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After months of meeting to discuss things to discuss at future meetings, the people in charge of the College Football Playoff actually made a decision on Thursday, and it was one we’ve assumed they’d make for a while. After last year’s 12-team CFP gave byes to the four most highly ranked conference champions, this year’s will not.

Conference commissioners voted to go to a straight seeding format (with five spots still reserved for conference champions) in 2025.

There are still plenty of things to discuss regarding what the CFP will look like in 2026 and beyond — and good lord, don’t even get me started on how much I don’t like where we’re probably headed in that regard — but with the 2025 season starting in less than 100 days, we at least know how things will take shape this fall. Here are a few thoughts regarding these changes.


A 2024 simulation

To see what something might look like in the future, my first step is always to revisit the past. Last year’s 12-teamer, the first-ever genuine tournament at the highest level of college football, indeed handed out byes to conference champions and gave us the weird visual of having two different numbers listed next to the teams in the bracket.

Boise State, for instance, was ranked ninth in the overall CFP rankings, but the Broncos got the No. 3 seed as the third-ranked conference champ. Arizona State was simultaneously 12th and fourth. Granted, the NFL does something similar, giving the top three seeds in each conference to the winners of each individual division (which occasionally gives us odd pairings such as 9-8 Tampa Bay hosting 11-6 Philadelphia in 2023 or the 10-7 Los Angeles Rams hosting 14-3 Minnesota in 2024). But from the start, it was clear there was some dissatisfaction with this approach. And when both BSU and ASU lost in the quarterfinals — all four conference champions did, actually — it became abundantly clear that this was going to change. It just took about five months to actually happen.

Regardless, let’s look at how the 2024 playoff would have taken shape with straight seeding instead of conference-champ byes.

First round

12 Clemson at 5 Notre Dame (SP+ projection: Irish by 13.1, 79.4% win probability)
11 Arizona State at 6 Ohio State (OSU by 24.2*, 93.6% win probability)
10 SMU at 7 Tennessee (Tennessee by 7.0, 66.9% win probability)
9 Boise State at 8 Indiana (Indiana by 12.5, 78.3% win probability)

(* Here’s your reminder that SP+ really didn’t trust Arizona State much last season, primarily because the Sun Devils were a pretty average team early in the season. At 5-2 with a number of close wins and a sketchy-looking loss at Cincinnati without injured quarterback Sam Leavitt, they entered November ranked in the 50s. While they certainly rose during their late-year hot streak, they finished the year only 35th. They were genuinely excellent late in the season — just ask Texas — but they were 6-1 in one-score games heading into the CFP, and they were lucky to reach November with the Big 12 title still within reach.)

In last year’s actual first round, the four home teams (Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State and Texas) were projected as favorites by an average of 7.2 points per SP+. The average spread was Home Team -8.9. The results were actually much more lopsided than that, and that probably wouldn’t be any different with the matchups above — here, home teams are projected favorites by an average of 14.2. Changing to straight seeding wouldn’t have made the first round more competitive.

Assuming all four home teams win in this simulation, that gives us the following quarterfinals.

Quarterfinals

Rose Bowl: 1 Oregon vs. 8 Indiana (SP+ projection: Oregon by 5.9, 64.4% win probability)
Fiesta Bowl: 4 Penn State vs. 5 Notre Dame (PSU by 0.7, 51.8% win probability)
Sugar Bowl: 3 Texas vs. 6 Ohio State (OSU by 7.1, 67.1% win probability)
Peach Bowl: 2 Georgia vs. 7 Tennessee (UGA by 2.4, 55.9% win probability)

Interestingly enough, we got two of these four matchups in real life, but they were the two semifinals — Ohio State’s 28-14 win over Texas in the Cotton Bowl and Notre Dame’s late 27-24 win over Penn State in the Orange Bowl. Now these games take place in New Orleans and Glendale, Arizona, respectively. We’ll conveniently project those results to remain the same. Meanwhile, SP+ says there’s only about a 36% chance that the other two projected favorites (Oregon and Georgia) both win, but we’ll roll with that.

Semifinals

Cotton Bowl: 1 Oregon vs. 5 Notre Dame (SP+ projection: Oregon by 2.1, 55.3% win probability)
Orange Bowl: 2 Georgia vs. 6 Ohio State (OSU by 6.8, 66.6% win probability)

With those win probabilities, there’s only about a 37% chance that both projected favorites win, and this time we’ll heed that and project an upset: Conveniently, we’ll say Notre Dame upsets Oregon, giving us the exact same Fighting Irish-Buckeyes title game we got in real life.

Final

5 Notre Dame vs. 6 Ohio State

Again, we saw this one.


Who would have benefited from this change?

In all, using my pre-CFP SP+ projections from December, here’s a comparison of what each team’s national title odds were heading into the tournament versus what they’d have looked like with straight seeding.

Not surprisingly, Arizona State’s and Boise State’s odds would have sunk without receiving a bye, but their title odds were minimal regardless. The teams that actually ended up hurt the most by the change would have been 2-seed Georgia, original 5-seed Texas and original 11-seed SMU. The main reason for the downshift in odds? They’d have all been placed on Ohio State’s side of the bracket. Meanwhile, Ohio State’s and Tennessee’s odds would have benefited from the simple fact that they would no longer be paired with unbeaten No. 1 Oregon in the Rose Bowl quarterfinal. Obviously Ohio State handled that challenge with aplomb, but the Buckeyes still had to ace that test, then win two more games to take the title.

Beyond Ohio State and Tennessee, both Indiana and Oregon would have seen their title odds improve a bit with straight seeding, though for different reasons. Indiana would have gotten a first-round home game instead of having to travel to South Bend, while Oregon would have avoided Ohio State until a potential finals matchup.


Takeaways

Good: The No. 5 seed isn’t quite as uniquely valuable now

We never got to see the 12-team playoff as originally envisioned, with six conference champions earning bids from a universe that featured five power conferences. Instead, between the announced adoption of the 12-team playoff and its actual arrival, the SEC officially added Oklahoma and Texas to its roster while the Big Ten, with help from the Big 12, cannibalized the Pac-12. With only four power conferences remaining, we ended up with only five conference champions guaranteed entry, and with the distribution of power getting further consolidated (we still have four power conferences, but it’s clearly a Power Two and Other Two), that left us with an awkward bracket.

For starters, the new power distribution meant that the No. 5 seed — almost certainly the higher-ranked team between the losers of the Big Ten and SEC championship games — would get an almost unfair advantage. As I wrote back in December, “the odds are pretty good that the teams earning the No. 4 and 12 seeds (aka the two lowest-ranked conference champs) will be the weakest teams in the field …. Texas, the top-ranked non-champion and 5-seed, is indeed pitted against what SP+ thinks are the No. 17 and No. 30 teams in the country and therefore has excellent odds of reaching the semifinals.”

As you see above, Texas actually entered the CFP with better title odds (17.2%) than Georgia (16.6%), a higher-ranked team in SP+ and the team that had just defeated the Longhorns in the SEC title game. In theory, giving a team a bye and asking them to win three games instead of four would be a massive advantage. But in practice Texas’ odds of winning two games (against Clemson and ASU) were better than Georgia’s odds of winning one (Notre Dame). That’s not particularly fair, is it?

Bad: Conference title games mean even less now

Making this change would have indeed given the SEC champion better title odds than the SEC runner-up. That’s good, but it comes with a cost. In the re-simulation above, you’ll notice that both the winners and losers of the SEC and Big Ten title games ended up with byes and top-four seeds. That means there were almost literally no stakes — besides a quest to avoid major injuries like what afflicted Georgia — in either game.

Meanwhile, in the ACC championship, SMU lost to Clemson but barely fell in the CFP rankings (and, more specifically, still got in) because the playoff committee didn’t want to punish the Mustangs for playing a 13th game while others around them in the rankings were already done at 12. Add to that the fact that the straight-seeding approach diminished the above title odds for four of the five conference champions in the field, and it leads you toward a pretty easy question: Why are we even playing these games?

Commissioners of the power conferences have pretty clearly had that in their minds as they’ve discussed a convoluted (and, in my own opinion, patently ridiculous) new playoff structure that hands multiple automatic bids to each of the top four conferences: up to four each for the SEC and Big Ten and likely two each for the ACC and Big 12. With this structure in place, they can drift from title games and toward multiple play-in games within each conference. I absolutely hate this idea — if you want to wreck the integrity of the regular season, nothing would do that faster than a 7-5 or 8-4 Big Ten team potentially stealing a bid from a 10-2 or 11-1 comrade that was vastly superior in the regular season — but you can at least understand why the commissioners themselves, facing a world with diminished conference title games (and always looking for more TV spectacles), would try to get creative in this regard.

Straight seeding doesn’t change all that much. Ohio State was given a harder title path last year than would have existed with straight seeding, but the Buckeyes cruised regardless, winning four games by a combined 70 points. Meanwhile, even with a bye, Boise State and Arizona State weren’t likely to win three games and go all the way. The team that best peaks in December and January will win 2025’s title just like it did in 2024, we’ll enjoy ourselves all the same, and we’ll be facing another change in 2026 no matter what.

The countdown toward 2025 continues.

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.

Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.

A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.

Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.

“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.

The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.

“Dear Mr. Abbott …”

“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”

“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”

“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”

For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.

There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.

That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.

Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.

The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.

“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”

In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.

“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”

“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”

One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.

She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”

Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.

Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.

“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.

“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”

Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.

Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.

Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.

“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”

Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.

“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”

Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.

“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.

“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”

Griffin.

Pickett.

Newell.

Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.

When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.

“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”

But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.

“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”

“Southpaw – The Life and Legacy of Jim Abbott,” a new edition of ESPN’s “E60,” debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN; extended version streaming afterward on ESPN+.

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Cubs’ PCA on track for $1.1M from bonus pool

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Cubs' PCA on track for .1M from bonus pool

NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.

Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.

He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.

“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”

Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).

Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.

A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.

Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.

Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.

Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.

As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.

Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.

A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.

Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.

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