The Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns open the season as an underdog but carry the weight of expectation like a favorite. Head coach Billy Napier has guided the long-middling program to back-to-back seasons of at least 10 wins, the only double-digit-win seasons in school history. The Sun Belt Conference team has been so successful, in fact, that […]
First, we talk about the college football season. Everything is still possible at the moment, but the pressure is on some schools much more than others. Nebraska’s poor showing against Illinois during “Week Zero” led to questions about what coach Scott Frost has accomplished with recruiting classes that should be performing better. Whatever the Huskers […]
Since 2014, FiveThirtyEight has used Elo ratings to assess and predict NFL games. But while we love Elo, we were curious: Can you forecast the games better than our favorite system? We’re giving you the chance to play along and test your forecasting acumen against Elo. Every week of the NFL season — including the […]
Spare a thought for the younger contenders trying to stop Novak Djokovic from winning the men’s calendar-year Grand Slam at the U.S. Open, which started Monday in New York. The 34-year-old Serbian is one of the greatest tennis players ever to grip a racket. By winning this year’s tournament in Flushing Meadows, Queens, he would […]
With a new college athletic season underway, no one must be happier to turn the page on the 2020-21 calendar than the NCAA itself. Last season, as colleges struggled to play through the pandemic, a series of debates around gender equity spilled out into the open. First there were the woefully inadequate provisions at the […]