The world seems to be aflame a mere five days into 2026. According to Pablo Torre, “it’s sports, and it’s politics, and it’s unfortunate, and it’s insane, and I feel like I’m going crazy.” And yet, despite this, the world of sports continues turning.
For Offsides’ first episode of the year, Pablo and Jen recap the NFL and NCAA holiday head-to-heads: the Baltimore Ravens’ unfortunate exclusion from the NFL playoffs and the defeat of the Ohio State Buckeyes against the Miami Hurricane, to name a few.
Additionally, in the wake of the United States’ capture and extraction of Venezuela’s head of state, the duo reflect on how politics impact sports internationally.
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 following transcript has been edited for formatting.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre. Good morning, Pablo, and Happy New Year!
Pablo Torre
In honor of you and the Dodgers, and optimism in 2026, I got the memo. Jen: blue.
Jen Rubin
Yes, it is both Dodger Blue and Contrarian Blue. Just a coincidence, right?
Pablo Torre
Totally coincidence.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, exactly. So, let’s talk NFL. We had a game last night that was the deciding game of a season for two teams, and it came down—we kept saying—to this play, and then there was another play, and then there was another play. At the end of this, with two missed, kicks, Pittsburgh prevailed. Why do you think they missed, the fact they didn’t go through the uprights, both an extra point and then, on the other side, a close field goal? Was it the weather? Was it nerves? What do you think happened?
Pablo Torre
Sometimes the universe names a kicker who you don’t quite totally trust yet, Loop, that’s his last name. And there is some poetry in that, like this kick, like Loop Wide Right, it’s now playing on loop in the minds of every fan of the Baltimore Ravens. And in terms of why it happens, look. without being so grandiose about it, I think that there is… there’s something about… pressure that just can eat you, and I am more inclined always to turn to human psychology before I consider, like, something like… I don’t know, an external factor that may be a bailout of sorts, when it comes to the game of who should we blame here? But Tyler Loop is the embodiment of a season in which the difference between, wow, you’re a playoff team, and everything is still in front of you, and what a disappointment. Is the margin of that miss, and this is the entire season. Aaron Rodgers, Jen, like, we were prepared, entirely prepared for this kick to sail through the uprights, for Aaron Rodgers to think to himself, man, I probably should have tried to make it in politics, and for his career to be over. And instead, here we are with the Steelers having new life in a postseason in which anything, more than ever, is possible.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. What explanation for the missed extra point, which made that kick, the potential winning kick for the Ravens?
Pablo Torre
It’s just… I mean, it’s the sort of season where this stuff happens. You know, again, that’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but when I see the way in which we’re just… look, a mixture… a missed extra point amid a standings where the Jacksonville Jaguars are the hottest team in the NFL. I’m just ready for anything to defy what is our conventional probability. And so, yeah, I mean, but look, in the end, you had a series of near-choke jobs and a series of bailouts because of others’ mistakes in which right now we have a very different conversation than the one in which any couple of inches difference, end up being applied.
Jen Rubin
And you really kind of felt of mixed emotions. On one hand, Loop now has this hanging over his head, and of course, it’s a false conclusion that he alone made the difference. There were lots of episodes, including a lack of defense, on the part of the Ravens. But you kind of appreciated the reprieve on the other side, that this guy was no longer going to be the GOAT for missing an extra point. So somehow the cosmos, you know, aligned. Where do you see us going forward? We have this strange season in which we have some of the very best teams that, frankly, aren’t even there, some of the rising teams, like Detroit, which wash out, and some teams that, if you look at the record, really shouldn’t be there at all. What do you see in the first round with the wild card, and then going forward?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, to me, the team that has impressed me the most is the New England Patriots. And I say that because, as much as people want to say, they had a very convenient strength of schedule, they didn’t play a lot of great teams. The counterargument to that is that there weren’t a lot of great teams this season.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
So, when you look at the fundamentals of any NFL organization, you’re like, do they have the quarterback? And Drake Maye seems like one of the great young stars in the sport. So the answer to that is yes. Do they have the head coach? And Mike Vrabel has been so impressive in terms of basically installing a culture that’s familiar to anybody who loved the Patriots under Bill Belichick, but he’s doing it in the absence of that former main character, who’s, of course, in North Carolina and is under investigation by me perpetually.
So the Patriots, in terms of just, like, a well-rounded team that has the key ingredients, they have that. The Bills are breathing right down their necks. Like, I look at the AFC East, and I think to myself, if you’re asking me preseason, like, who’s the most talented player in the NFL, the guy who enters that conversation, who is in the playoffs, is Josh Allen, their quarterback. By the way, the other answers to that question, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, as alluded to with the Ravens, they’re not in this. And so there is a big superstar gap, so to speak, especially in the AFC. And then in the NFC, I just think about where you are, I think about going out west, and I think about the NFC West, and the Seahawks, the Rams, and the Niners are all, like, really, 14-3, 12-5, 12-5, really strong this season, relatively pedigreed teams. But anything truly the roulette wheel of football has never felt more random, and so, you know, God bless anybody who’s trying to gamble on this thing.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. If you had to pick a single underdog, a single dark horse, what would it be? Who would it be?
Pablo Torre
As stunning as it is, like, the Jaguars are the hottest team in the NFL. And the Jacksonville Jaguars have a quarterback in Trevor Lawrence who had all of the promise coming out of college, coming out of Clemson, to be a next… you know, a next great star. And this season, it looks like he’s putting that together, and… I laughed at the premise of, like, these… so the broadcast partners of the NFL, if you follow the money, like, they want marquee teams with giant fan bases that play nationally, and the idea that there is a world, now it’s an unlikely world, but it is a funny one, in which you get the Jaguars out of the AFC South, and the Panthers in 8 and 9 out of the NFC South, and you’re thinking to yourself, it is the greatest challenge that football’s dominance over media might have, is to see if we get a zillion people to still watch that Super Bowl. I don’t think it’s gonna happen, but it’s possible.
Jen Rubin
And I bet you can, because unlike other sports, the Super Bowl has become a thing unto itself. In that respect, it’s different than the World Series, I think. It is pure spectacle, it’s pure entertainment. The commercials alone have become an institution. It kind of speaks to the genius of the NFL, that they have just figured out how to make it the dominant sport by sometimes just making these events like a national event.
Pablo Torre
It’s a holiday. It’s our foremost, unanimously celebrated, like, civic holiday, which is to say, capitalist holiday, which is to say the last monocultural thing. Look, I went to the Super Bowl, I remember one year, in Atlanta, and I was sitting there in the stands, on one hand, like, grateful, so cool to be at a Super Bowl, but then, in between plays, thinking of myself, I miss the commercials.
Jen Rubin
Yes!
Pablo Torre
The whole pageant is actually built around commercialism in a way that you want to watch even the commercials, and that’s… we’re living in, like, time-disrupted, time-shifted, you know, post-DVR, ad blocker era, everything. And yet, for this one thing, we’re like, ads! And that, to me, is a bit… that says everything as well.
Jen Rubin
Well, you know, if you’re paying thousands of dollars for a ticket, the least they could do would be to play the ads for all of you guys.
Pablo Torre
Perversely, perversely, that’s what I was wanting.
Jen Rubin
Yes. Exactly. Well. Let’s go from one football league, and I use that term advisedly, to another football league, because that’s essentially what the NCAA has become. It’s very professionalized. We are in the playoffs already. We have people making millions of dollars, not as many millions of dollars in the NFL. And so far, we’ve gotten some shockers. Let’s face it, did you have Miami beating Ohio State on your bingo card? I didn’t. And what do you think happened there? Was it a belly flop? Was it Ohio State being overrated? Was it Miami being underrated? Was it simply that, on any given day, one team has a great game, another has a bad game? How do you look at that?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, the through line through the two leagues that you’ve rightfully called them is, like, the end of the formal football dynasty. And why, right? So, like, in the NFL, there’s this general sense of, okay, mediocrity, which is to say parity, that’s the euphemism for it. But in college football, the answer, I think, is more concrete, which is that in the incipient free market, which is not a free market, but the beginnings of labor getting compensated. You have a marketplace that’s distributing talent in a way that has been more even than we’ve ever seen before. And so, Miami… look, Miami’s always recruited well, they’ve always had great athletes, and I think that’s clearly, credit to them, part of the story. They were underrated. But in terms of why Ohio State can’t be a team like Alabama, which, relatedly, got smoked by Indiana. Right? In a year in which the SEC, which used to have the closest thing to a conference-wide dynasty, reigning over the sport, in the same year in which the SEC has basically disappeared from what they used to consider their personal invitational, the college football playoff, we’re looking at a parody that is born of, I think, economic factors that aren’t gonna change.
So, Miami upsetting Ohio State, not as big of an upset when you consider everything else that’s happening. And by the way, Indiana, to just talk about them, like, they were the worst team in college football for a hundred years. And now they can, like, again, get money, follow the money, they have, you know, my frenemy Mark Cuban helping boost the coffers of his alma mater, and more generally, you have the ability to keep your coach, who can build a program, really microwave a program in 2 years. Such that he doesn’t go to, like, Penn State. Which is what would have happened 10 years ago, now he’s gonna stay and do it at Indiana, because Indiana can pay him and others, and they can pay for their talent.
Jen Rubin
Right. Speaking of Alabama, they got smoked, just destroyed. Now, let’s not take anything away from their opponents. They’re a very good team. Sure. this was an embarrassment for a team that cares about as much about football as any institution. You think their coach is going to get fired? You think there’s gonna be a personnel change? Are they just going to go big into the, portal? This is not an alumni base that takes well to failure.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, there’s a level of impatience that is singular in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And Kalen DeBoer, who’s the head coach, you never want to be the guy who follows the guy. I think you want to be the guy who follows the guy who follows.
You want to have the expectations low, and then exceed them, and Kalen DeBoer replaced Nick Saban, who, I think, to his credit. you know, I don’t agree with him on everything in terms of his vision for how to reform college football, but he saw how much harder this job was gonna be as the head coach of Alabama, and said, I’m outta here.
Jen Rubin
Yep.
Pablo Torre
And so, that opened the door to Kalen DeBoer coming out of, you know, Washington, and it’s just… I think there is a real chance that he doesn’t make it to next season. I think the polling on him is not reflective of that larger degree of difficulty that we just talked about. The polling is rapacious in terms of its appetite for immediate results. Alabama isn’t used to this. And I think there’s no program that has less patience for it.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. You know, New Year’s Day was an interesting day. Two blowouts that really you know, were hard to watch through the end, because at a certain point, it was kind of ridiculous. And then one really exciting game. Again, you didn’t expect that, but perhaps that speaks to the parity. There’s also a sense, I think, that there’s a little vindication to my absolute chagrin, for the NCAA in expanding the playoffs. Because, yeah, you had some blowouts, but those blowouts were from teams that had both clearly, you know, qualified, and you had a tremendous upset, and you now have, really, four very different teams, for the semi-final. Do you think they’re pretty pleased with themselves over there at the NCAA?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, so, I wanna shout out Ole Miss in this. I don’t know, in the morality play of Ole Miss making a run to the college football semifinal, like who the big winner is, but I do like the thumb in the eye of Lane Kiffin.
Because the whole thing about a coach, right, is that, like. it was… it was concretely a betrayal for him to take a job at LSU while his team was about to be in the postseason, and the premise was, ff you don’t care, this was the criticism of him, if you don’t care about coaching your current team in the playoffs, then you’ve basically degraded and undermined the whole premise of why we play sports.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, exactly.
Pablo Torre
It’s kind of like a civilizational kind of conflict. If you don’t feel some kind of irritation at what Lane Kiffin did, if you don’t believe that that was a problem, I don’t know how you like sports. So, the fact that Ole Miss, in his absence, has made this run, proving that they don’t need him. To be as good as they apparently are is such a delightful statement about, by the way, about players. About labor.
College football, to your part about the NCAA, the NCAA has had to reckon, in the most macro sense, with how the great man theory of governance doesn’t really apply, because they suppressed wages, they eliminated anything like a reasonable governance structure, and the NCAA had to realize we don’t matter. And in Ole Miss. for at least this month, you have the ability to say, our head coach didn’t really matter either. A total reversal of all the logic of college sports.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, and what a great quarterback they have, and what a fine, example. I mean, I think he… many people who perhaps had not been following Ole Miss, aside from the fact that they were following, you know, this great betrayal, probably saw him for the first time, and they had to have been impressed. He had, you know, a great game, and he is such an engaging young man, and so deserving, I think, of this shot at greatness. Any predictions for the semi-final games?
Pablo Torre
I mean, now… so now the closest thing to a favorite is Indiana, which is wild to me. I think Indiana… oh man, do I pick against Miami? So, I’m… I’m gonna go Indiana-Ole Miss. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna take the Lane Kiffin list. I want this team to do the thing that makes me want to just have a picture-in-picture camera on that guy leaving before his team wins a title, it’s the most delicious possibility, and that’s what I’m rooting for.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And, you know, yes, Oregon was impressive, but you kind of have the sense, you always had the sense with the West Coast teams, they were never really pushed. I mean, they’ve had some great games, they had 1-1, against them before, but really, you know, it’s not unlike playoffs in other leagues, where it doesn’t really matter, particularly with these young kids, where it’s the emotion, where it’s the moment that kind of carries us through. So, looking back, because we always have to do this, sports in the context of the insanity that we have been greeted with this year. This is one of those times that you really love to have sports just for the escape of it, for the enjoyment.
Pablo Torre
Not even enough.
Jen Rubin
You know, on the same, you know, weekend that once again, Donald Trump was doing horrendous things, and perhaps next week we’ll talk about the effect on Venezuelan players, and what that’s gonna do to the World Cup and other things, oh, by the way, which is gonna be a real interesting affair now. You kind of have to say, this is one reason why sports endures, because when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, or people’s personal lives are in destruction, or in a quandary, you can still love sports, and maybe that’s why I enjoy these college playoffs more than I think I ever have before.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I do think there’s a bit of a palate-cleansing dynamic here. And as someone who is also ingesting politics, and by the way, as just a side note here, because you mentioned the Venezuela thing. So, the episode that we did, we’ve talked about before, about Jerce Reyes who is a former, himself, Venezuelan pro soccer player and youth sports coach, who fled Venezuela, and Nicolas Maduro’s regime. He got imprisoned in Venezuela by Maduro’s administration because he was protesting. He flees, he tries to go through legal channels in the United States, and he gets, of course, disappeared to CECOT in El Salvador by the Trump administration. He’s fleeing the autocrat that Donald Trump is now saying is, like, the number one problem in the world for the United States. And so, I just think about someone like that, because he embodies, of course, the total logical incoherence of what Trump cares about, when in reality, of course, he’s saying, I care about oil. Oil!
I care about favor trading, and all of that is totally consistent. The other stuff is just… deeply, vastly insane to pretend, as if they’re real motives, but I think about Jerce Reyes because his whole life was devoted to sports. And in the episode that we did, what he wanted to do in the end was not come to America, but return to coaching and playing soccer in, in fact, his home country. And so, that story is a story full of contradictions, right? An autocratic regime that no one should feel great about, objectively, that is being effectively destabilized by us, a country that has motives having very little to do with the good.
We should consider a story, for instance, like Jerce Reyes, and why, in fact, he tried to escape. So, sports are everything, they’re in everything, they’re everywhere, and to the extent that we can enjoy them on their own terms is also something that I want to preserve, because all of the time, we see it being used against people who did not ask for it, who only want to, you know, exist.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. And by the way, his story, as we continue to follow it, he has gone back to a country that is every bit as corrupt, in which the regime essentially is intact, all they’ve done is lifted out Maduro and his wife, and what is going to become of him now? It’s not as if there is a pro-democracy regime in power, just the opposite. And, of course, they have the backing of the least democratic, small-D democratic, leader of the, quote, free world that we have ever had.
Pablo Torre
But, but, but, Jen, keep in mind, you know, we say a lot of, you know, tough things about President Trump, but he is the winner of FIFA’s inaugural Peace Prize.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, and look what he did with that, you know?
Pablo Torre
Again, the award he was given because he was so mad at the winner of the actual Nobel Peace Prize, who got recognized as the leader, the democratically elected leader, of Venezuela. It’s sports, and it’s politics, and it’s unfortunate, and it’s insane, and I feel like I’m going crazy. So, there is that.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, that is the perfect summation of where we are. Well, wow, we’re still in the first few days of 2026. Goodness knows what is ahead of us, but I know, but next week we will have those finalists for the NCAA, we’ll have the first round of the NFL playoffs, so next week will be, a lot of fun. So, thanks as always, Pablo, have a great week.
Pablo Torre
I look forward to it despite it all, Jen. I’ll see you next time.
Jen Rubin
Bye-bye.
