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While prognosticators have been wondering who the next school to make an Indiana-type leap into the big leagues could be, with some already crowning UCLA as the likeliest successor, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons have been quietly developing into something of a budding juggernaut. Those are big words for an ACC program that put up back-to-back 4-8 seasons in 2023 and '24, but I don't think they're totally inaccurate. In Jake Dickert's first year at the helm of Wake Forest, they went 9-4 with a Mayo Bowl win over Mississippi State. In his second year, they are currently 9-1, with their only loss coming against championship favorite Miami. While they have not exactly gone against a gauntlet, they have dominated in most of their games, particularly in the last six weeks, outscoring their opponents 313-38. This casualty list added SMU on Saturday when the Demon Deacons crushed the Mustangs 49-7, with 42 points scored in the first half. It was a spanking! Quarterback Gio Lopez accounted for 201 yards and a TD in the air, plus 34 yards and two more TDs on the ground, while the running backs added another 252 yards and 4 TDs. SMU, which is a good team with a solid record, could do absolutely nothing against these guys. They committed three turnovers and were not able to score until garbage time in the fourth quarter.

The NHL unveiled a whole roster of alternate jerseys for this season, and the Tampa Bay Lightning's features a big skull, which you can see at center ice in the above screenshot. At first, I wondered if it was just some synergy with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but I have since learned that it's a tribute to the city's annual Gasparilla Season, which is headlined by a pirate parade with a fraught racial past. But does that center ice logo look kind of uncanny to you? Maybe a little too smooth or artificial? Honestly, does it even look like ice at all? Watch the players skate over it, and see for yourself. https://youtu.be/qnRrDN5X6Sw?si=9kRmnHllEIwtvcXm&t=231

The Texas Longhorns triumphed in an exciting, last-second 22-21 victory over the LSU Tigers on Saturday, thanks to a heroic effort by QB Arch Manning and some typical breaking down of the LSU defense. But if you did not watch the contest in full, do not let the thrilling end fool you: This was some of the year's dumbest football, authored by two of our dumbest college football programs. Let's start with the six interceptions total in this game: three for each, which is nice and neat. At first, it was LSU's Sam Leavitt throwing most of the picks, two in the first half, which makes it particularly strange that LSU was leading for the majority of this game. They were helped by the fact that Manning tossed two picks in the second half, to add to one he threw in the second quarter, and as a result the game was the Tigers' for the taking—21-10 late in the third, and still 21-16 when they punted with only 2:19 to go. But if nothing else, Manning has shown an ability to get better when his back is against the wall. And if you're going to beat Texas, you have to stomp them out completely. Despite Manning's overall pedestrian performance, 174 yards on 19-of-35 passes, his night climaxed with the crucial touchdown. In the game's final two minutes, Manning led a 12-play, 58-yard drive down the field, culminating in a seven-yard run on third down at LSU's 11-yard-line and then a four-yard TD pass to RB Raleek Brown for the go-ahead score. Cue the Texas sideline going absolutely, understandably nuts.

On Friday, a nationwide ground stop lasting over four hours led to thousands of flight cancellations and delays from coast to coast. As a result, we're getting some Sunday afternoon college football, with No. 19 Ole Miss playing Oklahoma in Norman because they couldn't arrive on their previous schedule. Per Ole Miss, who was flying out of Tupelo about 50 miles from their campus in Oxford, the ground stop began just a few minutes before the team buses were scheduled to leave for the airport, at 4 p.m. Once they learned that the stop would last for hours, the players were allowed to go, and they were called for a team meeting at 8 p.m., just a little before stop was lifted. Still, it was apparently too late for them to salvage their journey that night, and the SEC ultimately pushed the game back a day as a result. "At that hour, due to the time required to rescreen the party and travel to the Tupelo airport, the crew's duty time would have expired prior to departure," the Ole Miss statement said. "There were no other flight options at that point, and we determined it was too late to put our student-athletes on a bus trip of eight or more hours. In addition, the flight crew's duty time restrictions prevented us from being able to fly out until Saturday afternoon at the earliest."

After an extended denouement to a doomed tenure, Manchester United finally set manager Michael Carrick loose on Thursday, hoping to put an end to the club's worst league start in 40 years. On Friday, the next era for England's most famous club began, sort of, as United announced that Mauricio Pochettino would be leaving the U.S. men's national team on Nov. 18 in order to become the new boss at Old Trafford. Carrick's departure is no surprise, but Pochettino's arrival counts as a bit of a shock. Pochettino had famously come to international prominence first at Southampton and then in his five-season-plus stint at Tottenham Hotspur, which saw that club's evolution from an also-ran into, well, an also-ran that could actually fight with the big boys. Eventually, his tenure there grew stale and the lack of trophies forced a move, with Tottenham firing him in November of 2019. The Argentine then took a year off before signing on to succeed Thomas Tuchel at Paris Saint-Germain in early 2021; his first half-season there wasn't great, as he oversaw the only PSG squad to not win the Ligue 1 title this decade. He did go on to win the league in his first full season, but PSG let him go in the summer of 2022 anyway. A return to the Premier League with Chelsea followed in 2023, where he finished in sixth place in his only season at Stamford Bridge. That brings us to September 2024, when Pochettino became manager of the USMNT ahead of the 2026 World Cup cycle. His appointment was a big deal, as he became the highest-paid and most accomplished manager in the country's history (Jurgen Klinsmann will quibble with the latter assessment, but whatever) in advance of a home(-ish) World Cup. Pochettino had a rocky start there, but eventually righted the ship enough to guide the USMNT to a Group D first-place finish and a Round of 32 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. An embarrassing loss to Belgium in the Round of 16 put a bit of a damper on the run, but overall, Pochettino did what he was hired to do: help the USMNT perform at the World Cup.

Welcome to The Friday Chart, in which Defector contributor Harry Krinsky attempts to turn whatever’s been going on in his head lately into a chart.

Before the NWSL playoffs started, I predicted, like many, that San Diego would go all the way. The second-seeded Wave were so solid, so well-balanced, and with a possession-based style that steamrolled team after team. Making it past the faltering, Mina Tanaka–less Utah Royals in the quarterfinals didn't feel anything close to a question. Where San Diego had earned 25 points in the final 10 matches of the regular season, Utah earned just 11. I've never been so happy to be wrong. In delivering a 1-0 upset in San Diego last Friday, Utah provided a postseason performance that left me, a neutral, pumping with joyful adrenaline.  As expected, San Diego dominated in nearly every way: shots, possession, touches in the final third. But the only stat that matters is goals scored, and Utah goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn had something to say about this. 

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Lots of things got chucked in the bin last week: Miami's unbeaten season and Mario Cristobal's muffled rage, Ryan Day's offseason peace of mind, Lane Kiffin's shiny glow in Baton Rouge, the Heisman Trophy projections (now it's Oklahoma State quarterback Drew Mestemaker and Boise State running back Dylan Riley as the favorites, right?), Nebraska's budget for the next seven years if it fires Matt Rhule and has to pay him $63 million to turn in his sideline credential—in all, it's just getting thicker at this end of the trough. As a result, Georgia is the new badass in residence after stomping Ole Miss, 42-7, and UCLA and Utah are last unbeaten teams in FBS. Texas is back—what, for the third time now?—and there are still five Big Ten coaches who haven't gotten the memo to rip ESPN for jerry-rigging the committee rankings to satisfy their SEC overlords. Remember, children: A conspiracy doesn't have to be proven to be advanced—it only has to sound evil to be convincing—and college football's various hierarchies have been doing Satan's bidding since 1869. But never mind all that; you're already bought in, so enjoy hell. For now, let's dance that ska.

The suspended rabona, the showy drag with the left foot, the ricochet off the defender, the bobble of instinctive control on the byline with the right, then back onto the left for a quick push with the outstep into the goalmouth, where a teammate applies the finishing touch. https://bsky.app/profile/cbssportsgolazo-m.bsky.social/post/3mydcrsneyu3h Even a few weeks later, the rabona-croqueta that Lamine Yamal improvised in Barcelona’s recent Champions League win over Galatasaray astonishes with its ingenuity. Did he intend the move to come off exactly as it did? We don’t know. Does it matter? It does not. 

It's just like they told you it would happen in D.A.R.E.: You have been miraculously, tragically transported 2,800 years back in time, in the land that is now the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia. The site will be eventually called Tunnug 1 by the archaeologists who excavate it in 2017. But that is the future, and this is the present, meaning 800 B.C. You have come to sit with the Scythians, nomads who roamed the Eurasian steppes on horseback. You have even glimpsed their warrior-king, whose long and stately braids make him seem like a pretty cool guy. Also, he's smoking. Suddenly the warrior-king glimpses you back, his reddish eyes glinting in the firelight. He leans over to you, whispers something inscrutable in an Eastern Iranic language, and extends in his grizzled hands an ancient joint, leaving you with only one question: Would you smoke that shit? There are, to be certain, pros and cons. But one thing is clear, per a paper published recently in the journal Science: The Scythians were definitely using cannabis to get high. The analysis, led by Fabio-haired University of Bern archaeologist Gino Caspari, represents the earliest definitive evidence of humans consuming marijuana as a psychoactive drug, which was previously only traced back 2,500 years ago where Sogdian mourners once lit up in the ancient Jirzankal Cemetery in what is now western China. It's only fitting that marijuana hails from one of the highest places in the world: the eastern Tibetan Plateau, also known as the Roof of the World. The plant evolved around 28 million years ago, and as early as 4,000 years ago Chinese farmers cultivated the plant for rope, clothing, and paper, per Science. But it is harder to tell when in the archaeological record ancient people first became gone off that loud. Wild weed, the ancestors of the domesticated kind, has only a little tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the plant's intoxicating compound. Some researchers confirmed this when they tried to smoke wild weed and felt nothing, also per Science. (It is unclear if these particular researchers are also the paper's authors, who described cannabis as an "illicit" substance.)