The Sweep, October 11 — Two Ejections Before Anyone Had a First Down

Sunday, October 11 — London. The Jaguars beat the Eagles 19-17 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which is the least interesting sentence available about this game. Jacksonville rookie Josh Cameron took the opening kickoff 90 yards to the house and it did not count, erased by offsetting penalties that included a hold on Branson Combs. Then a scrum broke out at midfield and two players were thrown out of a game that had produced zero snaps from the line of scrimmage: Philadelphia's Jeremiah Trotter Jr. and Jacksonville's Bryan Thomas Jr. Twenty-one years earlier, Trotter's father was ejected from an Eagles game in a pre-game scuffle with Atlanta. Cam Little then won it with a 57-yarder as the clock hit zero, and the two players who will be in the highlight package are the two who never saw the second quarter. The lesson teams never learn: the fight is always more expensive than the thing you were fighting about, and in this case the thing you were fighting about had already been nullified.

Sunday, October 11 — the second ad. Sydney Sweeney released another Novig commercial, this one with her topless in branded underwear behind a pair of footballs, delivering the line about grown men making spreadsheets on what colour she is wearing. The first one landed on September 9 and drew public objections from Olympic and professional athletes. This is not a celebrity story and we have not treated it as one; it is the clearest live example of an advertising regime that binds state-licensed sportsbooks and does not reach a federally designated exchange, which is our third piece today.

Saturday, October 10 — the Finals we did not pre-write. Atlanta eliminated New York to reach its first WNBA Finals since 2013, and Golden State got there in the Valkyries' second season of existence. Game 1 is October 17 at 3:30 p.m. ET in San Francisco. Worth remembering because last edition's rejection list included a preview, written before Friday's games and published in the present tense, that had the Finals starting October 17 "between the Dream and the Aces." Half of that was a projection dressed as a fact, and the Aces then lost. The Dream half came good, which is exactly why that kind of writing is dangerous — it is right often enough to keep getting published.

Saturday, October 10 — Tuscaloosa, after the whistle. Alabama fans threw objects at Georgia players as they left the field following the 20-17 loss. Alabama has a real grievance about the officiating in that game and we wrote 1,400 words taking it seriously. This is not part of it. A stadium that throws things at nineteen-year-olds in the opposite uniform has converted a legitimate argument into something nobody has to listen to.

Saturday, October 10 — the league's official pharmacology. The NFL fined three Browns over a Week 4 touchdown celebration in which they appeared to pass an imaginary joint: $14,397 each for Quinshon Judkins and Deshaun Watson, $6,944 for Austin Barber. The governing standard, per the joint NFL-NFLPA position, is that celebrations depicting smoking or drug use remain prohibited while drinking celebrations are now permitted. So a player may mime a shot and may not mime a joint, in a league with beer money in every broadcast and marijuana legal in most of the states its teams play in. That is not a safety rule or a conduct rule. It is a sponsorship rule, and it would cost the league nothing to say so.

Saturday, October 10 — paid to shut up. Shuffle, a crypto casino, signed the YouTuber Jack Doherty to a sponsorship that includes a six-month prohibition on him posting online. Doherty says he did not read it closely and thought the original offer was a joke. Co-founder Noah Dummett confirmed it publicly — "yes it's real, six month term, money well spent" — and said that "his lawyers are now pressing us hard to have this contract scrapped but we will stay strong." Doherty says he is working with his own lawyer to fix it. The contract is not public, so whether the clause is enforceable is genuinely unknown and anyone telling you otherwise has not read it either. What is knowable is the business logic, and it is bleak and funny in equal measure: a gambling company calculated that the most valuable thing an influencer could do for its brand was stop talking.

Thursday and Friday, October 8-9 — Wake County. Robert Murphy Jr., formerly NC State's director of sports medicine, was extradited from Florida on Thursday and held on a $2.25 million bond. A Wake County grand jury indicted him on September 14 on nine felony counts of sexual contact under pretext of medical treatment and 23 misdemeanour counts of sexual battery; he was arrested in Florida on September 23 on fugitive warrants. The criminal charges involve 14 complainants; civil litigation that began in August 2022 and was expanded this year involves 31 athletes, with allegations running from October 2016 to the autumn of 2021. His attorneys have previously denied wrongdoing. The next hearing is November 2. We are reporting the charges, the bond and the dates, and nothing else, because nothing else is established.

Sunday, October 11 — Macao, 6 a.m. Eastern. Kyrie Irving was expected to play in the NBA's China Games finale, his first appearance since a knee injury in March 2025, with Kevin Durant resting on the other side. We file before it, so we are reporting the expectation and not the outcome. Friday's game in the same building gave Alperen Sengun a 16-10-10 triple-double in front of Yao Ming, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Ray Allen, Jackie Chan and David Beckham, which is the most 2026 sentence in this column.

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What we are not running, and why

"Four top-10 teams lost in Week 7." This was the single most quotable line available about college football this weekend, it was in the top organic result for the obvious query, and it comes from a CBS Sports piece headlined "Week 7 winners and losers: Alabama continues dominance, Georgia folds." We fetched it. It is dated October 14, 2018. The headline is an inversion of what happened on Saturday, which is how you can tell the search engine was not reading either. Nothing from it is anywhere in today's edition.

"Georgia's first win in Tuscaloosa since 2014." Also "since 2007." CBS Sports says one, ESPN says the other, and we could not reconcile them from anything we read. We printed the thing both agree on — Kirby Smart's first win there — and said so in the piece.

Half an NBA news cycle. A search for October 10 NBA news returned, in one summary, Giannis Antetokounmpo traded to Miami, Jaylen Brown to Philadelphia, Kawhi Leonard to Toronto and LaMelo Ball to Minnesota, plus Steve Ballmer suspended for a year, a $30 million fine and five docked first-round picks. Some of that may be real and none of it could be dated to this weekend from the pages involved, which were undated offseason buzz trackers. We are not laundering a rumour tracker into a Sunday column.

"Novig hit No. 11 on the App Store, up from 50 in August." Appeared in a search summary and in no source we were able to read. The Novig numbers in today's third piece — the follower counts, the search-interest peak, the September 10-16 volume table — come from a dated Yahoo Finance report citing Social Blade, Google Trends and Aldrin Research, and we used only those.

The week number for the London game. One YouTube upload calls it Week 5, another calls it Week 6, and nfl.com's injury page was still headed Week 5 on Sunday morning. It did not matter to anything above, so we left the number out rather than guess.

The name of the Alabama defender whose third-quarter interception was overturned. Wire copy renders it as "QB Reese," which is not a name. We described the play and did not name the player.

The exact height of the pitch José Ramírez homered on. ESPN's recap says 0.74 feet off the ground; ESPN's own analysis page says 0.89. Both call it the lowest pitch hit for a postseason home run in the tracking era. We wrote "under a foot" and flagged the disagreement, because printing a number to two decimal places that our own best source gives two ways is how a stat becomes folklore.

"Tate Sandell's walk-off field goal." Four outlets describe Oklahoma's 47-yard winner against Texas as a walk-off, a last-play kick or a last-second kick. News 9's own live file puts it with under five minutes left, which is not a walk-off and is also hard to square with Texas scoring again after it. We wrote the distance and the result and left the clock out of it.

Two NFL injury items. A carted-off linebacker and an ejection for a headbutt both surfaced in searches for this weekend and neither could be pinned to Saturday or Sunday from the pages we opened. Week 6 was still being played while this column was written; whatever happened in the late windows belongs in tomorrow's.