Something happens every year in sports that leaves us questioning if there really is anything we can hold to be true. We think we know everything until we don’t. With only a month and a half left of 2025, here are the top five things that shook the proverbial sports wheel off its axis, so far.
5. LONG LIVE THE KING! The year started with a rematch of a Super Bowl from two seasons ago. Talk of a Kansas City Chiefs dynasty was being shuffled around at nauseum. If you weren’t a Chiefs fan, the constant narrative was exhausting and repetitive. On the other side of the equation, the Philadelphia Eagles had a year magnified by the oddities of controversy. Remember when AJ Brown was reading a book on the sidelines? Nobody gave Nick Siriani a coaching edge. But…the Eagles shelved the dynasty talk in the first quarter of the Super Bowl. They dominated the game on the defensive side, and they made Travis Kelce appear like he was past his prime. Say what you will, but the Chiefs have been the most dominant football team in the NFL for quite some time, and the Eagles closed that door with a crashing thud. Dynasty talks on pause.
Bill at UNC (photo courtesy FOX News)
4. What is this game? I don’t recognize it. (Oh, it’s major college football.) College football is its own entity. It is not to be outdone by the NFL or any other major sports league. The transfer portal and NIL have changed college football for the foreseeable future, and nobody feels that more acutely than college football head coaches. Hiring Bill Belichick at the University of North Carolina was a minor shockwave compared to Penn State’s dismissal of James Franklin. Brian Kelly. Mike Gundy. Bill Napier. The litany of coaches without a job is alarming. What is even more disturbing is that neither team has a clear idea of who their next coach will be. Lane Kiffin’s name has been floating around so much, it’s as if people have forgotten he still has a job. College football is a machine functioning at a high level, but it’s dangerously close to functioning out of its own control. With so much talk of whether Nick Saban or Urban Meyer would come out of their retirement to coach, college football is grasping for coaching straws.
3. The NFL draft never fails to disappoint, and the Browns never fail to surprise. Pick number 144—Shedeur Sanders for the Cleveland Browns. Sports media couldn’t understand why Sanders had fallen so far down the draft board. But he did. What was even more interesting was that the Browns had picked Dillion Gabriel before that, and Deshaun Watson is still collecting money from the Browns but sitting on the bench. Leave it to the Browns to take another quarterback and at number 144, no less. Interestingly enough, Sanders hasn’t even made it to the field. Maybe not surprising at all. A significant portion of the reasoning behind Sanders’ downfall was due to his off-field antics more than his on-field ability. There have been a lot of words used to describe Sanders, and a lot of them have not been complimentary. He, himself, said he was better than half the quarterbacks currently starting in the league. But he hasn’t started. It’s not like the Browns are having a great season either. Please leave it to the Browns to draft two quarterbacks, trade Joe Flacco to the Cincinnati Bengals, and still seem lost at the position. Drafting Sanders at 144 was shocking, but it was seemingly because it still doesn’t make sense at all.
Chauncy on the sidelines before he was sidelined (photo courtesy Bloomberg.com)
2. You can bet on the NBA (No, don’t do that.) The NBA has faced accusations of gambling for a long time. Even with legalized gambling, the league has desperately tried to distance itself from the possibility that games are being thrown in any way. Then the FBI blew that thinly constructed wall, the NBA had crafted, into the water. Chauncey Billups, a Pistons legend and head coach for the Portland Trailblazers, had been heavily involved in an illegal gambling scheme for quite some time. The way it was described read like a scene out of Goodfellas. The mob was reportedly involved. Other players were reportedly involved. It was the opposite of what Adam Silver wanted. All those conspiracy theories about poker tables and people making alleyway deals seemed like fact and not fiction. It’s not necessarily shocking that illegal gambling is a thing, but, shockingly, the NBA itself seemed shocked by it. Greed is a thing that haunts the American framework, and when you add millions to the already shaky ground…draw your own conclusions.
1. Naw! This can’t be happening. In the wee hours of a February morning, the basketball world thought it was in the middle of a ruse. Maybe an early April Fool’s joke. Luka Doncic was being traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. The Dallas Mavericks traded their franchise player?! One year removed from Luka and the Mavericks being in the NBA finals, the Mavericks brass had decided that they had had enough of their superstar. They didn’t believe he was going to lead them to a championship, and they weren’t going to give him a super max either. Luka was perhaps more shocked than anyone else. His tears, on the night he returned to play in Dallas, made the grief and heartbreak still very much real. Heck, Dallas fans were still grieving the loss of their greatest player since Dirk Nowitzki. Whatever you want to say about Luka’s weight, habits, or defensive output, through all that, he still led a team to the NBA finals. One team will live to regret their decision. And one day, someone will ask you what you were doing when Luka got traded? And the obvious answer is, we were all sleeping. Everyone but Nico Harrison and Rob Pelinka.
Postscript: We should never be so removed from the reality that sports figures are human beings as well. Let us learn from their tragedies.
The passing of Jets legend Nick Mangold and Dallas Cowboys player Marshawn Kneeland deserves to be noted here. Although there were different circumstances for both, their passings left heartbreaking effects.
Great article