—On3 ranks the 100 most impactful college football players for the 2026 season and includes three Cardinals: Isaac Brown (29), Clev Lubin (41) and Antonio Watts (67).
—The NBA Draft withdrawal deadline is Wednesday at midnight. I wrote about the 10 biggest remaining stay or go decisions here.
—The Louisville men’s golf team is headed to the NCAA Championships for just the sixth time in program history following a program-best second place finish at the Athens Regional.
—There had been chatter that this
game was going to be played on Saturday, Dec. 26 or Sunday, Dec. 27. With that not being the case, I wonder if Kentucky is planning on bringing the Louisville game back to its traditional spot in the week between Christmas and New Years.
—Donovan Mitchell isn’t making any excuses following Cleveland’s sweep at the hands of New York in the Eastern Conference Finals.
—The CJ’s Alexis Cubit takes a stab at projecting the Louisville football depth chart for 2026.
—If you missed Eric Crawford’s story from last week on the current financial situation at U of L, you should check it out.
—Louisville Report has a way too early preview of NC State.
—Malachi Moreno has pulled out of the NBA Draft and will be returning to Kentucky for next season, saving the Wildcats from having basically no frontcourt in 2026-27.
—You heard it here first like 10 years ago, Ja’Hyde Brown has the potential to be special at U of L.
—Wake Forest saw their revenue share from the ACC drop in 2024-25 for the second straight fiscal year. Here’s an interesting look at how they’re trying to address it.
—For the third straight year, it’ll be Trinity and St. X squaring off for the 7th Region baseball crown. Bullitt Central and Bullitt East will play for the 6th Region title. Both games will be played on Wednesday at Jim Patterson Stadium.
—247 Sports ranks Louisville football’s 2026 transfer portal class as the 13th-best in the country.
—ESPN lists Louisville as one of the 10 teams most likely to make the College Football Playoff for the first time.
5. Louisville: Louisville is trending up under coach Jeff Brohm, who returns for his fourth season at his alma mater. A season opener against Ole Miss is a chance to impress the selection committee with a win against a 2025 CFP team, and a Sept. 19 win against SMU could be against an eventual CFP top-25 team.
The same feature names Lincoln Kienholz as a “Heisman Darkhorse.”
—The decision to move the Kentucky Oaks to primetime has stirred Louisville locals’ growing resentment towards Churchill Downs.
—The NCAA opened an investigation of the Ole Miss football program the same day that Dabo Swinney accused Pete Golding of tampering with linebacker Luke Ferrelli. Louisville faces the Rebels in Nashville to open the 2026 season.
—Not having Louisville in the field sucks, but happy to see Cardinal alum and Louisville native Skylar Meade get into the field with his Troy Trojans squad.
—I am excited about Ferlandes Wright.
—On3 identifies the four most pivotal games on Louisville’s 2026 football schedule.
—The CJ’s Brooks Holton looks at the biggest questions facing Pat Kelsey as Louisville prepares to enter the summer workouts portion of the offseason calendar.
—NIL spending was supposed to slow down. Instead, college basketball keeps getting more expensive. Why? Brian Rauf attempts to explain.
The market just keeps quietly resetting upward.
Who is to say that, in 2030, we won’t look back on where we are now and say we were foolish for thinking we were at the peak of spending?
There is real evidence to back up that notion, too.
In 2025-26, the first year of its new media deal, the NBA is generating roughly $6.9 billion a year from its television and streaming partners. College basketball’s most valuable asset, the NCAA Tournament, currently brings in a little more than $1 billion annually through its deal. The rest of the NCAA’s championship inventory, the women’s tournament included, sits in a separate ESPN agreement worth around $115 million a year. Add it all together and the comparison is not particularly close. The NBA is pulling in something like six times what college basketball’s signature event generates.
That kind of gap would make sense if the audiences were just as lopsided. They are not.
The NBA averaged about 1.78 million viewers a game this season, its best mark in seven years, and there is no reason to undersell that. But college basketball’s best inventory does not trail those numbers — it beats them.
Duke’s win over Arkansas on Thanksgiving drew 6.8 million viewers, and Michigan State and North Carolina pulled 6.5 million on the same afternoon. The NBA had strong regular-season windows of its own, but its high-end nights generally topped out closer to three million. And then there is March, where the comparison stops being a comparison at all. The 2026 NCAA Tournament averaged 10.9 million viewers across three weeks, and the Michigan-UConn title game reached 18.3 million. The NBA’s regular season simply does not have anything that climbs that high, and the postseason fails to match up, either. Game 1 between the Thunder and Spurs was the most-watched Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals ever, and it brought in 9.2 million viewers.
College basketball is in a genuinely unusual spot because of this. It is a sport whose best games match or beat the NBA’s best games, and whose postseason operates on an entirely different tier, yet its national television revenue still comes in at a fraction of what the NBA commands.
That is not the profile of a sport that has run out of financial room, but rather the profile of a sport that has been underpaid relative to what it actually draws.
—Now on the verge of a playoff spot, the Louisville Kings are suddenly the hottest team in the UFL. All it took was getting rid of the Kentucky guys.
—Fran McCaffery seems to be just as much of an ass off the court as he appears to be on it. Who could have guessed?
—The CJ takes a stab at explaining exactly what Cardinal Ventures is and what it will do.
—I don’t think any of us knew that Sam was going through this, and it explains a lot about why his game looked so different in college than it did when he was coming out of high school. I’m hopeful he is able to continue his professional career after this year, but even more hopeful that he can find some effective relief for his condition.
—What were the top 10 Louisville athletics moments of the 2025-26 season? Brooks Holton weighs in with an obvious (I think, at least) choice at No. 1.
—Louisville is a finalist to land the services of Trinity safety Elijah Burns-Crump.
—And finally, we’re coming down the stretch in the Let’s Dance Louisville fundraising campaign. I am in fifth place out of 12 dancers and probably need about 8K in donations to have any shot at winning this thing (I am not banking on dominating the dancing). Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Donate here.
