One training camp battle for the Los Angeles Rams that is under the radar is at center.
Could Beaux Limmer potentially unseat Coleman Shelton in the starting lineup?
Rookies rarely crack the rotation under Sean McVay. Limmer started 17 games in his first year including two playoff contests. He did not make a single start during his sophomore campaign.
That's because the Rams watched the 2024 season end at the hands of Limmer in a missed blocking ***** ignment that allowed Jalen Carter to wreck a red zone possession in the NFC divisional round. LA responded by signing Coleman Shelton in free agency. Shelton may not be a Pro Bowl caliber player in terms of performance; however, he excels in the key area that Limmer lacked: communication.
Player

#limmer #shelton #rookies #mcvay

Look, everyone, you need to come to grips with the reality that Indiana really did win the College Football Playoff National Championship under Curt Cignetti, and it might do it again.

This isn't stopping.

Anecdotal, I know, but let me sum up the prevailing attitude of just about all the various media hits I've done since the Hoosiers had, arguably, the greatest season in the history of college football.

Wonderful story, amazing job done by Cignetti. Now Ohio State, Alabama, Notre Dame, and the other bluebloods will restore order, and Indiana will go back to waiting for basketball season.

Well done, Hoosiers, here are your commemorative t-shirts, off you go ...

Nope.
Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
It's not just that Indiana took a blowtorch to everything the stodgy world of college football knows to be holy, right, and true.

It's that now everyone - from Kentucky to UCLA to insert-your-Power-Four-school-here - has some glimmer of hope that maybe, with the right mix of miracles, can have the type of success that fans of most schools have been generationally conditioned to not dare dream possible.
It's also that the bar has been raised for the powerhouses.

Alabama didn't just lose in the College Football Playoff. Ala-FREAKING-Bama is still recovering from the atomic wedgie applied by ... Indiana?! It offends the sensibilities.

And if you think that's not sitting well for an Alabama, try Nebraska, and USC, and Florida and all the other traditional football schools that expect to compete for giant things every year, and can't.
But no, this doesn't necessarily mean Indiana will win the national ****** le again this year, or next year, or five years from now. It means that it'll at least be in the mix.

Ohio State doesn't win it all every year. Texas still hasn't won one since Vince Young. Notre Dame hasn't won one since 1988.

#alabama #done #playoff

The Los Angeles Rams have a stellar offense that is being commanded by one of the best quarterbacks in football. Despite their elite scheme and the play of Matthew Stafford, the team still needs playmakers and these three are in position to be that difference.
Here are three Rams who should exceed expectations in 2026, even as high as they might be.
Nacua is already one of the best receivers in football and yet he's still grossly underrated compared to his counterparts. Entering last season, there were some divided opinions about whether he was a top-10 wide receiver. His response was to continuously shine against the top defenses in 2025. Entering 2026, Nacua is considered one of the best but his current career track makes this the season where he goes from being among the NFL's top playmakers to being the best.
With Davante Adams being a year older and the Rams evolving their tight end usage, their only consistent receiving threat is Nacua. Naturally, he will see the majority of targets and with a scheme that can attack a variety of defenses, Nacua is the tip of the spear to the NFL's best passing offense. Even at Pro Bowl status, there's still another level Nacua could reach and 2026 is the perfect opportunity to reach it.
At some point, Trost has to see the field. He's essentially the Rams' main backup lineman. He will likely serve as the swing tackle and could challenge Justin Dedich and Beaux Limmer for the top backup role on the interior.

Underperformance across most of the Magnificent Seven is giving ETFs built around smaller stocks a rare chance to beat the S&P 500 this year.

Five of the seven megacaps are trailing the index in 2026. The S&P 500 is up 10.9% year to date through July 9. Apple, with a 16.5% gain, and Alphabet, up 14.8%, are ahead of it, but Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Tesla are all behind, and three of them are in the red for the year.
For most of the past few years, these stocks powered the bulk of the S&P 500's returns. They finished 2025 at roughly 35% of the S&P 500, and they sit at about a third of it today.
Their dominance is why plain exposure to the S&P 500, or to a broader fund like the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI), has been such a reliable bet. It also punished anyone who strayed from that setup, whether by layering on a mid- or small-cap fund like the iShares Core S&P Mid-Cap ETF (IJH) or the iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF (IJR), or by trimming the largest names with something like the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP).

But this year, with the megacaps stalling, those same funds have found an opening. IJH is up 15.3% so far in 2026 and IJR is up 21.6%, both comfortably ahead of the index. RSP has outperformed too, though by a slimmer margin at 12.4%.

Taken together, the data shows smaller companies outrunning their larger counterparts as a group. That may come as a surprise given the magnitude of the AI boom—a boom the Magnificent Seven are spending heavily on and benefiting from.

The boom is real, but so are the questions around it. What kind of returns will the massive spending on AI generate? And how will AI reshape the long-term business models and competitive moats for the Mag-7?

The bigger winners at the stock level have been the semiconductors. There is a chip name inside the Magnificent Seven in Nvidia, but it has sharply lagged the rest of the industry this year. Broadcom, which entered 2026 in the top 10, has also trailed its semiconductor peers.

Micron Technology is the one that broke through, muscling into the top 10 on the back of a massive run tied to memory demand. Names like Intel, AMD, and Applied Materials have also soared.

But because these semis were a relatively small percentage of the S&P 500 entering the year, their surge has not lifted the index the way the Magnificent Seven's gains did in prior years.

Of course, none of this takes much away from the index itself. A double-digit first half is a strong showing in its own right, and it would take far more small-cap outperformance to undo years of large-cap dominance.

Whether that continues will likely come down to the same thing that opened the door in the first place, which is whether the Magnificent Seven keep lagging.
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LOS ANGELES - Just when things look like they couldn't possibly get any worse for the San Diego Padres after leaving Chicago with their worst loss in franchise history, they've managed to prolong this grueling stretch of bad baseball.
Not only did they extend their losing streak to six games after their 12-7 loss to the Dodgers on Thursday at UNIQLO Field at Dodger Stadium, but it was the way it happened that makes it feel like a new low for the season, giving up 12 unanswered runs.
The Padres thought they had a glimmer of hope to get back on track facing right-hander Roki Sasaki, who not only was the only starting pitcher charged with a loss during their series last weekend at Petco Park but he is currently the Dodgers weakest arm in their rotation.
But all it did was even the playing field with San Diego having issues with their own lack of quality starting arms, and it continued to be the biggest issue with this ball club with struggling right-hander Randy Vásquez on the mound.
At first, things started to look hopeful for a team that has now given 65 runs over the last six games. Before the bottom of the second inning, the Padres were ahead 6-0 and had right-hander Roki Sasaki at a 60 pitch count.

The San Francisco 49ers enter the 2026 offseason with one of the best rosters built for another championship run.
But ****** ysts are quick to point out one glaring vulnerability that could sabotage their aspirations. To return to standard-bearing dominance, San Francisco must first solve its self-inflicted defensive crisis up front, says ESPN's Nick Wagoner.
Until proved otherwise: the pass rush and, by extension, the defense. In 2025, San Francisco finished last in the league in sacks (20), 31st in pressures (157) and 29th in pass rush win rate (29.2%). ... The pass rush is the key to unlocking it all, and if that group can take a step in the right direction, the 49ers should be much better defensively in 2026.
While those numbers are jarring for a franchise built on defensive line supremacy, context offers an immediate glimmer of hope. The Niners should be much improved simply by getting defensive ends Nick Bosa and Mykel Williams back from torn ACLs. Bosa projects to return at the beginning of training camp or soon after. Williams might be a bit further behind, but also has a chance to get back early in the season.
Just as important, the Niners added defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa via a trade with the Dallas Cowboys this offseason and drafted rookie Romello Height. Odighizuwa should be the best interior pass rusher the team has had since Arik Armstead's departure, bringing with him a 10% pass rush win rate that ranked ninth among defensive tackles in 2025 as well as 17.5 career sacks and 81 career quarterback hits. Height had 10 sacks at Texas Tech this past year.

We all know someone like Alexi Lalas. He’s the ranter whose rants never actually say anything, the life of the party at the party no one enjoys attending, the “big personality” who’s always misjudging the size of the room. He’s corporate America’s idea of a fun guy, the type of workplace “character” whose business trip hangover never stops him from being first at the hotel breakfast buffet, hair wet, Untuckit shirt untucked. He would absolutely dominate karaoke night at a conference on infrastructure finance. If only this were the limit of Alexi Lalas’s actual impact on the world, our culture would live in blessed ignorance of his existence. But in the real world Alexi Lalas is not a small-time menace working the floor at an infrastructure conference. In the real world Alexi Lalas is American soccer’s brightest media star, and he is everywhere this World Cup.
When Lalas’s Roger Ramjet jaw thrust into frame on Fox Sports at the start of this tournament, it’s fair to ****** ume that many viewers felt a sense of dread similar to that expressed in the Grand Theft Auto meme: “Ah ****** , here we go again.” Lalas’s ubiquitousness every World Cup is American TV’s answer to the Iran War: no one wants it, everyone hates it, and as it drags on, it inevitably becomes a face-saving exercise in damage limitation. But there was also a glimmer of hope: for this tournament Fox has enlisted a pair of elite European strikers, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, to terrorize Lalas and shake proceedings up. Steered by Rebecca Lowe, this new-look panel has promised a slightly more sophisticated approach to covering the tournament than the yahooing belligerence that has been Fox’s stock-in-trade at the last two World Cups.
Related: Take me home: why Country Roads has struck a chord at the World Cup
Zlatan is a dud, the late-career Samir Nasri of pundits – all minimal effort and visible exhaustion. But Henry is magnificent, which is no real surprise for those of us who follow his work through the Champions League season on CBS. And he has already begun to work his blood-twisting magic on the Maga hack at the far-right end of the panel. Brazil-Morocco, Netherlands-Japan, and France-Senegal have all had their admirers, but for sheer drama and eviscerating beauty they have not come close to matching Fox’s on-set ****** le fight. The French aristocrat vs the all-American idiot: Henry-Lalas is the real battle of this World Cup.
Henry’s now-viral humiliation of Lalas in the studio kickaround segment the other day – passing the ball with one foot then dragging it away with the other, leaving the defender with 96 caps for the US men’s national team to dance with thin air – was absolutely filthy, and in the arena of on-set debate the action has been no less processional. This has been less a battle than a slow-motion scalping, and the good news is it still has weeks left to run.

Luka Dončić appears to have lost 20-35 pounds in the 2025 offseason, as reported by media like Yahoo Sports and Sports Illustrated. This follows past criticism of his conditioning, with fans noting a slimmer look in recent photos. The change may improve agility and reduce injury