Fantasy Football is almost here!

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🚨 Headlines

🎾 Back-to-back champs: Defending champions Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, the only traditional mixed doubles team in a field of singles stars, beat Iga Świątek and Casper Ruud to win the revamped U.S. Open event and claim its $1 million grand prize.

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🏈 Chiefs shooting scare: Someone fired a shot into Andy Reid’s office in 2024 while he was inside, the Kansas City Star reports. The Chiefs head coach was uninjured, but he now sits behind bulletproof glass.

⚾️ Epic LLWS comeback: South Carolina trailed South Dakota, 6-1, in the final inning before rallying for a 7-6 walk-off victory to keep their title hopes alive.

🏀 Attendance record: The WNBA has broken its single-season attendance record set back in 2002, with nearly 2.5 million fans across 226 games. And there are still three more weeks to add to that tally.

🏈 CFP tweaks criteria: The College Football Playoff Selection Committee has adjusted its schedule strength metric “to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents.” In other words: good wins will count for more and “good” losses will count against you less.

🏈 Fantasy Football is (almost) here!

The NFL season kicks off two weeks from today (!!), which for the fantasy players among us means the draft is right around the corner. But what’s your strategy? Who are you avoiding early and targeting late? For that and much more, here’s our fantasy football mega-preview.

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Player rankings: Let’s start with a basic lay of the land. Here are the top 20 players based on half-PPR scoring as ranked by Yahoo Sports’ Scott Pianowski, Justin Boone and Matt Harmon.

1. Ja’Marr Chase (WR, Bengals)

2. Bijan Robinson (RB, Falcons)

3. Saquon Barkley (RB, Eagles)

5. Justin Jefferson (WR, Vikings)

6. CeeDee Lamb (WR, Cowboys)

7. Christian McCaffrey (RB, 49ers)

8. Nico Collins (WR, Texans)

9. Amon-Ra St. Brown (WR, Lions)

10. Malik Nabers (WR, Giants)

11. Derrick Henry (RB, Ravens)

12. Brian Thomas Jr. (WR, Jaguars)

13. Drake London (WR, Falcons)

14. Ashton Jeanty (RB, Raiders)

15. Josh Jacobs (RB, Packers)

16. De’Von Achane (RB, Dolphins)

19. Jonathan Taylor (RB, Colts)

20. Chase Brown (RB, Bengals)

If only fantasy were so simple. You aren’t likely to be able to draft more than two of those guys, so now it’s time to talk strategy.

How (and who) to draft: There’s a lot of “here’s what the first round of your draft should look like” content out there, but those aren’t terribly helpful. Leagues aren’t won in the first round; they’re won by snagging undervalued guys in the middle rounds, identifying sleepers in the late rounds, and hitting on a few gut-instinct, “I just think this is their year” guys.

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• Sleepers: From Geno Smith and Jacory Croskey-Merritt to Keon Coleman and Chig Okonkwo, here are some of our favorite sleepers at QB, RB, WR and TE.

• Breakouts: Panthers QB Bryce Young, Chiefs RB Isiah Pacheco and Cardinals WR Marvin Harrison Jr. headline our 2025 All-Breakout team.

• Regression candidates: Remember, regression doesn’t have to be negative; it’s just a return — up or down — to the mean. Saquon Barkley surely won’t have another all-time great season, and Jordan Love should improve drastically from his QB17 finish last year.

Position-by-position: Each season provides a different landscape when it comes to positional depth and value. What does this year’s look like?

• QB: There are pros and cons to taking a signal-caller in the early, middle or late rounds. Whether you’re targeting Lamar Jackson, settling on Dak Prescott or hoping for a bounce-back from Justin Herbert, here’s how to approach drafting your QB.

• WR: The receiver revolution has reached another gear, as the position looks deeper than ever this season. Pay particularly close attention to these four guys whose situations or roles have improved immensely.

• RB: The hero-RB approach — drafting a star early, then waiting to add to your backfield — may not be the best move this year. Consider using two of your first 4-5 picks on RBs.

• TE: If you don’t land one of the “Big Three” (Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, George Kittle), you’d be better served throwing a dart at someone in the later rounds than settling for one of the many low-ceiling guys in the middle rounds.

Fantasy Football Draft Kit: Strategy, cheat sheets, mock drafts and more

⚾️ Batting average is making a comeback

Batting average has fallen out of favor in recent years as the rise of analytics has shown other stats are more predictive of success. But a quick look at the leaderboard begs the question: Is it making a comeback?

Hits equal wins: Five of the six division leaders are currently ranked in the top six for batting average league-wide. And the sixth isn’t too far behind, still ranked in the top 12.

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• Blue Jays (AL East): .267 (1st in MLB)

• Brewers (NL Central): .258 (2nd)

• Phillies (NL East): .257 (3rd)

• Dodgers (NL West): .254 (t-4th)

• Astros (AL West): .253 (6th)

• Tigers (AL Central): .249 (t-12th)

Plus: Four of the other six current playoff teams are also in the top 12: Red Sox (.252, 7th); Padres (.251, t-8th); Yankees (.251, t-8th); Cubs (.249, t-12th).

⚽️ The Marshall Islands are on the board

The Marshall Islands, the last UN-recognized nation on earth without a soccer team, has finally shed itself of that ignominious title.

0-2, but on the board: The tiny Pacific nation made its international soccer debut last week at the Outrigger Challenge Cup in Springdale, Arkansas.*

• That they lost both matches — 4-0 to the U.S. Virgin Islands and 3-2 to Turks and Caicos — was neither surprising nor important in the grand scheme of things.

• “Some of our squad hadn’t played 11v11 before, some had never played in a real match before,” the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation (MISF) wrote after the tournament. “And yet, in our second match ever, we went toe-to-toe with a full FIFA member for 90 minutes. Proud doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

A long time coming: The small territory in the North Pacific, comprising five main islands and 30 coral atolls between Hawaii and Australia, didn’t have a single full-size soccer pitch even four years ago, notes The Athletic ($).

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• That changed in 2020 when the MISF was founded with the dual goal of earning FIFA recognition and raising climate change awareness: 40% of Majuro, the capital island, is projected to be underwater by 2030.

• By 2022, the federation had hired a technical director: an Englishman named Lloyd Owers who is also now the manager. By 2023, soccer had been added to the nationwide curriculum in schools.

Fun fact: The Marshall Islands may not be recognized by FIFA yet, but they do have an ELO rating, and it’s not even in last place! In fact, they’re ranked ahead of six other nations and territories (out of 242): Kiribati, Tonga, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and Eastern Samoa.

*Why Arkansas? Due to a quirk of immigration, Northwest Arkansas has the largest Marshallese population (15,000) outside of the nation itself (40,000).

📚 Good reads

🏀 Ben Rohrbach: The Danny Ainge System: Ranking every NBA executive

Using baseball’s Sabermetrics, we categorized every trade, draft pick and free agent signing as a strikeout, walk, single, double, triple or home run, creating a rating (or OPS) of each executive.

🏈 Nick Bromberg: College football preseason rankings

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How will the upcoming season shake out? Here’s our preseason Top 25, with previews for every team.

⛳️ Jay Busbee: New PGA Tour CEO looks to a future of ‘significant change’ that may not include LIV Golf

Brian Rolapp has only been on the job for 18 days, but he’s clearly focused on a philosophy that change is necessary, and change is coming.

📺 Watchlist: Thursday, Aug. 21

⛳️ Tour Championship | 11am ET, ESPN+; 1pm, Golf

30 golfers will tee it up at East Lake (Atlanta) for the season finale, which unlike in recent years will not feature the maligned starting-strokes format. Instead, everyone starts at even par as they compete for a gargantuan $40 million purse, which includes a whopping $10 million for the winner, at least $1 million for the top eight and $355,000 for finishing in dead last.

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⚾️ Red Sox at Yankees | 7:15pm, Fox

The AL East rivals begin their third series of the season tonight in the Bronx — a four-game set with potentially huge implications. New York (69-57) and Boston (68-59) are currently separated by 1.5 games in the tight AL wild card race.

⚾️ LLWS | 3pm, ESPN

We’ve almost reached the end of the 78th edition of the Little League World Series. Chinese Taipei awaits the winner of Venezuela vs. Aruba (3pm) in the international championship; Connecticut awaits the winner of Nevada vs. South Carolina (7pm) in the U.S. championship.

More to watch:

• 🏈 NFL Preseason: Steelers at Panthers (7pm, NFL); Patriots at Giants (8pm, Prime) … The final week of preseason kicks off.

• 🏀 WNBA: Sky at Liberty (7pm, Prime); Mercury at Aces (10pm, Prime) … The Aces have won eight straight to climb into a tie for fourth place. Are they contenders?

• ⚽️ NWSL: Angel City vs. Orlando Pride (10:30pm, CBSSN) … Orlando’s Barbra Banda ranks third in goals (8); Angel City’s Riley Tiernan (7) ranks fourth.

Today’s full slate.

📺 ESPN trivia

ESPN debuts its new streaming service today, as the company breaks away from its cable roots and goes direct-to-consumer.

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Question: What year did ESPN launch as a cable channel?

Answer at the bottom.

📈 Charted: The pickleball boom

In 2019, pickleball was half as popular as badminton. Last year, it was more popular than baseball. What does its rise tell us about fads, fitness and culture?

Dive in: How pickleball explains American culture (Derek Thompson)

Trivia answer: 1979

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