Weekend Recap

One housekeeping note before diving in: this recap and this week’s numbers cover games played through Saturday. Three more Week 1 games are still ahead as of this writing, Washington State at Washington, Louisville against Ole Miss in Nashville, and Wisconsin against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field, all on Sunday, plus one more Monday night. Those results will show up in next week’s numbers rather than this week’s. Consider this the first 47 games of Week 1, not the whole picture.

Week 1 did what Week 1 is supposed to do so far. Across those 47 games and 2,389 combined points, it exposed who actually built something during the offseason and who is still running on reputation. Home teams won at an 80.9 percent clip, and only 10 of the 47 games, about one in five, were decided by a single score. Most weekends aren’t this lopsided this early.

Start in Baton Rouge, where Lane Kiffin’s LSU debut turned into the sport’s first real statement game. Sam Leavitt threw for 230 yards and ran for 113 more with two scores on the ground, and LSU’s defense held Clemson to one first down in the entire first half. The final was 51-10, LSU’s fourth straight opening-week win over a program that used to define the sport, and Clemson has now dropped four consecutive season openers without scoring more than 10 points in any of them. That’s not a slow start anymore. That’s a pattern.

The game carried an extra layer of theater. A Louisiana judge had granted an injunction clearing former Ole Miss players Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris to return to college football at LSU. The SEC didn’t just object. It sued. On Thursday, the conference filed suit against LSU, Kiffin, and university leadership in federal court in Alabama, accusing the program of running a “deliberate and coordinated campaign” to recruit players who’d already signed NFL contracts. Kiffin left both players off the roster for the opener anyway, unwilling to test the SEC’s patience before the legal fight plays out. He didn’t need them. LSU led 31-3 at halftime, and when ESPN’s Holly Rowe wrapped an interview with him at the break, Kiffin walked away, then turned back to a hot mic and said, “Imagine if we had pro players.” He’d also used the two-hour weather delay to his advantage, refusing to shorten Clemson’s stay in the visitors’ locker room. “That locker room sucks over there,” he said afterward, treating the discomfort as a legitimate part of the game plan.

Michigan needed a much stranger path to 1-0. Trailing Western Michigan 12-7 in the final seconds, Bryce Underwood’s first Hail Mary sailed out of the end zone with the clock reading zeroes. Officials reviewed it, put one second back on, and Underwood connected with Utah transfer JJ Buchanan on the second attempt to win it, 13-12. Western Michigan played the better game for nearly sixty minutes. The extra second is the part people will remember.

Oregon needed 378 yards and three touchdowns from Dante Moore, including a 62-yard go-ahead strike, to get past Boise State 34-27. The Ducks survived. Boise State looked like a team that could cause real problems for someone in the playoff picture later this year.

Everyone else with something to prove mostly proved it. Ohio State ran up 56 points on Ball State behind Julian Sayin and Jeremiah Smith. Texas put up 59 on Texas State, with Arch Manning throwing four touchdowns. Miami’s Darian Mensah threw for 401 yards and five scores in a 45-6 rout of Stanford. Georgia, Alabama, Penn State, Texas A&M and Iowa all posted comfortable wins that told you exactly what you expected to hear.

Not everyone got the easy version of Week 1. Auburn survived a Baylor two-point try at the goal line to win 17-16. Colorado beat Georgia Tech 14-13 on a blocked field goal as time expired Thursday. And Rutgers, reportedly paying $1.55 million to host a home opener, lost to UMass, a 29.5-point underdog that hadn’t won a game in sixteen tries.

Rankings Talk

Since this is the first issue where numbers show up alongside the writing, it’s worth explaining what you’re actually looking at.

Starting this season, The Precedent is tracking its own ranking system for college football, the Precedent College Football Ratings, built from a simple formula: a team’s win percentage multiplied by the win percentage of the teams it’s played. The idea is to reward teams for beating good opponents, not just for winning games against whoever happened to be on the schedule. A team that goes 3-0 against three good teams should rate differently than a team that goes 3-0 against three bad ones. That’s the whole premise, and over the course of a season it tends to separate the teams that are actually good from the teams that just look good on paper.

One thing worth being clear about up front: the score of the game doesn’t matter to this formula, only the result. The objective is to win, not to cover a point spread, so a team that wins by one point gets treated exactly the same as a team that wins by fifty. Blowouts don’t earn bonus credit and close calls don’t get penalized. Winning is winning.

Here’s the catch for week one specifically: the formula can’t do its job yet. Week 1 actually spans two separate weekends of games, so a handful of teams, Memphis and USC among them, have already played twice. But that’s still a small enough group that it doesn’t move the needle. Almost every team is sitting at either 1.0 times 0.0, if they won, or 0.0 times something, if they lost. Nobody has played a big enough slate yet for the math to tell anyone apart. That’s not a bug and it’s not the system failing on its debut. It just needs more games in the bank before it can carry real signal, and from that point on, this section is where the actual numbers get discussed.

For now, what we can talk about honestly is the raw win-loss record, and that tells its own story. The SEC went a perfect 9-0 in Week 1’s first 47 games. The Big Ten went 12-1. Every other conference finished with a losing or middling record, and the newly reconstituted eight-team Pac-12, the one that added Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Utah State and Texas State, opened its first season together at a rough 1-4.

The preseason poll held up better than the weekend’s chaos would suggest. Not a single team in the preseason AP Top 25 has lost yet, and USC is the only ranked team already sitting at 2-0. The bigger story is what happened just outside the rankings. Ten teams that received preseason votes without cracking the Top 25 have already played, and nine of them lost. Clemson picked up 112 votes and is 0-1. Boise State (43 votes), TCU (11), Oklahoma State (8), Georgia Tech (4), California (2), Liberty (1), Tulane (1), and Western Michigan (1) all opened 0-1 as well. UNLV (4 votes) is the only one of the bunch that’s even 1-1. That’s about as clean a gap between “ranked” and “almost ranked” as you’ll see all year.

The Rankings

Conference standings by raw record (FBS games only), Week 1

• SEC: 9-0 (1.000)

• Big Ten: 12-1 (0.923)

• ACC: 8-6 (0.571)

• Big 12: 4-3 (0.571)

• American: 4-5 (0.444)

• Mountain West: 5-7 (0.417)

• Sun Belt: 2-4 (0.333)

• Pac-12: 1-4 (0.200)

• Mid-American: 2-10 (0.167)

• Conference USA: 0-7 (0.000)

Team ratings will show up here once there’s enough separation in the data to say something meaningful. With 51 of 138 teams still waiting on their opener, that’s likely another week or two out.

Loose Ends

• Indiana’s Josh Hoover played through a bloody face and still threw four touchdowns in the defending champs’ opener.

• Hawaii is the only team in the country sitting at 0-2. Everyone else who’s lost has only played once.

• Memphis and USC are the only two teams at 2-0.

• Florida scored more points than anyone in Week 1, putting up 66. Mississippi State (62), Texas (59) and Pittsburgh (59) followed.

• Three FCS teams beat FBS opponents: The Citadel over Charlotte in triple overtime, Tarleton State at Bowling Green, and Idaho State at Utah State.

• The scoreboard took a beating elsewhere too. Louisiana Tech hung 80 on Northwestern State, Virginia Tech put up 73 on VMI, and Kansas State beat Nicholls 71-3.

• Arkansas’ mascot Tusk VII sat out a heat-advisory opener, and a game elsewhere ended in a tie when a 108-degree heat index made overtime untenable.

• FBS newcomer North Dakota State opened 1-0. Fellow newcomer Sacramento State opened 0-1.

Looking Ahead

Ohio State and Texas both did exactly what they were supposed to do against overmatched openers, which sets up the first real test of the season. The two meet next Saturday in Austin, and it’s the first game all year where nobody can hide behind a soft schedule. That’s where Weekend Precedent picks back up next week.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop

The offense wasn’t broken in 2025, but Chiefs fans might disagree. An offense that used to not sweat at all on 3rd-and-18 made fans nervous on 2nd-and-2. It ranked 11th in the league in overall efficiency, respectable by most standards, underwhelming by the standard Kansas City set for itself. The real trouble showed up in the specific moments that used to define this team. Third down, where the Chiefs had built a decade of reputation manufacturing conversions out of nothing, dropped to 22nd in the league. At one stretch early in the season they were converting barely a third of their third downs. The running game produced exactly one run over 20 yards from an actual running back all year. Nearly every other explosive rushing play came from Mahomes scrambling for his life, which is not something you want to lean on with a 30-year-old quarterback returning from a torn ACL.

The Diagnosis

Mahomes himself said that defenses had seen a lot of the plays Kansas City had leaned on for years, and the offense needed new answers. That’s not a decline story. The league always catches up. Coordinators had years of tape on Kansas City’s go-to concepts, and those concepts stopped working as often. Add an offensive line that cycled through 17 different combinations over the season, with the Week 1 starting five playing together for exactly two games after Week 6, and you get an offense leaning harder every week on one player to bail it out.

The injuries tell the story in specifics. Left tackle Josh Simmons needed wrist surgery and landed on injured reserve. Right tackle Jawaan Taylor missed time. Right guard Trey Smith went down late in the year. By Week 14, Kansas City was projected to start two backup tackles, Wanya Morris and Jaylon Moore, alongside a backup guard just to field a line. The pressure showed up before Mahomes ever got hurt. From Week 8 on, he was sacked at least three times in every single game, and on Thanksgiving against Dallas, that number hit four.

The numbers back up what Mahomes was describing. Early in the season, Kansas City actually ranked second in the league in rushing plays of 10 yards or more. That sounds like progress until you look at where those runs came from. Seven of the team’s nine explosive rushing plays came off Mahomes scrambles, not handoffs. The ground game wasn’t creating explosive plays. Mahomes was creating them himself, with his legs, on broken plays, which is a great highlight reel and a terrible long-term plan for a quarterback who’d just torn his ACL.

Brett Veach put it in blunt front-office terms this spring. He wanted the running game to be more explosive because a real ground threat takes pressure off everybody, especially a quarterback working his way back from a major injury. That’s the entire thesis of Kansas City’s 2026 offseason, stated by the man who built it.

The Fix

The headline move was signing running back Kenneth Walker III in March. A team that had relied on late-round draft picks and older running backs for several years was finally admitting they couldn’t do that any longer. An even more revealing decision came in where the resources went after that. Veach specifically singled out the interior offensive line trio of Kingsley Suamataia, Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith, saying the plan was to take advantage of those three to impose your will on an opposing defense. Impose your will is not the language of a team that built a dynasty on spacing and matchup problems. It’s the language of a team trying to become harder to solve, not just faster.

Eric Bieniemy’s return as offensive coordinator reads the same way. Bieniemy coached Kansas City’s running backs from 2013 through 2017 before ever calling plays, then ran the offense as coordinator from 2018 through 2022, helping the Chiefs win their first two Super Bowl titles of the Mahomes era. Bringing him back isn’t just a reunion. It’s a bet that the coach who built the running back room the first time around is the right person to rebuild it now, at exactly the moment the Chiefs need it most. Since coming back, his message has been almost stubbornly basic. Do the fundamentals right or nothing else matters, he said. That’s a push toward an offense that doesn’t need a magic trick on every third down just to move the chains.

They didn’t stop at one running back either. Fifth-round pick Emmett Johnson joined the room alongside Walker, Emari Demercado and Brashard Smith, which says Kansas City wanted real competition at a position that had neither depth nor juice last season, and perhaps a nod to the fact that Walker shared carries in Seattle prior to Zach Charbonnet getting injured in the playoffs.

Johnson wasn’t the only rookie brought in to fill a specific gap. Kansas City used its first two picks after Delane on defense, taking defensive tackle Peter Woods and edge rusher R Mason Thomas, then circled back for cornerback Jadon Canady in the fourth round and wide receiver Cyrus Allen in the fifth. Even the sixth-round pick, quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, reads less like a lottery ticket and more like organizational patience, developmental depth behind Mahomes rather than a threat to his job. Look at the class as a whole and a pattern emerges. Kansas City didn’t spend this draft chasing one big fix. It spent the class reinforcing almost every position tied to the thesis: protect Mahomes, support the run game, and make the defense finish what it starts.

The Other Half

The Chiefs acknowledged that the run game wasn’t the entire problem. Kansas City’s defense generated pressure on more than half its third-and-long snaps last season and turned almost none of it into sacks, finishing with the seventh-fewest sacks in the league while allowing opponents to convert 44 percent of their third downs. A defense that creates pressure but can’t finish plays puts the offense right back where it started, needing to be perfect. So the Chiefs spent real capital there too. Defensive tackle Peter Woods and edge rusher R Mason Thomas came off the board with their first two picks after cornerback Mansoor Delane, and run-stopping tackle Khyiris Tonga arrived in free agency. They also brought back cornerback L’Jarius Sneed, a two-time champion in Kansas City who already knows what Steve Spagnuolo wants from his defensive backs.

The Chiefs are betting on the problem having been the talent, not the coaching schemes. Spagnuolo is still calling the same aggressive, pressure-first defense he’s always called. What changed is the talent underneath it, built specifically to finish what the pressure package starts.

Put the two halves together and the picture sharpens. Kansas City isn’t trying to make Mahomes less important. They’re trying to make him less necessary on every single snap, so the next time the league takes something away, as it just did, there’s enough around him to absorb it instead of asking him to make up the difference by himself.

The Deeper Dive

Teams that consistently win eventually run into the same issues. The league adjusts, the quarterback ages another year, and whatever edge used to separate them from everyone else gets thinner. Every dynasty comes to an end. What the front office builds around the quarterback determines how long the window stays open.

The 1990s Cowboys are worth revisiting here, though not for the reason people usually bring them up. Troy Aikman never had to become a different quarterback to win three Super Bowls in four seasons. He wasn’t the reason for all of their success the way Mahomes and the other all-time greats have been in their runs. Emmitt Smith won four rushing titles in that stretch, Michael Irvin gave Aikman a real outside threat, and the offensive line in front of them was arguably the best of its era. When Jimmy Johnson left after the 1993 season and Barry Switzer took over, the formula didn’t change. Dallas kept feeding Smith, kept protecting Aikman, and kept reinvesting in the trenches, drafting guard Larry Allen in 1994 to reinforce a line that was already the engine of the whole operation.

The defense is where Dallas made its most telling move. After losing the 1994 NFC Championship to San Francisco, the Cowboys signed Deion Sanders that September, adding a true difference-maker to a unit that already had Charles Haley and Darren Woodson. Aikman didn’t need to throw for 4,500 yards to win the 1995 Super Bowl. He needed a complete enough team around him that he didn’t have to.

San Francisco’s response to that same Dallas problem tells the flip side. After back-to-back conference championship losses to the Cowboys, the 49ers didn’t ask Steve Young to simply outduel Aikman. They rebuilt the defense that had been the actual gap, adding six new starters in 1994 alone, Sanders among them a year before he landed in Dallas, plus linebacker Ken Norton Jr. San Francisco went 13-3, Young won MVP, and the 49ers finally got past Dallas in the title game before winning the Super Bowl.

Both franchises landed on the same answer from different directions. An elite quarterback buys a lot, but not forever, and not alone. The help usually shows up in the trenches and on defense, not in asking the quarterback to be more spectacular than he already is. Kansas City’s 2026 approach, an interior line built to impose its will and a defensive front retooled to finish what it starts, reads like a team that studied the same history we just did.

For the Curious

If you want the fuller, rougher version of how that Cowboys roster actually came together, Jeff Pearlman’s Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty is worth your time. It’s a candid, sometimes uncomfortable look at what that locker room was really like off the field, and it doesn’t clean up the parts of the story that don’t reflect well on the people involved. Worth knowing going in if you’d rather keep this one strictly about football.

Worth Watching

Keep an eye on Kansas City’s first five regular season games. That stretch should answer the real question hanging over this offseason: is the offensive output we’ve come to expect from this team back, or is something more structural going on that a new running back and a healthier line can’t fully fix.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop.

That’s the part of the Myles Garrett story that got lost in the noise of trade grades and highlight reels. Yes, the Browns sent a two-time Defensive Player of the Year to the Rams for Jared Verse and a stack of future draft picks. Yes, it reshapes both rosters for years. But buried in the fine print of Garrett’s contract was something that made this trade fundamentally different from almost every other blockbuster in NFL history: Garrett had to say yes first.

The Fine Print

Most NFL players have no say in where they get traded. Football contracts, unlike their baseball and basketball counterparts, are built around team control. No guaranteed money for the life of the deal, limited leverage once you’re under contract, and almost never a no-trade clause unless you’re a quarterback with enough gravity to demand one.

Garrett had one anyway. When Cleveland extended him for four years and $160 million, the deal included a no-trade clause, a rare enough provision on its own that he was reportedly the first defensive player in the league to carry one. Not a running back. Not a receiver. Not another edge rusher. The first.

That clause meant Cleveland couldn’t simply shop him to the highest bidder and call it done. Garrett had to waive it. And by the terms reported after the trade, he negotiated the same protection into his new deal with the Rams, so the leverage didn’t disappear once he changed teams. It traveled with him.

The Numbers

The money tells its own story about how this trade actually got built. Garrett’s 2026 compensation included a $1.3 million base salary alongside a $29.2 million option bonus, plus workout and per-game roster bonuses worth another two million combined. Here’s the part that matters strategically: in late March, Garrett and the Browns jointly agreed to modify the contract language, pushing the deadline to exercise that option bonus from March 25, the 15th day of the league year, back to seven days before the regular season. One report at the time called the move bizarre, since on its face it simply deferred Garrett’s own payment. But it wasn’t one-sided. The Browns also moved $8 million of his later base salary into earlier roster bonuses, a change that worked in his favor. Cleveland framed the whole thing publicly as a routine cap adjustment and insisted no trade was coming. Adam Schefter reported the team was “100 percent not trading” him, just over two months before they did exactly that.

Whatever the public explanation, the effect was clear. The restructure meant that when the trade actually happened, the Browns hadn’t yet paid out the $29.2 million option bonus, which gave the front office room to maneuver. It’s part of why Cleveland could structure the deal the way it did, spreading Garrett’s dead money across two seasons instead of absorbing it all at once. The final breakdown came to roughly $15.5 million in 2026 and another $25.5 million in 2027, a total of about $41 million in cap charges for a player no longer on the roster.

That two-year split happens automatically for any trade completed on or after June 1, no special paperwork required. It’s a different mechanism than the formal “post-June 1 designation” teams use for releases, which is capped at two players a year and lets a team cut someone early while still getting treated as if the move happened after the deadline. Trades don’t have that cap or that formal process. They just need to actually close on or after June 1 to get the same cap treatment. Garrett’s deal was finalized on June 1 itself, right at the edge of that window, which is almost certainly why the option bonus deadline got pushed back in the first place. It gave Cleveland room to wait for the calendar to cooperate rather than forcing a trade earlier and absorbing the full $69 million hit in a single year.

Cleveland didn’t invent this trick. Philadelphia has been doing it for years, timing option bonuses late in the calendar specifically to keep every roster decision open as long as possible, and the approach has spread to San Francisco, Buffalo, and Baltimore. This same offseason, the Eagles used the identical logic with receiver A.J. Brown, saving roughly $20 million in dead money by waiting on a trade until after June 1. New Orleans did something similar with Alvin Kamara, restructuring his deal purely to preserve the option of moving him later. What looks like a one-off maneuver in Garrett’s case is really a front office adopting a strategy that’s becoming standard practice across the league. Contracts increasingly aren’t just about what a player gets paid. They’re about keeping every future option open for as long as possible.

A Familiar Trade, Missing One Thing

Dallas ran this play before, thirty-seven years earlier, though nobody called it that at the time. In October 1989, the Cowboys traded running back Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for a package of players and draft picks. On paper it looked like a bad deal. The Dallas media said so loudly, and the Vikings themselves believed they’d won. But Jimmy Johnson had done his homework. The picks acquired in that trade eventually became Emmitt Smith, Darren Woodson, and much of the core that carried the Cowboys to three Super Bowls in the nineties.

The underlying math is nearly identical to Cleveland’s. Give up a great player now, in exchange for draft capital that might build something bigger later. Garrett’s return, Verse and three future picks, is a smaller version of the same bet Johnson made in 1989.

What’s different is who got a say. Walker had none. Johnson shopped him around and made the call unilaterally, and Walker learned where he was headed along with everyone else. He didn’t have the standing to object even if he’d wanted to. Players in 1989 were still years away from the kind of true free agency baseball and basketball players already had, and the reserve-style control teams held over careers made a scenario like Garrett’s almost unthinkable. A star could be moved the way a stock gets traded, without so much as a phone call first.

Garrett had to sign off before any of it happened. Cleveland couldn’t simply take the best offer on the table; the front office needed his blessing on the destination, which turned this trade into a three-way negotiation instead of two front offices working it out alone. That shift didn’t happen overnight. It’s the product of decades of labor fights, salary cap evolution, and a handful of stars over the years who were willing to burn bridges to win a bit more control over their own careers.

Thirty-seven years separates a franchise moving its best player without asking from a franchise having to ask. That gap says something about how far player leverage has traveled since 1989. Not evenly, and not for everyone. Most players still operate closer to Walker’s position than Garrett’s. But it has moved.

Two Exits

What’s most interesting about how Garrett got here is how quiet it was. No trade demand. No public ultimatum. No cryptic social media posts building toward a standoff.

Instead, Garrett simply didn’t show up. NFL rules make offseason workouts and minicamp voluntary, so his absence wasn’t a violation of anything. It was a signal. Browns coach Todd Monken acknowledged the two of them had exchanged texts but had never actually met face to face, months into Monken’s tenure as head coach. Whatever conversations happened between Garrett and the front office stayed private, which is itself unusual for a star of his stature.

Compare that to another star edge rusher barely a year earlier. In August 2025, Micah Parsons forced his way out of Dallas after a contract standoff with Jerry Jones dragged from the offseason through training camp, complete with daily attendance updates and a public trade request. Parsons had called himself “a Cowboy for life” in 2024. A year later he was calling the split a divorce, and by the time Green Bay finally landed him a week before the season opener, the saga had played out in headlines for months. He got his trade, and a contract that made him the highest-paid non-quarterback in the league at the time. But he had to fight publicly, and repeatedly, to get it.

Garrett landed in almost the same place, an elite pass rusher moved to a contender, without any of that theater. The no-trade clause did the work that public pressure did for Parsons. Withholding consent turned out to be just as effective as forcing a standoff in the media, and considerably quieter about it.

Which raises the real question at the center of this story: not why Cleveland moved on from Myles Garrett, but why so few players outside the quarterback position ever get the chance to make that choice for themselves.

The Deeper Dive

No-trade clauses are common enough in baseball and basketball that fans barely notice them. Full no-trade protection shows up regularly in MLB deals for franchise veterans, and NBA supermax contracts often include the same language as a matter of course. Football has always been the outlier, and the reason comes down to how differently the sport treats guaranteed money.

In the NBA and MLB, long-term deals are typically guaranteed for their full length, so a no-trade clause is really just an extra layer of control stacked on top of security the player already has. In the NFL, guarantees are far more limited and structured around timing, not the life of the contract. That gives teams enormous leverage over a player’s career even without a trade involved, since a club can simply release a player once his guaranteed money runs out. Adding a no-trade clause on top of that removes one of the last tools a front office has to manage an aging or underperforming asset, which is exactly why teams almost never offer it unless a player has enough standing to demand it.

A handful of non-quarterbacks have carried the protection over the years. DeAndre Hopkins negotiated one during his run as arguably the league’s best receiver. Tight end Jimmy Graham had one with the Bears, offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif picked one up as part of a contract restructure with the Chiefs, and Hall of Fame receiver Larry Fitzgerald held one for years in Arizona as the face of that franchise. Defensive players are rarer still. Houston’s Will Anderson Jr. picked one up this year and was reported as only the second defensive player in the league to have that protection. Garrett was the first.

It’s worth remembering that Garrett didn’t get this clause by staging a holdout or forcing a confrontation. He earned it the conventional way, through sustained, historic production over nearly a decade, until the Browns felt they had no real alternative but to grant it if they wanted to keep him at all. The leverage was built quietly, one dominant season at a time, long before anyone in Cleveland had to decide whether to actually use it.

That’s the pattern worth watching going forward. As rosters get more expensive and front offices get more sophisticated about roster-building, the question isn’t whether more non-quarterbacks will start asking for this kind of protection. It’s which ones will have accumulated enough value, and enough patience, to actually get it.

For the Curious

The Curious Case of Curt Flood (HBO, 2011) tells the story of the Cardinals outfielder who sued Major League Baseball in 1969 rather than accept a trade he didn’t want, challenging the reserve clause that bound players to teams indefinitely. Flood lost his case at the Supreme Court and it cost him much of his career, but the fight helped pave the way for the free agency system players operate under today, Garrett included. Worth knowing going in: the documentary also covers the racism Flood faced as a black player during the civil rights era, and doesn’t shy away from the toll the fight took on his life personally. Heavier than a typical recommendation, but it’s the clearest historical throughline to a story about a player controlling his own destination.

Worth Watching

Keep an eye on Baltimore this preseason. After nearly two decades under John Harbaugh, the Ravens are running training camp under a new head coach for the first time in a generation, and how Lamar Jackson responds to a completely different coaching voice could shape the entire AFC picture by September.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop.

Not because Sanders was right, necessarily, but because the question underneath what he did stopped being optional for anyone else. Rosters can turn over almost completely in a single offseason now. The money that would stop that from happening is capped, sometimes hard, sometimes softer than it looks. So every program in the country is stuck answering some version of the same question every year: keep what you’ve got, or go get something new?

The Evidence

Basketball is a good place to see that decision play out, mostly because the shift there is almost hard to believe if you haven’t been paying close attention. Last season, for the first time since anyone started counting, less than half of all Division I minutes went to guys who’d been on the roster the year before. Six high-major programs didn’t return a single minute: not “not much,” zero, a team that existed in November that had, in any meaningful sense, nothing to do with the team from the March before.

Here’s the twist, and it’s a real one. None of this seems to be working, at least not the way people assumed it would.

Kentucky is the best evidence, and it spans two different eras, which makes it more convincing rather than less. Go back to 2020-21, years before any of this NIL money existed. John Calipari had the No. 1 recruiting class in the country, by consensus, no argument. Kentucky went 9-16, missed the tournament entirely, the worst season the program had had in over a hundred years. Then, in 2024: different roster, same shape of problem. Reed Sheppard, Rob Dillingham, a loaded freshman class again, and Kentucky lost in the first round to 14-seed Oakland. Two different money environments, same result. A pile of talented new pieces isn’t a team just because you called it one.

Kansas is the flip side of that coin, and it’s arguably a cleaner story. Bill Self won the whole thing in 2022 with a roster that was mostly homegrown, patched with a few veteran transfers like Remy Martin who fit in around guys Self had coached for years. Since then, Kansas has gone deeper into the portal, and the results have gone the wrong direction: no trip past the second weekend since that title, a first-round-ish exit two years ago that hadn’t happened at Kansas in twenty years, big-name transfers like AJ Storr and Rylan Griffen who were productive elsewhere and then weren’t at Kansas. Self basically has the receipts sitting in his own program’s history, and the program hasn’t been listening to them lately.

It’s not just anecdotal, either. Teams that kept three-quarters or more of their minutes made the tournament twelve times out of fifteen tries over a recent four-year stretch, two of them reaching the title game. Teams that kept under sixteen percent made it six times out of twenty. And the 2025 Final Four made the point plainly: three of the four teams standing were continuity teams. Houston at 82 percent returning minutes. Florida at 70. Auburn just under. Turnover might be the fashion right now. It isn’t the thing that’s actually winning.

The Money

The build-or-buy decision doesn’t stop at basketball’s edge. It’s the same choice every athletic department is making across every sport it sponsors, because the money all comes from the same place. The House settlement caps what a school can pay athletes directly at something like twenty million a year, and that cap covers the whole department, not one sport in isolation. Football, basketball, baseball, track, it’s all drawn from the same pool, and someone has to decide how to divide it. Most schools send the largest share, something like fifteen million of the twenty, to football, leaving three million or so for basketball and whatever’s left for everything else. Different program, different bet, same underlying question the basketball examples above were already answering.

That scale gives the football portal its particular intensity. A veteran starting quarterback can pull three to five million dollars now. Offensive tackles and defensive ends who can actually play are getting seven figures without much of a fight. And because there’s no spring portal window anymore to patch a hole later in the year, the logic coaches use is blunt: pay for the guy now, or watch him leave and deal with the hole in August.

Some programs went out and bought a lot, but it’s worth asking why before drawing any conclusions from it. Oklahoma State brought in forty-nine transfers in one cycle, and West Virginia and Purdue weren’t far behind. All three had just been through the wringer: Oklahoma State went 3-9 the year before, and West Virginia and Purdue both made coaching changes tied to bad seasons of their own. None of them were choosing volume as some bold new philosophy. They were doing triage, using the portal to rebuild fast because the alternative was several years of losing while a new staff recruited high schoolers the slow way.

That’s a genuinely different situation than Georgia, Clemson, Notre Dame, and Texas A&M, who held onto their rosters at a rate well above the rest of the sport during that same stretch. Those programs weren’t rebuilding anything. They were already good, already in the playoff conversation, and had far less reason to blow anything up. So the real comparison isn’t retention versus volume as two equally available strategies. It’s closer to this: programs already near the top tend to protect what they have, and programs digging out of a hole use the portal as a shortcut, because it’s faster than waiting on high school recruits to develop. Whether that shortcut works long-term is still an open question nobody can answer yet, since most of these rebuilds are only a year or two old.

Baseball Already Did This

Here’s the thing that gets lost in all of this: none of it is actually new. Go back to December 1975. An arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled that two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, could sign wherever they wanted after playing a season without a contract. Baseball had run for nearly a century on a reserve clause that basically owned a player for life. One ruling, and that was over.

Front offices panicked, more or less, in both directions. Some teams threw money at any recognizable name, treating free agency like a shortcut around the slow work of actually developing players. Others froze, scared of long contracts for guys they hadn’t grown themselves, and watched talent walk right past them instead. It took most of a decade to land somewhere sane in between: develop your own core, use the open market for specific gaps, don’t confuse activity with strategy. A few teams never fully made that turn even now, fifty years later. The Rays have carried one of the smallest payrolls in the sport for two straight decades, bottom five almost every year, and they’ve still made the playoffs regularly, almost entirely off drafting and developing rather than buying.

The NFL went through its own version once free agency arrived alongside a salary cap in the early nineties, just slower. Teams that grabbed every marquee free agent in those first few seasons often ended up bloated and stuck, no cap room left to fix a mistake once they’d made it. The franchises that stuck around drafted well, developed what they drafted, and used free agency the way you’d use a good spice rather than the whole meal.

College sports actually has something neither baseball nor football had back then: a preview. Every athletic director making these calls right now has fifty years of baseball history and thirty-some years of NFL cap history sitting there, fully documented, showing exactly what worked and what blew up in someone’s face. Some programs seem to be studying that. A lot of others are acting like nobody’s ever lived through this before, which, at this point, just isn’t true anymore.

The programs that crack this first won’t be the ones who spent the most money. They’ll be the ones who figured out, faster than the rest of the league, which guys were worth the patience, which spots were worth just going out and buying, and which situation, rebuilding or already-elite, they actually were in before picking a strategy built for someone else’s problem. Baseball eventually learned that, unevenly, some franchises more than others. Football learned a version of it too. College sports is out there learning it right now, in real time, in front of everybody.

The Deeper Dive

On paper, schools without a football program should have a real edge in basketball. They’re working under the same twenty million dollar cap as every other school, since that number applies flatly across Division I, not based on what any individual school brings in. But the cap only sets a ceiling. It doesn’t hand anyone the money to reach it, and that’s where the real limitation shows up. A school that never fielded football never built the television deals, ticket sales, and sponsorship money that come with one, so even with no football bill to pay, there’s often not enough revenue to get anywhere near the cap either.

Gonzaga is the clearest example. Its entire athletic department, every sport combined, brings in somewhere around $48 million a year. That’s the whole operation, not a spare pool sitting around for one sport. The school’s own athletic director has said flatly that Gonzaga won’t come close to the $20.5 million cap, and he’s declined to even estimate a basketball number, because there isn’t fifteen million dollars lying around to spend on it.

Big East schools tell a different story, and it’s the real version of the advantage people assume Gonzaga has. Without football’s costs but with a real revenue base behind them, mostly built through alumni giving and corporate sponsorship rather than television money, Big East programs are reportedly spending somewhere between five and seven million dollars on basketball, with total revenue-sharing figures at some schools estimated as high as seven to twelve million. That’s real money, genuinely more than the two to four million a typical football-first Power Four school can spare for basketball. It’s not the fifteen million dollar figure that got tossed around early on. Nobody is actually spending that. But it’s a meaningful gap, and it’s the clearest evidence that going without football can be a real basketball advantage, as long as the revenue is there to back it up.

For the Curious

John Helyar’s Lords of the Realm is still the best account out there of what the Messersmith-McNally ruling did to baseball’s ownership class, who fought free agency in court and in the papers for years before they finally caved. Fair warning: it reads like business history more than sports writing for long stretches, boardrooms and lawyers more than diamonds and dugouts. Helyar tells it from ownership’s side of the table mostly, so if you want the on-field version of that era, you’ll want something to pair with it.

Worth Watching

UCLA’s head basketball coach, Mick Cronin, keeps saying, publicly and often, that schools should be allowed to blow past the twenty million dollar cap specifically to keep their own guys, arguing that constant movement is bad for the athletes and worse for the sport. Whether that goes anywhere is genuinely worth tracking. If it does, a good chunk of this issue is out of date within a year.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop

The USMNT’s 2026 World Cup ended in Seattle on July 6, a 4-1 Round of 16 loss to Belgium. It was the fourth straight tournament in which the Americans went out at that same general stage, echoing the exit in Qatar four years earlier. Christian Pulisic, the team’s most accomplished attacker, suffered a bone bruise and microfracture in his lower right leg in the second half and was subbed off, ending his tournament. The U.S. did win a knockout match this time, its first since 2002, but that distinction comes with an asterisk: the 48-team format added an entirely new round, the round of 32, that didn’t exist in the previous 32-team bracket, so the “knockout win” came against a fuller and more diluted field than past tournaments required. The run still ended short of the quarterfinals on home soil, with every scheduling and travel advantage a host nation could ask for.

So look at how a soccer career actually begins in the countries that keep reaching the later rounds.

In France, the answer starts at a converted estate outside Paris called Clairefontaine, opened by the national federation in 1988. Every year, about 22 boys are plucked from the Paris region at age 13 and moved in, training all week and going home only on weekends. Nobody’s family pays for it. The French Football Federation, a nonprofit recognized by the French state as serving the public interest, covers it and also distributes more than 100 million euros a year to amateur clubs across the country, subsidizing everything from coaching to bus fare. Thierry Henry slept in those dorms. So did Nicolas Anelka and, more recently, Kylian Mbappé.

The Netherlands does it differently but arrives at a similar place. Ajax isn’t run by a federation at all. It’s a private company, traded on the Amsterdam stock exchange, and its academy runs on ticket revenue, sponsor money, and the transfer fees it collects when a bigger European club buys one of its graduates. Boys enter around age 8 and spend a decade absorbing one tactical philosophy, so that by the time a 17-year-old gets promoted to the first team, he already speaks the same footballing language as everyone around him. Frenkie de Jong and Matthijs de Ligt both came up this way.

Brazil and Argentina run looser, less formal versions of the same idea, but the economics land the same place. Clubs like Santos, Boca Juniors, and River Plate start watching children as young as 6, sign the best of them to youth contracts that cost nothing, and push the most talented into first-team minutes by 17 or 18. Messi left Rosario for Barcelona’s academy at 13. Neymar came up through Santos, the same club that produced Pelé a generation earlier.

Three different ways of paying for it, France’s public money, the Netherlands’ private club revenue, South America’s informal investment, all land in the same place: the family never pays, and a genuine prospect is playing real minutes as a teenager.

The American version looks nothing like this. U.S. Soccer is a nonprofit too, but unlike its French counterpart, it takes no government money at all. Youth development here runs almost entirely through private clubs that bill families directly, and at the level where scouts are actually watching, ECNL, MLS Next, that bill can run well into five figures a year once travel and private training get added in. Most players who do make it through that system spend four more years in college before turning pro, often not signing a professional contract until they’re 21 or 22.

Christian Pulisic is the exception everyone points to, and his path is worth a closer look, because it doesn’t actually match the European model either. He came up through PA Classics, a pay-to-play club near Hershey, Pennsylvania, joining around age 10. His father, Mark Pulisic, a former professional indoor soccer player, directed the PA Classics academy itself from 2000 to 2015 and coached Christian directly for much of that stretch. So Pulisic’s development ran through the same pay-to-play system every other American prospect uses, just with his own father running the program. He didn’t leave for a real academy environment, Borussia Dortmund’s, until he was 16, three years after Messi had already moved into La Masia. Pulisic isn’t proof the American system can produce a Messi. He’s closer to proof that a gifted kid whose father happened to run the local academy can outrun a mediocre system by a few years, not escape it entirely.

Now set soccer’s price tag next to the other sports Americans grow up playing, because the comparison isn’t as clean as it first looks. Youth hockey, by some measures, is the single most expensive sport in the country. Its elite AAA tier can run $10,000 to $25,000 a year, rivaling or beating elite club soccer. Elite AAU basketball gets expensive too, once travel and tournaments enter the picture, though it varies wildly by program. Football sits at the other end almost entirely because its top level, the one recruiters actually watch, is high school football, and high school football is free. Basketball lives somewhere in the middle: high school still matters, but AAU has become close to mandatory for real exposure, and AAU isn’t free either.

Soccer, in other words, has more in common with hockey than with football on the cost question. Both sports funnel serious development through private clubs that bill families directly, and in both, the high school team isn’t where anyone with a scholarship or a pro contract in mind is spending their energy. Where the two sports really part ways is in who else is playing. Hockey’s serious international competition comes down to six countries, Canada, the U.S., Sweden, Finland, Czechia, Russia, drawing from broadly similar populations and resources. That’s a field the U.S. can and did win, beating Canada in overtime for Olympic gold in Milano-Cortina this year, its first hockey gold since 1980.

Soccer’s field isn’t six countries. FIFA counts 211 member federations, more than the United Nations has member states, and for most of them, soccer isn’t competing against three other major sports for the nation’s attention and talent. It’s the only game in town. Baseball splits the difference: its serious international field is maybe 15 to 20 countries, which is part of why the U.S. still produced about 74 percent of MLB’s Opening Day rosters this year even as Venezuela beat the Americans in the 2026 World Baseball Classic final, the second straight WBC final the U.S. has lost after winning the tournament outright in 2017.

There’s also a live, unsettled argument about whether America’s best all-around athletes even end up trying soccer in the first place. Some former U.S. national team players believe the money and visibility of football and basketball, Friday night lights, March Madness, the NIL paydays now available in college, pull the most gifted kids elsewhere before soccer gets a real look. Others push back hard on that idea, arguing that soccer rewards ball control and split-second decision-making in ways that don’t track with the size and speed that make someone a star in football or basketball, so the “our best athletes would dominate” theory doesn’t hold up under its own logic. Neither side has settled it.

What U.S. Soccer has actually done, measurably, is start closing the funding gap at the margins. MLS launched MLS Next in 2020 to build something closer to a centralized academy structure, stepping in after the U.S. Soccer Development Academy collapsed early in the pandemic. All 30 MLS academies, including Inter Miami, Atlanta United, and FC Dallas, are now free to attend for the prospects who make them, and the league added a second, broader Academy Division for the 2025-26 season that more than doubled the program’s total clubs and players. That’s the closest thing the American system has to Clairefontaine’s model of absorbing the cost instead of passing it down. More teenagers are also skipping college and signing with European clubs directly, following a version of the road Pulisic took. Whether any of it has meaningfully closed the gap in outcomes, there’s no real data yet. And the new academies still exist inside the same pay-to-play economy they were built to work around.

The Deeper Dive

Ajax profits when it sells an academy graduate to a bigger European club. So does a Brazilian club like Santos, or a French club buying a Clairefontaine graduate for its own youth ranks. FIFA’s rules make this explicit: when a professional player transfers, a share of the fee, along with a separate training compensation payment, flows back to every club that trained him between the ages of 12 and 23. Development isn’t a cost center in this system. It’s the product.

Venezuelan baseball has run on a version of the same logic for decades, just with a different buyer. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Major League Baseball teams themselves owned and operated academies inside Venezuela, signing teenagers, housing them, training them, and playing them in a dedicated Venezuelan Summer League, all because MLB teams profit when they develop a prospect cheaply and bring him to the majors. That system has partly broken down since around 2015 as teams pulled out over Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, and it’s been replaced by independent agents, known as buscones, who now train prospects privately and shop them to all 30 organizations. Different operators, same incentive: someone is trying to develop a player specifically so they can sell him.

American youth soccer has no equivalent mechanism, and there’s a specific, documented reason why. When Seattle Sounders academy product DeAndre Yedlin transferred to Tottenham for a reported $3.71 million in 2014, Crossfire Premier, the Washington club that developed him before the Sounders ever had him, sought a share under FIFA’s rules. FIFA’s Dispute Resolution Chamber ultimately ruled in 2019 that Crossfire was entitled to compensation in principle, but rejected its specific claim against Tottenham because Tottenham had already paid the full transfer fee to MLS, relying on assurances from MLS and U.S. Soccer that no solidarity money needed to be set aside for American youth clubs at all. Both MLS and U.S. Soccer have said publicly that enforcing FIFA’s training compensation system domestically would violate U.S. antitrust law, a position that traces back to a 1997 consent decree in Fraser v. MLS, though whether that’s actually true under U.S. law has never been tested in court. MLS began collecting solidarity payments from European clubs itself in 2019, but none of that money passes down to the private, pay-to-play clubs that actually raised those players. An American youth club’s revenue comes almost entirely from family fees, which means its real incentive is keeping paying families happy, not necessarily producing a player good enough to sell.

Baseball offers a useful check on how much this matters. The U.S. still produced about 74 percent of MLB’s Opening Day rosters in 2026, even after losing back-to-back World Baseball Classic finals. But baseball’s serious international competition is only 15 to 20 countries deep, a fraction of soccer’s 211 FIFA members. The population edge that has carried American baseball this far assumes the rest of the world isn’t optimizing the way it optimizes for soccer. If a broader field of countries developed baseball players the way Ajax or Clairefontaine develop soccer players, with development itself as the financial product, it’s a reasonable question whether American baseball would hold up any better against that many organized competitors than American soccer does today.

For The Curious

If this issue has you wanting to go deeper, pick up the 2026 World Cup Edition of Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. It’s not a book about tactics or highlight-reel talent, it’s an economist’s and a journalist’s attempt to explain why certain countries consistently produce elite soccer players and others don’t, using the same kind of population, wealth, and infrastructure data this issue leaned on. This new edition adds a chapter specifically on MLS, Messi’s move to Inter Miami, and the rise of soccer in the United States, which lines up directly with this issue’s theme. One honest caveat: the authors have opinions, and a few of their conclusions are more debated among economists and soccer writers than the book lets on. Worth reading critically rather than as a final word.

Worth Watching

Keep an eye on U.S. Soccer over the next few years, not the next few games. Watch whether MLS Next’s fully funded academy tracks expand beyond a handful of clubs, whether more American teenagers sign with academies abroad before college the way Pulisic eventually did, and whether the training-compensation question ever gets resolved. Those are the variables that actually move the sport forward. Until the development system changes, there’s little reason to expect the results to change with it.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop

The Day Baseball Stopped

On the morning of August 12, 1994, major league baseball players walked off the field and didn’t come back for 232 days. By the time they did, the World Series had been canceled for the first time since 1904, a billion dollars had evaporated, and millions of fans had decided they were done caring about a sport that clearly didn’t care about them.

Now baseball is heading back to the bargaining table, and the same argument that started the fire in 1994 is sitting there waiting for them.

The current collective bargaining agreement expires December 1, 2026. MLB owners have put a proposal on the table: a hard salary cap of $245.3 million, a hard floor of $171.2 million, and a 50/50 revenue split modeled after the NFL and NBA. The players’ union has rejected it outright, offering instead a softer system built around what they’re calling a “competitive integrity tax.” The two sides aren’t negotiating over numbers inside the same framework. They’re negotiating over whether the framework itself should exist, and the 2027 season is the thing sitting between them and a deal.

Here’s what tends to get lost about 1994: the owners wanted a salary cap then too. The players said no, the whole enterprise collapsed, and the strike didn’t end through negotiation. It ended because a federal judge named Sonia Sotomayor granted an injunction blocking the owners from imposing their new labor rules unilaterally. Sotomayor stopped them cold, restoring the previous collective bargaining terms. The players won that round. The sport still lost.

Rob Manfred, who was a junior lawyer on the owners’ bargaining team in 1994, is now the commissioner of baseball. Last week he said something remarkable in public: “We have tried mightily over several rounds of bargaining to use a competitive balance tax to address competitive concerns. And sometimes you’ve got to admit you failed.” The commissioner of baseball, on the record, conceding that the current system has not worked. That’s where things stand.

What Fans Actually Want

Most baseball fans are reasonable people. They understand that bad decisions in the front office lead to bad teams, and that injuries derail good ones. What frustrates them is something more specific: the sense that certain franchises lose not because they made poor decisions, but because the structure of the sport made winning nearly impossible before spring training even started. Fans aren’t asking for guaranteed parity. They’re asking for a legitimate chance.

Competitive balance is really three different things. Championship diversity measures how many different teams win titles. By this measure, baseball looks surprisingly healthy — thirteen different franchises won the World Series between 2006 and 2025, more than the NFL’s ten or the NBA’s eight. But MLB’s own proposal put a sharper point on the deeper problem: over the past decade, nearly 80 percent of League Championship Series teams, 85 percent of World Series teams, and 90 percent of champions have come from top-15 markets. Since 2012, only one team from a bottom-15 market has won the World Series. That was the 2015 Royals.

Postseason participation tells a similar story. The Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, Astros, and Red Sox have been fixtures, all large-market franchises. The Cardinals are the notable exception: a mid-sized city, a brilliantly run organization, and one of the most devoted fanbases in baseball. They’re a genuine example of smart management overcoming market size, but they’re the exception. The Pirates haven’t been relevant in October in decades.

The third measure is preseason contention, how many teams enter a season with a legitimate shot at the postseason. Betting markets price in payroll and roster quality before a pitch is thrown, and by that measure the gap between teams that can and teams that can’t is real and persistent. The Royals winning in 2015 doesn’t change that. Green Bay has been in playoff contention almost every year for three decades under a hard cap, competing with New York and Los Angeles from a city of 100,000 people. If Green Bay had an MLB team playing by baseball’s current rules, it wouldn’t have a prayer.

That’s the difference fans are pointing at.

The Dodgers Problem

No team has exposed the limits of baseball’s current system more dramatically than the Los Angeles Dodgers. The revealing issue isn’t just how much they spend. It’s what that spending buys that no other team can replicate.

In 2024, the Dodgers lost what amounted to two full rotations worth of starting pitchers to injury. Most teams would have collapsed. The Dodgers won the World Series anyway. Their injured list at points during the season would have been a competitive rotation for half the teams in baseball. That’s not talent. That’s depth at a level most franchises can’t afford.

The architect of that roster is Andrew Friedman, who spent nine years building the Tampa Bay Rays into one of the most respected organizations in baseball before joining Los Angeles in 2014. The description that followed him was simple: the Rays with money. Friedman took the same philosophy to a city with vastly different resources, and built something Tampa could never sustain. The Rays currently sit at 48-33, first in the AL East. The Dodgers are 54-30. Both organizations are exceptionally well run. The difference showed up in October 2024, when the Dodgers activated the players they’d had sitting on the injured list all summer.

Then there’s the contract structure. Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million deal defers $680 million until after his playing years end, meaning the Dodgers’ luxury tax hit runs roughly $44 million per year rather than $70 million. Most fans know Bobby Bonilla Day, the running joke about the Mets sending Bonilla $1.19 million every July 1st as part of an old deferred arrangement. Ohtani Day will be something else: starting in 2034, the Dodgers owe him $68 million per year for a decade. Other ownership groups either can’t afford to replicate that structure or won’t, out of basic financial responsibility. Either way it’s a tool that exists only for the wealthiest franchises.

The owners know it. In their latest proposal, MLB called for eliminating deferred contracts entirely for any deal signed after the new CBA takes effect. The very structure that helped build the Dodgers’ dynasty would be prohibited under the system the owners are now asking everyone to accept.

What a Cap Would and Wouldn’t Fix

A hard salary cap does not automatically produce competitive balance. A study published in the Journal for Economic Educators found no evidence that caps improved competitive balance in major American professional leagues. The NFL is the counterexample most people reach for, but the NFL’s parity isn’t just the cap. It’s the cap combined with aggressive revenue sharing, mostly non-guaranteed contracts, and a single-elimination playoff format. The cap alone didn’t build parity in football. The whole system did.

Baseball’s current luxury tax has the same weakness as the union’s proposed integrity tax: wealthy owners treat the penalty as a cost of doing business. A hard cap would compress the payroll gap and force the twelve teams currently below the proposed floor to spend significantly more. Written tightly, it could close the deferred salary loophole too. But it wouldn’t fix drafting, player development, or ownership groups that have treated losing as a profit center.

Even a perfectly designed cap runs into a newer problem: defining what counts as revenue in the first place. The Atlanta Braves built The Battery, a mixed-use entertainment district next to their ballpark with restaurants, offices, and apartments, and that revenue sits entirely outside MLB’s revenue sharing system. It is not baseball income by any formal definition, even though it exists because a baseball stadium sits at the center of it. The Braves’ baseball operations generated roughly $272 million in the first half of last year. The entertainment district added another $28 million on top of that, money no other team gets a share of and money that would likely sit outside a salary cap calculation too. The Cubs have done something similar with Wrigleyville. The Royals have pledged a billion dollars toward a district around their planned new ballpark. If owners agree to a hard cap built around traditional baseball revenue, the next fight is obvious. Smart franchises will simply build more of their business outside the lines the cap draws.

The owners have a legitimate point: a well-designed hard cap removes the most egregious advantages that currently exist. The union has a legitimate point too: the cap alone won’t fix what’s broken. Both can be true.

Why 1994 Still Matters

Negotiations are actively underway. Both sides have exchanged formal proposals and the gap is wide. The owners have offered some concessions, including earlier free agency for veterans and elimination of the qualifying offer system, but every concession is tied to accepting the hard cap. The union calls it a package deal with no room to negotiate the parts separately.

The environment is more complicated than it was in 2021. MLBPA executive director Tony Clark resigned in February following an internal investigation and a separate federal inquiry into the union’s finances. Bruce Meyer, the union’s lead negotiator on the 2022 CBA, stepped in as interim director. He now leads the union into the most consequential labor fight in baseball since 1994, less than four months after taking the job.

That’s not 1994. Not yet. But the 1994 strike is the ghost in every serious negotiation, because it showed what happens when one side decides it can impose its will without a deal. The owners tried that in 1995. A federal judge stopped them. The lesson hasn’t been forgotten.

Baseball has produced more World Series champions than the NFL over the past twenty years. It also has more fans who feel like their city’s team doesn’t have a real shot before the season starts. Both things are true, and the gap between them is the whole argument. The fans in Pittsburgh and Kansas City are just hoping someone figures it out.

The Deeper Dive

The most revealing detail in the current MLB proposal isn’t the cap number. It’s the revenue sharing component.

Owners are asking for a 50/50 split of baseball-related income, modeled on how the NFL and NBA divide money between the players and the clubs. The cap is essentially a mechanism for enforcing that split: once you’ve agreed on 50/50, the cap number follows mathematically from total revenue.

The players’ union understands this, which is part of why they’ve rejected a hard cap so firmly. Accepting one doesn’t just mean accepting a spending ceiling. It means accepting a fundamental restructuring of how baseball’s money gets divided, on terms the owners are setting. The union has called the owners’ latest proposals “flat out bad for baseball,” words that make clear this is viewed as an existential fight, not a position to be bargained away.

The owners’ June 25th proposal included genuine concessions: earlier free agency for veterans 30 and older, elimination of the qualifying offer system, and a higher minimum salary. But every concession is conditional on the union accepting a hard cap. That’s a package deal: take the whole thing or none of it.

There’s also a generational dimension worth noting. Under the current system, younger players are significantly underpaid relative to their value. The 2022 CBA introduced the Prospect Promotion Incentive, a draft pick reward for teams that bring top prospects up on Opening Day, provided the player goes on to win Rookie of the Year or finish in the top three of MVP or Cy Young voting. It’s a real incentive, but a narrow one. It helps at the very top of the prospect pool. The broader class of good-but-not-elite young players can still be held back for service time reasons with little penalty. The union’s push for better pay for younger players is the part of this negotiation that gets the least public attention and may matter the most long term.

For the Curious

“The 1994-95 Baseball Strike” — Baseball Almanac (baseball-almanac.com)

Baseball Almanac has compiled contemporaneous accounts and retrospective pieces on the 1994 strike worth spending time with if this issue got you thinking. The raw numbers, 948 games canceled, the first World Series cancellation in 90 years, attendance that didn’t recover for years, are one thing. The fan accounts are another. The strike happened at a moment when baseball was experiencing a genuine renaissance, and the damage it did to that goodwill is worth understanding before the sport risks repeating it.

A caveat: Some of the historical pieces touch on the steroid era that followed, which intersects with the strike’s aftermath in complicated ways. Worth knowing going in.

Worth Watching

Keep an eye on how the Dodgers’ roster construction evolves as the trade deadline approaches. No team in baseball illustrates the current system’s contradictions more clearly, and whatever they do next will tell you something about whether the owners’ cap proposal is really about competitive balance, or about limiting what one franchise in particular has been able to build.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop

That is where college sports finds itself in 2026. Not in crisis, exactly. But in a place its architects never quite imagined.

The Duke-Michigan situation is still being worked out. The game is scheduled for December 21st, and the reported reason for the potential relocation from MSG to loanDepot Park — home of the Miami Marlins — comes down to a specific and surprisingly concrete conflict. Duke committed the game to Amazon as part of a deal for premium nonconference games. But Madison Square Garden sits in shared ACC and Big Ten territory, and the two conferences have a pre-existing agreement to alternate broadcast rights for neutral-site games played there. Last year’s Duke-Michigan game was in Washington D.C. on ESPN, which is the ACC’s rightsholder. That made this year’s game Fox’s turn under the Big Ten’s deal. Amazon’s involvement broke the rotation. New York became a legal tangle. Miami, apparently, did not.

Most fans who heard about this scratched their heads and moved on. But the story underneath it is worth slowing down for, because it did not start with Amazon or Fox or even college basketball. It started in 1984, in a Supreme Court courtroom, with two football programs that were tired of being told how often they could appear on television.

The Case That Broke the NCAA

By 1981, major college football programs had grown frustrated with the NCAA’s stranglehold on television. The NCAA controlled every aspect of the sport’s broadcast rights through exclusive deals with ABC and CBS, and its plan was built on a principle that sounds almost quaint today: limiting how often any school could appear on television. Under the NCAA’s 1982-85 arrangement, each network paid a fixed rights fee — the total value across both deals was $131.75 million over four years — and the NCAA capped how many times any school could appear on television in a given season. Serious money at the time, but distributed under terms the NCAA dictated entirely, with appearance caps that kept any one program from dominating the airwaves.

The College Football Association, a group of major football schools that had banded together specifically because they wanted more control over television policy than the NCAA structure allowed, negotiated a separate deal with NBC in 1981. It would have let CFA schools appear more frequently and negotiate more freely. The NCAA’s response was swift and pointed: comply with our plan or face sanctions — and not just in football. The threat extended to other sports, meaning a school that signed with NBC could find its basketball program or track team barred from NCAA competition. It was a full-leverage play from a governing body accustomed to winning.

Oklahoma and Georgia sued. The case worked its way to the Supreme Court, and on June 27, 1984, the Court ruled 7-2 against the NCAA. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion, and the language was not gentle. Drawing on the district court’s findings, Stevens described the NCAA’s football television controls as giving it “almost absolute control” over the supply, price, and output of college football on television — the functional definition of a cartel. The NCAA’s defenses, that limiting exposure protected live attendance and preserved competitive balance, did not hold up under antitrust scrutiny.

The immediate aftermath was striking. Before the ruling, 89 college football games were televised in a single season. Within a year, that number jumped to nearly 200. ESPN, which had launched in 1979 but had not yet entered the college football business, began airing games in 1982 and expanded its coverage rapidly once the 1984 ruling opened the floodgates. The open market that Oklahoma and Georgia had fought for arrived almost overnight.

What they were actually fighting for is worth dwelling on, since it shapes everything that followed. The NCAA’s system suppressed the number of times a major program could appear on television, which limited both visibility and the revenue that came with it. Oklahoma and Georgia wanted the right to control their own exposure and negotiate their own value, rather than operating under a centrally dictated limit. More appearances meant more recruiting reach, more alumni engagement, and more leverage when it came time to negotiate their own deals. The lawsuit was about breaking a system that artificially capped the schools that could draw the biggest audiences.

They won. And for a while, the open market delivered exactly what they wanted.

The Arms Race

With the NCAA’s centralized control gone, conferences moved quickly to negotiate their own deals. The market opened, games flooded television, and the schools that could draw national audiences built media relationships that grew more valuable with each contract cycle. The Big Ten Network launched in August 2007, the SEC Network in August 2014 — conference-owned channels that would have been legally unimaginable before 1984. Schools that once shared a single national pool of television money now had dedicated networks generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually for their members alone.

The numbers today are genuinely staggering. For the 2025 fiscal year, the Big Ten distributed $1.37 billion to its eighteen members, an average of roughly $76 million per school. The SEC distributed just over $1 billion to its sixteen members, an average of about $72 million per school. Both conferences now sit in the same range as MLB and the NHL in terms of annual television income, and well ahead of MLS, which signed a deal with Apple worth roughly $250 million per year. For context, the NFL generates approximately $10 billion per year from its television deals, and the NBA pulls in roughly $7 billion annually under its current contracts. College sports has not caught the professional leagues at the top, but it has lapped almost everyone else.

The gap between the two college powerhouses is smaller than the headline contract numbers suggest, even if it has not closed entirely. The SEC signed the bulk of its rights with ESPN years ago, then added a new package in 2020 to replace what CBS had been paying — and it did so at the worst possible moment, during the depths of the pandemic, when the media market was in no condition to pay peak value. The Big Ten negotiated its landmark deal with Fox, CBS, and NBC in 2022 in a much hotter market, with three networks competing aggressively against each other. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has said publicly that he believes his conference’s deal is undervalued. The data backs him up — the SEC consistently delivers the sport’s best ratings, yet still trails the Big Ten by several hundred million dollars in total annual revenue. They got outmaneuvered at the negotiating table despite having the better product.

That money came attached to conditions. The Big Ten’s deal assigns specific games to specific networks, with Fox carrying the noon window, CBS the late afternoon, and NBC primetime. The SEC locked every tier of its rights under the Disney umbrella. Exclusivity windows, territorial claims, platform assignments, neutral-site approval processes — the contracts grew more specific and more binding with every renegotiation. Which is exactly how a basketball game between Duke and Michigan became logistically complicated in New York City.

The fragmentation that followed 1984 gave television networks a version of leverage they did not have under the old NCAA system. With conferences competing separately for deals, a network that lost one conference’s rights could find content elsewhere. The market was competitive in both directions. Schools and conferences were getting richer, but the networks retained enough options to keep rights fees from reaching their theoretical ceiling.

The House settlement, approved in 2025, added another dimension. For the first time, Division I schools that opt in can share revenue directly with their athletes, up to roughly $20.5 million per school annually — a cap that applies equally regardless of how large a school’s media deal happens to be. A school in the Big Ten and a school in the Sun Belt face the same ceiling. It is a genuinely historic change. But it did not alter the underlying financial architecture. Media rights still determine how much money flows into the system. The conferences with the biggest television deals have the most left over after the cap is met. The gap between the powerful and everyone else did not close with the House settlement. In some ways it widened.

The Circle Completes

Here is where the story gets genuinely strange.

The schools that went to the Supreme Court in 1984 argued that the NCAA’s plan, which capped how often any school could appear on television while also fixing what networks paid for the games that did air, was an illegal restraint of trade. They won that argument. The market opened. Appearances exploded. Revenue followed. For forty years, the open market did roughly what it was supposed to do.

Now, serious conversations are happening — reported, not just rumored — about whether the SEC and Big Ten might consolidate their football operations into something resembling a super league. The economic logic is consistent: if the two most valuable conferences in college sports negotiated their television rights together as a single block rather than as separate entities, they would eliminate the last meaningful competition for their content. Networks that must have SEC football and Big Ten football would no longer be able to play one against the other. They would be bidding into a closed auction for access to content they cannot afford to lose.

This is not a return to the old NCAA model, and the distinction matters. The NCAA suppressed exposure — it limited how often schools appeared on television in order to protect live attendance and maintain what it called competitive balance. What the SEC and Big Ten are contemplating is almost the opposite. The games would all still be broadcast. The schools would still get their visibility. What would be consolidated is not the content but the negotiating power. The networks would pay dramatically more while still getting the games they want. It is a seller’s market engineered by the sellers, and it has nothing to do with the NCAA’s original rationale for central control.

Here is the part that surprised me once I dug into the legal history. The 1984 ruling does not automatically stand in the way of something like this. The Supreme Court objected to the NCAA’s plan because it restricted how many games could be shown while also fixing the price networks paid for them. If the SEC and Big Ten negotiated jointly without limiting how many games get broadcast, that specific combination would not be present. Board of Regents, in other words, might not be the legal obstacle most fans assume it would be.

But two competing conferences agreeing on terms together is still a horizontal agreement between rivals, and arrangements like that invite antitrust scrutiny on their own, separate from anything the 1984 case decided. This is essentially the situation the NFL solved in 1961.

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 granted professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey leagues the right to negotiate broadcast rights collectively without violating antitrust law. It passed because a federal judge had just struck down an NFL television deal on antitrust grounds that same year, and Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner, pushed Congress to act. The legislation transformed the NFL’s financial model. The league’s current deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, and Amazon total roughly $110 billion over eleven years — numbers made possible because the NFL negotiates as one entity rather than 32 competing ones. No individual network can play one team’s rights against another. The league controls the auction entirely.

The Act came with a condition, and this is the part most college football fans have never connected to their own sport. In exchange for the antitrust exemption, the NFL agreed to stay off television on Fridays after 6:00 p.m. and on Saturdays when a high school or college game is being played within 75 miles of the broadcast station. That blackout runs from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December each year. After that date, the NFL is free to go. The restriction was designed to protect local high school and college football from direct competition — not just ratings competition, but attendance at the games themselves.

College football fans will recognize immediately how much that arrangement has frayed in practice. The NFL season has grown longer, the college playoff has pushed the college calendar deeper into January, and the two sports now compete for the same late-season Saturdays in ways the 1961 Congress never anticipated. The NFL is not violating the law — the blackout expires on the second Saturday in December, right around when the college regular season ends anyway. But once it expires, the NFL moves in, and the ratings damage is real. A routine NFL regular season game routinely outdraws a College Football Playoff game airing in the same window. College football built itself into a billion-dollar enterprise and the NFL still beats it head to head without breaking a sweat.

College sports has never had anything like the Sports Broadcasting Act. The 1984 ruling did not ban collective negotiation outright, but nothing in the forty years since has given college conferences the kind of legal certainty that Act gave professional leagues. If the SEC and Big Ten want that certainty, the path runs through Congress, the same path Pete Rozelle walked in 1961. And there is one more complication: most of these schools receive federal funding, which gives Congress real leverage over whatever structure gets proposed. A super league does not happen without Washington having a say.

So the schools that once fought their way out of a restrictive, centrally controlled television plan may now find themselves asking Congress for something that plan never had and never needed: explicit permission for direct competitors to negotiate as one. The 1984 ruling did not create this situation and it does not resolve it either. It simply never had to. Forty years later, it might.

The European Precedent

This instinct is not uniquely American. In April 2021, twelve of Europe’s most powerful soccer clubs announced the formation of a European Super League — a closed competition that would guarantee them places each season regardless of how they performed domestically. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, six Premier League clubs. The logic was familiar: the biggest clubs generate most of European soccer’s television value, so why should they keep sharing it with everyone else through UEFA’s open competition structure?

The backlash was volcanic. Fan protests erupted outside stadiums across England. Players and managers spoke publicly against it. Politicians threatened legislative intervention. Within 48 hours, nine of the twelve founding clubs had withdrawn. The project collapsed before a single match was played.

What did not collapse was the financial logic that created it. The clubs were responding to the same pressure driving American conference consolidation: when media money concentrates at the top of a sport, the entities generating the most value start asking why they are sharing it with everyone else. The European Super League failed because European fans still carry real weight, and European regulators are willing to step in when they don’t like what they see. American college sports has neither of those things in the same form. The consolidation has crept in gradually, one realignment wave at a time, and most fans have absorbed each move without quite noticing where it’s all headed.

Notre Dame’s Impossible Position

No program illustrates the stakes more clearly than Notre Dame.

The Fighting Irish have maintained their football independence since 1991, built around a standalone deal with NBC that has been extended through 2029 and is estimated to be worth somewhere between $50 and $60 million annually. Notre Dame’s football identity is inseparable from that relationship — the school built its national brand around being the one major program that answers to no conference. While most of the sport reorganized itself around conference revenue pools, Notre Dame kept its own arrangement and made it work.

The College Football Playoff has been unusually good to Notre Dame. Under the terms of the new CFP contract running from 2026 through 2031, Notre Dame automatically qualifies for the 12-team field if it finishes ranked in the top 12 of the final CFP rankings, with no conference championship game required. For a program that plays no such game by definition, that is not a small thing. The Irish made the expanded playoff field in its first season, which validated the independence model in the short term and quieted some of the pressure to join a conference.

But Notre Dame is genuinely alone in that position now. Army and Navy, once fellow football independents, both play as football-only members of the American Athletic Conference — Army joined in 2024, Navy was already there. The remaining FBS independents are UConn and UMass, programs without Notre Dame’s brand leverage or realistic playoff aspirations. The Irish negotiated a place in the new college football order. Everyone else either joined a conference or accepted the margins.

The arrangement works as long as the broader system remains open enough to accommodate it. Notre Dame does not share in the conference revenue pools that ACC, Big Ten, and SEC members receive. The NBC deal is valuable, but it covers home games. If the SEC and Big Ten formalize their dominance into something closer to a closed structure — with tighter playoff access, separate revenue sharing, and potentially congressional antitrust protection — Notre Dame’s independence stops being a carefully managed advantage and becomes something considerably more precarious.

The 1984 ruling gave schools and conferences the right to control their own television destiny. Notre Dame used that right to build something genuinely singular. Now the conferences that used the same right to build something enormous are quietly discussing whether to change the rules of the game entirely. Notre Dame did not get a vote on that conversation. Neither did anyone outside the SEC and Big Ten.

Which brings everything back to a college basketball game that may or may not end up in a baseball stadium in Miami. The Duke-Michigan situation is a small story about contracts and territorial maps. But it is also a window into a much larger question about who decides how college sports works, who profits from those decisions, and whether the system that emerged from a 1984 courtroom is finally running out of room to grow.

Oklahoma and Georgia wanted more exposure, and they got it. What remains to be seen is what happens when the schools with the most exposure decide they’ve outgrown the system that gave it to them.

The Deeper Dive

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 is short enough to read in ten minutes and specific enough to reward careful attention. Most sports fans know vaguely that the NFL has some kind of antitrust exemption. Fewer know exactly what the league gave up to get it.

The mechanics of the trade are worth laying out plainly, since the Main Story only sketched them. Two restrictions did the work: no NFL games on Friday nights after 6:00 p.m., and no NFL games on Saturdays within 75 miles of a high school or college game, for a window stretching from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December. Outside that window — including the entire postseason — the NFL faces no such limits. In 1961, with the college football season effectively over by mid-December, that carve-out cost the NFL almost nothing. The calendar did the protecting on its own.

What makes this worth understanding now is how cleanly the December cutoff aligns with the college football regular season calendar. The second Saturday in December is roughly when conference championship games wrap up and the college regular season effectively ends. After that point, the NFL is legally free to schedule Saturday games, and it does. The College Football Playoff then runs into January directly against NFL wild card and divisional weekends. The 1961 law protected college football’s regular season. It left the postseason exposed.

The ratings consequences are real and not subtle. College Football Playoff games airing in windows with direct NFL competition consistently draw lower numbers than comparable games without that competition. A first-round CFP game averaged 10.6 million viewers in 2024 — a strong number in isolation, but still well below what a comparable NFL game draws in the same window. The NFL does not need to be doing anything extraordinary to beat college football head to head. A middling regular season game between two average teams will usually outperform a meaningful college playoff game on the same afternoon.

This is the environment in which the SEC and Big Ten are contemplating collective negotiation. They are not just trying to maximize revenue from college sports fans. They are trying to build a rights package valuable enough that networks will pay a premium simply to secure access before a competitor does — the same dynamic that made the NFL’s model so powerful. The Sports Broadcasting Act made that possible for professional football in 1961. College sports would need its own version to attempt something similar today, and getting it through Congress would mean dealing with every mid-major conference, every smaller school, and every politician whose district has a program that would be left outside the new structure.

That political problem may ultimately be the biggest obstacle. The NFL had 32 teams and a relatively contained lobbying task when Rozelle went to Congress in 1961. The SEC and Big Ten would be asking Congress to grant a carve-out that explicitly advantages two conferences at the expense of everyone else in college sports — at institutions that receive federal funding, which gives Congress standing to push back. Getting that through a legislative body where every state has colleges and universities with a stake in the outcome would be a different kind of fight entirely.

For the Curious

The full text of NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is worth reading if you want to understand how the Court actually thought about college sports and antitrust law. Justice Stevens’ majority opinion is careful and surprisingly readable for a legal document of its era. The framing of the NCAA as exercising “almost absolute control” over supply, price, and output is striking language, and the dissent by Justices White and Rehnquist — who argued the NCAA’s arrangement deserved more deference as an amateur sports regulator — gives a useful sense of how divided the Court actually was. You can read the full opinion for free through the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute.

On the European Super League, the documentary Super League: The War for Football walks through the 2021 attempt in detail, from its launch to its collapse. It is available on Apple TV+. Candid caveat: the film is largely sympathetic to the fan and club perspectives that opposed the breakaway, and critics of that framing argue it understates the genuine financial pressures the founding clubs were responding to. The more interesting question the documentary raises, without quite answering it, is whether the fan backlash actually solved anything or simply delayed a reckoning that the economics of elite soccer make inevitable.

Worth Watching

The College Football Playoff’s expansion keeps changing how programs approach their seasons. Keep an eye on which mid-major conferences push hardest for guaranteed access in the next round of CFP negotiations — that fight will tell you a lot about whether college football’s power structure is willing to share anything at all, or whether consolidation is already past the point of reversal.

Thanks for reading The Precedent. If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would too.

Written by Bob Sloop

Pitching is dominating baseball again in 2026. History tells us what usually happens next, and this time, technology might be the answer.

If you’ve watched much baseball this season, you may have noticed something feels a little off at the plate. Hitters are struggling. Pitchers are dealing. Scoreboards look more like hockey scores from the 1950s than a modern era of offensive firepower. The league-wide batting average is hovering around .241, the lowest it’s been since 1968.

That’s not a coincidence. The number 1968 is worth paying attention to, because baseball has been exactly here before. What happened that year, and what the league did about it, might be a preview of what’s coming. Only this time, the fix might come from a computer rather than a rulebook.

The Year the Pitchers Took Over

To understand 1968, you have to understand Bob Gibson.

The St. Louis Cardinals right-hander was already one of the most intimidating figures in baseball when the 1968 season began. He was big, he threw a mean fastball, and he genuinely scared hitters. He owned the inside half of the plate and made no apologies for it. During that season, he hung a sign above his locker that read simply: “Here comes the judge.” (Not that Judge. Aaron Judge was still about 37 years away from making the name famous in the Bronx.)

He wasn’t wrong.

Gibson started 34 games in 1968 and went the full nine innings in 28 of them. He threw 13 shutouts. He had a stretch from June through July where he won 11 straight starts, all complete games, and gave up a grand total of three runs. His ERA for the entire season was 1.12. That number isn’t a typo. It remains the lowest single-season ERA in modern baseball history.

But Gibson wasn’t even the whole story. He was just the most spectacular example of a much bigger problem. Twenty-two pitchers across both leagues posted earned run averages below 2.00 that year. The Detroit Tigers’ Denny McLain won 31 games, a number that seems almost fictional by today’s standards. The Dodgers’ Don Drysdale threw 58 consecutive scoreless innings. Only six hitters in all of baseball batted over .300, combined across both leagues.

The league-wide ERA was 2.98. Fans were going to games and watching a whole lot of nothing happen at the plate.

“There is ample evidence,” wrote Washington Post columnist Bob Addie late that season, “that the public is getting a wee bit tired of all these pitchers’ duels.”

Baseball had a problem. And it decided to do something about it.

Baseball’s Answer: Change the Rules

After the 1968 season ended, MLB officials didn’t wait around. In December of that year, a rules panel voted to make two significant changes before a single pitch of the 1969 season was thrown.

First, they lowered the pitcher’s mound. The mound had been sitting at 15 inches above home plate. They dropped it to 10 inches, where it remains today. A higher mound gives pitchers a steeper downward angle on their pitches, making them harder to hit. Lowering it leveled the playing field, literally.

Second, they shrank the strike zone back to its traditional boundaries. Umpires had been calling a generous strike zone for years, one that tilted the advantage heavily toward pitchers. The league told umpires to enforce it more tightly.

The numbers in 1969 told a good story. Runs per game climbed from 3.42 to 4.07, and the league batting average rose eleven points from .237 to .248. Whether the mound change deserves full credit is debatable; 1969 also happened to be an expansion year, adding four new teams and diluting pitching depth across the league. But something worked, and baseball was happy to call it a success.

So Why Is Batting Average Down in 2026?

Here’s where the 2026 story gets more nuanced and more interesting than a simple repeat of 1968.

The long-term decline in batting average isn’t new. It’s been building for nearly two decades, pushed along by forces that have nothing to do with umpires. Average four-seam fastball velocity has climbed from 91.1 mph in 2008 to 94.2 mph today, meaning hitters have progressively less time to react to every pitch. Spin rate analytics gave pitching coaches the ability to fine-tune breaking balls with a precision Gibson and his contemporaries would never have believed possible. And the evolution of bullpen strategy means hitters rarely face the same pitcher twice in a game, eliminating any opportunity to adjust through repeated looks.

These aren’t things that changed in 2026. They’ve been grinding batting averages down for years.

What makes 2026 specifically interesting is what’s happening on top of those long-term trends. The new Automated Ball-Strike system (more on that in a moment) had an effect on umpire behavior that nobody saw coming. Knowing their calls would now be subject to challenge and review, umpires quietly began calling a tighter strike zone even before the first pitch of the season. Borderline strike calls on the edges of the plate dropped sharply. The zone that pitchers had quietly relied on for years got smaller overnight. Paradoxically, a system built to make ball-strike calls more consistent actually reduced the number of hittable pitches in the zone, sending walks up 7.3% and scrambling offensive rhythms in ways that are still sorting themselves out.

So 2026 isn’t 1968. It’s something new: a long-simmering problem colliding with an unexpected technological side effect. The result just happens to look eerily familiar.

Enter the Robot Umpires

The Automated Ball-Strike system, known as ABS, debuted in the major leagues this season after years of minor league testing. It works like this: umpires still call every pitch the old-fashioned way, but pitchers, catchers, and batters each have the ability to challenge a call by tapping their helmet. The challenge goes to a Hawk-Eye camera system that reviews the pitch location within seconds and either confirms or overturns the umpire’s call. Each team starts the game with two challenges and keeps them if successful.

The early results are striking. Through the first month of the season, the system upheld 53.4% of challenges, meaning nearly half of disputed calls were overturned. Pitch-framing, the art catchers have spent careers mastering to steal borderline strikes, has already declined significantly. The computer doesn’t get fooled by a smooth glove.

In-stadium, the reaction has been enthusiastic. Fans are cheering challenges the way they cheer replay reviews in football. “Outside!” becomes a moment. The energy is real.

But here’s the deeper irony: by making umpires accountable, ABS has actually tightened the strike zone before the computer even gets involved. Umpires are calling fewer borderline strikes on their own initiative, simply because they know a challenge might prove them wrong. The result: more walks, more pitches outside the zone, and hitters who are paradoxically less comfortable because the predictable edges of the zone they used to exploit have disappeared.

What Do Fans Actually Want?

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, and where opinion is more divided than you might expect.

MLB’s own Spring Training survey found that 69% of fans want to go to full ABS, meaning the computer calls each pitch with no challenges at all. That’s a strong majority. But a Seton Hall Sports Poll found something different: 45% of MLB fans don’t think baseball should adopt a system where the computer reviews every pitch automatically, versus only 31% who do. A brand-new survey found that 38% of Americans love the challenge system, 20% disagree, and 42% say they don’t know what to think yet.

Fan opinion is still forming. The challenge system is new enough that plenty of people haven’t decided what they want from it. The in-stadium energy suggests the drama of a challenge moment is popular. But whether fans want the computer to take over entirely is a genuinely open question.

Players, for their part, are divided. Many prefer the challenge system over full automation because it preserves pitch framing, a craft catchers have spent careers developing. When full ABS was tested in the minor leagues, players, coaches, and fans pushed back, citing more walks, longer games, and the elimination of that subtle art. The Players Association has not issued a unified position, though it supported the ABS rollout as negotiated under the collective bargaining agreement.

Commissioner Manfred specifically thanked the Major League Umpires for their collaboration in the ABS rollout.

Three Schools of Thought

So where does this leave baseball in 2026? There are really three positions worth understanding.

Leave it alone. Pitching dominance is a legitimate outcome of how the game has evolved. Today’s pitchers are the best-conditioned, most analytically optimized athletes in the sport’s history. Penalizing excellence to manufacture offense feels artificial. A 2-1 pitching duel has its own audience.

Use the tools already in place. ABS is already reshaping how the game is called. Give it time to work before reaching for bigger interventions. Umpires are recalibrating, hitters and pitchers are adapting, and the dust hasn’t settled yet.

Go further. If batting averages keep dropping, full automation becomes harder to resist: every pitch, no challenges, no human behind the plate. The technology exists. Interestingly, the umpires have largely collaborated on the ABS rollout rather than fighting it. The real resistance has come from players themselves, many of whom prefer the challenge system because it preserves pitch framing. Whether that player preference holds as the numbers keep trending downward is an open question.

History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Rhymes

The 1968 season didn’t spring up overnight. It took nearly a decade of pitchers gradually gaining the upper hand before the numbers got too big to overlook. The league watched. It monitored. And when it finally acted, it rewrote the rules.

The difference between 1968 and 2026 is that baseball today has tools its predecessors could never have imagined, and those tools are already changing the game in ways nobody fully anticipated. The question isn’t whether the technology can rebalance things. It’s whether baseball is willing to let it, and how far it’s prepared to go.

The pitchers keep getting better. The computers keep getting more accurate. Something has to give.

Bob Gibson would probably hate whatever they come up with. But even he’d have to admit it: runs went up, batting averages climbed, and the game moved on. Whether it was the mound, the zone, the expansion teams, or all three, baseball declared victory and never looked back.

Worth Watching

Keep an eye on the Tampa Bay Rays, who are quietly sitting near the top of the American League standings under new ownership despite one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. It’s early, but if they sustain it, their front office approach of building through analytics, development, and smart roster construction will be one of the best stories in baseball this summer.

The Deeper Dive: The Man Behind the Myth

The numbers tell you Bob Gibson was dominant. What they don’t tell you is what it was actually like to face him.

Dusty Baker, who spent 19 years in the major leagues and managed for another 26, said something that captures it better than any ERA ever could: “The only people I ever felt intimidated by in my whole life were Bob Gibson and my Daddy.”

Baker wasn’t alone. Hank Aaron, a man who faced the best pitchers of two generations without flinching, pulled Baker aside early in his career and gave him a set of instructions so specific they sound more like a survival guide than baseball advice. Don’t dig in against Gibson. He’ll knock you down. Don’t stare at him. Don’t smile at him. Don’t talk to him. If he hits you, don’t charge the mound, he was a Golden Gloves boxer. If you hit a home run, don’t run too slow and don’t run too fast. If you want to celebrate, get in the tunnel first.

That was the operating manual for facing Bob Gibson.

What makes him fascinating as a character, not just as a pitcher, is that he was largely unaware of the effect he had. In a 2010 Newsweek interview, Gibson reflected on his reputation with something close to genuine surprise: “The intimidation thing didn’t come from me. It was in the eye of the beholder. People built up all of this stuff, and they came up with this ogre-type image. After I retired and got older and heard all these stories, I was like — damn, I didn’t know they felt like that. I wish I had known. Because if I had known I intimidated people the way I did, I would’ve been even uglier.”

His teammate Joe Torre put it more bluntly: “Bob wasn’t just unfriendly when he pitched. I’d say it was more like hateful.”

Gibson’s own explanation was simpler. “My thing was winning,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t see how being pleasant or amiable had anything to do with winning, so I wasn’t pleasant on the mound and I wasn’t amiable off it.”

He worked fast, almost aggressively so, which hitters interpreted as a psychological tactic. Gibson always insisted it was just his personality. But when hitters kept stepping out of the box to slow him down, it genuinely irritated him, which only made him more imposing. The intimidation fed on itself.

His delivery added to the effect. After releasing the ball, the right side of his body hurtled violently toward the first base line, giving hitters the impression that he was physically exploding in their direction. His cap pulled low. His eyes fixed on the catcher’s mitt, or so hitters thought. Gibson was actually nearsighted and couldn’t see them clearly. The famous glare was essentially a visual aid.

What the mythology sometimes obscures is the craft underneath it. Gibson didn’t beat hitters with fear alone. He had pinpoint control of two different fastballs and a vicious slider. He set hitters up with inside heat and finished them on the outside corner. He was a student of the game who thought deeply about how to get each hitter out.

The legend of Bob Gibson the intimidator is real. But Bob Gibson the pitcher was something even more dangerous: a man who combined that presence with genuine, relentless excellence. The 1968 season was the intersection of both at their absolute peak.

For the Curious

Two recommendations this issue, one for the big picture and one for the close-up.

Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age by Sridhar Pappu (2017)

Pappu uses the 1968 season as a lens to examine two men who could not have been more different. Gibson was disciplined and fearsome; McLain was a brash self-promoter who flew his own plane while his teammates took the team charter. One black, one white. One serious, one reckless. Both historic. The book places the season in the context of a turbulent America, with King, Kennedy, and Chicago all playing out in the background, while keeping baseball at the center. The Boston Globe called it seldom matched for vividly bringing an era and its personalities to life. Worth knowing going in: some readers feel the historical context enriches the story, others feel it occasionally overshadows the baseball. Judge for yourself.

Pitch by Pitch: My View of One Unforgettable Game by Bob Gibson with Lonnie Wheeler (2015)

If the Pappu book is the wide-angle lens, this is the extreme close-up. Gibson walks through one complete 1968 World Series game, pitch by pitch in his own voice, explaining exactly what he was thinking, why he threw what he threw, and what was going through his head at every moment. No agenda, no outside interpretation. Just one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived taking you inside his mind during the best season of his career. For anyone who wants to understand what elite pitching actually feels like from the inside, this is as close as you’ll ever get.

The Precedent is a biweekly newsletter covering sports through a deeper lens — strategy, history, and everything behind the game. Written by Bob Sloop. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, visit theprecedentmedia.com

Follow us on X at @PrecedentMedia