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🚨 Headlines
🏈 Tua benched: The Dolphins are benching Tua Tagovailoa in favor of Quinn Ewers, the seventh-round rookie out of Texas. Tagovailoa, the fifth overall pick in 2020, leads the league with 15 interceptions this season and is now Miami’s QB3, behind Zach Wilson.
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🎾 Alcaraz splits with coach: World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz has parted ways with longtime coach Juan Carlos Ferrero. “We’ve managed to reach the top, and I feel that if our sports paths had to part ways, it had to be from up there,” wrote Alcaraz, who did not give a reason for the split.
🏀 Knicks won’t raise banner: The Knicks will not raise an NBA Cup banner in the Madison Square Garden rafters because the team is “focused on the bigger picture” of winning their first NBA title since 1973. The Bucks and Lakers, the first two NBA Cup winners, both raised banners.
⚾️ Nats youth movement continues: The Nationals are hiring 31-year-old Phillies assistant GM Ani Kilambi as their new general manager. He’ll team up with manager Blake Butera, 33, and president of baseball operations Paul Toboni, 35.
🏀 Rioux makes history: Florida’s 7-foot-9 freshman Olivier Rioux made his first career basket in the Gators’ blowout win over Saint Francis, becoming the tallest player ever to make a field goal in a college basketball game.
🏈 Could the Bears move to… Indiana?
(Found Image Holdings/Corbis via .)
The Chicago Bears are thinking outside of the box — er, state — for their next stadium, writes Yahoo Sports’ Jack Baer.
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What they’re saying: Bears president Kevin Warren sent a letter to season-ticket holders on Wednesday with an update on the franchise’s years-long search for a new home after a century at Soldier Field.
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In recent years, the campaign has focused on a site in the suburb of Arlington Heights that the Bears purchased in 2023, with Warren saying in September that the team needs to finalize plans this year.
From the letter:
Stable timelines are critical, as are predictable processes and elected leaders, who share a sense of urgency and appreciation for public partnership that projects with this level of impact require. We have not received that sense of urgency or appreciation to date.
Consequently … we need to expand our search and critically evaluate opportunities throughout the wider Chicagoland region, including Northwest Indiana. This is not about leverage. … Our fans deserve a world-class stadium [and] our organization must keep every credible pathway open to deliver that future.
Soldier Field in Chicago. (Quinn Harris/.)
Border crossing: The NFL has never seemed to mind the location of a stadium not matching a team’s name.
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The New York Jets and New York Giants play in New Jersey; the Washington Commanders play in Maryland (though they’re moving back to D.C.).
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Still, a move to Northwest Indiana — where Gary and Hammond are the two biggest cities — would be a shocking outcome for the Bears… and the Colts.
Reality check: Warren says “this is not about leverage,” but of course it’s about leverage. The Bears are hoping that the threat of them leaving Illinois forces state leaders to the table. They don’t actually want to move to Indiana. (That said, the longer this drags on — and the louder it gets — the more plausible it becomes that their bluff turns into a fallback plan.)
The backdrop: All of this lands three days before the first-place Bears (10-4) host the second-place Packers (9-4-1) in one of the most meaningful games at Soldier Field in years. Talk about a weird moment to remind fans the team might be looking for the exits. I believe the term is “tone deaf.”
💯 Big numbers
Teammates swarm Draisaitl to celebrate his 1,000th career point. (Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo)
🏒 1,000 points
With four assists on Tuesday, Oilers superstar Leon Draisaitl became the 103rd player in NHL history to reach 1,000 career points, and the first German to do so.
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1,000 in a hurry: Draisaitl reached the milestone in just 824 games, which is the fourth-fastest among active players (Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, Nikita Kucherov) and the fifth-fastest among all players born outside North America (Peter Šťastný, Jari Kurri, Jaromír Jágr, Kucherov).
⚽️ $50 million
Next year’s World Cup will feature the biggest prize in the history of the tournament, with the winner taking home a record $50 million. That’s up from $42 million four years ago and $2.2 million back in 1982, the first year FIFA publicized the prize money.
Full payouts: Champion ($50M); runner-up ($33M); 3rd place ($29M); 4th place ($27M); 5th-8th place ($19M); 9th-16th place ($15M); 17th-32nd place ($11M); 33rd-48th place ($9M).
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🏈 14 coaches
A whopping 14 head coaches, coordinators or assistants on College Football Playoff-bound teams are departing for other programs at the end of the season, notes Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger. That list spans eight of the 12 CFP teams, with Ole Miss “leading” the way at six departing personnel. Texas A&M and Oregon have two each, while Ohio State, JMU, Tulane and Alabama have one. (Congrats to Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Georgia and Indiana for avoiding the coaching carousel!)
What they’re saying: “We’ve got to fix the calendar,” said Tulane assistant Will Hall, who will replace Jon Sumrall as head coach after the Green Wave’s playoff run ends. “We are the only sport in the world where free agency for players and coaches begins in the middle of the season.”
Rivers celebrates a touchdown pass during last week’s game. (Steph Chambers/.)
🏈 5 years
Philip Rivers’ surprising return to the NFL means he and his family are now eligible for five more years of league-sponsored health insurance, which was otherwise set to expire next August. On the one hand, he’s made $244 million in his career, so he can certainly afford his own insurance; on the other, he has 10 children between the ages of 2 and 23. Those premiums ain’t cheap!
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Hall of Fame clock reset: Rivers’ insurance isn’t the only thing with five extra years of runway. He also must now wait five more years before becoming eligible for the Hall of Fame, despite having already been named a semifinalist for the Class of 2026.
🏀 100 wins
Duke’s victory over Lipscomb on Tuesday was the 100th win of Jon Scheyer’s career, making him the fastest head coach to reach the century mark in ACC history (122 games). That’s six games faster than Duke’s Vic Bubas (1959-69) and seven games faster than North Carolina’s Roy Williams (2003-21).
Who got there faster? In the past 45 years across all of Division I, only Butler’s Brad Stevens won 100 games faster than Scheyer, reaching the milestone in his 120th game back in 2011.
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⚽️ $1 million
Sophia Wilson (née Smith), who missed all of the 2025 NWSL season after giving birth to her first child, has exercised her player option with the Portland Thorns worth $1 million — the first seven-figure salary in league history.
More to come? The NWSL approved a new measure last week that will allow teams to pay select stars up to $1 million above the salary cap, so deals like Wilson’s should become more common moving forward.
🥊 Joshua to Paul: “I can kill you”
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/. for Netflix)
Anthony Joshua has made it clear that he plans to show Jake Paul no mercy on Friday in their polarizing Netflix boxing match.
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Joshua: “If I can kill you, I will kill you,” the former heavyweight champion said Tuesday ahead of his bout against the YouTuber-turned-boxer. A day later, when pressed on those words, he doubled down:
“It’s my job — we fight. We have a license to kill. … When you’re in that ring, it’s a dangerous place to be and anything can happen. You hope your opponent leaves the ring safely, but if they don’t, you still have to go to bed at night knowing that you’ve just done your job, it wasn’t personal.”
To which Paul responded: “Let’s f***ing go, bro. Let’s put on a show for the fans. Let’s go to war. … I want his hardest punches. I want there to be no excuses when it’s all said and done, and let’s f***ing kill each other. … This is going to be the biggest upset in the history of sports, and you guys get to witness it.”
Pre-fight reading (via Uncrowned):
⚾️ Take me out to the (prison) ballgame
The gates at Old Joliet Prison in 2011. (Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/.)
The Frontier League’s Joliet Slammers will play an exhibition game next season inside the walls of Old Joliet Prison. And for any amateur baseball historians out there, it should come as no surprise to you that the Veeck family has a hand in this stunt.
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“The Big House Ballgame”: The Slammers will face the Gateway Grizzlies on April 30 in the same Chicago-area yard that once housed criminals such as Leopold and Loeb, John Wayne Gacy and, most famously (albeit fictitiously), “Joliet” Jake Blues in 1980’s “The Blues Brothers.”
How are the Veecks involved? William “Night Train” Veeck (pronounced veck) joined the Slammers last year as a marketing executive and part-owner. His father, Mike, and actor Bill Murray are also part of the ownership group, and this upcoming exhibition is just their latest foray into the family tradition of promotional showmanship.
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Just a few examples: In 1951, as owner of the Browns (Orioles), he drummed up sales by sending 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate as a pinch hitter; in 1979, as owner of the White Sox, he and Mike threw the infamous and destructive “Disco Demolition Night.”
Why Old Joliet? The correctional facility has a longstanding connection to baseball, which was introduced to the prison in 1914 by a warden who sought to improve morale and encourage good behavior. Inmates continued playing there until the prison closed in 2002, and April’s game is the official kickoff for the centennial celebration of Route 66, the historic highway from Chicago to Los Angeles that opened in 1926.
📺 Watchlist: Thursday, Dec. 18
The Rams won their first meeting this season, 21-19. (Sean M. Haffey/.)
🏈 Rams at Seahawks
The two best teams in the NFL just so happen to play in the same division, giving extra weight to this NFC West clash (8:15pm ET, Prime). Tonight’s game could determine which team gets the bye as the No. 1 seed, and which is forced to go on the road during Wild Card Weekend as the No. 5-seed.
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A league of their own: With all due respect to the Broncos (12-2) and Patriots (11-3), no teams have looked as consistently great as the Rams (11-3) and Seahawks (11-3), who have by far the best scoring differentials in the NFL, at +163 and +159, respectively. The Pats are in third at +106.
🏐 NCAA Volleyball Final Four
The semifinals are tonight in Kansas City, where the path to a championship is suddenly wide open after undefeated Nebraska’s stunning defeat in the Elite Eight. First up is No. 1 Pitt vs. No. 3 Texas A&M (6:30pm, ESPN), followed by No. 1 Kentucky vs. No. 3 Wisconsin (9pm, ESPN).
Trophy case: Pitt and Texas A&M are seeking their first national championships, while Kentucky (2020) and Wisconsin (2021) are seeking their second.
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More to watch:
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🏀 NBA: Clippers at Thunder (8pm, NBA) … OKC (24-2), coming off a loss, hasn’t dropped two straight games since April.
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🏈 NCAAF: Missouri State vs. Arkansas State (9pm, ESPN2) … The Xbox Bowl in Frisco, Texas.
Today’s full slate.
🏈 NFL trivia
(Megan Briggs/.)
The Dolphins have benched Tua Tagovailoa, making him the only QB of the four taken in the first round of the 2020 draft who is no longer his team’s starter.
Question: Can you name the other three?
Hint: LSU, Oregon, Utah State.
Answer at the bottom.
📸 Photo finish
(Jason Mowry/.)
🇺🇸 Columbus, Ohio — Blue Jackets goalkeeper Elvis Merzlikins locks eyes with his son, Knox, through the glass before Columbus’ game against the Ducks. And yes, his “Sonic the Hedgehog”-inspired facemask is for Knox, who’s a huge fan.
Core memory, unlocked.
Trivia answer: Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love
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