AP Top 25: With a logjam at top of poll, a bunch of early marquee matchups may help sort things out
Only two first-place votes and five points separate No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Penn State. Each of the top five teams, and six of the top seven, received at least one No. 1 vote.
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After one year, this MLB postseason schedule innovation is no longer
The World Series could end in November this year. Major League Baseball can do without all the "Mr. November" jokes, so the league took a creative step last year: a flexible start date for the World Series. It's not easy to cram a four-round postseason in a month. But it's even less ideal if the World Series teams roll through the league championship series, then sit around for close to a week before the World Series starts. MLB unveiled this creative reform last year: If both World Series teams complete the league championship series in no more than five games, the start of the World Series would move up three days. Nothing kills interest in an everyday sport like a week off before the most important games of the season. The reform did not come into play last season. Although the New York Yankees won the American League Championship Series in five games, the Dodgers needed six games to complete the NLCS. Read more: Yoshinobu Yamamoto rocked by Zach Neto and Angels as Dodgers' NL West lead falls to 1 When MLB announced its postseason schedule Tuesday, the flexible start date for the World Series was gone. With the Dodgers coming within one victory of making that happen last season, league officials and television partners had the chance to prepare for two possibilities for the start of the World Series. The uncertainty of what date to promote, and the need for alternate travel plans and hotel blocks, left the parties with the thought that a fixed date for the World Series remained a better plan. The World Series this year is set to start on Friday, Oct. 24, with a possible Game 7 on Saturday, Nov. 1. The wild-card round starts Tuesday, Sept. 30, with the division series round starting Saturday, Oct. 4. The teams with the top two records in each league earn a bye in the first round and advance directly to the division series. If the postseason started Tuesday, the Dodgers (68-51) would be the No. 3 seed in the NL, behind the Milwaukee Brewers (74-44) and the Philadelphia Phillies (69-49). The wild card teams, in order of seed, would be the Chicago Cubs (67-50), San Diego Padres (67-52) and the New York Mets (63-55). In that scenario, the Dodgers and Mets — the NLCS combatants last season — would meet in the wild-card round this season. Sign up for more Dodgers news with Dodgers Dugout. Delivered at the start of each series. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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21 minutes ago
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The end of the UFC pay-per-view era is bittersweet
Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay-per-view buys he'd bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. (It did, he didn't). When UFC 151 was canceled after Jon Jones refused an opponent switch, White called Jones' coach, Greg Jackson, a 'sport killer.' It left a crater in the UFC's schedule that only MMA fans could fully appreciate. A few years later, when Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the PPV record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome. Since UFC 1, when people paid out of morbid curiosity, pay-per-views have been a vital part of the identity of this sport. It's hard to get nostalgic over being gouged, and what follows here shouldn't be mistaken as such, but Monday's news of the UFC's coming $7.7 billion partnership with Paramount came with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the PPV model will soon belong to a bygone era. In our sport, people have long huddled around a UFC PPV as if it were a religious rite. When social media was gaining steam in the early-2010s, UFC PPVs were ladled out on Twitter (now X), 140 characters at a time from those on the ground level, as if they were transmissions from the war. Any MMA fan who didn't spring for the then-$59.99 price tag suffered instant FOMO. Why? Because getting the PPV meant attending the party. A sacrifice, it's true, but also a shared experience. The price of admission kept unserious fans out. What lurked behind the paywall was the sport's everything, and the feeling of camaraderie for any of us who willingly paid the door fees was priceless. A typical Monday conversation might go something like this: 'Did you get Saturday's pay-per-view?' 'Damn right I did. That GSP is a freaking monster.' 'I can't believe Dan Hardy didn't tap.' 'Dude is Gumby!' A UFC PPV stood for 'can't-miss event' for what was essentially a continuing saga — a long-running, fighting soap opera that early aficionados deemed sacred. Of course, it wasn't nearly as hipster as it sounds. If nothing else, the UFC has always been anti-hipster. It gladly poured Monster Energy drink over men in capris. It was more like a monthly concentration of our greatest focus, to see firsthand the best the sport could offer, which gave MMA its sense of community. It was a choice that could be regretted in the end — anybody who sprung for UFC 149 from Calgary never fully recovered from that groin kick — yet it was a choice we made because we didn't care for the alternative. All of this largely held true into the 2020s, even though pirating and illegal streams have long done away with the sacrifice. A few years ago, Dana proclaimed he was going to go after pirates himself, and it was fun to imagine him in a suburban tree with his binoculars searching through windows for glitchy Russian streams. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that PPVs could be on the way out. The WWE, which is run by the same TKO ownership group as the UFC, came to that conclusion a couple of years back. The UFC has been tied to a dying animal, and it will be for five more PPVs in 2025. Still, you worry about the sport of MMA losing some of the vital distinction that made it. UFC Fight Night events, especially those held at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, have become skippable affairs. PPVs have always meant title fights, which the UFC has done a masterful job over the years of holding to high standards. To see belts change hands, you paid for it. Even if that feels a little heisty in 2025, it served to force a value in its structure and interest, to keep a premium on things. To give title fights away, even at a subscription fee? Perhaps the value scale loses some of its natural escalation. The greatest fear is that things blend together, and the sport plays out on a gray plateau. Will the UFC even be as interested in developing stars without PPVs to sell them on? The savings on the pocketbook can't help but be a welcome thing for fans, ultimately. And who knows exactly how things are going to play out? Lester Bangs declared rock & roll dead in the 1970s, and some 50 years later there's still a pulse. Right after TKO COO and president Mark Shapiro said the 'PPV model was dead,' White wasn't so quick to pull the plug. 'A fight will pop up that I never saw coming,' White told the New York Post. 'A star will pop up out of somewhere. Anything is possible. And you could do a one-off pay-per-view. I am going to be on pay-per-view this Saturday. Pay-per-view is not dead.' But it'll be dead in the sense we knew it. And what that means is a paradigm shift in the sport. Fighters will no longer be linked to PPV points, which has always been a story within the story. Diehard fans who've willingly paid for (or at least went through the trouble of illegally streaming) PPVs will now share the sport with the homogenized sports world at large. Which I guess is the root of things. Homogeny is the scariest thing in combat sports. We didn't miss Dude Wipes until we saw the Reebok fight kits. Then we understood some soul was being sucked out of our rogue sport. The closer to the mainstream the sport drifts, the more it loses some of its lifeblood. It's hard to be nostalgic about being gouged, it's true, but you can't help but be protective of what got us here. Or to remember that at one time there was some good bang for the buck. Back in the mid-aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation. From there it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how red Dana's face would turn as he tried to sell the PPV at the end of the televised portion of the card? Remember the names? B.J. Penn. Matt Hughes. Chuck Liddell. Tito Ortiz. Randy Couture. Georges St-Pierre. Quinton Jackson. Jon Jones. Brock Lesnar. Cain Velasquez. Conor McGregor. Ronda Rousey. Go through the posters of the past, and they were the special attractions, the names on the marquee for the numbered events. Those were some good parties we shelled out for. As MMA fans, they were ours. And if that passion is lost, those PPVs will seem like bargains next to the ultimate cost of business.
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21 minutes ago
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Major League Baseball announces dates of playoff games, in case Brewers fans are interested
Major League Baseball released its schedule for the upcoming MLB postseason, which should highly interest Milwaukee Brewers fans watching their 74-44 team possessing the best record in baseball midway through August. The schedule follows its traditional custom from past years, with the best-of-three Wild Card series beginning the Tuesday after the regular season ends. In 2025, that means the games will run Sept. 30, Oct. 1 and Oct. 2 (Tuesday through Thursday), with the winners advancing to the division series. The Brewers, if their record finishes among the two best in the National League, won't have to worry about that part of the postseason and will advance straight to the NL Division Series, which begins Friday, Oct. 4. That means the Brewers would, as it stands today, have four days off before their first playoff game, hosted at American Family Field. The NLDS series will run Oct. 4-11. The NL Championship Series will run Oct. 13-21, with the World Series from Oct. 24-Nov. 1. The World Series will air on Fox, while the NLCS and NLDS will run on Turner networks like TBS. The wild-card series will air on ESPN networks. Times and opponents, of course, remain up in the air. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Major League Baseball sets dates of playoff games; Brewers fans await
