NEW YORK — Nearly 3,000 miles away, Jack Flaherty will make his second start for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night. After reviewing his medical records, the New York Yankees backed out of a preliminary trade agreement for Flaherty with the Detroit Tigers.

When asked after the trade deadline, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did not specifically comment on Flaherty’s medicals, stating only that he could not match the ask of what the Tigers wanted.

“At the end of the day, I would’ve brought Jack Flaherty in if I could’ve matched up,” Cashman said. “I had difficulty matching up, and that was the reason I don’t have him.”

An argument could be made that trading for Flaherty, who has the seventh-best ERA in MLB, would have been worth the risk for the Yankees. It’s impossible to make direct comparisons between what the Dodgers traded and what the Yankees might have offered after they backed off their agreement, but let’s do so for analysis purposes.

The Dodgers traded catcher/first baseman Thayron Liranzo, an offensive-minded prospect in A ball, and Trey Sweeney, a former Yankees infield prospect. Roderick Arias and Jorbit Vivas seem like the safest equivalents. Arias has struggled this season with the Low-A Tampa Tarpons, carrying a 32.4 percent strikeout rate, but he could develop into a strong major leaguer in a few years if he reaches his potential. Vivas might be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster in 2025 as the starting second baseman.

The American League is wide open this year. Getting a top-of-the-rotation starter in Flaherty could have cemented the Yankees as the overwhelming favorite heading into October. Instead, the Yankees’ starting rotation is filled with question marks. Since June 1, only the Miami Marlins and Colorado Rockies have a worse starting pitching ERA. After Nestor Cortes’ Thursday night dud in which he gave up six runs to the Los Angeles Angels, the Yankees’ starters have combined for a 5.48 ERA since June 1.

How you doin’? 😉#RepTheHalo pic.twitter.com/u5eovtRZlf

— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) August 8, 2024

Yankees manager Aaron Boone says he’s unconcerned with how poorly his rotation has pitched in the last two months.

“Our guys are more than capable,” Boone said. “More help is on the way with guys coming back from injury. We have everything we need.”

Even with the Yankees removing themselves from the Flaherty sweepstakes, not adding another starter feels like a miss. Cortes has allowed 24 runs over his last five starts, the most for any pitcher since July 11. Marcus Stroman’s 6.32 is the fourth-worst ERA since June 1. Carlos Rodón’s 5.83 ERA is the 11th worst since the start of June. That doesn’t even get into Luis Gil’s career-high workload coming off Tommy John surgery and Gerrit Cole, the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, not looking sharp just yet.

But outside of Flaherty, there weren’t many appealing starting pitchers traded. The Houston Astros overpaid for Yusei Kikuchi, the second-best starter who got moved. James Paxton, Frankie Montas, Martín Pérez, Michael Lorenzen, Erick Fedde and Zach Eflin were other notable starters traded, but each profiles as a depth option rather than an impactful acquisition.

Once the Yankees didn’t get Flaherty, it made sense for them to not pursue any of the second-tier options because Clarke Schmidt, who was pitching like one of MLB’s best starters before his lat injury, could be back in the rotation by the end of the month. Schmidt threw his first live batting practice Tuesday and is expected to throw another Saturday. If that goes well, the Yankees could send him on a rehab assignment beginning next week. If everyone stays healthy from now until Schmidt’s return, the Yankees may have to make a decision on whom he should replace in the rotation. Cortes and Stroman are the two likeliest candidates to get bounced.

“I don’t feel like Nestor is that far off,” Boone said. “It just comes down to finishing off execution. Stro, we have to get rolling a little bit.

“We have the guys to go out there. It’s just getting a few guys going and getting to that next level of execution.”

4 of the 20 worst starting pitcher ERAs in MLB since June 1 (min. 40 IP) are by Yankee pitchers: Stroman, Rodon, Cortes, Cole.

No other team has more than 2 pitchers in that group. https://t.co/j3Aoq9MCSU

Advertisement

— Katie Sharp (@SharpStats17) August 9, 2024

Stroman had his start date pushed back from Thursday to Sunday as he works on his mechanics, which he felt were out of sync in his last outing. Stroman said Thursday afternoon that he believes he’s “figured some things out,” but he wouldn’t specify what he may have tweaked. Stroman has a career-worst walk percentage, strikeout percentage and ground-ball percentage. Since Stuff+ and Location+ debuted in 2021, Stroman is running career lows in both categories, too.

With how they’ve performed lately, it’s possible both Stroman and Cortes could find themselves out of the Yankees’ playoff rotation. Their best four starters right now are Cole, Rodón, Gil and Schmidt, if he bounces back fine from his lat injury. The Yankees could use Cortes out of the bullpen as another left-hander because the only other lefty option is ground-ball specialist Tim Hill. But thinking about the playoff starting rotation configuration seems like a moot point if Cole can’t return to being a legitimate ace.

“Anytime we give the ball to Gerrit, we expect good things,” Boone said. “He’s spoiled us with that.”

The Yankees need Cole to return to the form he showed in 2023, or at least come close to it. If he can’t be that pitcher this season, the starting rotation won’t be strong enough to carry them through October. That’s why taking a risk on Flaherty, who will be a free agent at the end of the season, would have felt worthwhile in a year with high stakes, especially with Juan Soto in pinstripes for only one guaranteed season.

(Photo of Nestor Cortes handing the ball to manager Aaron Boone after getting pulled Thursday: Wendell Cruz / USA Today)

College football’s postseason enters a new era in 2024 with the arrival of the 12-team College Football Playoff, featuring automatic bids for the five top-ranked conference champions plus seven at-large selections. The bracket intrigue will only build throughout the fall, but one thing’s for sure: More teams will have a realistic shot to play for a national title than ever before.

But how many more? It’s assumed many of the nation’s elite programs will play their way into the top 12 most years, but the expanded field leaves room for a number of surprises, especially in the first year of a new system. Below, The Athletic’s college football writers make their picks for this season’s most enticing sleeper College Football Playoff teams. Programs ranked in the preseason Coaches Poll and voted atop their league’s preseason media poll were excluded from consideration.

This might be the Hokies’ best team since Frank Beamer retired. Tech found something in quarterback Kyron Drones and won five of its last seven games, including a bowl, to close out 2023. Drones threw for 17 touchdowns with just three picks and ran for 818 yards last season, igniting a long-dormant offense. Defensive lineman Antwaun Powell-Ryland (14.5 tackles for loss, 9.5 sacks) and a loaded secondary return on the unit in which head coach Brent Pry specializes. The Hokies rank top-five nationally in returning roster production, per ESPN’s Bill Connelly. Maybe there’s room for a slow-cooked sleeper to sneak into the 12-team field. — Kyle Tucker

The Cyclones return nine starters on both offense and defense, including breakout quarterback Rocco Becht, his top four receivers, the defense’s top five tacklers and leading rusher Abu Sama. Iowa State beat Oklahoma State and Kansas State last year and wraps up this season with a trip to Utah and at home against K-State. — Scott Dochterman

Jeff Brohm led the Cardinals to a 10-win season and an ACC championship game appearance in his first year at the helm, and he has some key pieces in place for what should be a sound defense, including end Ashton Gillotte. Can Texas Tech transfer quarterback Tyler Shough thrive in Brohm’s system? There will be ample opportunity to rise up the rankings with games against Notre Dame, Clemson and Miami. — Jesse Temple

Believe in the second-year leap. Louisville returns 15 players with at least five starts in 2023 and bolstered that group with a robust transfer portal class. The schedule is also favorable: Louisville only plays two of the top eight teams in the ACC preseason poll (Clemson and Miami), and the road trip to South Bend is a prime opportunity to beef up the playoff resume. —Kennington Smith III 

Are we not talking and writing enough about the Mountaineers? Quarterback Garrett Greene has a shot to contend for the Heisman. Neal Brown’s team has a chance to upset Penn State and make an immediate statement in Week 1. West Virginia has seven home games, which could help tip the scales with plenty of showcase opportunities as Penn State, Kansas, Iowa State, Kansas State, Baylor and UCF all travel to Morgantown. — Audrey Snyder 

The Bobcats came in atop the West Division in the Sun Belt preseason poll but still finished behind East-leading Appalachian State in the overall vote, qualifying them as a G5 sleeper. G.J. Kinne’s first team went 8-5, including a season-opening road win over Baylor, and Kinne dipped into the transfer portal this offseason for quarterback Jordan McCloud, the reigning Sun Belt Player of the Year for James Madison. The schedule sets up favorably, too: The Bobcats have winnable yet respectable nonconference games at home against Arizona State and UTSA, plus a Sun Belt slate that avoids the East Division’s top five teams based on the preseason poll. — Justin Williams

UCF

The Knights were the only Big 12 newcomer last season to reach a bowl game, and head coach Gus Malzahn drastically upgraded his roster through the transfer portal, adding 27 new players with 327 college starts between them. Quarterback K.J. Jefferson comes over from Arkansas to lead the offense, which features two 1,400-yard rushers from a year ago in RJ Harvey and Peny Boone (Toledo transfer). They’ll score plenty. — Manny Navarro

UNLV

What in the name of Randall Cunningham? (Or Stacey Augmon?) Actually, it’s in the name of Barry Odom, who was a very good defensive coordinator at Missouri and less of a good head coach there but has found his level out west. UNLV was picked second in the Mountain West, and the only big question is how it will replace quarterback Jayden Maiava, who transferred to USC (after first committing to Georgia). That matter does need to be resolved quickly because three early nonconference games will be pivotal to any CFP hopes: at Houston, at Kansas, home against Syracuse. It’ll be tough, but UNLV making the first expanded CFP would be a great story. — Seth Emerson

If the Rebels can figure out how to replace Maiava, they are going to be dangerous. The Rebels reached the Mountain West championship game in Odom’s first season, and his team has a ton of talent surrounding the quarterback. But we all know how important quarterbacks are in college football. — Daniel Shirley

Call me crazy, but I believe in the Scarlet Knights this year. Greg Schiano has done a great job recruiting in the program’s backyard and returns a ton of talent from a team that actually led Ohio State at halftime last season. They’ll have a new quarterback in Minnesota transfer Athan Kaliakmanis, and running back Kyle Monangai is one of the best running backs the country doesn’t talk enough about. The schedule breaks right for contention, too: The Scarlet Knights don’t play Penn State, Oregon, Ohio State, Iowa or Michigan this year. — Cameron Teague Robinson

You want to get nuts? Let’s get nuts. The parameters for this exercise basically require a team to be in a high-leverage situation where one or two unexpected twists and turns upends all assumptions. I give you the Badgers, who get Alabama at home in mid-September — the first time since 1971 that an SEC team will play at Camp Randall Stadium. The place will be bonkers, and the Crimson Tide will be coached by someone other than Nick Saban. Then there’s USC on the road two weeks later. Not insurmountable! And finally, Oregon, at home, in mid-November, when the climate could be very unfriendly to those unfamiliar with late fall in the Midwest. Even if the Badgers lose one or two of these games, that’s no longer fatal in a 12-team playoff. And Tyler Van Dyke at quarterback is, himself, a high-leverage wild card. — Brian Hamilton

The Bulls took a huge leap forward in Alex Golesh’s first season as head coach, going from 1-11 to 7-6 with a 45-0 bowl win against Syracuse. With star quarterback Byrum Brown back and a defense that can only get better, keep an eye on Tampa. The nonconference schedule is tough with Alabama and Miami, but the conference schedule could be favorable, with USF set to play four of the bottom five teams in the AAC preseason poll, plus conference frontrunner Memphis at home. If the Bulls can get through the first five games at 3-2, watch out for a late run. — Chris Vannini

SMU

The ACC race feels like a bit of a wild card, so why not pick the conference newcomer to make waves in Year 1? Last year’s Mustangs ranked No. 8 in the FBS in scoring offense en route to an 11-3 record and an AAC championship. Quarterback Preston Stone returns after throwing for 3,197 yards (26th in the FBS) and 28 touchdowns (11th) with a 161.3 passing efficiency rating (13th) as a redshirt sophomore. Of course, the Mustangs were beat out by undefeated Liberty for last year’s G5 New Year’s Six bid, so there’s an added chip on their shoulders against the committee. — Jayna Bardahl

I’m a big believer in new coach Jon Sumrall after his time at Troy, where he inherited a program that won a combined 15 games in the previous three seasons and went 23-4 in his two years there with back-to-back Sun Belt titles. Sumrall brought both of his coordinators with him to Tulane and did a solid job of adding portal talent to an already athletic Green Wave roster. The schedule offers opportunities to impress the committee with a home game against Kansas State and a road trip to Oklahoma. And Memphis, the AAC preseason favorite, must travel to New Orleans in the regular season finale. — Sam Khan Jr.

The Sun Belt contenders could cannibalize themselves as Playoff hopefuls, and Liberty’s strength of schedule likely won’t be all that impressive. That leaves room for someone else to break through and earn the G5’s guaranteed spot in the 12-team playoff. After a reset year that featured nine wins (two over Power 5 schools), the Bulldogs bring back quarterback Mikey Keene and have the schedule that could set up for a nice run even with the retirement of head coach Jeff Tedford this summer. — Antonio Morales

(Top illustration photos: Chris Jones, Vincent Carchietta / USA Today)

PARIS — The ball bounced off the rim five times.

Five!

Stephen Curry came off that brick-house screen from Joel Embiid late in the fourth quarter, with Serbian guard Ognjen Dobrić running into the wall as if he were Wile E. Coyote and crumpling to the floor, and the greatest shooter of all time fired a shot from up top that might as well have landed on a craps table.

With just 144 seconds left to play in this FIBA-style game where the clock is no one’s friend, it fell through the net to give Team USA a lead for the first time since midway through the first quarter. Eventually, Team USA pulled off one of the most stunning comebacks ever by somehow surviving a 17-point deficit against Serbia, 95-91, en route to the Olympic gold-medal game against France. Eventually, we’ll come to truly appreciate how close this squad — with names like LeBron James, Curry, Kevin Durant and so many more all-time talents on board — came to a level of infamy that would have surpassed the 2004 team that took bronze in Athens and inspired a reckoning within the national program as a result.

STEPHEN. CURRY. TEAM USA LEADS.#ParisOlympics | 📺 NBC, USA Network and Peacock pic.twitter.com/C4MUUl1v78

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 8, 2024

Advertisement

Phew.

I honestly don’t know what else to say.

When you cover international tournaments such as the Olympics, there is a level of support from some non-American media for their respective teams that is, to be honest, quite off-putting. Some reporters cheer on press row, which is considered a no-no in the United States, and others even shout disparaging things at American players like Joel Embiid (true story).

But to watch these Americans walk up to the edge like they did, and to anticipate the sort of scrutiny that was headed their way from people like yours truly if they fell short, was to quietly hope that shots like Curry’s late 3 would fall. It’s a dynamic that simply doesn’t exist in the NBA, one that’s born out of the reality that you know one group of humans so much better than the others. And when Curry finished the job, stealing that pass from Bogdan Bogdanović and going coast-to-coast for a left-to-right layup that put Team USA up 91-86 with 1:01 left, there was a sense of relief that the Golden State Warriors star had finally had a moment in his debut Summer Games.

As Team USA coach Steve Kerr shared afterward, Curry had the look of a player who was pressing coming in. He scored in single digits in three of Team USA’s four Olympic games while averaging a whopping 7.3 points in the first four, with the lone highlight of his first Olympics experience being the exhibition game against Serbia on July 17 in which he scored 24 points.

That was child’s play compared to this one. Curry was unconscious, finishing with 36 points while hitting 12 of 19 shots and burying nine of 14 3s in all.

You know how many times he has hit that many 3s on 14 or fewer attempts in his entire storied career? Nine, according to Stathead.com, and that includes 1,103 games in all between regular season and playoffs (0.8 percent of the time). As a relevant reminder, these games are 40 minutes long and not the 48-minute affairs we see in the NBA. The fact that it came in a game in which Team USA was in such desperate need of a hoops hero made it all the more epic.

“There were times these last couple weeks where I thought (Curry) was working too hard,” said Kerr, the Warriors coach who has had his front-row seat to Curry’s greatness for a decade. “He just cares so much, works so hard at his game constantly. We all know who he is, what he’s about, and I almost wanted to tell him, ‘Hey, take a day off,’ But it’s just not who he is. He works so hard, and he willed himself to that game tonight over the past couple weeks with the work he’s put in.”

Curry, the 36-year-old who had still managed to enjoy this Olympic experience to the fullest off the floor, insisted the walls weren’t closing in.

“I didn’t feel (pressure) at all, because we were winning by … 15, 20 every game,” he said. “I know that I affect the game in other ways. But about two minutes into the game tonight, we realized that I’m getting looks, that they were playing a different type of defense on us. Obviously, they were scoring crazy on the other end, so you just keep going and get lost in the moment.

“It’s whatever the game calls for. I shot three times last game (in a rout of Brazil), and I wasn’t looking to force it, because that’s not what the game called for. So that’s the beauty of Team USA and FIBA and this whole experience. Every game has been somebody different.”

Still, to hear Curry’s side of the story was to realize this role has been a massive adjustment for him. While he entered the Serbia game shooting just 35.7 percent from the field and 25 percent from three (5 of 20), he had also averaged just seven shots per game. That context, the reality that this team makes it so challenging for so many great players to find a way to play like they do with their NBA squads, is often lost in the discussion.

“I haven’t had many opportunities,” Curry said so plainly. “I haven’t shot the ball well the whole tournament, but it doesn’t waver your confidence to meet the moment.”

And did he ever.

When one of the greatest basketball games of all time was over, James — who was a part of the ’04 team the USA Basketball program would rather everyone forget — threw the ball into the air and looked down to find Curry waiting to hug him with unbridled joy. It was a surreal scene in every way, the sight of these two NBA rivals sharing the kind of memory no one could have imagined when their Cavs and Warriors teams were battling for all those years in the finals.

So, I asked James, where does this game rank in terms of sheer emotion?

“I mean, it’s up there,” said James, the four-time champion and Los Angeles Lakers star whose triple-double (16 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists) played a massive part in the win. “I mean, I’m 39 years old, going into my 22nd season. I don’t know how many opportunities or moments I’m gonna get like this, to be able to compete for something big and play in big games.”

This game was bigger than big. It was downright magical, with all this history tied up between the players who matter most falling by the wayside for the sake of their national pride. Just listen to Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns star who won two championships with Curry in Golden State and sounded like he’d never seen anything like this before.

“Steph, man, that was a God-like like performance,” said Durant, who forced Bogdanović into a crucial backcourt violation with 1:34 left and hit a nasty jumper with 34 seconds remaining that put Team USA up 93-89. “Dang, (Curry) was tough. He felt like he was struggling throughout the whole tournament, and we always said each night it could be somebody different (every game). And tonight, he showed up in a way that, man…”

Durant almost couldn’t find the words.

“Shot after shot, getting a steal and then finishing with the layup,” he said. “He was everywhere tonight. It was one of the greatest games I’ve ever seen him play.”

Required Reading

(Top photo of Stephen Curry and Aleksa Avramović: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)