Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

It’s been a busy week offline for me but I’m glad to still be able to get this edition out. Sorry for being a day later than usual. So let’s get to it!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s Juan Soto.

It makes complete sense that the Mets signed him to a 15-year contract paying him an eye-watering $765 million. No deferrals or anything, just cold hard cash.

Baseball players work in a market where the very best of them will almost always keep pushing salaries exponentially higher.

Soto is a generational talent. He just turned 26 years old and already has six-and-a-half seasons under his belt. He is already on track for a Hall of Fame career. He has a career .421 on-base percentage, the best rate of any active player. His 201 career home runs are 7^th -most of anybody since he debuted. In his weakest season, when he hit for just a .242 average, he still topped a .400 on-base percentage.

If you have a player like this, you never let them go. You bend over backward to accommodate them. You dedicate every ounce of energy to building this guy a winner.

Mets owner Steve Cohen understands that. Like legendary Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Cohen knows you have to spend money to make money and earn wins. Other teams may try all sorts of savvy business moves to eke out a win here or there. Cohen plays the old-fashioned way, buying up as much elite talent as he can.

Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner does not understand this, despite literally growing up watching his dad George Steinbrenner apply this principle and win seven World Series titles in just under 40 years of owning the team. Hal has run the club for 15 seasons and has zero. 

Why? Well, the Yankees under Steinbrenner like to operate as if they are a mid-market team. Gone are the days of knowing the Yanks will pay anybody in an effort to always chase a title. Now, fans watch the Bronx Bombers try to eke out wins through business moves. But every move builds a talented but woefully incomplete team.

All of the worst Yankee excesses—the facial hair policy, the strict “no-fun” attitude—made sense when they were the gold standard. Now, we see emerging reporting that suggests that may have been a factor in driving Soto away.

Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported after Soto signed with the Mets that the Dominican star had negative feelings about the club as far back as the spring, when a security guard removed one of his parents from an area of Yankee Stadium. The same security staffer removed Soto’s chef and driver, forcing them to stand out in the rain.

Beyond the off-the-field drama, the Yankees have shown time and time again that the days of raining cash are over for them. Sure, they may chase after some consolation prize free agents. Tuesday’s signing of former Braves star pitcher Max Fried being the first of presumably multiple examples.

But they let the best hitter of his generation walk to their crosstown rivals, their “little brothers,” because they decided to prioritize making money over winning and made the mistake of forgetting how much money you can make as a winner.

When I was a little kid, I signed up to be a Yankees fan. In return for rooting for the “Evil Empire,” I expected a team that would relentlessly chase greatness. They were an institution you could trust on that front.

In a world where institutions are collapsing, so have the Yankees. Nowadays, they are no different from the penny-pinchers of the league. Had I known this would happen, I might have just gone and pulled for the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Oakland Sacramento A’s. At least they don’t pretend they’re still big spenders.

For the next decade-and-a-half, I and all the other Yankee fans will have a reminder of what it’s like to have an owner who embodies the George Steinbrenner approach to good team ownership. It’s just that it won’t be in the Bronx. It’ll be across town.

My Reporting

The College Football Playoff bracket is out! 12 teams are in. Big names including Alabama and Miami are not among them, while SMU convinced the committee to let them in with a strong performance in a loss, taking Clemson to the last seconds of the ACC Championship this past weekend.

While this is the first year of the 12-team playoff, the remaining bowl games follow the same process as usual. Once the bowls know which teams are eligible but not claimed, the race is on to create 36 non-playoff bowl game matchups.

It’s one of the best times of year. As life slows down for the holidays, you can have pointless college football on all day. And out of the pointlessness, we draw meaning.

Players may be donning the uniform for the last time. They may be looking for bragging rights. Degenerate gamblers may want a payday. And diehard fans, the real sickos out there, want a good matchup.

Enter the Sickos Committee.

They are a group who track the “unconventionally appealing” parts of college football. That can mean a matchup between two very bad teams who both feel they need a win. It could be a game with a team that runs an unusual playbook, such as teams who run the option. It could involve teams who emphasize one part of the game at the expense of another (like a team that has a high-powered offense but basically no defense.) Maybe there’s a bizarre rivalry trophy, like a cranberry scoop or a skillet.

The weirder and wilder it is, the more the Sickos Committee is likely to love it.

The project started out of a Discord group of college football fans trying to piece together life in 2020, during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Some people started making sourdough bread, some people started podcasts. We started a Discord,” said Sickos Committee co-founder Jordan Edmonson.

He sat down with me yesterday for a chat about how it came about and looking ahead to the bowl games.

In a nutshell, the Sickos Committee does its best to chronicle everything weird in college football. College Gameday and games on ESPN, CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox may funnel you toward the big names.

The name comes from a classic comic done by The Onion. A family sits at home watching in horror in a world where drugs are legalized, as TV crime dramas have nothing to do. As the family cries, in the window is a man with a five o’clock shadow and a black shirt reading “Sickos.” He says, “Yes… Ha Ha Ha… YES!”

In an agreement with the comic’s creator Ward Sutton, who drew it under the pen name “Stan Kelly,” he earns proceeds from their merchandise and created special versions specific to the Sickos Committee.

Now, they have thousands of followers across social media platforms and run an open monthly poll that gets a ton of respondents.

Edmonson is officially the Vice President of Graphic Design and Data Science for the Sickos Committee, “but it’s all made up,” he tells me as he describes his title.

Edmonson and co. are the types to be ignoring a big SEC or Big Ten showdown, instead watching a stream of a local El Paso TV station showing the New Mexico State vs. UTEP game. In fact, that was one of the first games that brought what’s now the Sickos Committee together.

“This is as old as you can imagine. The history is brutal,” he told me.

Edmonson says a lot of this is available through academic libraries, with school newspapers and local letters to the editor documenting absurdities.

He responded to something I brought up in Edition 19 last week, namely college football rivalry games ending with fights.

“It’s never been civilized. That’s part of the fun of this,” he said.

One example he brought up was an early rivalry showdown between Iowa State and Iowa. Iowa State pulled off its first win in nearly a decade in the 1906 matchup, winning, get this, 2-0. Then the celebration got crazy.

“They opened the army stocks in the town, pulled out barrels of oil and black power, and blew up their football field in celebration at two in the morning,” Edmonson said. “It’s great!”

And just wait until you hear the Harvard-Yale story from over a century ago of a player who may have been… ummm… pleasured (?) mid-game. He scored and then he scored.

Full conversation is back at the top of this section. 

Even now, bowl season is the embodiment of what the Sickos chase. So many smaller-time teams get their days in the sun.

So do the brands that sponsor them, who take the opportunity to go as unhinged as possible.

A recent Sickos Committee favorite has been the Duke’s Mayo Bowl and Tubby, the googly-eyed tub of mayonnaise that serves as the game’s mascot. Instead of Gatorade, players dump mayo on their coaches.

Edmonson told me December 28 is the day you’ll probably want to set aside for peak Sicko action. 

That day includes the Pop-Tarts Bowl, where Iowa State and Miami will square off in Orlando. In addition, the mascot of the game will be on his quest. Last year, the game drew extra social media attention because of its mascot, a smiling Pop-Tart named Strawberry hell-bent on committing suicide.

Throughout the game, the Pop-Tart tried to jump into a toaster to fulfill his dream of being toasted and eaten.

After the final whistle blew, Strawberry received his wish, holding a sign that said “dreams really do come true” while getting lowered into a giant toaster as “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer blared at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium. Players on the winning Kansas State team then chowed down on a smaller edible version.

@espn

“We’ll always love you strawberry.” 🥹 #football #poptarts #mascot #cfb

BYU and Colorado will have an entertaining on-field matchup that day in the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio. Heisman Trophy finalist Travis Hunter will lead Colorado as BYU will look to rely on quarterback Jake Retzlaff, who we documented back in Edition 16 of the newsletter for being a rare “B-Y-Jew.”

But if you think the fun stops there, just wait.

Many bowl games have strange names constantly changing as sponsors come and go. The Beef O Brady’s Bowl. The Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl. The Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl. And of course, the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl.

This year, a new contender arises on December 28^th . And it may be the strangest name of them all.

Miami [Ohio] will face Colorado State in the newly renamed Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop.

The game is the first bowl game to feature an alcohol brand as sponsor and plans to create a first-of-its-kind NIL program to pay players involved in the game.

It will be played in Tucson, Arizona, on the campus of the University of Arizona. You can almost certainly expect Snoop Dogg to be there. And if they come remotely close to the sponsorship excesses of Pop-Tarts and Duke’s Mayo, you will absolutely want to tune in and see what Snoop does that day.

And I can 100% confirm, Sickos Committee is worth your time and both a great gateway into college football and a great way to go from casual to sicko about it. They’re on YouTube, BlueSky, Substack, pretty much everywhere.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

New York Football: New York’s NFL team is on fire, despite a tough 44-42 loss in Los Angeles to the Rams. When your quarterback throws for 342 yards and three touchdowns, then rushes for three more, you can still feel pretty good about your prospects going forward. When he literally sets the fantasy football record for most points in a game accumulated by a quarterback, things are great.

Except none of this is the reality for fans of teams based in the New York City area. This is life for the Buffalo Bills and quarterback Josh Allen.

New York’s teams, the New Jersey-based Giants and Jets, are steaming hot garbage. As a plane flew overhead urging Giants owner John Mara to address the “dumpster fire,” the Giants managed 11 points. Quarterback Drew Lock, who started the season as a third-string QB option, started the game 0-9 on his pass attempts.

@bleacherreport

“Mr. Mara enough - plz fix this dumpster fire” 😭 (via SNYGiants/X) #nfl #football #giants #johnmara #metlifestadium

The Jets, meanwhile, have played football that evokes “gangrene” more than “Gang Green.” They fell out of playoff contention for the 14^th straight season with Sunday’s loss to the Dolphins. They have had five games this season where they have lost a lead in the fourth quarter, including on Sunday.

Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson was flummoxed.

“When you’re up in the fourth quarter all of a sudden it starts to feel like we have a losing problem,” Wilson told reporters postgame, “like a gene or some shit.”

I’m not sure whether Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers believes in losing genes, or any genes for that matter, the Jets will probably be looking for a new quarterback come 2025. Considering the team has had a dozen different starters in the last ten seasons, what else is new?

Beware the SEC: South Carolina and Tennessee each earned statement wins in the early going of the women’s college basketball season. Top teams are playing in tournaments, showcases, and other major non-conference matchups, and the SEC’s most established teams each emerged with a big win this weekend.

3^rd -ranked South Carolina blew out TCU on the road Sunday, winning 85-52 over the team ranked 12^th in the country coming in. Gamecocks forward Ashlyn Watkins put an exclamation point on the win with a dunk, her third in three seasons. Guard Mi’Laysia Fulwiley led the way with 20 points.

TCU had entered undefeated at 9-0, led by former Louisville and LSU guard Hailey Van Lith and graduate transfer center Sedona Prince, who you may remember for posting a viral video in 2021 showing the disparity between women’s and men’s facilities at their respective NCAA tournaments.

Van Lith led the way against South Carolina with 21 points but was left as the only option as the Gamecocks stifled the Horned Frogs’ offense. Prince finished with six points.

Unranked Tennessee earned a major 78-68 win over 17^th -ranked Iowa. The Hawkeyes were still undefeated in their first season without star guard Caitlin Clark, but ran into trouble against the Lady Vols.

Transfer guard Lucy Olsen led Iowa with 23 points, while post player Addison O’Grady added 17 points and 11 rebounds, but the Hawkeyes shot just 21% from 3-point range, making just three of their 14 attempts.

The Vols grinded out a win, with guard Talaysia Cooper scoring 23 points and adding 6 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 blocks while making 10 of 22 shots. Guard Tess Darby came off the bench to score 11 points, including making three of her six 3-point attempts.

While Iowa had the better field-goal percentage and both made more free throws and grabbed more rebounds, Tennessee majorly won the turnover battle, forcing a staggering 30 Iowa turnovers while only turning the ball over nine times themselves.

The win vaulted Tennessee into the AP Top 25 rankings this week.

If first-year coach Kim Caldwell can get more stifling defensive performances like this out of the Vols, they may be a serious threat in the SEC and the NCAA Tournament this season.

An Overdue Recognition: Baseball Hall of Fame voting results usually come out in January, with classes honored in the summer. But in the late fall, members of the Hall of Fame’s veterans committees vote on a rotating set of baseball eras, to give a new path into Cooperstown for players who fell off the ballot long ago. 

The Classic Era Committee voted in two honorees who have waited decades for this moment, including one who received it a few years too late.

Dick Allen and Dave Parker are now Hall of Famers. Allen and Parker were two Black men who made waves with their play in an era where Black players still struggled with racism.

Allen hit 351 career home runs in 15 seasons, earning seven All-Star appearances, winning the 1972 American League MVP Award and leading the AL in home runs twice. In an era where offensive production hit its lowest levels since the Dead Ball Era during and before World War I, Allen was a slugger who racked up five seasons with 30 or more home runs.

Parker came up a few years later, becoming a mainstay of the Pittsburgh Pirates team that won the 1979 World Series and bouncing around a few clubs throughout the 1980s.

Like Allen, Parker was a seven-time All-Star and an MVP Award winner, winning the National League honor in 1978. But Parker could hit for average, too. He won three Silver Slugger awards and two NL batting titles. Plus, his cannon of an arm helped him throw out 72 runners from right field in the final five years of the 1970s and helped him earn three consecutive Gold Glove Awards from 1977 to 1979.

Both faced horrible abuse from fans and racism in their careers. As a minor leaguer in 1963, Allen played in Arkansas in the state’s first desegregated baseball game. Gov. Orval Faubus, the one who ordered a barricade to block the Little Rock Nine from integrating Little Rock Central High School just six years earlier, threw out the first pitch.

Things weren’t much better in Philadelphia. Allen took to wearing a helmet out in the field because of the constant objects thrown at him.

Parker earned scorn for being one of the first players to pull in a $1 million contract in the early days of free agency. When he struggled in 1979, he received letters telling him to “go back to Black Africa.” As Tom Verducci reminded in his Sports Illustrated piece on the vote, Parker kept the letters as inspiration.

In the years that followed, Parker still faced abuse, with fans throwing everything from steel valves to batteries to a five-pound sack of nuts and bolts at him.

Allen died in 2020 and won’t be able to be there in Cooperstown to receive his round of applause.

Parker has been suffering with Parkinson’s disease for over a decade. While he still works to raise money and awareness in the fight for a cure, the Hall made sure Parker could earn one more win.

Something Good I Ate

Eight years ago, I drove across America with my college roommate. When we visited Austin, Texas, we stopped at Torchy’s Tacos, a chain with most of its locations in Texas and nearby states.

We were floored by the taste of the tacos and for years, I wished that I might live close to one. Over the weekend, we discovered that that had happened without me knowing. There is now a Torchy’s in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

On Saturday, my fiancée and I drove out to Rockville to see if they were as good as we remembered.

They absolutely were.

I ordered two: the Trailer Park, served trashy, i.e. a soft taco with a fried chicken tender, green chiles, pico de gallo, shredded cheese, queso and poblano sauce. And the Republican, with smoked beef brisket, barbecue sauce, crispy onions, grilled corn relish, cilantro and chipotle sauce.

They were both so full of flavor, so rich and such a perfect click with my taste buds that I was transported to another place while eating them.

I didn’t even think to snap pictures until halfway through, so not the best angles, but definitely the best flavors.