Monday means more Pablo! Today, the pair discuss the Los Angeles Dodgers’ powerhouse player Shohei Ohtani who, according to the Atlantic, just had “A Truly Awesome Performance” this Friday against the Milwaukee Brewers. Sadly, not everyone in the sports world is as great a run as Ohtani. Bill Belichick and the North Carolina Tar Heels, for example, are managing to lose to everyone and anyone. Everyone is asking if the University of North Carolina will keep Belichick until the end of the season…including the university itself.
What’s more concerning than Belichick’s record, though, is the team’s General Manager’s, Michael Lombardi, fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia. What business does a public university have dealing with authoritarian nations? Pablo and Jen discuss all this and more, in the latest episode of Offsides with Pablo Torre.
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out .
The transcript below has been edited slightly for clarity.
Jen Rubin
Hey, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre. Pablo!
Pablo Torre
It’s been a weekend, Jen. It’s been a weekend. It’s been a year of a weekend. Happy to be back.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Exactly. In more ways than one, and for sports fans, it’s all there. There’s too much to watch, and that’s why I am like one of those flies with my multi-screen on the TV, meaning I have an attention span of nothing.
Let’s talk baseball. What is your take on, first of all. a really extraordinary phenomenon. We have never had anyone like Shohei Otani, in baseball, or at least not since Babe Ruth. Talk to us a little bit about a game in which he had 3 home runs and had 10 strikeouts. That’s, like, superhuman stuff.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, it’s the greatest game, I think, that’s ever been played, in the national pastime. I am a Yankee. apologist, Jen. You know this about me.
Jen Rubin
Yes!
Pablo Torre
Ohtani is doing things that Babe Ruth could only dream of. This game, in which he does exactly what you described, is the best pitcher and the best hitter, is an echo, of course, of what he had proven already to us, which is that he can be that over the course of a single season, both at the same time, but to do it in the postseason is where, you know, we always talk about this, what happens under pressure. What happens when a guy who was never allowed to be in the postseason because the team was so bad in Anaheim slash Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, organization finally gets to be there. And the Dodgers, your Dodgers, it is… it is unfair.
I want a federal investigation into how this is possible, that the Dodgers not just have, are not just throwing out, Ohtani, it’s this pitching staff, which is doing stuff that we just don’t see in baseball anymore. I mean the Ohtani thing, greatest game ever. The pitching staff of the Dodgers, as a generation are truly so dominant that it is turning back the clock to an era when, you know, starting pitchers used to pitch complete games, and used to be dominant before the era of relievers being in everything.
So, it’s all, it’s all unnerving to watch.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, on the other side of the ledger, Dodgers, of course, won in a sweep. We have the full seven games, for the Mariners and Toronto, which is kind of what every baseball fan loves. There’s nothing like Game 7. Talk to us a little bit about what’s going on, and this kind of, real underdog status that the Mariners have, given they’ve never been to a World Series.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so they… you know, I was talking to a couple Mariners friends of mine, fan friends of mine, and they were never so confident as to think that this was obviously gonna happen, even when they were leading in the series against the Blue Jays, who came out of the AL East, of course, and beat everybody up. The Mariners fans carry around with them the traumas of decades. They are truly singular in their impotence when it comes to the World Series. So the fact that we have a Game 7, the fact that these games have been close, the fact that Vlad Guerrero Jr, who is, you know, himself a child of baseball immortality, Vlad Guerrero Sr, one of the all-time great sluggers, the fact that the Blue Jays might yet again, take what the Mariners and their fan base have long, long been waiting for. It feels cruel. I hope the Mariners do it. I really do. I think Dodgers-Mariners is the ultimate in that David Goliath kind of setup, which we talked about the last time we got together. But the Blue Jays are a really good team, and they might just inflict yet more generational trauma upon Seattle.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. You know, the lineup, the matchup, rather, actually kind of defies the normal, conventional wisdom, that you have to have the Yankees, or you have to have one of the other major, you know, big city teams with those long legacies. If the teams are great, there’s great baseball, people will watch!
Pablo Torre
Yeah, and look, Game 7 is the ultimate recipe for viewership and entertainment. I say this a lot, when you have humiliation truly on the line, when you have stakes that are the highest possible, caliber, you have… you have a Game 7. I mean, it’s the best because you’ll see teams do things that they just won’t do. You’ll see guys who are kind of hurt play, you’ll see strategies that will throw everything, yeah, out on the field. So, it’s a special thing. I don’t take it for granted.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and baseball, and particularly a seventh game, has something that a normal baseball game doesn’t. Baseball has a laconic pace. It’s the summer sport, you can watch for a few innings, you can wander away, you can go to the concession stand and come back after an inning. You haven’t missed all that.
What is missing during the regular season is this intensity of every pitch, every moment, which builds and builds, and that is extraordinary, that kind of tension you don’t really get during the regular season.
Pablo Torre
Yes, baseball being a sport without a clock, by the way. Yes. Game 7, you hear something even more terrifying ticking. Right? You sense the end right at your doorstep, and that tension… you’re so right. Baseball goes from this ultramarathon, in which there are way too many games to keep track of, to suddenly what feels like a sprint, and now we’re near the end of the race, and it really doesn’t get better than a Game 7.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. So, let’s go from the sublime to the ridiculous. Belichick. And North Carolina. They managed, they are managing to lose to anyone, to everyone. What are the boosters gonna put up with? I mean, are they gonna ride this all the way to the bottom? What’s going on?
Pablo Torre
That is a real thought experiment that I try to engage in with all of these stories that I’ve been doing lately, where it’s like, if you want to end the experiment, you can. It’s just that I think people have sunk so much cost into them, that they’re trying to figure out, can we escape? Can we minimize the PR damage? But what happened, I mean, on Friday, is that I released a new chapter in our investigation into Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson in North Carolina. And simultaneously, North Carolina goes cross-country to your neck of the woods. They go to play Cal. And what happens is they lose in a super painful, embarrassing way, as is familiar to fans of Bill Belichick’s North Carolina administration. And simultaneously, what I’m reporting is that during the weeks before the season opener, which was a blowout loss to TCU, their general manager, the highest paid general manager in college football, one of the highest paid employees in the state of North Carolina, public employees, who makes $1.5 million a year, Bill Belichick, reminder, makes $10 million a year. Michael Lombardi, the GM, goes to Saudi Arabia to try and fundraise.
And so, you’re already just seeing both whiffs of desperation that are reflected on the field, but then you’re also getting this dystopian future of college sports in the same breath. I mean this is college sports, ostensibly, the thing that is the hardest to, reconcile with the idea of, we’re just gonna take Saudi Arabian money, like all of these other sports have started doing. It’s almost a parody of itself, but it’s also the tip of the iceberg, because in this whole power dynamic, there’s Michael Lombardi running football, doing stuff like that.
failing miserably. And then, of course, there is Jordan Hudson, and we find, you know, longer story, too long to summarize, but we get footage from one of the shows that Bill Belichick was co-hosting that was supposed to be relaunched at North Carolina, was never launched because the team was so bad on the field, but you get
the experience of what it’s like to be in a room with Jordan Hudson and Bill Belichick, and the utter disdain and condescension that they have towards the people who are there to do their jobs, the producers, the graphics editors on this show that they worked on together that Jordan Hudson took control of. So all of it is, not just
ridiculous. It is, really, really, really unsustainable, is how I see it, but we’ll see how long they sustain.
Jen Rubin
And it really is, like, live golf meets the college football. It is bad enough that we now have investment firms that these cliques of American investors and fans have kind of bought into it, but we’re now going to have college sports controlled by foreign governments? That just seems a step too far.
Pablo Torre
And so, North Carolina, I mean, when I reported this, they scrambled, and they began to spin it, and they are currently saying, this is their position the, invitation came from a Saudi national who’s a big fan of North Carolina, and that there was no deal brokered. Now, I ask anybody with a pulse, why would you go over there if you were not interested in getting the money? Who said no?
My investigation continues into that front, but I just gotta reiterate, this is not merely a college program, this is a public university using taxpayer money to pay for its largesse, now saying, we need more, let’s go to Saudi Arabia. And so, I’m numb to a lot. I just don’t think we should be numb to that particular dynamic public university, authoritarian state, and Bill Belichick, somewhere in between.
Jen Rubin
Speaking of the Middle East, something else bizarre happened, which was the head of FIFA, another lovely organization, shows up in Gaza for the talks? What was that all about?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, you gotta understand that FIFA, Gianni Infantino, who’s the head of FIFA, he has been really, really close, seemingly by design to Donald Trump. And we say this, I think, pretty clearly in these conversations. FIFA is famously corrupt. Donald Trump also, and in that, there is a partnership.
And so, why is Johnny Gianni Infantino? Because, well, he says he’s there because football is the world sport, and blah blah blah blah blah blah. In reality, it just seems clear that this is an ongoing geopolitical quid pro quo in which FIFA, serving as a geopolitical power broker, in real ways. Right? Funneling money to and from various states under the guise of sport has realized it’s good business to be around the stuff the president is doing, and the fact that it’s happening in and around the Middle East, and what’s horrifyingly happening in Gaza. It’s a Mad Lib, Jen. We’re living in the era of a dystopian Mad Lib.
Jen Rubin
It really is, and you kind of wonder what we’re going to see there if the fighting ever stops. The Trump FIFA Resort Hotel on the coast of Gaza… I mean, there is no bottom, there’s no shame, there’s no limit to what these people will do. And that’s what gives you a full-time job. Speaking of your full-time job, what is going on with Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard and The Clippers?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so the Wall Street Journal has entered the fray. I’ve said for a long time, really since September when I dropped, first week of September when I dropped Episode 1, Part 1 of this investigation, which is endless, that the water is warm. Other outlets, please come on in. There’s plenty to investigate, to find out. It’s a fascinating story. The Wall Street Journal is now in the pool, and the story itself you know, there’s, again, too much to summarize, but the thing that I will pull out for the attention of your audience is that they kind of buried something that I have been circling for now months, because again, I spent 7 months before I did part one, and I’ve been trying to nail this down, and the Wall Street Journal kind of drops it midway through the piece, and I don’t totally understand if they understand what they have reported.
Because I’m so deep in the lore and the back and forth and what Steve Ballmer has claimed, but just to recap, Steve Ballmer has claimed to ESPN on national television that Aspiration came to him for an introduction to Kawhi Leonard, and he says that he can produce an email, as if an email, alone, in a vacuum, is certainly the only thing that ever would have happened in terms of a communication between these two parties. The email indicates, apparently, according to Steve Ballmer, that Aspiration asked him for the intro to Kawhi, and then they did whatever it is they did, and the Clippers had no idea what it is they did. I reported, of course, what they did was a $48 million cap circumvention deal, which is record-breaking and unprecedented in the history of professional sports.
But the Wall Street Journal buried halfway through their piece, I’ll just quote it here: “In December of 2021, Joe Sandberg, this is the co-founder of Aspiration, told a high-ranking Aspiration executive that the Clippers had approached him about doing a deal with Leonard, their injured star. The executive recalled Sandberg saying, quote. This is important to the Clippers.” And so, what the Wall Street Journal has done, in whatever it is fashion that they decided to do it, is truly provide a missing piece from… and again, this is the Journal. I’m not involved in their reporting, but they have found something that I consider incredibly important. In the story of what happened here and why, and I wonder what the NBA, Wachtel-Lipton, the investigating firm, the outside counsel, I wonder what they’re all gonna do with that bit of information.
Jen Rubin
Now, maybe Sandberg will say, oh, I was just saying that because I wanted it to seem more attractive that we were being sought after. There could be other explanations, but it seems to be that is the nub of the entire issue. If the Clippers went to them and came up with this really remarkable deal, then other than evasion of the salary cap, what else would be the explanation of the deal? That’s kind of the whole enchiladas.
Pablo Torre
Well, and the enchilada was, you know, an hour and a half with Mark Cuban last week, you know, or the week before last now, I suppose, I forget. But he came into studio, we debated at length, and should you be the kind of person whose kink is watching Mark Cuban defend Steve Ballmer, I have the episode for you. I ask everybody. Why was this deal never announced? Why and how was this arrangement constructed in a way that can only according to my reporting, be explained through a side deal for cap circumvention? And I have yet to get a satisfactory answer, but you’ve identified it, look, as certainly, all the President’s men has indicated the key question, which is, what did you know, and when did you know it? And this is yet another log on the fire that says Steve Ballmer knew a lot more a lot earlier than he has been telling people, and now there are various contradictions on the public record.
Jen Rubin
Well, being a billionaire, I’m sure that Mark Cuban reads the Wall Street Journal, so perhaps he will find new revelations that will push.
Pablo Torre
Oh, gosh.
Jen Rubin
We have yet to see that, but be that as it may. So, let’s end with some college football. You have one incredibly dominant team, Ohio State, which could probably compete in the NFL at some level. And then you have a lot of teams that ordinarily don’t appear in the top 10. Indiana. Now, some of those, you could say, well, they haven’t played anybody really big, but on the other hand, they haven’t lost. And some other really big teams have lost. So, what’s going on? Is there a kind of parody developing, or is this just a kind of a fluke period before the real competition gets underway?
Pablo Torre
So, Ohio State, I think, is very clearly the best team, and they deserve the credit that comes with that. But the era that we’re living in now, the era of NIL, the transfer portal, just the economy, in all the ways you’ve been alluding to, just radically changing. All at once, sort of gradually than all at once, and still today, as new rules and rulings from the courts are unlocking lots of money that can now be brought out into the sunlight, ostensibly. What you’re seeing is that the advantages that have been these almost hereditary inheritances that the SEC, for instance, even the Big Ten, there was always, like, a series of programs that were big brands that ruled over everything. Indiana, to me, is an incredibly interesting case study, because they have this coach, Curt Cignetti, who has been recruited now by everyone else. Penn State, for instance, would love to have him as their coach. But Indiana, by the way, with some help from boosters who understand this landscape, like Mark Cuban, in fact. Mark Cuban’s a big Indiana booster. They are paying to a degree that keeps Indiana competitive with Penn State. Indiana used to be a doormat. Penn State, of course, one of the all-time programs in sports history, and Indiana is basically saying, we will pay our head coach, like, the richest programs in the country, we will fund the budget for our roster, the NFL and transfer portal budget, we will fund that in a way that competes with anybody. And because money is of course, it’s always about following the money. If you follow it, you’ll see how much more is going to Indiana, and paying players on the books has enabled a parity, in a pretty meaningful way. Like, you have lesser teams that are now saying, we can hang with the biggest names in college football.
Jen Rubin
Now, if you had to look back over the last 10 or 15 years in college football, two teams would regularly appear. Florida and Florida State. And they are in deep, deep trouble. And one of them, perhaps not the one you thought, fired their coach. Yeah. What is happening in Florida?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, one of the cradles of college football recruiting, by the way, is Florida. So many great players come out of there. You’d think, again, that regionally speaking, these teams would be set up to always contend. Now, the pipeline, the networks are, you can pay those players to disperse across the country.
You could pay great Florida prospects to go to Indiana. Florida, though, having turned over their head coach. Now trying to hire, a modern figure who can steer them through all of this. It’s a fascinating question. Again, one of these…hey, here’s a public school trying to figure out how important is this program to our, desires, our needs as a state. And I would venture to say that, I mean, look, Florida State and Florida, both different, but also united in this kind of, manic need to win. And I would say that that is gonna be something that absolutely gets reflected in the answer to all your problems. The answer to all your questions will be more money. And so just watch this space to see how much they’re gonna spend.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Well, we are entering a period in the fall in which, if you like basketball, you got basketball. If you like pro football, you got pro football. If you like college football, you got it. If you like hockey, that’s coming too. If you like European soccer, that’s already there. So, it really is a sports fan’s dream, and I continue to be amazed on a Saturday, when there weren’t 5 or 6 games on. They’re, like, 14 games on. You really can’t keep up.
Pablo Torre
Oh my gosh, it’s… it’s… it’s all happening. It’s like equinox. It’s sort of like everything, all the shadows are being cast.
And…
And it’s what’s great about sports, is that there is so much to keep track of, and in that way, it reflects the… as you started this conversation, it reflects our attention span. We’re sort of flitting between a zillion things on a zillion screens, but I’m looking forward to Game 7, I’m looking forward.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, that’s where the whole screen unto itself. Yes, there are single-screen events, we’ll call them, and that is one of them.
Pablo Torre
We all… may we all create single-screen events every now and again, yes. Exactly right.
Jen Rubin
Well, when we come back next week, we will be most likely in the middle of the World Series, and it’s gonna be whoever wins on the AL side. It’s gonna be, really wonderful. So we will look forward to that, and we will look forward to… you have a lot of investigative reports going on. So, somebody like the New York Times should give you a job. Oh, that’s right, they did, they did, they hired you your job, they’re distributing the industry that is Pablo Torre of investigative behemoth that strides across the sports.
Pablo Torre
It’s a thing where… and I, of course, deeply respect what you’ve built, where you can do something independently. But then. be, I think, needed enough such that one of these other institutions are like, maybe we should begin to pay attention to what they’re doing over there. And so, in that way, I’m glad to be in this, partnership with the New York Times, and I look forward to what the Mad Lib that is the sports playbook of 2025 is going to bring us, next Monday.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Have a great week, Pablo. We’ll see you next Monday.
Pablo Torre
Thanks, Jen.
