Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I’ll have a more thorough look at the Week 1 slate tomorrow, but I’m excited for the real start of the college football season tonight.
In today’s SI:AM:
🐶 Georgia’s football dominance
If you're reading this on SI.com, you can sign up to get this free newsletter in your inbox each weekday at SI.com/newsletters.
Will Jonathan Taylor play for the Colts this season?
After an NFL offseason marked by conversations about the value of running backs, one star back remains sidelined amid a dispute over money—and it’s hard to see how it won’t seriously harm his team.
While Saquon Barkley and Josh Jacobs agreed to new one-year contracts with their teams after refusing to sign their franchise tenders, Jonathan Taylor remains embroiled in a contract dispute with the Colts that shows no signs of resolution anytime soon.
Taylor is entering the final year of his rookie contract, but he’s seeking to avoid the franchise tag drama that Barkley and Jacobs dealt with by securing a long-term deal. But the Colts are not interested in signing Taylor to a multiyear deal—at least not right now—and so Taylor, after meeting with owner Jim Irsay, requested a trade late last month.
Indianapolis set a self-imposed deadline of Tuesday at 4 p.m. to find a trade partner for Taylor, and with that deadline now passed, the two sides have reached a stalemate. It’s a messy situation made even messier because the Colts opted to place Taylor on the Physically Unable to Perform list with an ankle injury. He missed six games last season with an ankle injury and had surgery to address the issue in January, but the belief is that the Colts may have placed him on the PUP list more as a response to his contract dispute than the months-old injury.
Because Taylor was not activated before the Tuesday deadline, he will be forced to sit out at least the first four games of the season, though he will be paid.
“It sucks for the Colts, it sucks for Jonathan Taylor and it sucks for the fans,” Colts general manager Chris Ballard told reporters yesterday. “It’s where we’re at, and we’re gonna work through it. ... Relationships are reparable.”
It stinks for Ballard, too. As Conor Orr wrote earlier this week, Ballard is “between a rock and a hard place” thanks to Irsay’s steadfast refusal to negotiate with Taylor and his apparent high asking price in a trade.
Ballard also put his foot in his mouth yesterday when he was asked whether rookie quarterback Anthony Richardson’s growth would be stunted by not having Taylor alongside him in the backfield.
“I don’t think it stunts his growth. No, not at all,” Ballard said. “I don’t know, did it stunt Andrew [Luck’s] growth without a special back?”
You mean the same Andrew Luck who took such a beating in his short NFL career that he decided to retire at age 29?
That’s the most confounding part of the whole Taylor situation. The Colts are a team coming off a four-win season with a rookie head coach (Shane Steichen) and a quarterback who is undeniably talented but also wildly inexperienced. Hiring the guy who helped turn Jalen Hurts into a star and drafting the most physically gifted quarterback prospect in years should be a recipe for success. However, the Colts are at risk of damaging that strong foundation by letting the Taylor situation hang over the locker room like a dark cloud—and the on-field implications of saddling the play-caller and quarterback with a weakened running game.
Indianapolis has tied its future to Steichen and Richardson. It would be a lot easier for them to be successful going forward if they can get off to a strong start. But right now, the Colts are more concerned with their short-term dispute with their All-Pro running back, at the expense of optimizing conditions for their two biggest offseason additions. It’s a shortsighted strategy they could come to regret.
The best of Sports Illustrated
Kevin D. Liles/Sports Illustrated
- Georgia is not only the best college football team in the country, the Bulldogs could be the best for years to come, Pat Forde writes in today’s Daily Cover.
- But college football is a vast landscape. Forde, Richard Johnson and Ross Dellenger also gave their thoughts on every team not in the top 25.
- The 2023 NFL season is just getting started, but Conor Orr already has a list of quarterbacks who could have new homes in ’24.
- Our NFL division previews roll on with Gilberto Manzano looking at the NFC West and Matt Verderame analyzing the AFC West.
- Nebraska did break the world record for attendance at a women’s sporting event, eclipsing 92,000 fans for last night’s volleyball match at Memorial Stadium.
- Ken Griffey Jr. was pitchside at last night’s Inter Miami game working as a photographer.
- Rays shortstop Wander Franco is reportedly facing another allegation of an inappropriate relationship with a minor.
The top five...
… scenes from Nebraska’s record-setting volleyball match:
5. The postmatch drone show.
4. The highlights from Nebraska’s three-set victory.
3. The view of the prematch flyover from the Nebraska state police helicopter.
2. The smiles on the faces of coach John Cook and his players during their tunnel walk.
1. Cook’s emotional postmatch interview.
SIQ
On this day in 1987, minor league catcher Dave Bresnahan pulled an on-field prank involving which object, quickly leading to his being released by his team?
- A whoopee cushion
- A potato
- An exploding ball
- A pocketful of flour
Yesterday’s SIQ: Hall of Fame NBA center Robert Parish, who turned 70 on Aug. 30, attended which small college that now competes in Division III?
- Centenary
- Warren Wilson
- John Carroll
- Washington & Jefferson
Answer: Centenary. The school, located in Shreveport, La., had about 700 students at the time, but that wasn’t why Parish toiled in obscurity as a college player. No, Parish was college basketball’s “Invisible Man of the Year,” as one 1975 Sports Illustrated article called him, because of some NCAA nonsense.
When Parish enrolled at Centenary (his hometown school), the NCAA had a rule called the “1.6 Prediction Rule” that combined players’ high school grades and standardized test scores to determine their athletic eligibility. Because Parish had taken a different standardized test than the one the rule’s formula used, Centenary converted his score and applied that number to the formula. Despite the school having done the same thing for 12 previous athletes, the NCAA ruled that the conversion was a violation of the rule. The rule didn’t say that scores could be converted, but it didn’t say that they couldn’t, either.
The NCAA responded by placing Centenary on six years’ probation, but offered to rescind the punishment if the school pulled the scholarships of Parish and four other players. Centenary refused. The twist of the knife came when the NCAA repealed the 1.6 Prediction Rule the same week it punished Centenary. But even though the rule was no longer in effect, the NCAA said the punishment would stand.
Because of the probation, Centenary played a sort of shadow schedule. Not only was it banned from postseason competition, but the NCAA also refused to acknowledge the Gentlemen’s statistics in any official publication. If you followed the vast landscape of college basketball just by looking at the NCAA’s weekly recaps, you would never read Parish’s name. But Parish was so dominant and so undeniably talented that he still went eighth in the 1976 NBA draft.
