👟 Why Jayson Tatum Needs the Rarest Shoe Nike Has Ever Created

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🚨 Old-Man-Take Warning 🚨 

The NFL schedule release is dumb.

Don’t get me wrong, the creative teams at every franchise always knock it out of the park, but for the love of god, NFL, we don’t need a schedule release for the schedule release!

Just give me the games in one, easy-to-read graphic!

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Why Jayson Tatum Needs the Rarest Shoe Nike Has Ever Created

📉 Biggest Loser: You (Probably) Just Missed the Biggest Story in College Sports

🏆 Winner’s Circle: How MLB Saved Baseball With a 3-Inch Rule Change

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🗞 The Big Story

This is the rarest shoe Nike has ever made, but it could help Jayson Tatum recover from his Achilles tear in record time.

Kobe’s Injury: Twelve years ago, during the third-to-last game of the NBA regular season, Kobe Bryant suffered the same injury that Tatum suffered just this week.

However, in 2013 the average recovery time for an Achilles tear was upwards of 12 months and that wasn’t even considering the fact that Kobe suffered his injury at 35 years old, leaving most doctors to assume that it would be 4-6 months before he was even walking normally again, much less playing basketball.

But in true Kobe fashion, he wasn’t going to wait until the end of the 2014 season to make his return. Instead, he had surgery to repair his torn Achilles the very next day, just like Tatum did, and got to work rehabbing right away.

Ten days after the injury, Kobe was already out of a walking boot, and that very same week, he was walking in physical therapy without any pain or swelling.

Custom Shoes for Rehab: Now, part of the reason he could launch into rehab so quickly was because of these special shoes (above) that Nike custom-made for him in less than two weeks after getting injured.

Kobe would wear them as a part of his rehab in this anti-gravity treadmill that was initially designed to train astronauts to walk in zero-gravity. However, athletes have used them during their recovery process to build and maintain lower-body strength while reducing the impact of their own body weight on their:

• Hips

• Knees

• Ankles

Kobe even posted about these “Medical Mamba” shoes, which were specifically designed to have extra support in the heel. And even though they were never sold to the general public, it’s possible that Tatum could get a similar pair designed for him.

And given that Kobe was back practicing with the Lakers just seven months after his injury and played in his first game less than eight months after fully tearing his Achilles at the age of 35, I’d say the odds are pretty good Tatum will be following a similar recovery routine.

📉 Biggest Loser

The craziest story in college sports right now is one you probably didn’t hear about, but it could have massive consequences for your favorite teams.

GCU Men’s Volleyball: Grand Canyon University is home to one of the country’s best men’s volleyball teams, with the Lopes coming off a 2024 Final Four appearance and winning their first conference title in program history in what has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing team sports.

Not to mention, the team draws the second-highest attendance of any sport at GCU behind only men’s basketball, and they do it while operating with a $300,000 budget, just 1% of the more than $30 million in revenue the school’s athletic program generated in 2024.

Still, none of that was enough to avoid what happened next.

Program Terminated: Because on April 28th, during an optional meeting called by GCU’s athletic director, coaches, and players found out that the men’s volleyball team was being terminated. In a statement issued that same day, GCU cited “a rapidly evolving college athletics landscape.”

Now, while you might not care about the GCU men’s volleyball team specifically, you should care about what might start to happen across the college sports landscape.

Next in Line: Because once the NCAA finalizes its plans to require colleges to start sharing revenue with their athletes, athletic departments are going to start cutting any and all sports that don’t make them millions of dollars, and most of these casualties will likely be to Olympic sports, like:

• Track & Field

• Wrestling

• Volleyball

• Softball

• Swimming

Which don’t make a lot of money, even though they’re wildly popular.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that while many of these Olympic sports actively lose money for schools, there’s no proof that GCU Men’s Volleyball was one of those programs.

Instead, this decision seems to indicate that unless you play men’s basketball or football, no sport is safe from the chopping block starting this year.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

Major League Baseball just broke a 109-year-old record because of a forgotten rule, but it might have saved the entire sport.

Background: Before 2023, baseball was considered to be a dying game. What was once “America’s Pastime” was now losing ground to sports like basketball, soccer, and golf.

And this wasn’t just with casual fans.

According to a recent report from Sportradar, even 51% of self-described “hardcore enthusiasts” thought that the game had become too slow and too boring.

Now, we all know that this resulted in MLB implementing a pitch clock and banning defensive shifts in 2023, but there’s another rule they added that year that most people have already forgotten about, but it’s arguably had the most significant impact on the game.

See, even though the pitch clock has helped dramatically reduce the average game length by almost 30 minutes, none of that would matter if the games didn’t also get more interesting. This not only means fewer breaks in between the action, but more action in general.

Now, interestingly, this report by Sportradar points out that these rule changes seem to have increased both the number of home runs per game and strikeouts per game.

However, the stat that was by far the most shocking to me was the increase in stolen bases over the last two years.

Base Size Increase: This can largely be credited to the often forgotten 3-inch increase in the size of the bases, but even though most fans don’t notice the difference, that doesn’t mean they haven’t had a huge impact.

Between 2022 and 2024, the number of stolen bases in MLB increased by 45%. This not only helped increase the average number of runs per game to almost 9, but it also increased the average number of throwouts per game by over 17%.

Stealing the Spotlight: For context, the 3,167 stolen bases last season were the most in MLB since 1915, which not only translated to a 10.5% regular-season viewership increase but also, for the first time in decades, more fans in nearly every demographic say that they’re willing to give up time to follow Major League Baseball.

Click here to read the full report from Sportradar for free.

⏱️ In Other News

• The best NFL schedule release

• Why college teams are ditching NFL stadiums

• How much does it cost to see the G.O.A.T.?

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I went and watched Messi play in St. Paul, MN, last weekend. It was my first-ever MLS game, and now I think every stadium needs a maximum capacity of 20,000.

I’m not sure how we would avoid tickets averaging $1,000+ in some sports, but between the proximity to the field from every seat and the ease of getting in and out of the stadium… I think the future is going smaller, not bigger.