Dallas Mavericks rookie Cooper Flagg is doubtful for the team’s Thursday night matchup against the Utah Jazz, according to the team’s injury report.
Flagg, the 2025 No. 1 overall draft pick, left Wednesday night’s loss to the Denver Nuggets with a left ankle sprain.
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Head coach Jason Kidd said Flagg initially hurt his left foot during Monday’s victory over the Brooklyn Nets then landed awkwardly on it with 6:01 remaining in the second quarter against the Nuggets. Flagg grabbed the ankle for a few moments while grimacing in pain.
Flagg returned later in the second quarter but was clearly struggling with the injury. He did not play in the second half and did not return to the bench.
“He stepped on someone’s foot and so I think last game he twisted his ankle, too,” Kidd told reporters after the game. “So they decided to hold him for the second half.”
Flagg has avoided injury for the most part this season having played in 40 of the Mavericks’ 41 games. The Rookie of the Year frontrunner is averaging 18.8 points, 6.3 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.3 steals per game.
The Mavericks will play the Jazz again in Dallas again on Saturday evening before leaving for a one-game road trip to face the New York Knicks on Monday.
The Philadelphia Eagles went 11-6 in 2025 and earned the No. 3 seed in the NFC … and it was a disappointment. Following a tumultuous season — in which the team was attempting to repeat as Super Bowl champions — the Eagles took swift action, removing offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo from his position.
It was a move Eagles fans have been clamoring for all season. On Thursday, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni spoke about that decision. And while Sirianni didn’t go into great detail on Patullo’s removal, the head coach stressed that the offenses needed to “continue to evolve” under the team’s next offensive coordinator.
Despite bringing back nearly all of the same personnel from last season, the Eagles’ offense seemed to be stuck in the mud in their first season under Patullo, who was promoted into the role after Kellen Moore got hired by the New Orleans Saints to be their head coach. Star wideout A.J. Brown appeared constantly frustrated with his lack of usage, while running back Saquon Barkley put up an average season — for him — after rushing for over 2,000 yards in 2024.
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But it wasn’t just the vibes that were bad. The Eagles’ offense had a very tangible drop off. After ranking seventh in points per game last season, Philadelphia dropped to 19th in that category in 2025.
While Patullo was removed from the offensive coordinator position shortly after the Eagles were eliminated by the San Francisco 49ers in the wild-card round, he wasn’t fired. Patullo remains on staff and could take on another coaching role with the Eagles next season. Sirianni said he would “see how it plays out” with Patullo, who Sirianni said should have other opportunities this offseason.
Throughout the season, Patullo was criticized for predictable play calling and splits. NFL analyst — and former player — Brian Baldinger called that out early, sharing a video on Instagram showing the Eagles running what appeared to be the same play out of the same formation multiple times in one game.
Fans on Reddit noticed a somewhat similar phenomenon early in the season, when they pointed out that the Eagles had extreme splits on running and passing plays based on their formation out of the huddle. That may have tipped off defenses as to what type of play was coming, making it much easier to stop.
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Additionally, quarterback Jalen Hurts wasn’t used as much as a runner under Patullo. The quarterback finished the year with 421 rushing yards, his lowest total since his rookie season, because the team essentially stopped calling designed runs for him.
For all those reasons, Patullo won’t reprise his role next season. While expectations will certainly be high for the next person who takes over as the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, the team still has plenty of star power on offense, and there are at least a few easy fixes that coordinator can make to get the offense gelling again.
Kevin O’Connor and Tom Haberstroh give you the latest as the NBA trade talks heat up! The duo breaks down why Anthony Davis wants out of Dallas and whether the Lakers should trade Austin Reaves after Rich Paul’s latest comments. Plus, they discuss Jonathan Kuminga demanding a trade out of Golden State. Would Michael Porter Jr. be a good fit for the Warriors?
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Next, the pair discusses potential suitors for Ja Morant. Will the Heat be his new home after he purchased a house in Miami? Plus, they break down how Franz Wagner’s return to the Magic’s lineup will impact the team, the growing tension with Giannis in Milwaukee and Nikola Jokic’s return at the end of January. How did OKC end their losing streak against the Spurs? Why is the NBA in a scoring slump?
Plus, KOC & Tom react to the latest intel on the point shaving scandal indictments in college basketball.
(0:49) AD wants out of Dallas
(6:58) Should Lakers trade Austin Reaves?
(10:41) Jonathan Kuminga demands a trade
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(15:58) Should Lakers trade Austin Reaves? continued
(20:35) Would Golden State trade for Michael Porter Jr.?
(23:32) Clippers back on the rise
(33:06) Ja Morant buys house in Miami
(38:31) Franz Wagner returns to Magic lineup
(40:28) Giannis boos at Bucks fans
(45:31) Nikola Jokic to return at end of January
(48:39) OKC beats Spurs on Tuesday
(53:09) Why is NBA scoring down?
(58:12) 20 men indicted for point-shaving
(1:01:13) Trae Young recovering from injury
PHOENIX, ARIZONA – DECEMBER 23: Austin Reaves #15 of the Los Angeles Lakers dribbles the ball during the first half against the Phoenix Suns at Mortgage Matchup Center on December 23, 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Suns defeated the Lakers 132-108. (Photo by Chris Coduto/Getty Images)
No, we didn’t place the six-figure wagers on mid- and low-major college basketball games that drew suspicion from authorities. We weren’t the players who allegedly agreed to fix games for tens of thousands of dollars. Those are individual decisions to break the law, stain college basketball and shake the public’s trust.
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But as a society?
We asked for this. You bet we did.
Nearly eight years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act — the law that essentially limited sports gambling to Nevada — many of us celebrated. If you could bet on sports at a Las Vegas casino, why shouldn’t you be able to do it in similar establishments in New Jersey, Mississippi or Ohio?
It seemed like a win for freedom and common sense, not to mention the casino operators ready to get their claws into new clientele.
And what exactly did the rest of us win?
We won a never-ending deluge of ads for online sportsbooks. We won a generation of young gambling addicts who are ill-equipped, emotionally and financially, to handle losing money on long-shot parlays. We won a disgraceful level of harassment, both in person at games and online, from fans toward athletes who didn’t help them cash their bets. And we won a subculture of people like the six defendants in this indictment who preyed on young basketball players from low-profile teams that saw their peers cashing in on name, image and likeness deals and became tempted by the promise of easy money.
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In other words, we lost something too. Maybe a lot.
The sheer amount and availability of gambling has probably become too much. The frictionless experience of firing up an app on your phone and being able to bet on anything at any time has become way too easy. And the trade-offs for making gambling so widely available are now apparent. When PASPA fell, eventually bringing sports gambling to 39 states, we didn’t flip a switch as much as we touched a stove.
You can educate young athletes about the dangers of match-fixing, warn them to stay away from gamblers and even show examples of lost eligibility and legal trouble for those who fell into the trap. It doesn’t matter. Put enough money in front of people, and some are inevitably going to think they can get away with it.
The college basketball scandal unveiled Thursday is just the latest in the U.S. since the legalization of sports betting. (Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images)
(G Fiume via Getty Images)
It’s our fault. We opened the floodgates and let it happen. And if we’re going to continue as a country where gambling is available almost anywhere, we have to accept that an occasional scandal is going to be part of the deal.
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Is that worth the trade-off? Perhaps.
Sports gambling is pervasive in plenty of other countries, and match-fixing scandals have popped up in almost every sport across nearly every inch of the globe. In the UK, where you are likely to pass a handful of betting parlors on any decent city walk, there has been a recent push for regulatory reform but no real movement to shut it all down. It will likely be the same on our side of the Atlantic. Too many people are making too much money to go backwards.
But the uniqueness of American college sports is a real vulnerability.
College basketball is popular enough that sportsbooks can reasonably offer and profit from bets on lower-level games and player props. They are simply meeting demand. At this point, however, it’s impossible to deny the vulnerability of college athletes, particularly those at smaller schools.
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It’s not a coincidence that the match-fixers in this indictment started with Chinese Basketball Association players before targeting players at Nicholls State, Tulane, Northwestern State, Saint Louis, LaSalle, Fordham, Robert Morris, Southern Miss, DePaul, North Carolina A&T, Coppin State, New Orleans, Kennesaw State, Eastern Michigan and Abilene Christian.
They’re all colleges with athletes who weren’t making much, if anything, from NIL. Schools where few people would be paying attention. Games that wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar. Often the alleged match fixers focused on first-half lines, presumably to convince skeptical players that it wouldn’t be completely unethical to tank a first half if they could play to their full ability in the second. For someone who sees friends and former teammates signing huge NIL deals at more prominent schools, it must have been hard to say no when the fixers were texting photos with stacks of cash.
Of course, the argument in favor of the current legal gambling environment is that they got caught. The unusual amounts of money being bet on low-interest games triggered inquiries, which led to 20 people — including former NBA player Antonio Blakeney — being charged in the scheme. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
As a result, the issue is presented as an A or B choice: Is it better to have pervasive legal gambling with a system that can detect suspicious activity, or would you rather go back to the days when difficult-to-trace money was being gambled on the black market? After all, we had point-shaving and match-fixing scandals in college sports long before it was legal nearly everywhere.
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We should probably treat that as an open question, a still-evolving conversation. This indictment covers 29 compromised games over two seasons in which there were more than 12,000 college basketball games played.
Is that too many to stomach? Is it about what you’d expect? Or is it just the tip of the iceberg for a set of problems we’re going to deal with for years to come?
The answer is in the eye of the beholder, but it would be foolish to assume this is the last time we’ll see an indictment where a bunch of college athletes were recruited to fix games.
The hope, at least from an NCAA standpoint, is that states will move to limit prop bets on college games and the fallout from federal investigations will scare everyone straight. If both of those things happen, maybe college sports will have a fighting chance to stay as honest and fair as we’d want them to be.
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But whatever course history takes in the first decade of widespread legal sports gambling in the U.S., we must understand that it’s all the product of choices we made as a society to bring it into our lives.
We wanted it, we got it and the consequences are there for all to see.
For the seventh straight year, the NBA asked me if I wanted to be one of the media members who votes on which players should start in the NBA All-Star Game. For reasons passing understanding, I said yes. Here’s how I used my ballot.
A quick reminder: Yes, the NBA has yet again changed the format of the All-Star Game — this time to a round-robin tournament featuring two teams of American players and one “world” roster, resulting in 16 U.S.-born players and eight international players being selected … unless the voting results in fewer than 16 U.S.-born players or eight international players making the cut, in which case NBA Commissioner Adam Silver will just start naming Americans or international players to balance out the sides. (Find all that confusing? You’re not alone!)
Despite the latest grasp at a structural change to inject some juice into the proceedings, the nuts-and-bolts of the voting remain the same: You vote for five guys in each conference, with fan voting accounting for 50% of the final result, with player and media ballots accounting for 25% each. The main functional difference this year? Rather than choosing three frontcourt players and two backcourt players in each conference, the ballot has gone fully positionless. Just pick five guys, and keep it movin’.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing I don’t have to burn too many calories on convincing you that Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić — the top two finishers in Most Valuable Player voting in each of the last two seasons, and potentially this season’s top two, barring eligibility concerns — deserved a starting vote.
Gilgeous-Alexander has come back from winning his first MVP trophy and NBA championship seemingly better at everything. He’s second in the NBA in scoring, averaging 31.9 points per game on sparkling 55/39/89 shooting splits, producing points more efficiently and turning the ball over less as the preeminent mover on a Thunder team that opened the season 24-1 and that — despite what qualifies as a “slump” in OKC these days — remains atop the West, on pace for 68 wins (and with the point differential of a 70-win squad). With SGA on the floor, the Thunder have blown opponents’ doors off by 16.5 points per 100 possessions — the largest margin of any player in the NBA, according to Basketball Reference.
Hey, here’s something I just looked up: Only three guards in NBA history have averaged 30 points and five assists per game while shooting 50% from the floor. Stephen Curry did it during his unanimous MVP season in 2015-16. Michael Jordan did it five times. Gilgeous-Alexander, in Year 8, is on pace for his fourth … in a row.
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Which is to say: This is a legitimately historic run, one that could wind up landing SGA in some awfully lofty conversations before all’s said and done. For now, though, it’ll land him on his fourth straight All-Star team.
Jokić is fifth in the NBA in scoring at 29.8 points per game while leading the league in rebounding and assists; he is 12 total points away from being on pace to join Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook as the only players in NBA history to average a 30-point triple-double for a season. On a per-minute and per-possession basis, Jokić has never scored this much, thanks partly to him splashing 43.5% of the 4.8 3-pointers he’s attempting per game, both of which would be career highs.
He’s on pace to post the highest true shooting percentage in NBA history among players who use at least 25% of their teams’ offensive possessions, topping … himself. He is also on track to set new all-time records in win shares per 48 minutes, box plus-minus and player efficiency rating, and to become the seventh player ever to assist on more than half of his teammates’ baskets; the Nuggets have scored an absurd 130.1 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions in his minutes, which is light years beyond what even the best offenses in league history have mustered. Missed games be damned: The list of players who’ve had a more consistently pronounced on-court impact than Jokić this season is either one name long or it doesn’t exist. An easy choice.
Victor Wembanyama, Spurs
So, too, was Wembanyama, the centerpiece of the Spurs’ rise to third place in the West and — by virtue of knocking off defending champion Oklahoma City three times in four tries and making it to the championship game of the NBA Cup — a spot among the ranks of bona fide title contenders.
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Some voters might feel more compelled to knock Wemby out of a starting spot due to his injury absences: Thanks to an early-season calf strain, followed by a knee hyperextension that’s led to him being on a minutes restriction, he’s played just 26 games and 753 minutes — well below the other serious candidates for starting spots. I hear that. I also don’t really care about it.
There’s plenty of credit to go around for San Antonio’s surge up the standings: to Stephon Castle, making a massive second-year leap; to De’Aaron Fox, reminding everyone exactly why the Spurs went out, got him and paid him; to a roster full of guys (Devin Vassell, Harrison Barnes, Keldon Johnson, Luke Kornet, Julian Champagnie) playing like stars in their roles; to head coach Mitch Johnson, ably carrying the weight of carrying the mantle left for him by one of the greatest legends the coaching profession has ever seen; etc. All of it, though, starts with the man in the middle — and 750 minutes of what he’s been putting on tape was more than enough to earn my vote.
Luka Dončić, Lakers
Dončić, for his part, leads the NBA in scoring at 33.4 points per game on .606 true shooting to go with 8.8 assists (fourth-most in the league) and 7.9 rebounds a night — the lead guard at the controls of a Lakers team that is vying for a top-four spot in a tough-as-nails top of the West.
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There are nits to pick with these Lakers, who sit 10 games over .500 despite being just plus-1 for the season — not one point per 100 possessions; one point period — and have outperformed their point differential and 23rd-ranked defense, thanks in large part to being an NBA-best 13-1 in “clutch” games. But L.A. is winning on the strength of its offense, which ranks seventh in points scored per possession and is at its best with Luka leading the dance: The Lakers have scored like the Thunder with him on the floor and like the Pelicans with him off it.
Anthony Edwards, Timberwolves
The fifth starting spot came down to a handful of strong candidates in the midst of excellent seasons. Kevin Durant and Alperen Şengün have kept the Houston Rockets in the top five in offensive and defensive efficiency, and in the hunt for a top-four spot out West, despite the preseason loss of starting point guard Fred VanVleet. Ongoing salary-cap-circumvention investigations notwithstanding, Kawhi Leonard has been lights out for nearly two months — 30.1 points on 50/40/93 shooting with 6.5 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 3.1 stocks per game since Thanksgiving — to turn the previously lifeless Clippers into one of the NBA’s hottest teams. Out in the Bay, Curry is scoring as much on a per-minute and per-possession basis as he did during his unanimous MVP season a decade ago, and doing so with characteristically unbelievable shooting efficiency for a Warriors team that, as ever, only goes as far as he can carry it.
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In the end, though, I landed on Edwards, in recognition of both his role in fueling Minnesota’s rise up the standings — just a game out of second in the West entering Thursday’s games, with the NBA’s best record and fourth-best net rating since Thanksgiving — and his scintillating individual production.
Edwards’ impressive run of increasing his scoring volume and efficiency in every year of his career has continued. He’s averaging a career-best 28.9 points per game on .626 true shooting — a combination of volume and efficiency that represents incredibly rare air among NBA scorers — while reducing his turnover rate despite more frequently serving as Chris Finch’s point guard, getting to the free-throw line more often, and continuing to play a key on-ball role in a Minnesota defense that’s tied for fifth in points allowed per possession.
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He’s also been absolute nails in crunch time — an area of concern for Minnesota in recent years — shooting a scorching 70.7% from the floor (29-for-41), 57.1% from long range (8-for-14) and 83.3% from the foul line (10-for-12) when the score is within five points in the final five minutes:
The two-way play, the growth as a facilitator, the ongoing scaling-up of his scoring and efficiency and that close-and-late excellence — all in service of keeping the Wolves in the hunt in the West — earned Edwards the last spot on my ballot.
New York Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson left Wednesday’s game against the Sacramento Kings early in the first quarter after spraining his right ankle, missing the remainder of what would become a 112-101 Kings win.
Four minutes into the game at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Brunson dribbled into the frontcourt, taking a screen from teammate Josh Hart to force a switch that would allow him to isolate against rookie center Maxime Raynaud. As the star point guard started to attack, though, he fell to the floor and threw the ball away, leading to a steal and fast-break dunk by former Knicks teammate Precious Achiuwa.
Brunson got to his feet and remained in the game, but moved gingerly through the next several possessions before asking to come out of the game with 7:01 to go in the opening quarter. He went back to the locker room, and that was that; the Knicks would later list him as questionable to return to the game, before ruling him out entirely at the start of the third quarter. He’d finish with four points on 2-for-3 shooting in five minutes of floor time.
This marks the second right ankle injury of the season for Brunson, who missed two games in November after rolling it in a loss to the Orlando Magic. He suffered a more serious sprain to that same ankle during a loss to the Los Angeles Lakers last season — an injury that kept him on the shelf for nearly a month, costing him 15 games.
Jalen Brunson left the Knicks’ loss to the Kings after just five minutes following a right ankle injury. (Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images)
Brunson, 29, is eighth in the NBA in scoring at 28.2 points per game and 21st in assists at 6.1 per game, shooting 48.1% from the field, 38.8% from 3-point range and 85.2% from the free-throw line. He’s expected to earn his third consecutive All-Star selection when rosters are announced later this month.
The Knicks, who sit in second place in the Eastern Conference at 25-15, are 1-2 without Brunson this season. During his extended absence last season, they went 9-6, with Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby all averaging more than 20 points per game and shouldering an increased offensive workload.
With Brunson unavailable, New York’s offense cratered against the Kings, as the Knicks shot just 39% from the floor and 8-for-41 (19.5%) from 3-point range en route to their fourth-least-efficient offensive performance of the season, according to Cleaning the Glass. The loss was the Knicks’ sixth in the last eight games, continuing a prolonged slump that has seen them go 7-8 with the NBA’s second-worst defense since winning the 2025 Emirates NBA Cup last month. New York will travel to San Francisco on Thursday to face the Warriors on the second night of a back-to-back.
What exactly is a postseason ticket worth these days? Not just its monetary value, or its ability to get you into the doors of a significant game, though that’s obviously its primary purpose.
A ticket is also an asset — a very limited-use, rapidly expiring asset, of course, but an asset nonetheless.
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Consider, for instance, this year’s national championship game. Ticket prices are incredibly high to attend the game at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, for obvious reasons — the game is in Miami, home of one of the two teams playing, and the other team, Indiana, is in its first years of college football relevance. You literally could not script a more perfect matchup for stratospheric ticket prices, and the market has responded accordingly.
Per GameTime, the cheapest price to get into Hard Rock to watch the Hoosiers and ‘Canes is a tidy $2,700 a ticket. That’s down from $3,500 the day after Indiana won the Peach Bowl to clinch a trip to Miami, yes, but it’s still about $1,000 more than the Ohio State-Notre Dame championship game cost at this point last year.
(Also, remember: that $2,700 is just to get in the door. If you want to be anywhere near the field, you’re looking at double, triple or more the cost. Hope you saved your money!)
Ticket prices are always an interesting exercise in what, exactly, the market will bear, how much fans can be expected to pay to support their teams. It’s not uncommon to see ticket prices for less than the price of a hamburger to get into various bowl games, baseball games, even NFL games. (Team names withheld to protect the terrible.)
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The flip side of that equation, though, is that the College Football Playoff committee now sees that fans are willing to fork out nearly three grand for a single ticket. Extenuating circumstances like those noted above don’t matter; the money is exchanging hands. And so face value gets bumped up a couple hundred bucks, leading to a commensurate increase in secondary markets … because if you’re fortunate enough to have one of these lottery tickets, you might decide that you can watch the game at home and pocket a whole lot of cash.
Which brings us around to our next ticket topic of the weekend — the Seattle Seahawks’ plan to police secondary market ticket sales. When the Seahawks organization identified certain tickets on the secondary market as belonging to season ticket holders, they emailed the seller with a polite but unmistakable message: Get those tickets off the market or risk losing out on season tickets for 2026.
If you think that’s too draconian of a punishment, may we introduce you to Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Tournament. If you are fortunate enough to win the lottery for a badge to the tournament, and you decide to sell that badge — which you can typically do at upwards of 20 times the cost of ticket — you are risking a lifetime banishment.
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Is that fair? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s definitely legal, and it’s likely that more teams will start to use this method of ticket control in the future. It’s already the rule in various European soccer leagues, where fans of the opposing team can’t buy tickets in a home-team section. (This is done as much for the visiting fans’ safety as for the home fans’ unity, but the point remains.)
So this leaves the ticket market with two diametrically opposite forces working it from both sides. Are you with the free market — meaning tickets are more available, but at a substantially higher cost? Or do you go with artificially enforced controls like those laid down by the Seahawks, which can keep prices lower but severely impact supply? Which way do you go?
Aaron Rodgers signed a one-year deal to play his 21st NFL season for the Pittsburgh Steelers because of Mike Tomlin. Rodgers’ Green Bay Packers defeated Tomlin’s Steelers in Super Bowl XLV at the end of the 2010 season. In the following years, the four-time league MVP quarterback’s appreciation continued to grow for Tomlin, the latest pillar of stability in a Steelers organization fortified by strong leadership.
Tomlin waited for Rodgers this past offseason when the now-42-year-old was deciding if he still wanted to keep playing football. Rodgers repaid him with 10 wins and an AFC North title — plus, endless support in front of microphones the veteran signal-caller disdains.
“And more than that, though, when you have the right guy and the culture is right, you don’t think about making a change, but there’s a lot of pressure that comes from the outside, and obviously that sways decisions from time to time.
“But it’s not how I would do things and not how the league used to be.”
And yet Tomlin, 53, stepped down after a 19-year run that featured the franchise’s sixth Super Bowl victory and eight division titles without a single losing season. Tomlin was the first to break the news, and he did so in the team meeting room on Tuesday.
In speaking to a collection of players, coaches and staff members, DeFabo uncovered the emotions triggered by Tomlin’s final address as head coach in the Steel City. The Athletic story highlights the disbelief and grief that permeated throughout the Steelers’ facility earlier this week.
A ‘funeral’ atmosphere
NFL rosters are never the same year-over-year. The only constant in the league is change. Tomlin indicated he’d be part of that change in his speech to his players Tuesday.
“When he said, ‘Some of us will be here and some of us won’t, that’s when I was like, ‘Is this guy really stepping down?’”
Steelers star pass rusher T.J. Watt was stunned as Tomlin revealed his choice to walk away from a team he’s piloted for nearly two decades, including during the entirety of the 31-year-old sack artist’s career.
“No. No. No. No. No,” an emotional Watt reportedly said over and over again.
Third-year Pittsburgh cornerback Joey Porter Jr. grew up with the Steelers. His dad played for the franchise from 1999-2006 and was a part of a Super Bowl XL team that recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of its world championship during the 2005 season. He then went on to coach on Tomlin’s staff from 2014-18 before his son launched his Penn State career.
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Porter Jr. and Tomlin go way back.
When the young DB heard the news, he almost hyperventilated, according to The Athletic’s report.
“Fire Tomlin” chants were hard to ignore this season, as the Steelers once again danced with .500 before bouncing back and making a push for the division crown in an AFC North that was riddled by injuries.
The now-nine-year drought without a playoff win has angered fans. Many of them believed it was indeed time for a change.
Steelers players, though, remained steadfast in their trust that Tomlin was the right man for the job, and they wanted to help him get back over the postseason hump.
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“Every single player in that building wants to play for Mike T,” one anonymous player told The Athletic. “Were guys upset with coordinators? Yes. Was it the head guy? No.”
Tomlin has two years remaining on his Steelers contract. If he wants to coach for another NFL team before the end of the 2027 season, Pittsburgh has the right to seek compensation for him. But Rooney said Wednesday that Tomlin told him he wasn’t planning on coaching any time soon.
The decision he revealed Tuesday appears especially significant in that way.
A Steelers staff member told The Athletic that the atmosphere in the meeting room “felt like a funeral.”
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Tomlin reportedly earned a standing ovation after his speech and then hugged players one by one.
It was the end of an era, and of a season that started with Rodgers signing on with hopes of playoff success.
Christian Polanco and Alexis Guerreros break down the latest soccer headlines, starting with reports that USMNT striker Josh Sargent could be headed back to MLS with Toronto FC. Is it a smart career move or a major step backward for the American forward? The guys also react to rumors linking Timo Werner to the San Jose Earthquakes and debate whether the club made a massive mistake by failing to keep star winger Cristian Espinoza. Plus, with Chucky Lozano’s exit from San Diego seemingly inevitable, they discuss who the club should target as his replacement.
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Former Premier League defender Anton Ferdinand then joins the show to preview the West Ham vs. Tottenham derby and relive his legendary stoppage-time equalizer against Spurs in 2005. They also chat West Ham’s tough season so far and how the club can push forward to avoid relegation.
Finally, the guys debate whether Real Madrid made a massive mistake by firing Xabi Alonso and what it means for the club’s future. Christian and Alexis wrap things up with their AFCON Final predictions as Senegal and Morocco prepare to battle for continental glory.
Timestamps:
(6:45) – Josh Sargent heading back to MLS? Smart move or disaster?
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(17:30) – Timo Werner is headed to San Jose: redemption tour or flop?
(30:15) – Chucky Lozano is leaving San Diego – who will replace him?
(37:15) – Anton Ferdinand joins The Cooligans
(57:00) – Xabi Alonso now Real Madrid’s biggest enemy?
Nate Tice & Charles McDonald join forces to preview all four NFL divisional round games. After reacting to the New York Giants hiring John Harbaugh to be their next head coach, the duo deep dive divisional-style on the four big games coming up this weekend.
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Nate & Charles start with an AFC hoss fight featuring the electric Buffalo Bills offense vs. the stout Denver Broncos defense. On Saturday night we’ll see the San Francisco 49ers try to improve on their last performance against the 1-seed Seattle Seahawks, and the two hosts determine whether the 9ers have the juice.
The Sunday games feature Drake Maye and the New England Patriots taking on the stingy Houston Texans defense and the Los Angeles Rams trying to outscore the red-hot Chicago Bears. Nate & Charles wrap up the show with their Hail Mary bold predictions for this weekend.
(2:20) – Giants hire HC John Harbaugh
(10:00) – Bills @ Broncos
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(36:00) – 49ers @ Seahawks
(57:10) – Texans @ Patriots
(1:23:20) – Rams @ Bears
(1:43:45) – Hail Mary predictions
JACKSONVILLE, FL – JANUARY 11: Josh Allen #17 of the Buffalo Bills during the AFC Wildcard Playoff game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Buffalo Bills on January 11, 2026 at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Fl.
(Photo by David Rosenblum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
