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Trick or treat.

On Monday night, we had to choose. Something sweet to consume or something clever that someone comes up with, maybe even something we’ve never seen before?

On Sunday evening at Martinsville Speedway, we weren’t forced to pick one or the other. We got it all at once. And that led to a rush that not even the biggest bag of sugar and chocolate could possibly supply. A surge of WTH adrenaline that felt so good it managed to accomplish what most believe to be impossible. For a couple of hours on an autumn Sunday, NASCAR enjoyed more buzz than the NFL. All thanks to Ross Chastain, who topped the field with the most reality-defying move seen from a Cup Series machine at NASCAR’s oldest racetrack.

In case you’ve been asleep or have had all your social media feeds muted, here’s what happened. Chastain, running behind Denny Hamlin on the final lap of the final race before the NASCAR Championship Four will fight for the title at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, knew that he had to beat Hamlin if he wanted to be included in that season finale quartet. So, the 29-year-old dropped the hammer like Cole Trickle, only it was for real. In a tactic that he later admitted was taken from EA Sports NASCAR Chase for the Cup 2005 on his Nintendo GameCube, he ran his No. 1 Chevy so high that the racecar rode the wall like one of those mechanical rabbits running on a rail at the dog track.

He pulled off what has since been recognized as perhaps the fastest race lap ever recorded at Martinsville, dot-dot-dotting his way around that wall a full two seconds faster than race winner Christopher Bell. He rocketed from 10th to fifth, edged Hamlin at the line and made the cut to be among the title contenders — alongside Bell, Joey Logano and Chase Elliott — one week from now.

Hamlin was stunned. Chastain was stoked. The internet was on fire.

If I’m being completely honest, though, it was a slightly different fire than I expected. Not from everyone. Judging by the texts and phone calls that I received from friends who never pay any attention to motorsports, especially in the fall, the awesomeness of Chastain’s move struck a chord and a funny bone with many.

That chorus of wows and WTHs from those who wouldn’t know a sparkplug from a wall plug is perhaps why I was a little taken aback by the comments that came from those who live with high-octane fuel in their bloodstream year-round.

Logano was not impressed. “It was awesome, it was cool. It happened for the first time. There’s no rule against it. There needs to be a rule against this one because I don’t know if you want the whole field riding the wall coming to the checkered flag.”

Neither was Kyle Larson, a guy who has spent his entire career running inches off the wall, but not up against it, at least not in a stock car. Well, OK, he did once, at Darlington one year ago and even brought that up on Sunday at Martinsville, saying that it was “embarrassing.”

Not surprisingly, Twitter tended to agree with the two former champions. Twitter usually agrees with the former champions. At least during those rare instances where NASCAR Twitter agrees with anyone.

But do we really believe that, because Chastain did what he did in a desperate moment to try to win a championship, now every single time that the checkered flag is shown that everyone is suddenly going to start riding the top of the outside wall like Tony Hawk on a city park guardrail?

Sure, we had never seen a moment exactly like this one. But we did see Carl Edwards unsuccessfully bang off of the wall at Kansas Speedway in 2008 to try to defeat the man who continually kept him from winning a championship, Jimmie Johnson. It didn’t work, but everyone laughed about it after the fact, once everyone was done applauding the guts that Edwards had shown, as ill-advised as his decision making may have been.

NASCAR old-timers still say that the greatest finish in the sanctioning body’s history, across all divisions, was when NASCAR Hall of Famer Richie Evans crossed the finish line with his right side tires all the way atop the wall and his Modified machine looking like Joey Chitwood at the state fair.

So, let’s think about this. Had the move we saw Sunday been executed by the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Cale Yarborough, Tim Richmond or any other sacred demigod of stock car racing, would so many people have been so offended? Because it was Chastain, who not so long ago was best known for being sponsored by watermelons, were people quick to dismiss the move as reckless as opposed to a badass move by a much more worthy legend?

If Chastain had attempted the “Pass in the Grass” in the 1987 NASCAR All-Star race instead of Earnhardt, would it have led to new rules instead of creating paintings of a moment that people still have hanging in their living rooms? If it had been Chastain who dive-bombed his way through the corkscrew at Laguna Seca in 1996 to beat Bryan Herta instead of Alex Zanardi, a driver who was praised for his willingness to win at all costs, would it have been declared “embarrassing?”

I’m not naive. I’ve been doing this for a while now. I understand that the rules are different for the stars versus the other guys. But I’ve also been doing this long enough to remember that there were a handful of people, including his rivals, who called out Earnhardt for what he did at Charlotte Motor Speedway. And yes, they don’t like to admit it now, but there were plenty of people in the Champ Car paddock who voiced their displeasure over what Zanardi did in the corkscrew.

I’ve also noticed that we still remember those moments because no one has attempted anything like them since. In other words, a moment is not a trend.

Every racer and every fan has the right to express concerns, especially when they are tied to safety. But it is also no coincidence that most of the people in the garage who speak up are also the ones who just lost. Whether that be Bill Elliott talking about Earnhardt in 1987 or guys who’ve been eliminated from the 2022 NASCAR playoffs speaking of Chastain.

What may or may not come from this we have yet to see. We might not see for a while. But please, I am begging you as a fellow race fan, take a moment … heck, take every night this week and keep watching Chastain’s move from Martinsville, over and over and over again. Enjoy it.

Because no matter who you are or who your favorite driver might be, that moment was amazing. Awesome. Unreal. The reason that we watch motorsports. To be amazed. To be wowed. And to be reminded of why they sell T-shirts with race car drivers’ faces on them.

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Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

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Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

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Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

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Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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