It is Monday, December 8th, 2025. Welcome back to hang up and listen to the sports podcast here at Slate. Back with you

again this week. I'm Alex Kirsner. I'm a contributing writer for Slate, and I co-host the college

football podcast, Split Zone Duo. A bit later in the show, we'll talk some college football as the

playoff bracket came out on Sunday. It seems like it might be causing at least a couple different

varieties of

constitutional crisis within the sport. We'll tell you about them. But first, we're going to talk

about Friday's World Cup draw with Adam Crafton, cover soccer for the athletic and was on hand in

Washington, D.C. for this enormous spectacle and Trumpy spectacle at the Kennedy Center. He's going to tell us all

about it and how FIFA got up to this point and preview the tournament a bit for us as well.

It's coming up quick. And at the end of this episode, we're going to talk about an antitrust

dispute that we've touched on in the distant past involving NASCAR and Michael Jordan, who is

threatening to append the entire way that NASCAR has

done business for decades. It's a fascinating case, and Jordan Bianchi of the Athletic is going to

join us to take you through what's happening in the courtroom. As usual, joining me this week is

Lindsay Gibbs, Women's Sports Lead at CBS Sports, and the publisher of Power Plays, a newsletter covering the big stories of the moment in women's sports.

Lindsay, how are you?

Doing fabulous, Alex.

Panthers had a bye week, but basically won because the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost.

And when you can do nothing and still win, that is my favorite type of win.

Isn't it all of our favorite type of win? Ben Lindbergh. Welcome. Yes. You are a senior editor for

the Ringer and you co-host effectively wild, a baseball podcast. Hot stove heating up. Are you hot yet?

Yeah, winter meetings this week. Maybe there will be some moves to talk about next time. This is one of those weeks on the podcast when I wish we had twice as many segments as we do, because there's just so much to talk about. For one thing, there's an old Branch Rickey axiom about how it's better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late. I think that also applies to podcast segments.

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