Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw

As we put 2025 to bed and say “hello” to a new year, it’s time to consider what 2026 could bring for the universe of sports.

Today, this space is about predictions. It is not about New Year’s resolutions. I am not a fan of those at all. They are not practical and very few people follow through on them.

This is about what I think will or might happen in the coming year.

The challenge for you in this is that some of these predictions are meant to be silly and funny and I don’t really think they will happen at all. You get to figure out which ones are which.

Let’s roll.

I believe that the Hoosiers football team is going to win its first game in the College Football Playoff in a very convincing win over Alabama, but I do not think they will win the CFP championship.

If they make it into the championship game and they run into Ohio State again, Ryan Day will be at his most obnoxious in the days leading up to it. He’ll be telling us how the outcome will be different this time and how much tougher his team is this time around.

And somehow in it all, he will tell us how he’s out to prove Lou Holtz wrong.

And we will all roll our eyes.

I really hope I am wrong on that one.

In the same way, I don’t think the Bears are going to the Super Bowl.

I will say that I think the Bears’ wins in all those close games in the middle of this season will be a huge plus when it comes to winning playoff games. Experience doing something is very valuable, and the thought that they could be down 10 in the fourth quarter and no one on either sideline or in the stands believes the game is over is worth a lot.

I believe that the Olympics in Italy will be fraught with venue troubles and controversies that have nothing to do with the competitions and competitors.

We already know that the hockey rink is smaller than it’s supposed to be.

When that was revealed earlier this fall, and the project manager’s response was “we have no idea how that happened,” it did not inspire confidence.

Here’s hoping the games go off without a hitch, and here’s hoping NBC devotes an entire channel to curling.

I believe that the World Cup coming to North America this summer will mostly go well.

I also predict that the games and venues will be safe places for people to watch the matches from. While there is a part of me that understands that it only takes one person or one group and a well-coordinated attack to ruin the whole thing, I think it’s a lot harder to target one nation or fan group at events of this size.

I am very excited to have the world come over for a big party this July.

I predict that the Cubs will not make the playoffs in 2026.

Their dumpster-diving approach to finding players is shocking and embarrassing, and unbecoming of a team in the third-largest sports market in the country.

I mean, the way the Cubs go about filling out their roster would be like you going to a series of garage sales in May to find your family’s heirloom furniture or dishes. You wouldn’t do it.

Their front office has admitted that they are looking to bring in players who’ll have the best year of their career, and if enough of them do that, it will be a good year.

That’s a losing way of living.

I predict a major gambling scandal will rock college sports, but not until later in the year.

With the legal process playing out in the case of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former player Damon Jones for their alleged involvement in illegal gambling, rigged poker games, and providing inside info for prop bets, it’s only a matter of time before this hits the college campuses. The money is too big.

It probably already has, but we don’t know it yet.

The question is: “With the NCAA no longer in any sense of control of college sports and the conferences ruling the landscape, might a university administrator or conference commissioner learn of such a situation happening and hide it to protect the cash flow?”

Here are a couple of others.

I think Travis Kelce will retire from the NFL to spend the rest of his life with Taylor Swift. I also believe that by the time training camp starts, he will be ready to play football again.

I predict that I will catch more blue gills in Indiana in the spring and summer of 2026 than I have in a long time.

I predict that Notre Dame will be invited to join a conference and will decline.

I believe that significant conference movement will start back up again in local high school sports.

I believe that I will set a goal of writing 52 weeks of the year for you again in 2026.

Happy New Year!

The post What will 2026 hold for sports? appeared first on News Now Warsaw.

For a couple of weeks now, Ole Miss head football coach Lane Kiffin’s name has been right where he wants it — on the lips of every media member in the country.

This phenomenon started when LSU fired Brian Kelly. Well, ok, I should say it started this time when LSU fired Brian Kelly. This is a regular occurrence and happens every few years when the wind blows from a certain direction and the mood strikes just right.

Lane Kiffin is the son of Monte Kiffin, who was one of the best defensive minds in football for decades.

Monte died in July of 2024.

Ironically, his son is considered a great offensive mind.

I would say he’s one of the best recruiters in college football. I’d say he’s a very convincing speaker. I’d say he’s someone who people are mesmerized by and find themselves following everywhere he goes.

He’s like the pied piper, in a way.

Kiffin started coaching in 1997 when he became an assistant coach at Fresno State. He was there for two seasons.

In 1999, he was a grad assistant at Colorado State.

In 2000, he was an assistant coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

For the next six seasons, he was an assistant coach at USC. During that time, he held four different positions on the offensive coaching staff.

In January of 2007, at age 31, Al Davis hired Kiffin to be the head coach of the Oakland Raiders.

Oakland went 4-12 in its first season, and reports circulated that Davis was already done with Kiffin.

He did, in fact, fire him in September of 2008—during the first month of the season.

He went to the University of Tennessee to be their head coach in 2009, and that gig lasted 13 games. Tennessee went 7-5 that season, then lost the Chick-fil-A Bowl to Virginia Tech 37-14.

Shortly after the season ended, Pete Carroll announced that he was leaving USC and Kiffin bolted for Los Angeles. He took over the program under the assumption that the penalties coming from the Reggie Bush infractions would be light.

They were not.

Kiffin coached for three full seasons at USC and then started the 2013 season 3-2. The Trojans lost at Arizona state 62-41 in late September, and Athletic Director Pat Hayden met the team at the airport in the middle of the night and fired him on the spot.

He was an assistant coach at Alabama for three years before accepting the head coaching position at Florida Atlantic. He announced that he was staying with the Tide to coach in the postseason, but Nick Saban replaced him immediately.

Remember that moment.

At FAU, he won 11 games in two of his three seasons, but no one believed he would be there for very long, and he was on to the next big thing.

And the next big thing was becoming the head coach at Ole Miss.

He’s had six really good years there, and this one was his best. The Rebels are 11-1 and are going to be in the College Football Playoff.

Then that darned wind started blowing again.

Kelly got fired on October 27, and Kiffin’s name instantly came up in all the conversations on who should replace him.

The problem is, Kiffin had a job already. He was coaching a team that was ranked in the top 10 and had playoff aspirations.

Didn’t matter to him.

In an interview Sunday after his decision to leave Ole Miss and take the LSU job became public, he talked with an ESPN reporter, and that tells you everything you need to know about who he is and what he is all about.

“We went through a lot with Keith Carter (Ole Miss AD) trying to figure out a way to make this playoff run work and be able to coach the team,” Kiffin said, “but at the end of the day, that’s his decision and I totally respect that.”

In other words, he wanted to coach Ole Miss through the playoffs this season AND still accept the LSU job.

In what kind of world does college football live in that would allow a coach to take a job while already being under contract, while the current season is still going on?

The NCAA should step in and do something!
Oh, wait, the conferences rule college football now, don’t they? The NCAA has no power whatsoever to stop this.

And this is the way they wanted it.

Kiffin is like the young guy who’s had a lot of girlfriends, but every girl in town believes she can’t live without him. Meanwhile, all his previous girls are glad he’s out of their lives.

It will happen to LSU, too, and Kiffin will move on to a new place and make promises he will never be around to keep.

The post The Lane Kiffin situation is embarrassing appeared first on News Now Warsaw.

This is the final in my three-part series on things in sports that are broken and desperately need fixing.

I repeat what I said at the beginning — this is not an all-inclusive list. There are many more things that I didn’t have time and space to put in here.

These are just the biggest things that need repair.

Summer youth sports are a mess.

Now, saying that will immediately send the hair on the back of some of your necks into “attack” position. I understand.

We’re not talking about your local little league or your varsity coach’s summer basketball program.

But the lies that are propagated by those who operate “travel” sports organizations have been harmful to families and self-rewarding for those who have financially filled their pockets by telling them.

Now, I would be a fool to say that an individual player doesn’t benefit by playing with better competition during their offseason. Of course they do. Doing that will improve their game and make them better. But when they come back to their school team, how does that experience translate? There is a risk of bad habits being picked up playing for a summer coach who focuses on your offensive game and doesn’t care as much about your half-court defense and whether you block out or not.

Why?

Their thought process is that offensive skill gets you noticed by college coaches. Colleges offering their summer players scholarships adds to their resume. That means more players will seek to be on their team, and they can pick and choose who they take for their roster.

And every time they add a player, they get paid.

The other half of the lie is that this is the only way to get a college to notice you.

The truth is, in 2024, there are literally dozens of ways to spread the news about a player to college coaches.

If you are good enough to play at the next level, a college will find you.

The Name, Image and Likeness chaos has reached high school sports.

Thirty one states now have laws established by their state high school governing bodies that allow high school students to receive payment for being an athlete. The whole point of NIL is that athletes can get paid for video games using athletes names and jersey numbers and also for marketing campaigns by businesses where the players are spokespeople.

But how it’s evolved (very quickly, I might add) is that college players are getting paid for doing nothing.

Colleges are collecting money and funneling it to players, and the bigger colleges with football programs are getting more money to spend on bringing in better athletes.

How in the wide world of sports are high schools going to be able to do that?

I can count on two hands the number of high schools in Indiana that could pull off that kind of power play.

They are the biggest schools in the most affluent school corporations—Homestead, Carmel, Fishers … you get the picture.

And college sports are in a free-fall because of it.

You’ve read my thoughts about high schoolers being able transfer to other schools, and the proposal that the IHSAA is considering right now that would allow a family to transfer a player once in their four years without any scrutiny over the change of school.

In case you missed that column from a few weeks ago, the basics of the proposal would allow a student to transfer once after the conclusion of their freshman year without having to move to their new school district and without having to explain to anyone why they are changing schools.

We’ve already addressed this, and we are moving on from that today.

In the final analysis, the summary of this is that the concept of high school athletes being considered “student athletes” is in danger. The IHSAA’s positioning high school athletics as “education-based” is at stake with the way this all plays out.

I hope they get it right.

But, in the end, the truth is that there used to be a partnership between parents, their students and their schools.

That partnership was the foundation of how students learned inside the classroom and how they accepted coaching outside of it.

But ask any teacher or coach right now, and that partnership is being shredded.

The respect parents show teachers and coaches is evaporating, and that attitude is being translated to the children who are just mirroring the behavior their parents exhibit.

There isn’t a school corporation or a sports governing body that can do anything to stop that. We, as parents, must do better.

If we don’t, those unscrupulous summer coaches win, and then they actually do become the only way to get a college scholarship.

We can’t let that happen.

The post Things that are broken, Part 3 appeared first on News Now Warsaw.

I am not at all a person who says “I told you so” much.

It’s very pretentious and it’s just not my style.

But if you read this column regularly, I told you this storm was coming and now there is lightning all around us and it’s too late to take shelter.

News came out this week that the University of Iowa is investigating 26 athletes across five teams who are suspected of wagering on sports. That’s a violation of NCAA rules, and more than 100 people have been linked to the investigation.

Iowa State acknowledged that more than a dozen of its athletes across three teams are also suspected of violating gambling rules.

Last week, Alabama fired baseball coach Brad Bohannon following a report of suspicious bets made at an Ohio casino involving his team.

NCAA rules prohibit athletes, coaches and staff from betting on amateur, collegiate and professional sports in which the NCAA conducts a championship.

You should also remember that drinking alcohol is also illegal for people under 21 years old, but that never stopped a single college kid from filling a red Solo cup, did it?

Along with the ads promoting gambling, you are now seeing and hearing more and more ads for gambling hotlines telling sports fans “If you have a problem and need help, call (this number).”

You are starting to see and hear people bemoan sports gambling and its impact on America.

DUH! What did you think was going to happen?

Was there any other foreseeable outcome?

No … this was inevitable.

According to an industry report, Americans have bet over $220 billion on sports with now-legal gambling outlets in the five years since the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for all 50 states to offer it.

Five years ago Sunday is the anniversary of the court ruling that approved New Jersey for legalized sports wagering, and now two-thirds of the country will offer legal sports betting, with additional states likely to join in the coming months.

The CEO of DraftKings, whose company controls almost half of the sports gambling market, says his operation and others like it are nowhere near tapping its full money-making potential.

Sports leagues are wrapping their arms around it. They are in partnership with gambling agents…for a cut of the take, of course.

Professional teams, like my beloved Cubs, are building betting windows inside and on the properties around stadiums.

Sports media outlets are devoting whole segments to betting lines and strategies for “beating the book.” Every sports radio station in medium and large markets have experts on staff and weekend shows devoted to helping people make better betting choices.

Of course, there are horse racing tracks around the country that went from teetering on the brink of closure to flourishing because of the new freedom in betting at their facilities.
And the federal government and individual states are thrilled to be getting massive tax revenue from sources they didn’t have to woo to move there or build infrastructure to support.

But at what cost?

These companies are literally “hooking” their prey with deals like “spend five dollars on who is going to win the Super Bowl, and even if your team loses will put $100 in your account.”
Sounds like a no-lose deal, but you can’t cash that out—obviously. That’s money put into your account, and you have to use it to make wagers over the next week or so or you lose it.

So that one bet now becomes at least two bets (probably more), and when that money runs out … then what?

Consider this: we are appalled at pharmaceutical companies who created drugs that help us manage pain after surgeries that were so strong that when the prescription runs out, we can’t stop craving them.

What these gambling operations are doing is prescribing Americans just enough “free” money in their accounts to drag them down into an abyss they can’t climb back out of.

And now no one can stop it. That horse has run out of the barn and is running down the road, and there is no point in closing the barn door.

But the good news is at least now you can find a site that will let you bet on that horse somewhere.

* * * 

Roger Grossman has been covering local sports in Kosciusko County for more than 30 years and is employed with News Now Warsaw. You can reach him at  rgrossman@kensington.media.

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