The Sweep, September 25 — Kalshi Loses a Circuit, the Internationals Lose Nothing, and the NFL Fines a Man $8,847 for Pretending to Drink a Beer

Eight things, newest first.

Friday, September 25 — Kalshi loses a circuit, and loses it twice in the same opinion. A unanimous Sixth Circuit panel — Julia Smith Gibbons writing, joined by Eric Clay and Rachel Bloomekatz — held that Ohio and Tennessee can enforce their gambling laws against Kalshi's sports event contracts. The Southern District of Ohio's refusal to enjoin Ohio was affirmed; the Middle District of Tennessee's injunction protecting Kalshi was vacated. The court said the contracts are not swaps, and then said that even if they were, the Commodity Exchange Act does not preempt state gambling law anyway. Judgment: the second part is the one that matters, and it is the reason this is not a bad afternoon but a structural problem. You can redesign a contract. You cannot redesign a holding that says the redesign would not have helped. Our lead has the full read.

Friday, September 25 — the Internationals put up a 5-0 and Brandt Snedeker reached for the football metaphor. Five foursomes matches at Medinah, five International wins, and a 7-3 lead: Matsuyama and Im 3 and 2, Scott and Bezuidenhout 3 and 2, Fox and Min Woo Lee 1 up, the two Kims 4 and 3, and Conners and Taylor over Scheffler and Burns, 1 up. Snedeker: "This thing is 35, 40 percent over. It's not even halftime of a football game." Nick Taylor, on the putt that decided his match: "Fortunate there that Sam's lipped out." Judgment: Snedeker's fraction is accurate and his framing is a captain doing his job. The number he did not give is that the United States now needs 62.5 per cent of the remaining points. Seventh session sweep in the event's history, and the first time anyone has done it in back-to-back editions.

Friday, September 25 — two 79-80 teams, one ticket. Houston and Texas enter the final weekend tied, both eliminated from the wild card, with the AL West as the only door. Houston holds the tiebreaker on a 9-4 season series, so Texas has to finish a full game clear. Judgment: the winner may become the first team to reach the postseason with a losing record in a 162-game season, which is being written up as an embarrassment. The genuinely strange part is a rung higher — Cleveland at 83-76 is seeded ahead of a Yankees team that won 92.

Friday, September 25 — the Laver Cup opened at the O2, back in London for the first time since 2022. Casper Ruud took the opener over Francisco Cerundolo before Brandon Nakashima levelled it for Andre Agassi's Team World, beating Jakub Mensik 6-1, 3-6, 10-7. Nakashima afterwards: "playing in front of the London crowd was amazing, almost a full stadium." Judgment: an exhibition with a real match-tiebreak format and players who visibly care is a better watch than most of what the tour puts on in late September, and the honest thing to say is that the event's problem has never been the tennis.

Thursday, September 24 — New York sued Polymarket, and Polymarket sued New York the same day. Governor Hochul and Attorney General James filed in state court in Manhattan, alleging unlicensed gambling, tax avoidance, and letting 18- to 20-year-olds trade sports markets against a state minimum of 21. They want the platform stopped, the gains disgorged, and penalties at three times what the company made. Polymarket moved the case toward the Southern District of New York and separately sued Hochul and James for a declaration that federal law preempts the state's gambling code. Judgment: nobody drafts a federal complaint against a governor in an afternoon. That filing existed before the state's did.

Thursday, September 24 — Atlanta 35, Green Bay 14, and Lambeau booed its own team off. Michael Penix Jr. played his first game since tearing his left ACL in Week 11 last November and went 18-of-25 for 256 yards, including a 13-of-15 run through the second and third quarters. Bijan Robinson ran for 194 yards and two scores on 29 carries. Drake London caught nine for a career-high 194. Atlanta outrushed Green Bay 242 to 17 and scored 27 straight after falling behind 7-0. Penix, afterwards: "I got two words: But God." Judgment: the Falcons had scored 16 points in two games and gone 27 consecutive series without a red-zone snap before Thursday, so the temptation is to call this a quarterback fixing everything. Both of Atlanta's 194-yard performances came in the same game. That is an offence that was missing one part, not five.

Thursday and Friday, September 24-25 — the NFL's fine schedule had a week. Ja'Marr Chase confirmed that he and Tee Higgins were fined over the "people's elbow" celebration from Sunday's game against Houston: $14,926 for unsportsmanlike conduct and $11,941 for taunting. Chase's account: "We got fined for the people's elbow stuff. I would love to appeal it. It's something we made up, and then everybody else saying what it is." Separately, Colts guard Matt Goncalves was fined $8,847 for miming opening and drinking a can after Tyler Warren's touchdown against Kansas City — deemed in "poor taste." Judgment: the beer fine is the sillier of the two and the elbow fine is the more revealing. The league fined a gesture for what the internet decided it meant, which is a standard no player can comply with in advance.

Tuesday, September 22 — the Manning item, reported straight, and it is further along than the outrage cycle suggests. Arch Manning laughed during a press conference at an AI-generated video depicting Texas coach Steve Sarkisian striking ESPN reporter Holly Rowe. The clips circulated after Sarkisian declined an on-field postgame interview with Rowe following Texas's comeback win over Ohio State. Manning apologised; Rowe accepted the apology publicly and spoke with him privately. His uncle Eli Manning was then asked about it by Front Office Sports and answered in terms of media management — "you feel like they're your pal, you relax with them a little bit, you try to be funny, and then they can take it" — and drew criticism for framing it that way. Judgment: we are not adjudicating what Eli Manning meant, and this is not a punchline item. What we will say is narrow: the two people actually involved resolved it between themselves days ago, and the conversation that is still running is one the uncle restarted by treating a fabricated video of a woman being struck as a lesson in handling reporters.

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What we are not running, and why

Manchester City's "115 charges verdict." A piece carrying today's date reports that an independent commission found City guilty on 114 of 115 charges. It also says the Premier League has not published the ruling and no sanction has been determined, and it does not date the finding. A separate result surfaced by the same search carried an April 2025 stamp. We cannot establish that anything happened on September 25, and a three-year financial case is exactly the kind of story aggregators recirculate on a slow Friday. Not running it until we can date the event.

"LeBron James at 76ers media day." He was not at media day. Philadelphia's is Monday, September 28, in Camden; camps open September 29. His remarks about choosing Philadelphia came on a podcast this week, and the signing itself — two years, $8 million — happened in July. "Player explains a decision he made ten weeks ago" is not a Friday story, and we are not going to dress it as one.

The 38-state amicus brief. It resurfaced in three separate searches this week and reads like news. It was filed April 24, 2026, in the Massachusetts case. Old.

The college football Friday slate. Northwestern at Indiana and Clemson at Cal had not kicked off when we filed. We do not preview games and then publish the preview as the day's coverage.

A World Series odds roundup listing Milwaukee at 95-57. The Brewers are 100-59. The article was stale by a week and the odds attached to it were priced off the wrong record. If the standings in a betting piece are wrong, the prices in it are decoration.

CNBC's account of the Sixth Circuit ruling. It exists and it is from today. CNBC returns 403 to our fetcher, so we could not read it, so we did not paraphrase it. Everything in our lead comes from documents and outlets we opened ourselves — including the CFTC's own Sixth Circuit amicus brief and New Jersey's certiorari petition, both read in full.