This is not the first time I’ve talked about a college football coach getting a massive payment for effectively getting fired and asked to not coach his team anymore.

As a child of a certain era in Texas, I grew up on a certain brand of country music. Kenny Rogers, Alabama, the Oak Ridge Boys. I listened to Dolly Parton before she was retro cool.

Napheesa Collier’s recent public rebuke of WNBA leadership, which came after a hotly-debated no-call in the last minute of the Lynx’s semi-final game against the Mercury that left Collier with an ankle injury, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve with a one-game suspension and league-record $15,000 fine (and then two other coaches were fined $1000 each for agreeing with her!), and Phoenix forward Alyssa Thomas with the ball, has launched an abundance of conversations about the state of the league and, especially, its leadership.

It’s unfair to blame comedian Heather McMahan for the boorish and embarrassing behavior by American fans at last week’s Ryder Cup golf tournament on Bethpage, Long Island.

I’ve become a fan of Syracuse University athletics this year, which is something that happens when you send your kid and a whole lot of your savings up there.

Last week I was looking for something to watch, which usually means reruns of House Hunters or Magnum PI, and on the guide I came across what looked like the final stage of the Vuelta a Espana, the last of the year’s grand cycling tours – the Tour de France being the most well known.

I believe there are two kinds of people in this world. Folks who have caught a baseball at a fan at a game, and those that haven’t. I’ll actually expand that a bit to those who have caught anything from a player at a sporting event. Could be a tennis ball, a shirt thrown from a player, maybe a hockey puck.

There’s apparently a whole section at the University of North Carolina book store for shirts that without irony declare that UNC is now a football school. Sports fans recognize the twist, as Michael Jordan’s alma matter is historically known as one of the blue bloods of college basketball, along with places like Kansas and Kentucky, schools that expect to compete for basketball titles and hope for the best in the exorbitant world of big time college football.

Trent Grisham hit his second grand slam in five days and Jazz Chisholm Jr. homered twice to lead the New York Yankees to a 7-1 win over the Houston Astros.

Brandon Marsh went 4 for 5 and singled home the go-ahead run in the ninth inning as the Philadelphia Phillies erased an early four-run deficit to beat the Milwaukee Brewers 10-8 in the opener of a three-game series between the top two teams in the majors.