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AIPROPX ReportYahoo Sports · 1h ago
🇮🇪 Y! Sports AM: 75-year wait
🇮🇪 MAYO BREAKS THE CURSE
Mayo players celebrate with the Sam Maguire Cup. (Seb Daly/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
The year of the sporting exorcism continues. First, it was Indiana football breaking through after decades of futility. Next it was Arsenal winning its first Premier League crown in 22 years. Then it was the Knicks ending a 53-year NBA title drought. And now it's Mayo breaking a 75-year curse to win the All-Ireland title in Gaelic football.
Victory at last: Mayo won the All-Ireland final in 1951 but legend has it that they upset a priest when doing so. That resulted in a curse being placed on the team, which had lost 11 straight finals since 1989 before finally breaking through on Sunday with a win over Kerry. The scenes were absolutely incredible at Dublin's Croke Park, with tens of thousands of fans breaking down in tears and announcers losing their minds on the radio broadcast .
Mayo supporters celebrate their side's first goal on Sunday. (Ben McShane/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
Malachy Clerkin, Irish Times:
Nothing else feels like this. Croke Park untethered, the whole place afloat for an hour on a lake of the sweetest tears that were ever cried. The people of Mayo, raddled and belittled all their lives, looking at each other in wonder and collapsing into each other's arms. The decades of hurt and hope and loss all melting away forever.
They gave a Kerry team boasting the greatest player of the age a seven-point head start and still turned it around. They sent out a couple of teenagers to play in the forward line and watched them run all the old truths ragged and turn all the ancient voodoo inside out. Mayo 1-20, Kerry 1-17. Chisel it on the gravestones, scribble it in the sky.
Congrats from across the pond: Joe Biden, who pledged his allegiance to the team when he visited his ancestral home in County Mayo in 2023, toasted the win on Instagram . He was joined by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, who called himself "a proud son of County Mayo" in a congratulatory post on X .
Wait, what is Gaelic football? The strictly amateur sport* combines elements of football, soccer and rugby. 15 players per side compete on a rectangular pitch with an H-shaped set of goalposts at either end. Teams advance the spherical leather ball up the field with a combination of carrying, bouncing, kicking and hand-passing. There are three types of scores: Goals (ball goes into the net under the crossbar), points (ball goes over the crossbar between the posts) and 2-pointers (same as points, but the ball must be kicked from outside the 40 meter arc).
*Gaelic football is completely amateur in Ireland, meaning players compete for pride rather than pay. The funds generated from ticket sales (there were 82,300 fans at Sunday's match) are directly reinvested in local clubs across the country, many of them pillars of community life, particularly in rural areas, notes The Athletic .
🎓 STANFORD FOOTBALL SPARKS UNION PUSH
(Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
The momentum for collective bargaining within college athletics took another significant leap this week.
Driving the news: A group of Stanford football players are establishing the first-ever chapter of the College Football Players Association in a move intended to create a foundation for eventual unionization and collective bargaining, the association and players announced on Monday.
In the fifth year of the CFBPA's existence, Stanford became the first school to reach the membership threshold of players necessary to elect representatives.
What lies ahead is a long, arduous process of rallying players at more ACC schools and beyond to create chapters, eventually sign union cards and then, as a group, present to conference leadership.
CFBPA leaders are in active conversations with players from at least three other schools and executives are confident in the announcement of more chapters in the coming weeks.
Ross Dellenger, Yahoo Sports:
The creation of the Stanford chapter is noteworthy in a time of upheaval as multiple players association leaders, college executives and even congressional lawmakers attempt to bring stability and regulation to a college sports industry crippled by legal losses.
Conference commissioners, NCAA leaders and university presidents for years have publicly condemned any employment or bargaining model, but many of their coaches, and even athletic directors, are gravitating toward the concept out of frustration with the current environment.
In a way, some believe that bargaining may be to the benefit of the schools and conference, which for now find themselves in a rudderless environment of unlimited athlete movement, loose compensation restrictions and growing legal woes around athlete eligibility.
What they're saying: "The time is now to do something," said Stanford senior center Fisher Anderson, who expects players at other schools to follow their lead. "This is college football and it's increasingly becoming more like the NFL. At some point, we're likely going to need a CFBPA."
🦚 CHARTED: PEACOCK TURNS A PROFIT
It took only six years, but NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service finally turned a quarterly profit .
Sports, man: It's a monumental occasion for a platform with a rich array of sports rights, and it was on the shoulders of the NBA Playoffs and World Cup additions that Peacock finally clawed into the black.
📚 GOOD READS
(Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images)
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James' decision disappointed suitors in Cleveland, Miami and Minnesota, among other locales. But it might not have hurt anybody more than Golden State, arguably the biggest loser of the whole saga, both for losing out on adding James and for what coming up short in his decision-making calculus represented about the current state of play in the Bay.
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