FC Dallas hits the road down I-35 on Sunday night for the Texas Derby. A regular season match with real stakes following the Leagues Cup obligations for both sides.

Dallas absorbed a 3-1 loss at Toluca in Mexico on Wednesday night. Thankfully the league table doesn’t care about Leagues Cup results. Austin FC, meanwhile, pulled off one of the better runs in 2026 with three straight wins in the Leagues Cup. Thursday night, they downed Club América in a penalty shootout to advance to the Leagues Cup quarterfinals.

Austin currently sit 14th in the Western Conference, has had a rough season. Davy Arnaud took over as the interim manager after the club let Nico Estevez go before the World Cup break.

Will the Leagues Cup success translate? Here’s what we’ll be watching for Sunday night.

Don’t Let the Leagues Cup Glow Fool You, Austin has been a disaster in League play

Let’s be clear about what Austin FC is right now. They entered the World Cup break in 14th place and outside of the Leagues Cup, they’re still a team near the bottom of the table. One win in their last six. The other five results were all losses.

Davy Arnaud is in as interim manager, a placeholder until Jim Curtin takes over next season. Basically, this is a group playing to figure out who can stick around next year.

They’ve conceded 36 goals this season, while only scoring 22. Their league form has been rough. The Leagues Cup has given them a reset, a crowd, and a bit more of a narrative. Sunday is where Dallas gets to test whether any of that translates to success in league play.

Uzuni Is Absolutely on Fire Right Now – Dallas Has to Find an Answer

Here is the fun part for Austin: Myrto Uzuni might have been one of the best players during the Leagues Cup. He scored a hat trick in one game and is beaming with confidence.

The Albanian Designated Player leads Austin with goals this season, but those numbers (six goals, five assists) undersell what he’s been doing lately. He’s found his rhythm under Arnaud that Estevez struggled to figure out. Uzuni is making defenders uncomfortable with his newfound swagger.

Dallas’ backline has been solid in stretches this summer, but they have also shown vulnerability. Toluca reminded us all how quickly things can unravel when things aren’t sharp enough. Uzuni will be looking for the space behind the defense. Stopping him before he gets going has to be priority one.

Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever were back at the friendly confines of Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis as they welcomed another one of the league’s biggest stars, Paige Bueckers, and the Dallas Wings.

Now, there’s been a lot of drama in the WNBA as of late, and this one delivered some of that as well.

Just a different brand of drama. Not the clotheslining and rage-tweeting-about-White-privilege-from-the-locker-room kind.

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The Wings entered the game shorthanded, with Azzi Fudd among those sidelined.

Still, despite missing some serious firepower, Dallas kept things close.

It started slowly, with both teams failing to put more than 20 points on the board in the first quarter, but the offense ramped up a touch in the second quarter, with the Wings taking a 37-35 lead to the locker room.

Speaking of which, it was at the very end of the first half that one of the most notable moments of the game occurred.

Clark rolled her ankle while the Fever were on defense and, worse yet, hobbled off the court to the locker room.

The Fever were hoping to take over first place in the Eastern Conference, and that would be tough in a close game without Clark.

However, thousands of fans in the building breathed a sigh of relief when Clark started the second half and went on a roll.

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The floodgates opened offensively, with Clark finishing the night with 29 points and 10 assists. Bueckers also scored 29 points for the Wings, adding six assists and six rebounds.

But the Fever got an added scoring punch from Kelsey Mitchell — who finished with 23 points for a franchise-record 18th straight 20-point game — and Tyasha Harris, who went 4-for-4 from 3-point range, to pull away for a 98-87 win.

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That gives the Fever first place in the East over the Atlanta Dream, who, coincidentally, will host them on Sunday in a big game for the conference’s top spot.

Last night, Don Toliver took over the American Airlines Center for the second time this summer, returning for another sold-out show on the second leg of his Octane World Tour. Toliver had already stopped in Dallas on June 13, but demand was strong enough to warrant a return, and judging by the packed arena, there was clearly an audience for it. But fans were in for a disappointing night as most of the show, Toliver was a secondary player, relying on back tracks and DJs instead of performing live.

Toliver appeared dressed entirely in white with oversized shoes, baggy pants and a matching jacket promptly at 9:30 p.m. The set leaned heavily on Toliver’s newer material, opening with “E85” before transitioning through a mix of recent tracks and some of the biggest songs of his career.

For what felt like nearly half the show, though, Toliver’s DJ was doing most of the heavy lifting. Having a DJ play records during a concert isn’t exactly unheard of, but there is a difference between keeping the crowd energized between songs and essentially staging an extended intermission, with the greatest hits played from the table. Hearing songs like “Lemonade” or “Private Landing” blasted through an arena is fun, but when you pay to see Toliver, you would rather watch him actually perform them.

Even when he was onstage, Toliver relied heavily on his backing tracks, which also isn’t a rarity, but he didn’t seem very interested in supporting the tracks, either. He would rap the opening lines of a song, throw in a few ad-libs, dance around and wave his hands while a computer did the rest.

At times, it made the show feel less like a concert and more like a massive listening party with Toliver serving as the hype man. The crowd, however, did not seem to mind.

Toliver’s music has become deeply intertwined with the internet generation. Songs like “No Pole,” “Cardigan” and tracks from his latest project have taken on lives of their own through TikTok clips, edits and viral moments. His music is often less lyrically dense than many of his contemporaries, relying instead on atmosphere, melody and production.

If anything, watching the audience might have been the most entertaining part of the entire night. The general admission floor erupted into mosh pits whenever a recognizable beat dropped, with hordes of young fans losing their minds over songs they had spent years hearing through TikTok edits.

The biggest reactions came when Toliver dipped into the songs that helped build his career. “No Pole” sent the arena into a frenzy, while “Can’t Say” felt like a reward for the fans who had been following him before his music became so inseparable from internet culture.

During “Gemstone” Toliver performed from a suspended platform, hovering above the crowd as the floor erupted underneath him, providing one of the night’s strongest visual moments, but still a concert trope borrowed from his contemporaries. In 2026, we’d be more impressed to find a Grammy-nominated rapper that doesn’t have a suspended platform during their set.

Toliver clearly understands what a modern arena rap show is expected to deliver visually, with giant production pieces, mosh pits, DJs, viral hits and a crowd encouraged to treat every song like a riot soundtrack. But it is difficult not to notice how heavily the show borrows from the liveshow blueprints drawn by the artists that came before him.

Artists like Playboi Carti, Travis Scott and A$AP Rocky have all developed distinctive approaches to their concerts, creating larger-than-life spectacles. Toliver has many of the same ingredients. What he does not yet have is the fully-rounded stage presence that makes the artists who’ve inspired him true performers. What Toliver lacks in commandment, he attempts to make up for in theatre.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But once the lights, platforms, backing tracks and DJ interludes are stripped away, the person at the center of the spectacle still has to carry the show. Right now, Toliver doesn’t quite get there.

The crowd certainly had fun, and for many of the young fans packed into the American Airlines Center, that may have been enough. But for an artist capable of selling out the same arena twice in a matter of months, the expectations should be higher. Toliver has the songs, the audience and the production budget to give a memorable show, now he just has to be worth remembering.

Until then, the “E85” rapper is a sweet surprise on the nightly doom scroll, but he falls short of being a must-see live show.