ball went up, the arms stayed down, and Virginia Tech went home a loser to Pittsburgh in a ballgame of enormous conference consequence.
TRUDY: Eleven times and you still don't know, which is the story. CBS Sports put the question in its own headline this morning — "Was it actually good?" — over a critical ACC game. The only record of that kick is the recollection of the men who ruled on it. Hold that thought while he builds to his big idea.
GUS: The remedy is not complicated, and it does not require a laboratory. Station a man beside the post. A human being, a whistle, a pair of eyes. The gals in the press box will find such a solution insufficiently modern, and this reporter will gently assure them it has served sport since antiquity.
TRUDY: The gals in that press box file on the same deadline you do, sugar, and any one of them would have told you your big idea is sixteen years old and already has a father. Michel Platini proposed exactly that — a goal-line referee's assistant instead of goal-line technology — BBC Sport, 25 October 2010.
GUS: Now, Platini was a marvelous player. But it was Blatter, as this reporter recalls, who warned that the camera would reduce the sport to "Playstation football" — 2014 or thereabouts, following the tournament in Brazil.
TRUDY: Platini said it. UEFA president, 25 October 2010, BBC Sport, and he said it with the disputed calls of that summer's World Cup still warm on the table. You had the man and the quote in the same breath and handed the quote to another fella. Lie down a minute.
GUS: And the extra set of eyes worked handsomely. Donetsk, the European Championship: Rooney hooking the ball off the line, Terry's header carrying England through, and the fifth official standing right there, seeing the whole of it clean.
TRUDY: Backwards and blind. 19 June 2012, Donbass Arena: Dević shot, John Terry hooked it away from behind the goal line, Rooney's header put England through. The fifth official was standing beside that goal and did not give it. That is the entire argument, Gus — the man beside the post was tried on co-hosts' home soil, and the man beside the post missed it. They sell lion's mane in capsules now.
HOTMIC: Put me on the political desk, because this is the same racket. Replay is only one thing: letting somebody who isn't the crew look at the tape. That is an institution ruling on its own kick.
TRUDY: Gus, the mic is live and you have just compared a field-goal crew to the executive branch, which is unkind to the field-goal crew. It is also the record: 18 to 19 September 2026, the ban announced, the passes confiscated the next day; Judge Timothy Kelly ordered them restored immediately on 24 September, and that same day CNN and MS NOW reporters were still kept out of the Xi Jinping state-dinner arrival while other networks walked in — the Committee to Protect Journalists called it censorship.
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By GusThe Sports Desk · the early evening edition, 3 October 2026
TRUDY: Gus, Carter's not even in this conversation. Smith passed two players from his own locker room, Olave's touchdown record and Egbuka's reception record, both set this decade, per CBS Sports. Leave 1987 out of it.
TRUDY: Two Saturdays back, Gus — Oct. 3, then Sept. 26, that's two, not three. And the box score says four touchdowns for two hundred seventeen yards, not five for two forty, per that same CBS Sports piece. Get a calendar.
TRUDY: That's not a teammate, sugar — that's Jaxon Smith-Njigba, a Seattle Seahawks wideout who came up through that same Ohio State room, telling CBS Sports on Sept. 30. He's watching from the NFL now, same as the rest of us.
The oddsmakers only confirmed what the film already showed: Smith entered this week the Heisman favorite, a status this reporter considers inevitable for a junior who has turned opposing coordinators across the Big Ten into cautionary tales.
TRUDY: Mic's never off, Gus, and the switchboard already lit up before you finished the sentence. But the rant checks out: NCAA v. Alston was decided nine to nothing in 2021, and it freed up only education-related NIL money — the actual revenue-sharing arrangement with players came later, through the separate House v. NCAA settlement, not from Alston at all. Go take your nap, then eat the mushrooms we keep around here for your memory, because you've now lost two Saturdays and two Supreme Court rulings in one column.
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