In today's edition: Introducing guillotine leagues, Texas tops Coaches Poll, oddsmakers rank NFL QBs, 40 Schwarbombs, and more.
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🚨 Headlines
🏈 Coaches Poll: Texas, Ohio State, Penn State, Georgia and Notre Dame are the top five teams in the preseason college football Coaches Poll. As a reminder: The Longhorns and Buckeyes meet in Week 1.
⛳️ Nelly's reign ends: Thailand's Jeeno Thitikul has climbed past Nelly Korda to become the world's No. 1 women’s golfer, ending Korda's 71-week reign at the top.
🏀 Staying at 68 (for now): The NCAA voted not to expand March Madness for next season, but will continue to discuss increasing the field to 72 or 76 teams in the future.
⚾️ Judge is back: Aaron Judge (elbow) returns to the lineup tonight after missing 10 games, and boy could the struggling Yankees (four straight losses) use him.
🏀 Fox extension: The Spurs signed De'Aaron Fox to a four-year, $229 million max extension, keeping the former All-NBA guard in San Antonio through 2030.
🏈 Introducing guillotine leagues
Big news from HQ: We've added guillotine leagues to Yahoo Fantasy, offering you and your friends a whole new way to play this upcoming football season.
How it works:
Guillotine-style leagues offer a different approach by removing the head-to-head matchups and replacing them with a weekly battle royale between all managers, where the team with the lowest total score for that week is eliminated.
To make things even more interesting, the entire roster of players from the team that gets knocked out goes to the waiver wire — where everyone will have a chance to bid on them.
That process continues week after week until one team is left standing and that lone surviving manager is crowned the winner.
To put it simply, guillotine combines the best parts of fantasy drafting and waiver wire adds, with an undeniable urgency to survive every single week.
Instead of trying to win against one opponent, your goal is to avoid being the worst team in the league each week in order to escape elimination. As long as you're not at the very bottom, you keep playing.
Quick links:
Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy guillotine-style football league
🏈 Ranked: NFL QBs against the spread
How valuable is each NFL QB against the spread? It's an important question for bettors (and bookmakers) to answer, so that when a QB is injured, they have a sense of how much the line should change.
Yahoo Sports' Ben Fawkes asked 12 oddsmakers for the difference in the point spread if the starting QB and backup (both healthy) were playing at home against a league-average team. He then took all 12 different ATS values, averaged them together and ranked the starting QBs.
Top 10:
Josh Allen (6.98 points ATS)
Patrick Mahomes (6.94)
Lamar Jackson (6.65)
Jalen Hurts (6.31)
Joe Burrow (5.60)
Justin Herbert (5.15)
Dak Prescott (5.10)
Jared Goff (5.06)
Jayden Daniels (4.98)
C.J. Stroud (4.90)
Full rankings:1-32
📸 In photos: U.S. Nationals
We're still thinking about Cooper Lutkenhaus' historic race in the 800m final at the USATF Outdoor Championships, but that was hardly the only highlight from the weekend in Eugene. Here are a few more.
Noah Lyles came roaring back to beat Kenny Bednarek for his record-tying fifth U.S. men's 200m title, and the two got into a bit of a tiff after Lyles' stare-down led to a post-race shove from Bednarek.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the 400m hurdles world record holder, is switching her focus this season to the flat 400. So far, so good, as she dominated the final with a time that was just 0.2 seconds shy of the American record.
Remember Cole Hocker, who won 1500m gold in Paris with a kick for the ages? Well, he did it again, passing six guys in the final 200 meters to win an epic 5000m final.
Get to know the name Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. The South Carolina native, who won two medals last summer in Paris, just became the first woman since 2003 to pull off the 100m/200m double at nationals.
📺 Watchlist: Tuesday, Aug. 5
⚾️ Reds at Cubs | 8:05pm ET, TBS
Chicago (65-47) sits comfortably atop the NL Wild Card race, while Cincinnati (59-54) is three games back from the third and final spot.
🎾 Canadian Open | 6pm, Tennis
Three top-ranked Americans play in tonight's quarterfinals: No. 6 Madison Keys vs. No. 16 Clara Tauson (6pm), No. 2 Taylor Fritz vs. No. 6 Andrey Rublev (7pm), No. 4 Ben Shelton vs. No. 9 Alex de Minaur (8:10pm). And in the fourth match, Naomi Osaka faces No. 10 Elina Svitolina (7:10pm).
More to watch:
🏀 WNBA: Wings at Liberty (7pm, NBA); Fever at Sparks (10pm, CBSSN)
⚽️ Leagues Cup: Columbus Crew vs. León (7:30pm, FS1) … The final matchday of the league phase kicks off.
⚾️ MLB trivia
39 years ago today, Giants pitcher Steve Carlton recorded his 4,000th career MLB strikeout.
Question: Who are the only other three pitchers to reach that milestone?
Hint: They all have "R" as a first or last initial.
Answer at the bottom.
⚾️ 40 Schwarbombs
Kyle Schwarber smacked two home runs on Monday night for the first-place Phillies, giving him an NL-best 40 HR and MLB-best 94 RBIs. Is it time to consider he might be the NL MVP?
Absolute cinema:Watch this grand slam
Trivia answer: Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens
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Category: General Sports
