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A Kid on the Losing Team Last Night Was in the Transfer Portal Before His Mother Got Home From the Arena

Duke Holloway
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A Kid on the Losing Team Last Night Was in the Transfer Portal Before His Mother Got Home From the Arena

The buzzer hadn’t been done buzzing for ninety seconds and the chyron at the bottom of my television was already running a graphic about which of the losing team’s freshmen had ‘opened conversations’ about their future. Opened conversations. The kid was still in his uniform. His mother was still in the parking lot waiting for the shuttle. And ESPN had a logo for it — a little suitcase with wings, animated, presented like a weather alert.

I have been writing about basketball since the rim was a rumor, and I have to tell you, friends, the saddest sound in sports right now is a college coach finding out from Twitter which of his players is leaving him. Used to be a kid would walk into the office. Used to be there’d be a handshake and a couple lies told over coffee. Now it’s a graphic. With a suitcase. That has wings.

Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program back when men wore neckties to bench-coach a JV game, used to say that a roster was a promise. He’d say it real quiet, the way he said most things he believed, and then he’d go yell at a sophomore for an hour about footwork. He died in 2009 and I am thankful every day that he did not live to see a sidebar on a sports network listing twelve nineteen-year-olds who are ‘evaluating their options’ before the floor has been swept.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at quarter to eleven last night, which is two hours past Ray’s bedtime, just to ask me what an NIL collective is. I told him it’s a group of dentists and Buick dealers in a chat thread who pool money to pay a 6’4 wing from Lithuania to wear their school’s uniform for eight months. Ray was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Duke, that’s just the Yankees.’ And you know what? Ray Kowalczyk has never once been wrong about anything important, and he wasn’t wrong last night either.

The thing that gets me — and I want to be careful here, because it’s not the kids’ fault, none of this is the kids’ fault, the kids are doing exactly what every adult in their life has told them to do — is that we used to have a thing called a senior year. A senior would walk out of the tunnel one last time and the building would stand up. Now we have what amounts to a reverse draft, conducted on Instagram, in which a young man’s last college game is announced retroactively after he’s already in a Buick driving to a different state.

I knew a kid named Petey Corrigan who played four years at a small Catholic school nobody’s heard of, averaged six points a game, set picks like a man trying to put his shoulder through a barn door, and graduated on time with a degree in something practical. Petey is now an assistant principal in Erie, Pennsylvania. He owns a house. His knees don’t work. He calls his old coach on Father’s Day. I am not telling you Petey’s life is better than the kid in the suitcase graphic — that’s not for me to say. I’m just telling you Petey exists. Existed. Is a person.

Meanwhile the bracket app on my phone now has a feature called Portal Watch, which sends you a push notification every time a player from a team you picked enters the open market. I picked Drake to win in the first round, and at 11:47 last night my phone buzzed and informed me that two Drake players were ‘exploring opportunities elsewhere,’ which is a phrase that should never appear in a sentence about a 20-year-old who scored eight points in a basketball game. They hadn’t even been eliminated yet. They were ahead, by the way. They won.

I don’t want to be the old man yelling at the cloud. I want to be the old man yelling at the specific, identifiable individuals who decided that the back end of a college basketball broadcast should look like the trade deadline on cable news. I want to know who the suitcase guy is. I want a name. I want to ask him, gently, in person, what he thinks his grandfather would say.

Denise is bringing chili over for the late games tonight. She says it’s from a podcast. I asked her if the podcast had a suitcase logo and she told me to get my own dinner.

The IOC Just Elected Its First President Who Has Actually Gotten in the Pool, and They Want a Parade for It

Duke Holloway
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The IOC Just Elected Its First President Who Has Actually Gotten in the Pool, and They Want a Parade for It

Kirsty Coventry won her first Olympic medal in Athens in 2004, swimming the 200 backstroke in a time most of us couldn’t manage if you put a great white shark in lane two. She won six more after that. On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee elected her president, making her the first woman and the first African to hold the job in 131 years, and the organization is acting like it just split the atom.

I want to be clear about Coventry. The woman is the real article. She’s a seven-time Olympic medalist from Zimbabwe who got in the water at five in the morning for twenty years and came out of it with hardware nobody can take off her. If you’ve ever swum a 200 back, you understand. If you haven’t, just know that the last fifty meters feels like trying to outrun a memory of yourself. She earned the chair.

The IOC, however, has earned nothing, and is taking a victory lap anyway. The press release used the word “historic” four times in two paragraphs, which is the linguistic equivalent of a guy holding the door for one woman in 1974 and bringing it up at every Christmas dinner since. It took them a hundred and thirty-one years and seven previous presidents — six counts, one barons, and one marquis, I’m not making any of that up — to elect somebody who has actually competed in the Olympics. The bar wasn’t on the floor. The bar was buried.

Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, had a PE teacher down the hall named Mrs. Bevilacqua who in 1962 could outrun every boy in the building, including the seniors, including the kid who eventually walked on at Penn State. Nobody put out a press release. She just kept showing up at six in the morning and beating people. Coach used to say leadership wasn’t a thing you announced, it was a thing other people noticed about you eventually, usually after the fact. He’d have looked at this IOC business and said something unprintable and gone back to lining the field.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday afternoon, as he does whenever sports does something he doesn’t understand, which is most days now. “Duke,” he said, “is it a big deal or isn’t it.” I told him it was a big deal because of who she is and a small deal because of who they are, and Ray said that was the most diplomatic thing he’d ever heard come out of my mouth and he didn’t trust it. He’s right not to.

Because here’s the thing about the IOC. It is not a sports organization. It is a travel club for men in blazers who hold their meetings in Lausanne and refer to themselves as “members” the way people in cults refer to themselves as members. They have a per diem that would embarrass a cardinal. They award the Olympics to whichever government is most willing to bulldoze a neighborhood and call it a legacy project. They spent the last thirty years giving the Games to autocrats and acting surprised when the autocrats used them like autocrats use everything. And now they have appointed an actual swimmer to run it, which I suspect is going to feel, for the IOC, a little bit like sobering up at a wedding.

Coventry is going to walk into a job where the actual sport — the kid in Botswana with a stopwatch and a dream, the gymnast in Romania, the rower from a country I have to look up — is item nineteen on a forty-item agenda. Items one through eighteen are sponsorship tiers, broadcast rights, the Saudi question, the Russia question, the doping question that nobody wants to actually answer, and whether breakdancing gets a second chance. I wish her luck. I mean it. The athletes deserve someone in that chair who has been cold and tired and underwater at five in the morning, and now they have one.

What they don’t have, and what nobody ever has, is an IOC that deserves its own employees. The minute Coventry tries to clean up something real, the blazers are going to remember they preferred a count. Watch.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. She heard about Coventry on a podcast and asked me if it was a big deal. I said it was a big deal for Coventry and a small deal for the IOC and Denise said that was the most diplomatic thing she’d ever heard come out of my mouth and she didn’t trust it either. The chili, for the record, is excellent.

The First Four Is in Dayton Because Dayton Is the Last City in America That Still Shows Up Without Being Asked

Duke Holloway
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The First Four Is in Dayton Because Dayton Is the Last City in America That Still Shows Up Without Being Asked

I watched two of the First Four last night on a television old enough to vote. Got up off my chair four times — twice for snacks, twice because I was actually moved by something. Two teams from places you have to find on a map, playing their hearts out in front of a crowd that had driven eight hours to be there. Couldn’t tell you the final score now if you held a gun to me. Could tell you exactly what one of those kids’ mothers looked like in the eighth row.

The First Four happens in Dayton, Ohio because Dayton is the last city left that does not believe itself too good for what it has. They put up a sign. They open the doors. They sell popcorn. The popcorn is fine. There is no parlay-app cartoon goat hovering above the parking lot. There is just a parking lot.

The bracket apps had already updated by the time I brushed my teeth. The teams that lost last night don’t exist anymore — wiped out of the database faster than Coach DiMaggio used to wipe a chalkboard with the back of his hand. He used to say a man who plays a game and then disappears from the box score is still a man who played a game. Try telling that to ESPN’s bracket optimizer. The optimizer does not return calls.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:30 last night, which I should mention is also 11:30 his time, because we live four blocks from each other. “You watching this?” he said. I said yes. He said, “The kid with the headband — he’s playing like he means it.” Then he hung up. That was the whole call. That is a sportsman.

Meanwhile the prime-time boys won’t get on the floor until this afternoon, and they’ll do it after a forty-eight-minute pregame show that includes a segment called something like “The Madness Index,” in which a man in a vest assigns each team a vibe score from 1 to 100. There are graphics. There is a horn. There is a former point guard saying the word “energy” eighty-one times in a row. There is, every commercial break, an ad in which an animated goat tells you Bryant minus the points is a lock. The goat sounds confident. The goat is 9–and–14.

Petey Corrigan, who used to officiate eighth-grade CYO games for fourteen dollars and a slice of pizza, would have died for the chance to officiate a First Four game. He’d have died for it. He told me once that the games nobody watches are the only games that mean anything, because the men playing them know nobody is watching and they play hard anyway. Then he asked me for the fourteen dollars.

I’m told one of those kids on the floor last night is averaging 23 a game and is, as of this morning, in the transfer portal. He has not announced a transfer. He is still on his team. He is in the portal preemptively, the way you might leave the back door unlocked while you walk to the mailbox. Coach DiMaggio is rolling so hard in his grave they’re going to have to re-pour the headstone by Friday.

But that kid played 38 minutes last night. He played them in Dayton. He played them in front of his mother in the eighth row, and a crowd that drove eight hours to be there, and a fat old sportswriter in his garage who got up four times. Whatever happens to him in April, in May, in some collective somewhere with a logo on the wall — he gave Tuesday night everything he had, and Tuesday night doesn’t owe him a thing back. That’s the contract. That’s the last clean contract left in this sport, and they sign it every year in a 13,000-seat building in southwest Ohio while the bracket apps look the other way.

Denise is making chili. She heard about it on a podcast. The podcast is called “Bracketology With Brent” and Denise does not, to my knowledge, watch college basketball. The chili is excellent. I’ll be in the garage.

Boeing Astronauts Return After 9-Month ‘Eight-Day Mission,’ Receive $40 Voucher Toward Their Next Stranding

Lena Wexler
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Boeing Astronauts Return After 9-Month ‘Eight-Day Mission,’ Receive $40 Voucher Toward Their Next Stranding

OFF THE COAST OF TALLAHASSEE, FL — NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore splashed down in the Gulf on Tuesday evening after a Boeing Starliner mission that was originally scheduled to last eight days and instead lasted approximately one full pregnancy, emerging from the capsule visibly thinner, visibly older, and clutching a Boeing customer satisfaction survey that a recovery diver had handed them through the hatch.

The pair had been stuck aboard the International Space Station since June after their Starliner capsule, marketed in 2019 promotional materials as ‘the most reliable ride to low-Earth orbit,’ developed helium leaks, thruster failures, and what one engineer described as ‘a lot of noises we did not anticipate the spacecraft to be making.’ NASA ultimately sent the capsule home empty rather than risk putting humans inside it, a decision Boeing has politely characterized as ‘an abundance of caution’ and everyone else has characterized as ‘correct.’

‘We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Butch and Suni home, and Boeing is proud to have played a role in their journey,’ said Boeing spokesperson Marissa Trent-Holloway, who declined to specify which role. ‘As a token of our appreciation, both astronauts will receive a $40 credit applicable toward any future Starliner mission, plus a complimentary upgrade to the seat with the working thruster.’

Williams and Wilmore reportedly spent the unplanned 286 additional days conducting science experiments, performing station maintenance, and watching their once-temporary toiletry kits achieve a kind of permanent residency. Wilmore is said to have grown a beard, lost it, grown it back, and lost it again on a timeline that NASA flight surgeons described as ’emotionally legible.’ Williams used the extended stay to break the record for total spacewalk time by a woman, an achievement she did not pursue so much as accidentally back into.

Dr. Helena Voss, an aerospace systems analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the mission underscores a broader pattern in the privatized space economy. ‘There’s an old joke that NASA used to over-engineer everything and now contractors under-engineer everything,’ Voss said. ‘The Starliner program is what happens when you let the people who built the 737 MAX design something that also has to come back down.’ She added that Boeing has been paid roughly $4.2 billion for Starliner to date, or approximately $14.7 million per day Williams and Wilmore were not supposed to be up there.

SpaceX, which ultimately ferried the astronauts home aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, declined to gloat publicly, though Elon Musk posted a photo of the splashdown on X with the caption ‘🫡’ followed eleven minutes later by a second post reading ‘just sayin’.’ Boeing executives are reportedly working on a comprehensive Starliner improvement plan that one source described as ‘mostly a list of things we already told them in 2019.’

Asked at a brief press availability whether they would fly Starliner again, Wilmore offered a long pause, a small smile, and the words ‘I have a lot of confidence in the NASA assignment process,’ which reporters took to mean no. Williams, when pressed, said she was looking forward to seeing her dogs, eating a salad, and standing on a surface that does not require her to also be strapped to it.

The astronauts will undergo several weeks of rehabilitation as their bodies readjust to gravity. Boeing’s stock closed up 1.4 percent on the news, on optimism that the company had finally finished the mission it started.

Chicago River Submits Two Weeks’ Notice After 63rd Consecutive Green Dye Job

Tara Sparks
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Chicago River Submits Two Weeks’ Notice After 63rd Consecutive Green Dye Job

CHICAGO, IL — After being doused in 40 pounds of fluorescent vegetable dye for the 63rd consecutive March, the Chicago River formally submitted its two weeks’ notice Monday morning, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the city of Chicago and a profound need to “go find itself, possibly in Wisconsin.”

The resignation, hand-delivered to the Mayor’s office in a soggy manila envelope shortly after sunrise, marks the first time a major American waterway has voluntarily severed employment with a metropolitan area, according to officials, who conceded they had not been aware the river was technically employed in the first place.

“She’s been holding this in for decades,” said Marla Penhaligon, a freelance hydrology consultant who has been informally representing the river since 2019. “Every March, same thing. Boats. Dye. Three guys from Naperville in ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ tank tops Venmo-ing each other for Jameson shots over her face. At a certain point a body of water just snaps.”

In a 14-page statement posted to the river’s newly launched Substack, titled Currents, the waterway accused Plumbers Local 130 of “showing up unannounced once a year like an ex,” described the dye as “tasting vaguely of a dentist’s office,” and demanded retroactive compensation for an estimated 1.7 million unpaid hours of scenic engagement-photo background work.

Mayor Brandon Johnson called the resignation “deeply unfortunate” and “honestly kind of dramatic,” noting that the river had agreed to the arrangement in 1962 and had not raised concerns at any of the 62 subsequent dyeings. Parade organizers said they were blindsided, with one float coordinator confirming the news had cast a brief pall over an otherwise tremendous morning of corned beef and projectile vomiting.

The river’s grievances reportedly extend well beyond the dye itself. Listed alongside the chemical complaints were a kayaker who screamed “I’M IRISH TOO” directly into its surface in 2017, a viral Instagram caption referring to it as “thicc,” and the unrelenting presence of the Riverwalk’s saxophone busker, whom the river described in the filing only as “a man with whom I have things to say.”

City Hall has reportedly entered emergency negotiations, offering a four-day workweek, a 12% raise, and the immediate removal of a duck the river described as “a known menace.” Sources close to the talks say the river is “listening but not committing,” and has separately retained representation from the same agent who handled the Cuyahoga’s 2019 image rehabilitation campaign.

As of press time, the Hudson River had declined to comment on whether it would consider similar action, telling reporters only that it had “made peace with what it is,” and that it had bigger things on its mind currently, including a Citi Bike, a possum, and what appeared to be the entire bottom half of a Vespa.

Joe Lunardi Told Us the Bracket Three Weeks Ago and We Will Still Pretend to Gasp Tonight at 6

Duke Holloway
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Joe Lunardi Told Us the Bracket Three Weeks Ago and We Will Still Pretend to Gasp Tonight at 6

I have known the bracket since Tuesday. So have you. So has my mailman, my dentist, the woman who stocks the Pepsi at the gas station, and at least one of my grandchildren. CBS knows we know. CBS knows we know that CBS knows we know. And at six o’clock tonight CBS will roll out a two-hour broadcast pretending none of us has ever seen a basketball schedule, and we will sit there and let them.

Joe Lunardi has been publishing bracket projections since the leaves were still on the trees. By February the man had filed somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-seven brackets, each one varying from the last by exactly the seeding of one team from the Mountain West. By March he is essentially the bracket. The committee meets in a conference room in Indianapolis and follows along on his ESPN page. I am not entirely sure they bother with their own list anymore.

And yet the Selection Show, which used to last thirty minutes and consisted of a man with a marker drawing on a board, has now ballooned into something the network treats like the lunar landing. Two hours. Three hours if you count the pregame. Charles Barkley is involved somehow. Greg Gumbel, God rest him, used to read the bracket like he was reading a grocery list, and that was the right way to do it. Now we get dramatic music, we get teaser cuts, we get a man named Seth saying “buckle up, folks” before he reveals that Auburn is a one seed, which Auburn has been a one seed since January.

The worst innovation, by a country mile, is the Snub Segment. They put a camera in some poor mid-major’s gymnasium, a hundred kids in matching warm-ups holding pizza, and when the school doesn’t get called the camera lingers on a sophomore guard from Indianapolis trying not to cry on national television. This is presented as drama. This is presented as content. I don’t know what we did as a country to deserve being shown a teenager’s worst Sunday, but here we are, with a sideline reporter asking him how it feels.

Then they cut to the committee chair, who comes on looking like a deacon delivering bad news to a congregation. He uses words like “body of work” and “résumé” and “metrics suggested.” The committee chair is the Pope of college basketball for one Sunday a year, and he will, before the night is out, have to defend why a team from the Big East is a nine seed and not an eight, which is the kind of distinction that matters to exactly one fan base and exactly one gambling syndicate in New Jersey.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at four-fifteen this afternoon. Ray is a Marquette man, has been since 1962, and he wanted me to know that if Marquette gets a five seed and ends up in Spokane he is going to “raise hell.” I asked him with whom. He said he had not figured that part out yet. Ray will watch the show. Ray will yell at the show. Ray will then eat a sandwich and call me back.

My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, ran our school’s bracket pool on a legal pad. Twenty-five names, two dollars apiece, and he kept the cash in a Folgers can in the equipment shed. The whole operation took about six minutes. The pool would close before the play-in games — back when there were no play-in games, just sixty-four teams, the right number — and on Monday morning the pad would be pinned to the bulletin board outside the gym. Nobody filmed anybody crying. The bracket was the bracket. You won or you didn’t.

Somewhere in the middle of the third hour tonight, they will get around to previewing actual basketball. Maybe ninety seconds on a twelve-five upset pick. A graphic with arrows. Then back to four men in suits arguing about whether North Carolina deserved a bid, which they did not, and which the committee chair will have to recuse himself from, which is its own kind of comedy if you have the stomach for it.

I will watch all of it. I always do. The bracket is the bracket and the show is the show and complaining about the show is, at this point, part of the show. Petey Corrigan from the bowling alley will text me at seven-thirty asking who I have in the Final Four, and I will tell him the same four teams I tell him every year, and he will lose his pool to his nine-year-old niece, who picked by uniform color.

Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast.

We Started Bombing Yemen Again on a Saturday, Which Is When You Schedule the Things You’d Rather Nobody Notice

Margaret Thorne
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We Started Bombing Yemen Again on a Saturday, Which Is When You Schedule the Things You’d Rather Nobody Notice

Has anyone else noticed that we have begun outsourcing the opening of new wars to the weekend news cycle, when the only people paying attention are insomniacs, divorce attorneys catching up on email, and my sister-in-law Judy, who watches three cable channels at once because she works at the National Archives and has, in her words, “a professional interest in things being preserved”?

The airstrikes on Houthi targets went out around the time most of the country was deciding between brunch and yardwork. The announcement came not from a podium, not from a Joint Session, not even from the dignified fiction of a press briefing, but from a social media post written in the cadence of a man yelling at a referee. We are, apparently, fine with this. We have decided that the threshold for the United States entering open conflict in the Arabian Peninsula is now somewhere between a recipe reel and a mid-tier college basketball upset.

I had dinner Thursday with my friend Eliza, who has the rare gift of being able to remember which administration did which thing without consulting her phone. We were joined by a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, in the way one describes a mattress as firm-ish. The conversation turned, as conversations in this town do, to whether anyone had read the briefing materials. Nobody had. The lobbyist allowed that he hadn’t “gotten to Yemen yet,” as though Yemen were a chapter in a book he’d checked out from the library and would return, unread, on Tuesday.

This is, by my count, the fourth time in roughly a decade that an American president has decided that the way to handle Yemen is to bomb it and trust that the public’s geographic imagination is too foggy to keep score. Obama did it by drone. Trump did it by drone, then by ship. Biden did it by ship, then by air. Now Trump is doing it again, and the only thing that has changed is the platform on which it is announced and the speed with which the people who used to be against this sort of thing have located their inside voices.

I am told by people who know more than I do — and there are some, though fewer than they think — that the Houthis are a genuine problem, that the Red Sea matters, that container ships do not steer themselves around militias. Fine. I am willing to be persuaded of nearly anything if someone is willing to do the persuading in public, on the record, in front of the legislative body that the Constitution still, last I checked, vests with the power to declare war. What I am not willing to do is treat a Saturday Truth Social post as the modern equivalent of a Rose Garden address. It is not. It is a scrolling chyron with delusions of grandeur.

The most striking thing about the dinner Thursday was not what was said but what wasn’t. Nobody asked the obvious question, which is: what is the goal? What does winning look like? When does the bombing stop? At what point do we admit that “degrade and disrupt” is the foreign-policy equivalent of telling your spouse you’ll get to the basement “eventually”? The lobbyist refilled his glass. Eliza changed the subject to a Senate retirement. Judy, who was on speakerphone from Bethesda, said something about the documents arriving faster than they can be cataloged, which I took to be about the Archives but which I am increasingly convinced was about all of it.

I came up in this business at a time when starting a new military campaign required, at minimum, a speech. There was a script: the grave tone, the flag behind the desk, the assurance that this would not be like the last one. The script was often a lie, but the existence of the script was itself a small civic act. It conceded that the public had a role, even if the role was only to be performed at. We have now dispensed with even the performance. The script has been replaced by a notification.

So I am just asking, as I always am: if a country can begin bombing another country on a Saturday morning and have it be the fourth-most-discussed item in the news cycle by Sunday night, what exactly are we still pretending to be? A republic deliberates. An empire announces. A reality show posts. Pick one, and tell the rest of us, so we can at least know what we are no longer.

I Spent Pi Day Measuring Every Pie at Harris Teeter and I Regret to Inform You That Big Pie Has Been Lying About the Ratio

Brooke Ellery
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I Spent Pi Day Measuring Every Pie at Harris Teeter and I Regret to Inform You That Big Pie Has Been Lying About the Ratio

I want to be clear that I did not set out to make a scene at the Harris Teeter on Tunnel Road. I set out to verify something. The bakery manager — a very kind man named Dale — watched me press a cloth measuring tape around the rim of a Dutch apple, write a number in my notebook, and move on to the cherry crumble, and at no point did Dale ask me to leave. He just got quieter.

This whole project started Tuesday night, when my friend Marigold posted in our Facebook group (Real Math for Real Mothers, almost 4,000 members, very civil) that pi is classified as a “transcendental” number, which she pointed out is the same word people use for meditation retreats and yoga studios that charge $48 a class. Her question was simple: why is the most famous number in our children’s school curriculum a number that goes on forever and cannot be pinned down? Nothing in nature is irrational. A pinecone is not irrational. A nautilus shell is not irrational. So who decided pies were?

I went to four stores. I measured 23 pies. I used a soft cloth tape from my sewing basket because my sister-in-law Tasha — she works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse — has told me before that metal measuring tapes introduce a small electromagnetic field that can throw off readings on anything fermented, baked, or “made with love at scale.” Pies qualify on at least two counts.

The numbers were not good, friends. The Sara Lee Dutch apple came in at 3.02. A Marie Callender’s chocolate silk measured 3.41, which is not even close. A store-brand pumpkin from Ingles registered 2.89, which technically isn’t pi, it’s just a circle having a bad day. The only pie that came within a tenth of 3.14 was a key lime from a Publix in Arden, and that one had a graham cracker crust, which Tasha says “barely counts as a baked good in the eyes of God or the FDA.”

I want to stress that I am not a conspiracy person. I am a mother of four with a five-acre homestead and a working dehydrator. But when I called the consumer line at one of the major frozen pie companies (I won’t name them, they were polite) and asked what their target circumference-to-diameter ratio was, the woman on the phone said, and I am quoting from my notebook, “ma’am we don’t measure them like that, we measure them in inches.” Inches. As if a pie is a piece of lumber.

For comparison, I baked my own apple pie Wednesday afternoon with a sourdough crust I’d been cold-fermenting for nine days, butter from the Jersey cow share at the farm down Old Fort Road, and apples I picked and stored myself in October. I made it during a waxing gibbous moon, which Marigold says is the only moon phase where geometry behaves. Wade timed me. The pie measured 3.14159 on the nose. He measured it twice because the first time he didn’t believe it either.

Ember, who is six and has been asking sharper questions since her TikTok detox, wanted to know why the store pies were lying. I told her that some pies are made by people, and some pies are made by buildings, and the buildings don’t always tell the truth. She nodded the way she nods when she already knew. River asked if we could still eat the Marie Callender’s. We could not. I’d cut into it for the radius measurement and Wade said it tasted like a candle.

Here is what I think is actually going on. Pi Day is not about math. Math doesn’t need a holiday. Math is doing fine. Pi Day is about getting American families to consume roughly four pounds of bleached flour, soybean oil, and “natural and artificial flavors” between 3:14 PM and bedtime in the name of a Greek letter most of us couldn’t draw. It is a marketing holiday wearing a graduation cap.

I’ll be celebrating tonight the way my grandmother would have — with a bowl of raw cream, a small bowl of honey, and the protractor I borrowed from Beck’s math binder. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the kitchen, measuring things that have nothing to hide.

The Bracket Guys Now Call It ‘Stealing a Bid’ When a Small School Wins Its Conference Tournament

Duke Holloway
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The Bracket Guys Now Call It ‘Stealing a Bid’ When a Small School Wins Its Conference Tournament

Ray Kowalczyk called me from a sports bar in Akron at 11:30 Tuesday night, audibly chewing something fried, to ask if I’d seen what the man on TV had just said. Some little school out of Ohio had won its conference tournament — Ray didn’t catch the name, but he said the kids were hugging each other on the floor and one of them was crying into a piece of net. The man on TV called it bid theft. Ray, who is 71 years old and worked 38 years for the gas company, wanted to know what that meant. I told him I’d look into it.

I looked into it. Turns out that when a school you have never heard of wins the basketball tournament they are guaranteed by rule to play in, and earns the spot in the NCAA tournament that is the entire point of having a conference at all, a separate group of men in glasses regards this as a kind of larceny. They call those teams bid thieves. Bid thieves. As if a 26-win team from the Horizon League snuck into the Sheraton at midnight and lifted a bracket spot off the nightstand of an 18-13 team from Texas A&M.

The men in glasses do something called bracketology, which I gather is a full-time paying job that involves predicting on Tuesday what a committee will announce on Sunday. They have appearances. They have followers. They have spreadsheets with team names color-coded by something called “quad wins,” which sounds like a brand of off-brand allergy medication. There is, somewhere, a person whose entire professional identity is being slightly more correct on a Wednesday than they were on a Monday about something that will be revealed in 96 hours regardless.

And these are the men who have decided that when a small school wins, it has stolen something.

I want to be clear about what is happening here. A team of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds at, let’s say, Robert Morris, has just played its absolute heart out for four nights in a row in an arena that smells like a Knights of Columbus hall, and won the trophy they were told from the day they got there was the only door to the dance. They cut down a net. They called their mothers. And a man on a podcast in a half-zip pullover refers to them, with a straight face, as bid thieves, because somewhere a 9-9 SEC team with a guard who has his own cologne now has to play in the NIT.

My old coach, Vince DiMaggio, used to say that the only people who complained about the rules were the people who weren’t good enough to win under them. He said it about a kid named Petey Corrigan who got cut from our varsity in 1971 and spent the next two months telling anyone who’d listen that the tryout had been rigged. Petey is now, I assume, doing bracketology somewhere. He always did love a spreadsheet.

You want to know how far this thing has gone? There is a tracker. Somebody is tabulating, in real time, how many bids have been “stolen” by mid-majors as the conference tournaments unfold this week. There is a graphic. The graphic has a little cartoon burglar on it. I am not making this up. I cannot make this up. My imagination is not robust enough.

The whole thing tells you exactly who college basketball is for now and who it is not. It is for the four conferences with television contracts and the bubble teams that pretend the bubble is a moral category. It is not for the schools whose entire season is built around the four-game miracle that the rules say is supposed to be the whole point. We invented the auto-bid because we said every conference deserved a champion. Now we are mad that the conferences keep producing them.

Ray called me back Wednesday and said his sports bar had switched over to women’s tournament games and he liked them better anyway. The girls, he said, looked happier to be there. I told him that’s because nobody on television has gotten around yet to telling them they’re stealing anything.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a recipe she got from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.

The Players Championship Tees Off Tomorrow and Has Once Again Quietly Promoted Itself to Major

Duke Holloway
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The Players Championship Tees Off Tomorrow and Has Once Again Quietly Promoted Itself to Major

Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night to ask if the Players Championship was a major now or if we were still pretending to argue about it. I told him we were still pretending. He said good, because he had ten dollars on it not being one and he wanted to know who he was supposed to collect from.

The Players starts Thursday at TPC Sawgrass, which is a golf course built on a swamp by a commissioner who wanted his own tournament and got one. The purse this year is $25 million. The winner gets $4.5 million and a trophy that looks like a man in slacks reaching for something he dropped. CBS will spend four days speaking about it in the hushed voice usually reserved for funerals and the back nine at Augusta, and by Sunday evening they will have used the phrase “fifth major” enough times that a generation of children will simply grow up believing it.

Golf is the only sport on Earth where you can just declare a thing a major and then keep saying it on television until the saying is the proof. Imagine if the NFL announced that the Pro Bowl was the second Super Bowl. Imagine if Major League Baseball said the All-Star Game counts as a pennant now. They’d be laughed into the sea. But put a man in a navy quarter-zip in front of an island green and have him whisper about “a championship test of golf” and somehow we all just nod.

The 17th hole at Sawgrass is the famous one, the par-three over water to a green the size of my kitchen. It is a perfectly fine hole. It is also the only hole in professional golf that has its own merchandise tent, its own camera angle, and what NBC’s lead analyst Bryson Halliwell once called “a spiritual quality you can only really feel in person, or on the broadcast, or via the official app.” The official app, as far as I can tell, is mostly an invitation to bet a parlay on which Korean player will three-putt first.

My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, played golf the way he did everything else, which is to say angrily and with a cigarette. He would have hated the Players. He would have hated the bunkers raked into corduroy. He would have hated the man with the boom mic crouching ten feet from a player’s backswing. He would have especially hated the part where the leaderboard graphic spins and chimes like a slot machine every time somebody makes par. Coach DiMaggio believed par was the baseline expectation of a competent adult and did not require musical accompaniment.

I went down to Sawgrass once, in 2003, for reasons I no longer remember and a per diem I definitely do. What I remember is that everybody on the grounds was selling something. The clubs were selling clubs. The shoes were selling shoes. The water bottles had a sponsor. The sponsor had a sponsor. There was a man near the seventh fairway whose entire job was to hold up a sign that said QUIET, and I swear to you the sign had a logo on it. You cannot make a religion out of a thing that is also trying to sell you a Lexus during the backswing.

What bothers me, and I’ll cop to being an old man about this, is that the Players Championship doesn’t need to be a major. It is already a very good golf tournament. The best players in the world show up. The course chews most of them up. Somebody usually wins it in the rain. That’s plenty. The need to call it a fifth major is the same disease that gave us the College Football Playoff growing into a twelve-team buffet and the NBA inventing an in-season tournament with a court the color of a dentist’s pamphlet. Nobody can let a good thing be the size that it is.

The four real majors, by the way, became majors by accident. Nobody sat in a boardroom and decided. The Masters started as a buddy’s invitational. The U.S. Open is older than indoor plumbing. The British Open is older than the country that named it. They earned the title by being around long enough that nobody remembered when they weren’t. The Players Championship started in 1974, which is the same year Petey Corrigan went to prom in a powder-blue tuxedo, and it is asking for the same respect.

Watch it anyway. The 17th will eat somebody alive on Sunday and it will be tremendous. Just don’t let the broadcast convince you you’re watching scripture. You’re watching a very expensive Thursday at a very wet golf course, and that’s a wonderful thing to be without needing to be anything more.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast hosted by a man who used to caddie. I have not asked follow-up questions.

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