The Sweep — Saturday, September 12

Saturday, September 12 — Oklahoma State had lost 21 games in a row and beat the sixth-best team in America.

Not covered. Won. 39-31, in Stillwater, over an Oregon side that closed as a 23.5-point favourite — 24.5 at DraftKings, where the Cowboys were 11-1 to win outright. Oklahoma State went 1-11 last season and lost 24-10 at Tulsa seven days ago. Per the NCAA, no FBS team carrying a losing streak of ten or more had ever beaten an AP top-ten opponent before Saturday afternoon.

Drew Mestemaker threw for 317 and ran for 109. Eric Morris, in his first year, got his first win, and described his roster better than any of us could: they "had to listen to how bad they were after hearing how good they were for such a long time." Dan Lanning, to his credit, skipped the excuses entirely — "We got our (butts) kicked in a lot of areas."

The judgment: this is the one result this season that nobody can claim they saw. Save your screenshots accordingly.

Saturday, September 12 — Elena Rybakina took the ranking, and then took the trophy, which is the harder order.

Rybakina beat Aryna Sabalenka 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 for the US Open, denying the two-time defending champion a three-peat. She had already become world No. 1 days earlier — a fact that, on its own, means less than people pretend, because rankings are arithmetic performed on the previous fifty-two weeks.

Winning the final is not arithmetic. Sabalenka took the second set and made it a real match; Rybakina won six of the last eight games. She now has three majors and needs Roland-Garros for the career Grand Slam.

Saturday, September 12 — Michigan won a football game without throwing a touchdown pass, and nobody is quite sure what to do about it.

17-10 over No. 11 Oklahoma, as an unranked home underdog getting 5.5. Bryce Underwood completed nine passes for 111 yards and carried the ball eighteen times himself. Michigan held the ball for 33 minutes and turned it over zero times. Oklahoma, a week removed from beating UTEP 51-0, went 3-of-13 on third down.

Two top-12 teams lost to unranked opponents on the same afternoon. That has been a while.

Friday, September 11 — Junior Caminero hit the 40th home run of his season and sent the Rays to October.

Two-run shot in the ninth, 3-1 over Houston, first team in baseball to clinch. He is 23, and he is the second player ever to put together multiple 40-homer seasons before turning 23. The first was Eddie Mathews.

Atlanta had denied them the same clinch on Thursday behind seven scoreless from Martín Pérez, which is the kind of detail that will be gone from the record in a week and was very funny for about twenty-four hours.

Friday, September 11 — Kawhi Leonard was fined $700,000 and not suspended, and the trade is back on.

Reported soberly, because this one is not a joke. The NBA's discipline following its investigation into the Clippers landed on the organisation: first-round picks forfeited every year from 2029 through 2033, one-year suspensions for governor Steve Ballmer and business operations president Gillian Zucker, six months for basketball operations president Lawrence Frank. Leonard took a $700,000 fine and no suspension, which cleared the way for Toronto — reported as "eager" — to complete the trade the two clubs had already agreed.

The part that is not resolved: as we reported yesterday, the Eastern District of New York has an open criminal file. A league fine is not a prosecutor's decision, and nobody should read Friday as the end of anything.

Thursday, September 10 — a state gaming regulator subpoenaed ESPN.

Connecticut issued nine cease-and-desist orders to prediction-market platforms and, alongside them, nearly thirty subpoenas — to Apple's App Store, Google Play, Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Stripe, to payments and identity vendors including PayPal, Plaid and Socure, and to fifteen media companies. The list includes ESPN, Hearst Connecticut Media, the Hartford Courant, NBC Connecticut, WFSB, WTNH, iHeartMedia and Audacy.

The Department of Consumer Protection was careful to say the recipients "are not under investigation." We wrote the longer version of this today and will not relitigate it here, except to note the thing sports-media people should actually sit with: a gaming regulator has decided that who sells the advertising is a legitimate subject of a gambling investigation. Whatever you think of prediction markets, that is a new place for this fight to be.

Saturday, September 12 — Ryan Garcia and Conor Benn, nine fights, T-Mobile Arena.

Garcia defends the WBC welterweight title on Mexican Independence Day weekend, with Jai Opetaia against Noel Mikaelian underneath. It starts after this column publishes, so we are telling you it is happening and nothing else.

---

A correction

Yesterday's Sweep listed Canelo Álvarez vs Christian Mbilli as part of Saturday's combat-sports card. That was wrong. The fight was moved off September 12 specifically to clear the date for Garcia-Benn, and is now scheduled for late October in Riyadh as part of Riyadh Season. We should have caught it and did not. The error was ours, not a source's.

---

What we are not running, and why

"Ohio State beat Texas 14-7 on September 12." It did not, because the game had not started. Kickoff in Austin is 7:30 p.m. ET, after we publish. The 14-7 is the score from the two teams' meeting on August 30, 2025, and it came back to us this afternoon dressed as today's final. This is the fourth straight week an aggregator has handed us a result from a prior season with a current date stapled on.

The women's final score as "6-4, 7-5, 6-2." Several outlets published that. It cannot be right — women's finals are best-of-three, and that is three sets with two of them won by the loser. The WTA's own scorecard has it 6-4, 5-7, 6-2. When the arithmetic of a scoreline is impossible, the scoreline is wrong, and it takes ten seconds to check.

Messi's international retirement. Real, and not news. He announced it at the start of September; the letter itself was written on July 21, two days after Argentina lost the World Cup final 1-0 to Spain. It surfaced in our searches this week as a current item. It is eleven days old at minimum and the underlying decision is nearly two months old.

The US Open influencer clips. The ring-light video from Naomi Osaka's first-round match is now three weeks old. This is the fourth consecutive week it has recirculated and the third consecutive Sweep in which we have declined it. ESPN did real reporting on the USTA's creator credentialing; the clip is not that reporting, and passing one off as the other is how a column starts lying.

Mayweather-Pacquiao, "September in Las Vegas." Still no. The date moved from September 19 to September 25 and then the fight was postponed indefinitely. Anything promising you a September bout is running on a press release that died weeks ago.