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Will Leitch

Will Leitch

New Republic

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The NBA Playoffs Are Going to Be So Much Fun

All-Star Games serve many purposes: rest for weary players, a central location for everyone involved with a league to gather in one place over a long...

wednesday 5

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The NBA Playoffs Are Going to Be So Much Fun

All-Star Games serve many purposes: rest for weary players, a central location for everyone involved with a league to gather in one place over a long...

wednesday 4

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Thankfully, O.J. Simpson Was One of a Kind

A few years ago, back when Twitter was a place where you could have debates with reasonable human beings, a discussion arose: Would any modern-day...

12.04.2024 20

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Thankfully, O.J. Simpson Was One of a Kind

A few years ago, back when Twitter was a place where you could have debates with reasonable human beings, a discussion arose: Would any modern-day...

11.04.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Jalen Brunson Is the Star Knicks Fans Have Been Waiting For

The most fun sports story I’ve ever covered for this magazine was, unquestionably, Jeremy Lin’s incredible fortnight back in 2012. (A headline...

11.04.2024 10

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Jalen Brunson Is the Superstar Knicks Fans Have Been Waiting For

The most fun sports story I’ve ever covered for this magazine was, unquestionably, Jeremy Lin’s incredible fortnight back in 2012. (A headline...

10.04.2024 4

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Who You Should Root for in the Final Four (Not UConn)

It is unlikely that the women’s college-basketball national championship game will get better TV ratings than the men’s version. But the fact that...

05.04.2024 9

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

We Don’t Know Shohei Ohtani, and That’s Not Helping Him

“I’m very saddened and shocked that someone who I trusted has done this,” Shohei Ohtani said — through a translator, of course; Ohtani’s...

26.03.2024 7

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

We Don’t Know Shohei Ohtani, and That’s Not Helping Him

“I’m very saddened and shocked that someone who I trusted has done this,” Shohei Ohtani said — through a translator, of course; Ohtani’s...

26.03.2024 20

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Future May Be March Madness With No Cinderella Stories

It’s difficult to choose a defining villain in the world of college athletics; there are just so many candidates deserving of the title. But if you...

20.03.2024 6

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Future May Be March Madness With No Cinderella Stories

It’s difficult to choose a defining villain in the world of college athletics; there are just so many candidates deserving of the title. But if you...

20.03.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Aaron Rodgers Would Probably Regret Getting Into Politics

Every once in a while, you read a line in a news story that is so plainly self-evident, so thuddingly obvious, that it takes you aback — as if you...

13.03.2024 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Unlike MJ, LeBron Is Ending His Career With Dignity

On Saturday, LeBron James became the first player in NBA history to score 40,000 points. This is an incredible, almost mind-bending accomplishment. To...

06.03.2024 5

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Unlike MJ, LeBron Is Ending His Career With Dignity

On Saturday, LeBron James became the first player in NBA history to score 40,000 points. This is an incredible, almost mind-bending accomplishment. To...

06.03.2024 5

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Murder on My Running Trail

Last Thursday morning, a nursing student named Laken Riley, a junior at the University of Georgia, went out for her morning jog in Athens. Riley was...

28.02.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Murder on My Running Trail

Last Thursday morning, a nursing student named Laken Riley, a junior at the University of Georgia, went out for her morning jog in Athens. Riley was...

28.02.2024 4

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Slow, Painful Death of Sports Twitter

On Saturday evening, the Twitter/X account of ESPN superstar NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski — the most plugged-in reporter in the sport, purveyor...

27.02.2024 30

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Slow, Painful Death of Sports Twitter

On Saturday evening, the Twitter/X account of ESPN superstar NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski — the most plugged-in reporter in the sport, purveyor...

27.02.2024 30

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Women’s Sports Are About to Explode

The thing about truly special athletes — the ones we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives, the ones our kids will ask us what it was like...

21.02.2024 6

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Women’s Sports Are About to Explode

The thing about truly special athletes — the ones we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives, the ones our kids will ask us what it was like...

21.02.2024 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

A Super Bowl That Went From Dud to Dynamite

So many great moments in sports history, moments that seem like destiny in retrospect, were impossible to foresee or even necessarily understand while...

12.02.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Deep Blandness of Las Vegas Before the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is by far the biggest national television event every year, which can almost make you forget that it’s also a traveling road show....

08.02.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions Were Right to Trust Math

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that, in almost any field, from sports to politics to economics to media to parenthood, there are essentially...

30.01.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

6 Things We Learned from the NFL’s Season of Swift

How will we remember the 2023-24 NFL season? It’s possible that our primary association will be the Detroit Lions’ first-ever Super Bowl...

24.01.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Who You Should Root for in the NFL Playoffs (Not the Bucs)

After the frigid opening weekend of the NFL playoffs — the highlight of which was the Dallas Cowboys suffered a stunning blowout loss to the Green...

18.01.2024 10

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Victorious, Villainous Michigan Is College Football’s Future

On Monday night, the Michigan Wolverines defeated the Washington Huskies 34-13 to win their first college football national championship since 1997....

09.01.2024 9

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

How Michigan Became College Football’s Villain

In any other context, we’d all be rooting for Michigan to win the college-football championship next week. They’ve got a lot going for them, after...

02.01.2024 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2023

Nearly everything in sports in 2023 felt like it was about to end. It isn’t, of course: The Super Bowl is still happening next year, even if having...

27.12.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The 7 Most Important Athletes of 2023

It is perhaps telling that Google’s most frequently searched athlete of the year — actually, its most-searched person altogether —was not LeBron...

24.12.2023 10

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Shohei Ohtani Is My Favorite Athlete, But Paying Him $700 Million Is Bonkers

No matter how inured you are to the absurd money that’s thrown around sports, no matter how much you’d rather see the revenue sports generate...

11.12.2023 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The 10 Worst Things About the Florida State Travesty

At noon on Sunday, the College Football Playoff committee announced that the fourth spot in its four-team tournament, which begins on January 1, would...

04.12.2023 1

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

What the Sports Illustrated AI debacle is telling us

Editor’s Note: Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, the founder of the late sports website Deadspin and the author of six...

30.11.2023 5

CNN

Will Leitch

Michigan Won At All Costs and Your Team Would Too

The thing you need to remember about college football right now is that it’s all worth it — if you win. No matter what it takes, no matter how...

26.11.2023 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Bill Belichick Is About to Get Fired, and Nobody Cares

On November 7, 2016, the night before Election Day, Donald Trump, the surprise Republican nominee for U.S. president, spoke before an audience in...

14.11.2023 1

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Wembanyama Era Has Begun and the NBA May Never Be the Same

The NBA season is now two weeks old, and, for a league that lives in constant anxiety that its regular season is going to be perceived as...

08.11.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Is Frat-Bro Culture More Dangerous Than Ever?

Reading the news, you might think that every college student in America spends their nights protesting foreign wars, obsessing over arcane linguistic...

07.11.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

What Happened to College Basketball?

Imagine if the fate of a Major League Baseball team was directly connected to an NFL team that played in the same city. In this scenario, if the New...

01.11.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Banning Palestinian Flags Is Just the Beginning

For years, a 28-year-old man named Moon has attended every home game of the Major League Soccer team LAFC and the National Women’s Soccer League...

27.10.2023 4

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The NBA’s Player Empowerment Era Is Over

For the last half-decade, the signature buzzphrase of the NBA, which begins a new season on Tuesday, has been player empowerment. Players realized a...

23.10.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Travis Kelce Is the NFL’s Taylor Swift

Traditionally speaking, athlete-celebrity romances fall into one of three categories. There are the somewhat problematic but mostly harmless couplings...

16.10.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

Baseball’s Magnificent, Transformative Season

Baseball is a sport that exists to dissatisfy. As glorious as it can be (and, I’d argue, largely is), baseball is so rooted in tradition and...

02.10.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Knicks Are Being Smart About the Future, and It’s Weird

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a column for this magazine arguing that the offseason part of the NBA — free agency, trade rumors, the contract...

27.09.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

The Deion Sanders Hype Train Is About to Derail

One of the central reasons college football is in such danger is that it has sacrificed so much of everything its fans love about it — tradition,...

20.09.2023 2

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

This Might Be the End of Aaron Rodgers

On Monday morning, ESPN and Charter Communications settled a two-week stalemate over carriage fees, which some had postulated could change cable...

12.09.2023 3

Daily Intelligencer

Will Leitch

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