The Sweep, September 26 — Medinah Flips, Texas Wins a Game With 262 Yards, and the Bears' Backup Quarterback Is in Concussion Protocol

Eight things, newest first.

Saturday, September 26 — Medinah goes to Sunday with the wrong team in front. The International team leads 10½-7½ after eight matches on Saturday, and no International side has ever taken a lead into Sunday singles in the United States. Corey Conners and Nick Taylor beat Russell Henley and Jacob Bridgeman 1 up; Ryan Fox and Min Woo Lee beat Sam Burns and Wyndham Clark 3&2. Twelve singles matches decide it; Geoff Ogilvy's side needs five of them, Brandt Snedeker's needs eight. Judgment: the lead is smaller than three points sounds, because almost all of it was built in alternate shot — a format the Americans have gone 6-24 in since 2023 and do not have to play again. The last time the Internationals led into a Sunday, at Royal Melbourne in 2019, they were 10-8 up and lost the singles 8-4.

Saturday, September 26 — the No. 1 team in college football gained 262 yards and won. Texas 20, Tennessee 17 at Neyland, with sixteen sacks between them. Colin Simmons had five by himself, tying Shane Dronett's 1990 Texas record; the Longhorns had ten as a team. Arch Manning went 14-of-19 for 201 yards, was sacked six times, and threw two illegal forward passes. It ended with Jelani McDonald batting away a Hail Mary. Judgment: Steve Sarkisian's "we win big games around here, we do" is true and is also not what happened. A defensive end won this game, the quarterback survived it, and Tennessee — which has not beaten the AP's No. 1 since 1985 — was one deflection away with the President of the United States in the building for Texas's first ever visit to Knoxville.

Saturday, September 26 — Alex de Minaur saved a match point and the Laver Cup turned over. Zverev won the first set 6-2, served for the match at 5-4 in the second, and held a match point in the deciding tiebreak. De Minaur won it 2-6, 7-6(5), 11-9. Learner Tien had already beaten Flavio Cobolli 6-3, 2-6, 10-7. Team World, 1-3 down after Friday, leads 5-3. De Minaur afterwards: "I was in a fair bit of strife, and it was looking quite bleak." Judgment: the exhibition sneer is getting harder to sustain. Patrick Rafter's "bloody oath it is, it's massive" was about beating a player of Zverev's standing from a match point down, and the scoring system — Saturday matches worth two points, Sunday worth three — is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is make day two matter and day three decisive. Tennis gets a lot of things wrong. This format is not one of them.

Saturday, September 26 — Jeremiah Smith caught four touchdowns and became the first Ohio State receiver past 3,000 career yards. Twelve catches, 217 yards, four scores, all career highs, in a 42-19 win over Illinois. He had 21 catches for 400 yards in the season's first three games. Judgment: the four touchdowns tie a school single-game record at a school that has produced a lot of receivers, and the Heisman conversation that started Saturday afternoon is going to be loud. The honest caveat is that the position almost never wins it, and one 217-yard afternoon against Illinois is not the argument. The three-year body of work is.

Saturday, September 26 — Chicago ruled Caleb Williams out and the backup is in concussion protocol. Williams did not practise at all this week with the hamstring he hurt against Minnesota and will not play Monday night against Philadelphia. Tyson Bagent is questionable and still has to clear protocol. If he does not, Case Keenum starts. Judgment: this is the third straight week this column has had a quarterback story like this, which is itself the story of the 2026 season. The specific wrinkle here is that Chicago's contingency depends on a medical clearance nobody can schedule, which means anyone pricing Monday night before Sunday afternoon is pricing two different football teams and guessing at the weights.

Saturday, September 26 — the Saturday fine report is now a suspension ledger. C.J. Gardner-Johnson was fined for a hip-drop tackle; Alex Singleton and Jeremy Reaves for hits on defenseless players. Under the rule the league and the union agreed in August, three of the same in a season is a one-game suspension. Judgment: six of these have gone out in two weekends and every recipient has been a defender, five of the six in the secondary. Nobody publishes a running count. We wrote the longer version of this today.

Saturday, September 26 — the AL West went to the last two games with neither team above .500 and could not get there. Houston and Texas both entered Saturday 79-81 after the Athletics beat the Astros 6-5 and the Twins beat the Rangers 10-2 on Friday, Jacob deGrom matching a career high with eight earned runs allowed. Neither club's game had finished when this filed. Judgment: the arithmetic is already locked regardless of who wins — 81-81 is the ceiling, so this division will be won by a team that did not have a winning season. We are not going to join the pile-on about it. A 162-game schedule that produces a .500 division champion has told you something about the division, not about the format.

Friday, September 25 — a major bank said "prediction markets" out loud. Morgan Stanley will be a strategic partner at the NEXTPredict summit in New York on October 22 and 23, with Stephen Grambling, its head of US gaming, lodging and leisure research, leading a panel on institutional capital. Judgment: it is a panel, not a trading desk, and it was announced the day the Sixth Circuit told Ohio and Tennessee they may apply their gambling laws to sports event contracts. Both things happened this week. Only one of them changes what a compliance officer can approve.

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What we are not running, and why

The evening half of the college football slate. Oregon–USC, LSU–Texas A&M and Missouri–Mississippi State had not kicked off, or had not finished, when this column filed. We do not preview and we do not write about games in progress. They will be in Sunday's edition with final scores attached.

Tonight's UFC card. Fight Night: Rosas Jr. vs Barcelos had prelims at 5 p.m. Eastern and a main card at 8. The main event had not happened. Neither had most of the card.

Any MLB result from Saturday. Five games were unfinished and Houston's had not started when we filed. An earlier pass at a live scoreboard returned two results that contradicted a later pass at the same page — one had Cleveland losing 2-0, the next had Cleveland leading 4-3 in the second inning. Live scoreboards are not sources. We used Friday's completed games and the standings they produced, and nothing else.

A page about "the rise of viral memes" from the Packers' loss to Atlanta. It surfaced with today's date on a domain built for search traffic. It contains no reporting, no named account, no quoted post and no link to anything. It is a description of the idea that people make jokes on the internet. There is no item here.

Sportico's analysis of the Sixth Circuit ruling. Its URL redirects to a host our fetcher cannot resolve, so we could not read it. We did not paraphrase a piece we have not opened. The same goes for Justia's copy of the opinion, which returns 403 to us — though its URL was useful for one thing, which is that it dates the decision to September 25, and the opinion itself confirms it.

The Block's account of the panel's reasoning. Our link checker gets a 403 on it, so we would not have been able to cite it even though a fetch succeeded. Everything we have published about what Judge Gibbons wrote now comes from the published opinion, which we downloaded and read: Nos. 26-3196/5235, argued July 30, decided and filed September 25, Clay and Bloomekatz joining.

The PGA Tour's own Saturday recap, on two specific matches. Its summary of the morning four-ball had two matches halved. Two halves plus two American wins does not add to the 2½-1½ session score the same article reports. We went to Yahoo's match-by-match file, which is internally consistent — one halve, one International win, two American wins — and used that. A first-party source can still be wrong, and the tell was that the arithmetic did not close.

Kalshi's "$40 billion valuation." It is circulating this week and we could not tie it to a named transaction, a lead investor or a filing. We used it only as the top of a range, attributed, alongside the $22 billion May round and PitchBook's $30.4 billion base case. A number with no counterparty is not a valuation, it is a rumour with a decimal point.