The Sweep, October 17 — A No. 1 Lost to +800, a 22-Game Streak Ended on a Foot, and a Press Secretary Market That Went From 86 to 99 in an Afternoon

Saturday, October 17 — Georgia opened at -16.5, closed at -19.5, and lost to +800. Auburn 27, No. 1 Georgia 24, on Alex McPherson's 34-yard field goal as time expired, after Gunner Stockton was stripped at the Auburn 46 with 58 seconds left while driving for the go-ahead kick, and after Gabe Harris Jr. was flagged for roughing Byrum Brown with 14 seconds left to move the attempt 15 yards closer. Georgia had won nine straight in the series and was 18-0 at home as No. 1 under Kirby Smart. Our CFB piece is about why the number was fine and the three-point move toward Georgia all week was not. The judgment: a team that commits three personal fouls on the same quarterback has earned the third one.

Saturday, October 17 — one foot, one arm. Ohio State 19, Indiana 15. Nick Marsh caught the go-ahead touchdown on fourth-and-4 with 1:02 left and his left foot was out of bounds; Gus Johnson had already said "TOUCHDOWN." That ended a 22-game winning streak and a 19-game home streak, the two longest in the country. Eight minutes earlier Julian Sayin had been sacked, fumbled, and come back to the sideline with his right arm in a sling. "It looks like Julian will be out several weeks," Ryan Day said. Our second CFB piece argues the sling reprices Ohio State's season more than the foot does. Indiana, which had not lost a fumble in 1,487 snaps, lost two in the third quarter.

Saturday, October 17 — the Third Saturday in October went to the team that could run. Tennessee 26, No. 6 Alabama 10 in Knoxville. DeSean Bishop carried 32 times for 159 yards and two touchdowns, the second of them a 5-yard run with 3:17 left. Keelon Russell was 19-of-29 for 147 yards with two interceptions; Alabama turned it over four times, gained 201 yards, converted 2 of 13 third downs and held the ball for 24 minutes. The Tide are 5-2 and have lost two straight, to Georgia last week and now to Tennessee, which held the ball for 35 minutes and 44 seconds. The judgment: Alabama's problem is not the quarterback's arm, it is that the quarterback is the only thing moving.

Saturday, October 17 — fourteen days ago Texas was No. 1. Florida 27, No. 7 Texas 24 in Austin, with Tramell Jones Jr. making his first career start and throwing both of his touchdowns to Lacota Dippre, and Jadan Baugh's 11-yard run putting the Gators ahead in the fourth. Arch Manning was 14-of-20 for 173 yards and a 9-yard score to Cam Coleman with 4:21 left and did not get the ball back in time. Texas lost to Oklahoma as No. 1 on October 10 and to unranked Florida at home a week later; it is 4-2 and 1-2 in the SEC. Florida gets Georgia in Atlanta on October 31, which was not a sentence anyone expected to type in the present tense this month.

Saturday, October 17 — Michigan benched its quarterback at halftime and won. Michigan 21, Penn State 18 in Ann Arbor. Bryce Underwood started, Tommy Carr played the second half, and Carr led three touchdown drives, the last of them ending with his own run on third-and-9. Penn State's Rocco Becht threw two interceptions, one of them on the first drive of the half and one Yahoo called "stunningly bad," and lost a fumble on a sack deep in his own end. The Nittany Lions have lost four straight and are 0-4 in the Big Ten with a bye and then Purdue on Halloween. Whether Carr starts against Indiana next week is the question Kyle Whittingham will be asked every day until he answers it.

Saturday, October 17 — Jalen Hurts, soberly. The Eagles placed their quarterback on injured reserve on Saturday afternoon with the superficial blood clot in his calf, after a day of consultations ESPN says "continued into Saturday" and hours after a Saturday-morning report that the team intended to keep him on the active roster. He must miss at least four games, against Carolina, Dallas, Washington and the Giants, before the Week 10 bye; ESPN's medical sourcing puts the minimum for a moderate anticoagulant course at six weeks, and the team has set no timeline. Tanner McKee starts Sunday, rookie Cole Payton is the backup, and Joe Milton was signed off Dallas' practice squad. The Eagles' Thursday statement is the only medical document anyone outside the building has read, and we are not adding to it.

Friday, October 16 — the ALCS was rained into the weekend. Game 4 between the Rays and Guardians, scheduled for Friday night at Progressive Field, was postponed and will be played Saturday at 8 p.m. ET, with Game 5 moving to Sunday. Same starters: Nick Martinez for Tampa Bay, Shawn Armstrong for Cleveland. The Guardians lead 2-1. Milwaukee, which clinched the pennant on Thursday, now gets at least one more day of rest it did not ask for, which is relevant to the piece we wrote about what a week off does to a bullpen used as a rotation.

Friday, October 16 — a press secretary, a market, and a $19 trade, reported without adjudication. A senior White House official told Fox News at midday Friday that Katie Zacharia is "transitioning out" of the press secretary job she was named to on October 9. Her first briefing, on October 13, lasted 14 minutes and took three questions; on Hannity Thursday night she acknowledged she had not passed the bar. The president, asked if he fired her, said "No no. I want her to have a good life," and "Maybe it's not for her." Those are the uncontested facts. Kalshi's own post says its "out by November" market was at 86 percent when Fox reported and 99 percent by the time it wrote them up. The part this column cares about is older: CNN's Marshall Cohen reported that Kalshi is scrutinising three trades of under $100, one of them $19, placed on Zacharia to get the job when she was trading at 1 percent, after the Wall Street Journal first reported them. Kalshi declined to comment. A market that goes to 99 on a Fox News alert is doing its job on public information. A $19 trade at 1 percent a week earlier is the question, and nobody has answered it.

Friday, October 16 — New York's hold came back. The handle did not. For the week ending October 11, the state's eight mobile books took $581.2 million and kept $52.1 million, a 9 percent hold and the highest weekly revenue of the football season, per Covers. FanDuel: $209 million and $19.1 million. DraftKings: $203 million and $18.6 million, its best NFL week. Handle was under $600 million for a second straight week and down more than $9 million on the same week last year. Four days ago we wrote about a week in which New York took its fourth-biggest handle ever and finished 59th in revenue. The revenue fixed itself in a week. The volume is the number to watch.

Friday, October 16 — Ohio posted one sentence. The Casino Control Commission opened comments, due October 30, on a new paragraph in its sports-gaming accounts rule that would bar any direct marketing, push notifications included, for 48 hours after a customer enables or changes a responsible-gambling tool. Our sportsbooks lead is about the word "changes," which on a plain reading covers raising a limit as well as setting one. It is the third amendment to the same rule since July.

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What we are not running, and why

A scoreboard from 2018. A search for Saturday's college football scores returned a CBS Sports page headlined "Texas escapes Baylor, Miami upset by Virginia." Its date is October 14, 2018. Everything in this column's football items comes from pages dated today, and every score was checked against ESPN's own game pages. Seventh consecutive edition in which a stale national file was served as the current week.

Last year's Third Saturday. An ESPN "full game highlights" clip for Tennessee-Alabama verified as a real video and turned out to have been uploaded on October 18, 2025. It was not embedded. The SEC's Florida-Texas highlights above were uploaded this afternoon.

Hugh Freeze chasing the referees. Two of the first results for Saturday's Auburn-Georgia game were about Freeze throwing a headset and following officials to the locker room. Those are from a previous season. Auburn's coach is Alex Golesh, hired on November 30 last year, and he spent Saturday evening thanking people.

"Eagles won't place Hurts on IR." A Saturday-morning story said Philadelphia intended to keep Hurts on the active roster, citing two national reporters. The team announced the IR move at 3:57 p.m. The morning story was accurate when written and wrong by mid-afternoon; we ran the afternoon.

Kirby Smart's quotes. None of the five recaps we read carried a postgame quote from Smart, and the DawgNation postgame video we found was not transcribed. The Georgia piece runs without him rather than with a paraphrase.

"Fired," as a fact. Some outlets reported that the president fired Zacharia; Fox's official said "transitioning out"; the president denied it. We printed the positions we could read and chose none.

Four pages we could not open. Legal Sports Report's Ohio story, Gambling Insider, Greenwich Time's piece on which exchanges left Connecticut, and CNBC's interview with Adam Silver all returned 403, 402 or 451 to our tools. The Ohio piece is built on the commission's own PDF instead; the Connecticut withdrawals are reported from PPC Land's account of the state's statement, with the ProphetX dispute noted; Silver's remarks are not in this edition.

Kalshi's ladders and Selig on Fox Business. Both real, both Thursday and Friday, both dropped for space. Selig's "you can't offer an order book in a casino" is in the Google piece, where it belongs.