Stag Rally
Cheverus extends their winning streak.
During the fall, the newsletter doesn't come every day like it does for basketball season, but if it did, the Cheverus/Biddeford field hockey game would have been the easy choice for Game of the Day. It had a little bit of everything: 1 vs 2 in the Power Rankings, the 1 seed in A South on the line, and a rematch of a thriller from earlier this year.
Down a goal late, Cheverus rallied and pulled ahead when Ava Martin scored off a corner with 1:53 to go. The goal gave Cheverus the win (again) over Biddeford (again) and locked up the 1 seed in A South (again).
Biddeford, for their part, just can't get over the hump against the Stags, but these things never last forever and at some point you have to think the Tigers will get one. Maybe in a Regional Final?
Michael Hoffer was there.
Michael Hoffer
The big news comes from Portland where Joe Russo has retired after 518 wins and 6 Gold Balls over 39 seasons.
He might have saved one of his best coaching jobs for last, taking 6-seeded Bulldogs on a dominant tourney run en route to title number 6. Portland had injuries early in the season, but Russo got them playing their best when the calendar flipped over to Tourney Week with a suffocating defense. And that, of course, started with practice.
There's no word yet on who will take over the reigns at Portland as they start their title defense.
Michael Hoffer
One of the stories of the football season so far has been the emergence of Marshwood in B South under new coach Andrew Elwell. Elwell has the Hawks at 6-0 after taking over for Alex Rotsko, so I had him on the podcast to learn more about his approach, how he's simplified things for his players, the importance of getting buy-in from his seniors, and the vibes from the sideline during their epic 52-51 win over Noble.
You know the drill.
When ESPN fired Zach Lowe as part of their ongoing efforts to make their coverage worse, basketball obsessives lost something from their routine. Lowe was essential reading for anyone who cared about the NBA.
And sure, the Ringer hired Lowe to bring back his podcast a couple of months ago and that's great, but there's just something different about writing. Which makes it awesome that Lowe is bringing back the Lowe Post.
But writing ignites other parts of your thought process that might go dormant without it: word choice, language, sentence structure, the underpinnings of communication. Putting words on paper—the permanence of it—forces you to take an extra beat and make sure your material holds up: Does this trade really make sense? Would this rule change actually work, or does it have bad ripple effects? You game out your own ideas. You interrogate them. That process takes you to new places, notions you hadn’t contemplated.
I feel this.
So often I'll say something on the podcast and won't remember it 24 hours later. It's a looser, free-wheeling medium that rewards spontaneity, but that has a downside. You don't have to wrestle with it.
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The Ringer has clearly worked out a deal with Substack--this is at least the second Ringer person to start a newsletter over there--and it's been pointed out that The Ringer itself is a website where one could publish words. Why do it at Substack?
Well, newsletters have the advantage of being delivered into your inbox and your inbox is one of the places on the internet least beholden to billionaire algorithms. You "own" your newsletter audience more than followers on social media. It's likely going to be more sustainable moving forward.
The real question is if Lowe and Sean Fennessey actually own this or it's just a part of their deal with The Ringer. If Lowe decides to move on in a couple of years, can he take this newsletter with him or does Spotify control it like they do the podcasts? It's not just The Ringer. When Kevin Roose and Casey Newton ended their Hard Fork podcast to start a new one, the New York Times kept the feed and now there's a new guy hosting it and who wants that?
Meanwhile, the two people who built that feed had to start at square one.
Zach Lowe
The Action Network has a survey out where fans have some, uh, elevated opinions of their own talent level.
Fans aren't just confident about hitting a single lucky shot – many believe they could consistently put the ball in the basket against a pro. Notably, not a single fan (0%) said they'd fail to score at all, and men and women were almost equally confident on this question overall (2.5 vs 2.3 expected buckets on average). While half of fans (50%) say they'd manage just one bucket, 1 in 3 fans (34%) believe they could score three or more baskets in a pick-up game against an average pro, and the average fan puts their expected output at 2.4 buckets.
They could not.
If you'd like to feel better about your job performance...
I saw this pop up in my feed and thought, “How bad could it possibly be? They’re forced to make a statement on the conditions of the field markings?”
— Austen Allred (@Austen) October 13, 2026
Incredible. pic.twitter.com/Uxu8S8Cslx
A couple of football games moved from Friday to dodge the weather, just none of the really good ones. Exeter and Bonny Eagle could be interesting, but Exeter is 3-3 this year, so the Scots should be able to handle them.
There's also a Foxcroft/Bapst boys soccer game that won't decide the 1 seed in B North, but it'll put someone in the driver's seat.
And there's a GSA/Narraguagus volleyball game with a Stax Index of nearly 95(!), but those teams are essentially locked into their seeds.
Let's stay in volleyball.
Back on September 10th, Gorham beat TA in a 5 set thriller.
Since then, TA has been on a tear. They've won 9 straight and have only dropped 3 total sets. Gorham has lost 3 games over that same span--to Cheverus and York (the teams that took sets off TA) and Washington Academy.
Cheverus leads the Heal Points in A, but they don't control their own destiny.
A TA win and a Cheverus win over Bonny Eagle takes the Trojans to 83%. Gorham's realistic best-case scenario is the 2.
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.