Matt Brown

Happy to hang up my cleats after 8 years and pass The Athletic voting baton to Ralph

Old Ironsides (trophy) - Wikipedia

🤔 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Iro...

Watching a college football game from 1998 with commercials is a reminder that before that one sudden year of endless Draft Kings vs. FanDuel daily fantasy commercials there was the 10-10-321 vs. 10-10-220 war

Not sure that anything can hit the childhood nostalgia sweet spot for me more than the 1997 Heisman race 30 for 30

Great story, Jon

Watching Pony Excess for the first time in a few years and just laughing

Part of me is going to kind of miss the hate mail — and anticipating where it would come from — after eight years

What a time

Really testing a quarterback’s poise

Probably need to log off eBay for a bit. I blame the recent @bryancurtis.bsky.social physical media pod

How much would college football teams sell for? Ranking all 68 Power 4 programs

As college sports continue to look and act more like the pros, here's a question: How much would Ohio State football sell for? What about Texas? Texas Tech?
We used real pro franchise transactions as a guideline for every P4 football team. What we came up with:
www.nytimes.com/athletic/650...

Remember some guys

Before it arrived today I hadn't seen this Katzenmoyer cover issue since 1998 and it's amazing how much of it feels familiar because of how addicted I was to CFB previews at age 10.

Linebacker glory days

College football 2025 quarterback tiers: Ranking the FBS’ projected starters from 1 to 136 We surveyed more than 40 coaches and staffers from across college football to support our assessments of the nation's best QBs.

For the last six weeks, we attempted the borderline impossible: to rank every projected FBS starting QB, from No. 1 to No. 136.

Today, we published the result of that attempt.

With intel from 40+ coaches and staffers across the country, we introduce The Athletic’s College QB Tiers: nyti.ms/3IMdwW

Barely, I am due for a rewatch

Ranking college football’s 100 best rivalries. Who earned the top spot? Rivalries form the backbone of college football. After months of research and debate, here's how the top 100 stack up.

So did working with @scottdochterman.bsky.social on his spectacularly in-depth Rivalry 100, of course

www.nytimes.com/athletic/646...

Reading our readers' favorite rivalry memories really got me fired back up for the college football season and to go down inescapable YouTube nostalgia rabbit holes www.nytimes.com/athletic/648...

What's the best college football rivalry? We ranked the top 100

Ranking college football’s 100 best rivalries. Who earned the top spot?

www.nytimes.com/athletic/646...

How many college football teams could have won a national title with Nick Saban? How many teams could actually win the college football national title? Let's play the what-if game with the peak version of Nick Saban.

I spent a lot of time and crunched a lot of different numbers to try to answer this very important question: What's the worst program that peak Nick Saban could have led to a national title? Michigan State? Louisville? Oregon State? Kansas?
www.nytimes.com/athletic/645...

Life Aquatic is underrated

Raising Arch: How Cooper and Ellen prepared Texas’ QB for the Manning family spotlight Cooper and Ellen Manning spoke to The Athletic about their rising star son, who prepared for an intense spotlight by avoiding it.

EXCLUSIVE: As Arch Manning prepares for his first season as the starting QB at Texas, I spoke with his parents on how they raised their son with the famous name who was destined to be in spotlight... while largely trying to avoid it. www.nytimes.com/athletic/644...

Watching the French Open

Ranking college football’s top 25 players of the 2000s: Cam Newton tops Reggie Bush at No. 1 Who has been the best college football player of the 21st century thus far? Bruce Feldman talked to dozens of experts to form his top 25.

Ranking college football’s top 25 players of the 2000s: who should be No. 1? Reggie Bush? Cam Newton? Joe Burrow? How high is Ndamukong Suh? Tim Tebow? Travis Hunter? Ed Reed?
www.nytimes.com/athletic/636...

Can UMass sell hope? Why college football’s losingest program believes it can win Best known for basketball success under John Calipari 30 years ago, UMass has won 26 football games in 13 years in the FBS. Can it change?

Since jumping to FBS, UMass is averaging one fewer win per season than the nation's next-worst team. I counted 228 butts in seats at kickoff for the spring game.
Why things have been so dreadful, and why I think there's a path forward to, at least, respectability:
www.nytimes.com/athletic/635...

Worthwhile eBay purchase No. 1 of the offseason

I am happy to confirm I had actually truly legit carbonara in a non-airport setting a couple of days ago