Life comes at you fast. Regression comes at you faster.

On Sunday, July 10, inside Wintrust Arena in Chicago, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert took part in a press conference before the league’s annual All-Star Game. She said this when asked about the league’s diversity among head coaches.

“We have six out of 12, and now we have seven out of 12 women, and there were only a couple when I came into the league [in 2019],” she said. “I think we’re looking at diversity broadly, both gender and race.”

The six out of 12 she was talking about were Black coaches, as half the coaches in a league that’s around 75 percent Black looked like the players on the floor. Four months later, that’s not the case anymore. When Washington Mystics head coach Mike Thibault announced that he was stepping down to become the team’s general manager, as his son Eric Thibault would be the new head coach, it didn’t seem like a big deal. A franchise with a succession plan in the middle of the offseason doesn’t appear that newsworthy at first glance.

However, a second look will show that the move was the latest evidence of how the league’s head coaching vacancies were whitewashed. At the All-Star break, James Wade (Chicago), Vickie Johnson (Dallas), Tanisha Wright (Atlanta), Fred Williams (Los Angeles), Carlos Knox (Indiana), and Noelle Quinn (Seattle) made up the highest number of Black coaches the league had seen since 1998.

It was all good just a few months ago.

Since then, Latricia Trammell has taken over in Dallas after Johnson was fired, Knox’s interim tag didn’t turn into a permanent position in Indiana, as Christie Sides was brought in, and Williams left Los Angeles to take a position at Auburn, prompting the Sparks to hire former Connecticut head coach Curt Miller. The Suns then hired Stephanie White to fill the void Miller left, and then Eric Thibault took over for his father in D.C.

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In just a matter of months, the WNBA lost three of the six Black head coaches it boasted, as white coaches filled all five of the league’s offseason vacancies. Ironically enough, the opposite is taking place over in the NBA. The league currently has 16 Black coaches, which is more than half — and a new record. And when you add Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra to the mix — the first Asian-American coach in NBA history — it means that 17 of the league’s 30 franchises are coached by men of color.

This is why the WNBA needs a Rooney Rule, the NFL initiative that went into effect in 2003 that mandated that teams interview minority candidates for head coaching jobs. However, due to racism, teams have found ways to skirt the rule, as there are only three Black head coaches currently in the NFL, as the league is dealing with a class-action lawsuit for its racist hiring practices.

As easy as it is to argue how much of a failure the Rooney Rule has been over the years — at minimum, it serves as a constant reminder of the inequalities that are taking place when it comes to how owners hire head coaches, and points to the lengths that many will go to circumvent, and ignore the rule.

The WNBA is in a position in which the league has shown that it’s capable of following in both the footsteps of the NFL and the NBA, which sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. That means whichever step the WNBA takes next will be an important one — whether it be a march in the direction of equality or a hike toward hate.

We’re less than a week away from the opening ceremonies for the World Cup (which, by the way, still don’t have an announced performer, after being turned down by Rod Stewart, Dua Lipa, and now Shakira), and things in Doha are progressing just about as well as expected when you hold a World Cup in a country where companies held workers hostage to get their stadiums built. No less than Sepp Blatter, who is by all accounts a terrible human being and who was, as head of FIFA, instrumental in awarding the world’s biggest tournament to Qatar in 2010, is having second thoughts.

“It is too small of a country. Football and the World Cup are too big for it,” Blatter told a Swiss newspaper. Blatter also confirmed that, prior to 2012, FIFA didn’t give a toss about the human rights records of bidding nations. “Since then, social considerations and human rights are taken into account.” Super.

Just this morning, the New York Times published a sweeping exposè of what we already knew: That in order to dazzle the world with an oasis in the middle of the desert and those obnoxious “Come to Qatar!” ads that keep popping up, the country exploited thousands of migrant workers, thousands of whom lost their lives.

According to the Times:

“The work force is so large and drawn from so many places that its numbers seem impossible to count. It is a group so anonymous that, to this day, no one is able to agree on how many of its members died to get the World Cup across the finish line. Human rights organizations have put the death toll in the thousands. The official count by Qatari organizers — which they carefully limit to deaths on projects directly linked to the tournament — is 37, and only three if just workplace accidents are counted.”

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In addition, same-sex sex is illegal in Qatar, with a punishment of up to three years in prison for “sodomy.” Alcohol is prohibited (with the exception of beer being sold at designated fan fests, and unmarried sex is illegal, as is swearing. Sounds like it’s gonna be one hell of a party in 120-degree heat.

If that isn’t enough to make you believe that Qatar has no business hosting this event, World Cup organizers are also prohibiting foreign media from taking photographs. Of… anything, it seems.

And a Danish news team had a similar experience.

So, just to recap, Qatar invited the entire world to come to Doha for a sporting event, built massive stadiums, and decorated the town with slogans they created and approved, but the media is not allowed to visually document any of it.

That tracks.

Louisville, a once proud basketball school, is off to a historically and uniquely bad start. They’re 0-3 to start the season with all three losses coming by exactly one point.

According to Reece Davis during halftime of one of the State Farm Championship Classic games, it’s the first time a team has started 0-3 with three one-point losses in “at least 42 years.” I guess this is such a unique feat that they weren’t even keeping track of it back then.

These losses would be heartbreaking for anyone, but to be an ACC team and start the season by losing to Bellarmine, Wright State, and Appalachian State is brutal. Louisville was picked to finish 12th out of 15 teams in the conference in the ACC preseason poll, so the Cardinals weren’t exactly expected to contend for a national championship, but still, no one could’ve seen this coming.

Almost as unique as the run of one-point losses itself are the ways in which all of these games have ended. Let’s start at the beginning with the loss to Bellarmine, a private school in Louisville that only started competing in Division I in 2020.

Louisville trailed by one with 10.6 seconds left in the game, and was inbounding the ball underneath the opponent’s basket. After a tough contested two and a putback attempt that also missed, a Bellarmine player rebounded the ball and delivered a pin-point, no-look, over-the-head pass to an empty backcourt.

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The ball lazily trickled across the court as precious seconds ticked off the clock. It went out of bounds 94 feet away from the basket with 0.9 seconds left. Louisville’s attempt at a halfcourt shot bounced harmlessly high and wide off the backboard in the 67-66 loss.

In their next game against Wright State, Louisville led by one with 13.2 seconds to go, inbounding it under their own basket. They broke one of the cardinal rules (pun intended) of basketball and inbounded it into the corner. Two Wright State defenders trapped and were able to force a jump ball. Possession arrow: Wright State.

On the last possession of the game, Wright State’s Trey Calvin took what anyone would assume was a terrible shot. A step back, pump fake, long two, contested by two defenders as time expired. Nothing but net. 73-72.

The Cards’ most recent loss to Appalachian State might be the cruelest of all. Down by one in the last seconds of the game, Louisville scored a layup as time expired. That would’ve been the deciding basket, but it was waved off after review showed that the player did not get the shot off in time.

That was only after the players and fans had all celebrated the Cards’ first “win” of the season. To have thought you won, only to find out that you lost your third straight game by one point, is a Shakespearian-level tragedy.

Even more hilarious is that, if you watch the condensed version of this game on the ACC’s YouTube channel, the video just ends as Louisville is celebrating. The scoreboard shows a 62-61 Louisville win as it fades to black and then plugs the ACC Digital Network’s social media.

It’s likely just a mistake, but I’m choosing to believe it’s blatant ACC propaganda, an erasure of a troubling past by a fascist conference. Any books that tell the true story of that game should expect to be burned in the town square.

There’s probably a Louisville fan out there right now that only watched this particular highlight video and is going about their day thinking that they won. If you’re that person then I’m so sorry you had to hear it from me.

This unfortunate, unlucky, and yet comedic run makes me think that one of the coaches or players was granted a wish from a genie but didn’t read the fine print and is now experiencing some horrible, twisted version of what they wanted. Something like “I wish more people were talking about our team,” or “I wish our games were more exciting.”

The way in which Louisville lost these games may be extremely unlikely, but you might’ve been able to guess the wins and losses themselves. They played a preseason exhibition against Division II Lenoir-Rhyne University and lost 57-47.

Before we can truly look forward, we must go back in time, to a marvelous place where the United States men’s national team missing the World Cup was such an afterthought, it would be equal to falling into the abyss. Yeah, a few CONCACAF rivals like Panama and Costa Rica were rapidly improving and belonged in the discussion for a World Cup berth every four years. The USMNT couldn’t falter far enough to watch the international event from the sidelines? Of course not! Until it happened in 2018.

DeAndre Yedlin is the only American with previous World Cup experience that was named to Gregg Berhalter’s 26-man roster for Qatar. It’s an odd place to be. Even as the USA missed every World Cup between 1950 and 1990, six members of the 1994 World Cup squad had previous tournament experience, including Tab Ramos and Tony Meola. Yedlin is on an island by himself in that category. John Brooks and incredible longshot Julian Green appeared to be the only other 2014 participants to be considered for selection this year.

Yedlin’s place on the team despite the hard-roster reset of 2018 never went away. Even though it feels like he’s been around too long, he’s only 29. Yedlin was days shy of his 21st birthday when the USA got knocked out in the Round of 16 by Belgium in its last World Cup game to date. He was a young kid back then. Only Green was younger than the 23 men selected for the 2014 World Cup by the Yanks. Now, he’s the fifth-oldest member of the team, months shy of besting Walker Zimmerman for No. 4 in time spent on Earth.

Yedlin isn’t expected to start in Qatar, as Sergino Dest and Antonee Robinson have locked down his outside back spot for most of World Cup qualifying. He’s one of the more intriguing options off the bench, however. Remember his appearance at the 2014 World Cup against Portugal? His pace on the right side helped turn the tide of that game, bringing the USA from down 1-0 after an early own goal to up 2-1 late. Cristiano Ronaldo had a moment of brilliance to keep the USMNT to one point that day instead of three. Without Yedlin, the Yanks likely don’t advance to the knockout stage.

What should we expect from Yedlin in this World Cup? If you tuned out for eight years, basically the same thing he did in 2014, but a more mature version. While his speed and vision toward goal from defense stood out then, the USMNT is loaded with that style of player on this roster. His defensive ability has improved a little, and he’ll likely have to cover more at the back with the USA’s guaranteed opponents in Wales, England, and Iran. Relying on the center backs to solely do that grit work will lead to the Americans leaving Qatar after three games.

“There’s a state you can get in called flow state, which is basically when you’re not even thinking about what you’re doing. You’re just doing it and almost, you don’t know how. And (at the 2014 World Cup) I was in that state,” Yedlin said in a recent US Soccer video. “For whatever reason, everything was just flowing for me. And it was obviously a life-changing experience.”

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In recent days, some experts, including former USMNTer Landon Donovan, have called for Yedlin to start Monday’s World Cup opener against Wales over Dest. Their reasoning is while Dest is a better version of 2014 Yedlin in attack, his lack of recent play due to injury and defensive missteps have made some clamor for experience to be the deciding factor. I’d still give Dest the first chance at starting in Qatar over Yedlin. Dest’s best is worth the risk over Yedlin, which would be the safer move. When you’re guaranteed, you go with the best possible path, even if a crash and burn may occur.

The U.S. has had eight years to think about a return to the biggest stage in the sport. It has 270 guaranteed minutes to prove itself. Dest still provides a top-level quality Yedlin hasn’t shown consistently. The AC Milan right back may have an incredibly short leash to remove his starting tag in Qatar, as most players not named Christian Pulisic should. It’s impossible that Yedlin doesn’t touch the field in Qatar. Providing a super-sub spark will be ideal if the USA wants to advance out of the group stage. 

I hate to give Texas credit for anything because the state already takes credit for everything. However, of all the supposed football-obsessed hubs, the Lone Star State tops them all. Mostly because of how unhealthy the population’s dedication to the sport is — I’m sure there are Texans who got where Coach Kilmer from Varsity Blues was coming from — but that’s beside the point.

Or actually, that kind of is my point. There’s no better spite-viewing than watching the biggest brands from Austin and College Station underperform and falter. Coming into this college football season, the Aggies were No. 6 in the AP Poll, Baylor was No. 10, and there were the annual rumors of the Longhorns’ being back.

TCU, currently sitting at No. 4 in the College Football Playoff standings, was No. 72. After a 5-7 season in 2021, they fired longtime coach Gary Patterson, brought in Sonny Dykes from SMU, and haven’t lost a game all year. The Horned Frogs have five wins over ranked opponents, including a four-week span of victories over top 25 teams.

Max Duggan, a four-year QB out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, has played as mistake free as it gets, with a 25-2 TD-INT ratio and a completion percentage of 65 percent. Running back Kendre Miller has over 1,100 yards on the ground, and was seen a week ago dusting burnt orange defenders for a 75-yard sprint that went a long way toward the Frog’s win in Austin. Miller was a two-star recruit out of Mount Pleasant, Texas.

Leading receiver Quentin Johnston has flashed big-play ability in big moments all season long. He and Duggan were four-star prospects, so it’s not like these guys are a bunch of upstarts coming out of nowhere. Yet, none of them were recruited by Dykes.

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A few of the coach’s transfer portal guys have paid off. Linebacker Johnny Hodges is the team’s leading tackler after coming over from Navy. Center Alan Ali followed his coach from SMU, as well. The secondary has a bevy of new faces, but that unit is 84th in the country in yards allowed per outing.

The majority of the starters, though, are from, you guessed it, Texas. That’s what gets me. There is clearly more than enough talent in the state to compete for conference crowns and national championships every season.

Dykes has grown as a coach since his stint at Cal where he helped make Jared Goff the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft. He had a couple of 10-win seasons with the Mustangs — their first since 1984 — and is doing much of the same thing at TCU.

That said, like Tom Herman when he went from Houston to Austin, I have no idea if Dykes’ success would translate to whichever of the state’s most storied programs opens up first. Jimbo Fisher’s Aggies are 3-7, and even though they play in the SEC, it shouldn’t be this bad. The Longhorns always have a depth chart littered with five stars, and Baylor has had the better decade of the two Big 12 schools.

You can find the impact of Texas’ talent all across college football without having to look that hard. It could be a team like Herman’s Cougars squad that went 13-1, or the fact that Mike Leach consistently gave everyone (including his own players) headaches while in Lubbock. I mentioned Baylor already, but TCU came one second away from possibly spoiling the BCS when they were in the Mountain West and the Longhorns were still contending for titles under Mack Brown.

Outside of Vince Young and Co. in 2005, A&M and Texas don’t have a national championship since 19-fucking-70. I know the Longhorns ran the Southwest Conference for decades, but you have to find those titles on Wikipedia because that conference no longer exists.

It’s objectively untrue to say the state of Texas doesn’t matter to college football. Yet, so is saying the media’s coverage of the Longhorns and Aggies is outsized when juxtaposed with the year-in, year-out production. One also could surmise that less outside pressure and fear of failing to meet expectations do wonders.

Hell, this piece was supposed to focus on the team that’s three wins away from being the Big 12’s first non-Oklahoma participant in the College Football Playoff — and the state’s first in general. And yet, here I am, wasting words on UT and A&M.

If Las Vegas gave out odds prior to the first season of the playoff in 2014 for which Texas program would get to the CFP first, do you know how far down the list would the Horned Frogs have been?

Not that far at all, and definitely in front of Texas and Texas A&M. They had just come off a 12-1 season, a Big 12 title, and a No. 3 finish in the AP. That one blemish? A 61-58 loss to Baylor.

And who do they play Saturday on the precipice of making Texas college football history? You should know it’s not the Longhorns because I mentioned TCU beat them last week. Yup, it’s the Baylor Bears of Waco.

I lied earlier when I said there’s no better spite-viewing than watching the Longhorns and Aggies repeatedly vomit all over themselves. It does get better, and that’s when you mix their misery with the joy of the other Texas schools showing them how it’s done. 

Of the eight players currently averaging more than 30 points per game, there’s one who’s not like the others. Out of Luka Dončić , Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, I think it’s easy to pick out who I’m referring to.

The Oklahoma City guard is scoring 31 per night on shooting splits of 54/39/94, and it’s unclear if he’s even going to make the All-Star team. The West is loaded with perimeter talent, he’s on the ceaselessly rebuilding Thunder, and you need League Pass to see him play.

We have no idea if he’s a good stats-bad team guy, because every time OKC is surprisingly competitive, GM Sam Presti doctors an injury report to stay in the lottery mix. Who knows what the end goal is from the Thunder’s trove of draft picks, but having that many assets doesn’t mean it’ll be enough to convince the Brick for Vic winner to trade down.

Yes, this season would be playing out differently if Chet Holmgren wasn’t sitting it out due to injury. However, SGA’s timeline seems to have already started. Every other guy getting 30-plus in 2022 would be pissed about missing the playoffs, and probably still be irked if they’re relegated to the play-in.

If the Thunder earn a nine-seed they’ll be ecstatic, even though they have the means to trade responsibly and challenge for more. While I’m not urging Presti to piss away the big stack chasing gut-shot flush draws, he could bully his way into the money at the very least.

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Right now the most significant OKC trade headlines revolve around moving Gilgeous-Alexander. I’m not going to propose deals for the guard because that’s what casual NBA fans do on IG in their spare time. Plus, SGA is excited for the future.

I empathize with Thunder beat writer Brandon Rahbar’s agitation because that’s what pundits have been doing with Damian Lillard for years. The difference between the two organizations is Portland seemingly maxed out its roster around their franchise player, and OKC is actively sandbagging promising seasons of SGA’s young career.

And that’s my concern. The Thunder’s current tanking isn’t as bad as peak Process, which is good. Joel Embiid has shown us that great players can overcome poor culture. The 76ers will be a top four team in the East as long as he’s surrounded by serviceable talent.

The side effect of Philly’s asset-forward approach is that even though the team had the capital to broker trades to improve the roster every offseason, there’s little to no continuity. Very rarely is a collection of talent good enough to win a championship without collectively experiencing playoff failure first.

Wouldn’t you love to see how the Thunder look if Gilgeous-Alexander, Josh Giddey, Lou Dort, and Tre Mann are given a real rotation power forward and center. Aleksej Pokusevski and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl are ostensibly G League players at this point in their careers if that’s not Poku’s ultimate destination.

I doubt Presti would even notice the missing draft picks that it would take to acquire Miles Turner from Indiana. A veteran center could improve a defense that’s giving up 54 paint points per game, which ranks fourth worst in the NBA. And it’d be nice to have some form of interior infrastructure in place to ease the workload on Holmgren’s slight frame when he returns next year.

Say they miss out on the No. 1 pick, and end up with Scoot Henderson instead. Do they move on from Giddey in hopes of adding another guard capable of getting 30? Where does Chet fall in the pecking order if that happens?

These aren’t bad issues, but they already have a damn good problem solver, and one who’s going under appreciated because of a GM counting picks of over wins.

Kevin Durant most definitely wanted to be traded this past summer.

KD had issues with the direction that the Brooklyn Nets were heading, and was most certainly not satisfied with the coaching. That was the report during the offseason, and he confirmed it to Bleacher Report’s Chris Haynes.

In an exclusive interview, Durant talked to Haynes about the turmoil surrounding the Nets and their rough start to the 2021-22 season after getting trounced by the Sacramento Kings, 153-121, on national television.

“It wasn’t difficult at all to request a trade, because it was about ball,” Durant said to Haynes.

In telling his side of the story, Durant’s complaints sound like your average, everyday, upset Jimmy Butler. He was unhappy with the amount of Nets practices, and what they were going over during those sessions. Durant apparently loves closeout drills the way most American workers love a free lunch, because he mentioned twice that the Nets needed more of those in practice.

It’s almost Thanksgiving. The Nets are even more chaotic than they were last season, and playing worse basketball. Ben Simmons is sometimes on the court, sometimes not. And when he is playing, he has been a worse player than he was during his infamous meltdown in the 2021 playoffs while with the Philadelphia 76ers. Kyrie Irving decided to post a link to an anti-Semetic film just days after Adidas dropped Kanye “Ye” West for continuously making those kinds of statements publicly. Irving is currently suspended indefinitely and the Nets are 6-9.

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However, Durant was adamant that he is fine with the current state of the Nets. He spoke positively of new head coach Jacque Vaughn, because I guess they’re both big fans of closeout drills at practice. Durant claimed that he enjoys having to navigate five defenders, because it’s making him a better player. While this season is currently aimed in the opposite direction of the postseason it’s all good, because he gets to impart his wisdom on these inexperienced, and according to him, mediocre NBA players.

“Look at our starting lineup. Edmond Sumner, Royce O’Neale, Joe Harris, [Nic] Claxton and me. It’s not disrespect, but what are you expecting from that group?” Durant said to Haynes. “You expect us to win because I’m out there. So if you’re watching from that lens, you’re expecting us to play well because No. 7 is out there.”

Last season, Durant felt like the team was moving in the wrong direction and was losing respect in the basketball world. With the Nets becoming less and less centered, and playing “like shit,” He assumed that the blame was going to fall on him, and told Haynes that is why he requested the trade.

One thing Durant most certainly clarified, is why Steve Nash got canned as Nets coach 13 days into the regular season. When the news broke that Durant had requested a trade, it was reported that he gave the Nets an ultimatum. Either fire Nash and general manager Sean Marks, or ship him out. Cooler heads prevailed when all sides realized that moving the 34-year-old superstar who had achilles tendon surgery three years ago would be extremely difficult. The Nets braintrust met with Durant at his home in Los Angeles, and worked out a way for him to return.

Still, Durant insisted to the media that he was “shocked” when Nash was let go.

If the Nets had started the season on a five-game winning streak, maybe it could have bought Nash some time. Instead they lost five of their first seven games.

As the holiday season approaches, besides Nash, there isn’t much difference with the Nets from last season. Simmons is on the roster instead of James Harden, O’neal instead of Bruce Brown, Irving isn’t allowed on the floor, and the team is a disappointment.

Let Durant tell it though, it’s all good. The Nets may be a mess, but this is a mess that he can live with.