ARLINGTON, Texas — And now, 15 thoughts from Notre Dame 27, Penn State 24 and Ohio State 28, Texas 14 — two much-needed, much-enjoyed fourth-quarter finishes in the College Football Playoff semifinals.

1. The camera operators for the mammoth video board at AT&T Stadium love their crowd shots. There were several between every play. Friday night’s Ohio State-Texas Cotton Bowl provided them with an endless supply of dudes in Buckeyes jerseys flashing the Block O and women in cowboy boots giving the Hook ’Em sign.

When Ohio State’s Jack Sawyer stripped Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers, picked up the ball and returned it for a game-sealing 83-yard touchdown, that board morphed into a long montage of euphoric Buckeyes fans mixed with Longhorn surrender cobras. Moments earlier, No. 5 seed Texas was at the 1-yard line, possibly about to send this Playoff semifinal to overtime. Now, with one remarkable play, No. 8 seed Ohio State was on its way to Atlanta.

A pair of dramatic semifinals on back-to-back nights give us a Jan. 20 clash between the Buckeyes and No. 7 seed Notre Dame in the first all-Midwest national championship game since … well, ever.

JACK SAWYER SCOOP-AND-SCORE 😱

Ohio State is one step closer to advancing to the national championship! pic.twitter.com/BPoV5FBRGZ

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— ESPN (@espn) January 11, 2025

2. I knew the first 12-team Playoff would be compelling. I underestimated the extent.

In the old days, the four-team field was announced in early December, then the teams went into hibernation for a month. They finally came back for New Year’s to play a pair of semifinals that were sometimes great but sometimes anticlimactic.

This year, by the time the teams got to the semis, we’d been invested in their stories for weeks. Like following an Olympic swimmer on his quest for gold, we became Jeremiyah Love fans with his 98-yard touchdown against Indiana and marveled when he trucked four Penn State defenders on a 2-yard touchdown. We turned on that Dec. 21 Tennessee-Ohio State game not knowing whether the Buckeyes still had a pulse post-Michigan. Three wins later, they’re on the brink of a national championship.

Ohio State and Notre Dame will be playing for the third consecutive season, and yet this feels like an entirely fresh matchup. So much has happened since then. Perhaps Lou Holtz will perform the coin toss.

3. Generational freshman Jeremiah Smith had a combined 13 catches for 290 yards and four touchdowns through the Buckeyes’ first two Playoff games. The story of the Cotton Bowl figured to be whether Texas’s talented defense could slow him down. The Horns did, holding Smith to one first-quarter catch for 3 yards.

From start to finish, Texas made Ohio State earn this one. The Longhorns gave up one home run play, TreVeyon Henderson’s 75-yard catch and run touchdown to go up 14-7 in the second quarter. But the Buckeyes, which did themselves no favors with penalties, punted on four straight first-half possessions and did not score in the third quarter, which began with quarterback Will Howard throwing a pick.

But come the fourth quarter, Howard and the Buckeyes showed they’re not all 50-yard TDs. They took over on their 12-yard line with 14:47 left and spent the next 7:45 grinding out an 88-yard drive. Facing a fourth-and-2 at the Texas 34, Howard kept on a delayed draw and ran 18 yards toward the end zone (before slipping). The drive culminated in a Quinshon Judkins 1-yard TD. Obviously, the game was far from over, but it was an important moment. They’ll need more drives like it against an even stingier Notre Dame defense.

4. Fittingly, though, the Buckeyes sealed their victory with a huge defensive play by one of their veteran stalwarts in Sawyer. For all the star power on the other side of the ball, Ohio State’s defense has been its constant, behind the likes of Sawyer, bookend JT Tuimoloau (1.5 sacks) and linebacker Cody Simon (nine tackles, three TFLs). It wasn’t flawless. Ewers, under heavy pressure most of the night, still threw for 287 yards and two TDs, one being a game-tying 26-yard throw to Jaydon Blue. And after falling behind 21-14, Texas drove from its own 25 to the Buckeyes’ 1 with three minutes left.

But then Lathan Ransom snuffed out a second-down toss to Quintrevion Wisner for a 7-yard loss, Sawyer forced an incompletion on third-and-goal and then … you saw it.

GO DEEPER

Nobody is more Ohio State than Jack Sawyer. The Cotton Bowl’s defining play had to be his

5. Day is one win away from completing a world-record turnaround from the most hated man in Ohio to its conquering hero. His former rival, Jim Harbaugh, went from having to take a pay cut to winning the first of three straight Big Ten titles in 2021. The guy Day is about to face again, Freeman, was able to erase the stench of that loss to Northern Illinois throughout this season. But Day has pulled this off in the span of four games. Ohio State fans may never forgive him for the Michigan losses, even with a trophy, and they’ll certainly be disappointed if the Buckeyes fall short next Monday.

But no one could possibly say the guy doesn’t know what he’s doing/has been riding Urban Meyer’s coattails/can’t win the big one, etc. The SEC has been the country’s measuring stick for 18 years, and Day’s team defeated two of that league’s top-three teams since Dec. 21. In between, it walloped the No. 1 team in the country. Give the man his flowers.

6. America’s most popular backup quarterback, Arch Manning, got in for one play, a fourth-and-1 at midfield in the second quarter, and promptly ran for 8 yards on a keeper. Much to the chagrin of some Horns fans, he came right back out.

Ewers, who presumably played his last game in a Texas uniform (whether he turns pro or enters the portal), should be nothing but commended for what he did in three seasons at Texas. He led a program that had been down for nearly 15 years to a Big 12 title, an SEC title game and back-to-back Playoffs. He saved the day against Arizona State in the quarterfinals, and, for the second year in a row, had the Horns on the cusp of a semifinal victory (last year Texas lost close to Washington) but couldn’t quite get there. He went 21-5 as the starter over the past two seasons.

He wasn’t Vince Young or Colt McCoy. But he was the face of the program’s best two-year run since those guys played.

A 41-yard field goal by Mitch Jeter sealed Notre Dame’s 27-24 win against Penn State in the CFP semifinals.(Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)

7. In 2012, when Notre Dame last reached a national championship game, the 12-0 Irish wrapped up their berth on Nov. 24. It would be 44 days before they played again in their infamous 42-14 flop against Alabama. The stigma from that game fed the notion that Notre Dame had a free pass to the BCS/CFP by not playing a 13th game. It lingered for so long that Penn State’s James Franklin inexplicably pulled the “everyone should be in a conference” card just days before facing the independent Irish in a semifinal game.

Thanks to the 12-team format, Notre Dame got to definitively prove it belongs in the natty. Even if it loses 55-0 to Ohio State (it won’t), Notre Dame had to play 15 games to get there, culminating with three top-10 teams in a row, including SEC champion Georgia and 13-game winner Penn State.

If, after all that, you’re still hung up on “but they lost to NIU four months ago,” congrats on becoming the real-life Debbie Downer character from “Saturday Night Live.”

8. My colleague Ralph Russo wrote this week about how Marcus Freeman did the unthinkable and made the Irish likable. Watching their last-second 27-24 semifinal win, I saw his point. This Notre Dame team is not some little engine that could (the Fighting Irish closed as one-point underdogs against the Nittany Lions) but they have a lot of feel-good components. The boyish-looking head coach who initially seemed in over his head. An unfathomable Week 2 loss to NIU that could have crushed them. Injuries. Thirty-plus years of “can’t win the big one.” And more injuries — like quarterback Riley Leonard briefly getting knocked out Thursday night.

But they’ve also got a bunch of badasses. Like Love barreling through four defenders to reach the end zone. Or receiver Jaden Greathouse making two different DBs fall on his 54-yard TD catch. Or linebacker Jack Kiser grabbing an acrobatic interception that would have saved a touchdown if not for a phantom pass-interference call.

And yet, even with all that going for them, the game was very much in doubt until …

9. Drew Allar has carried the weight of savior status since arriving at Penn State. The junior led his team to 13 wins this season. But when he met his biggest moment yet, with 33 seconds left in a tie game, he did the unforgivable and threw over the middle under duress. Notre Dame’s Christian Gray intercepted it, giving Leonard the chance to set up Mitch Jeter’s game-winning 41-yard field goal. (Props to Leonard on that third-and-3 dart to Greathouse.) Allar owned it in his postgame news conference, during which Franklin could be seen trying to cheer him up.

Franklin’s infamous top-five record dropped to 1-15 at Penn State, but there was no in-game decision to blame the coach for on this night. He has, however, let his star QB down.

GO DEEPER

Brian Kelly is Thursday’s big loser and will have to watch Notre Dame play for a title

10. It’s inconceivable how a team could win 13 games and reach the CFP semifinals with such a desolate receiver room. Not one of Allar’s 12 completions Thursday went to a wide receiver. Star tight end Tyler Warren and running backs Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen did their usual things, but receivers Harrison Wallace III and Omari Evans were MIA. Franklin tried to plug the hole when he landed Ohio State’s Julian Fleming, a former top-five recruit, but he barely contributed.

Whatever money Penn State’s NIL collective had to spend to keep Allar in State College for another year, it better have enough left over to go on a wide receiver shopping spree.

In the meantime, here’s one parting salute to Warren, who finished the 2024 season with 104 catches (tied for second nationally) for 1,233 yards (sixth) and eight TDs. Those are impressive numbers for any pass-catcher, much less a tight end. For perspective, Georgia’s Brock Bowers, himself an all-timer, topped out at 63 catches.

11. While Franklin still has not shed his big-game rep, Penn State hasn’t come this close to a national championship since 2005, when it finished No. 3. If you’re a Nittany Lions fan who’s been living in “almost” mode for the past decade, you should feel more optimistic today than at any point since at least the Saquon Barkley era. But Franklin will remain polarizing. According to my colleague Pete Sampson, Freeman was ticked at Franklin after their pregame news conference, when the Penn State coach joked about the 39-year-old’s youth. “All the anger went toward us and that anger went onto the field,” said Notre Dame safety Xavier Watts.

Penn State: Now less likable than Notre Dame.

GO DEEPER

Notre Dame used everything to beat Penn State. Did James Franklin provide extra juice?

12. Notre Dame quarterback Steve Angeli played just one series after Leonard went out shortly before halftime, but it was a big one. The Irish trailed 10-0 and had shown little life on offense. Angeli took over at his own 40 and completed his first four passes, and 6-of-7 on the drive. He took two sacks, the second by Abdul Carter, ending any chance of a touchdown. But the Irish got three points, and more importantly, went into the half on a positive note. When Leonard returned for the second half, Notre Dame — which holds a ridiculous 155-10 edge in the “middle eight” this season — promptly drove for a game-tying touchdown.

Who knows if it ever gets to that point if Angeli hadn’t lived up to the moment?

13. I’ve now lived through a quarter-century of “Will THIS be the thing that forces Notre Dame to join a conference?” The most recent edition was the 12-team wrinkle where the Irish can never earn a first-round bye. Well, it took one season to prove this is in fact an ideal system for them.

In the four-team CFP, it was assumed Notre Dame would have to go undefeated to make it, as it did in 2018 and 2020, and sure enough, this year’s 11-1 team finished No. 5. No, they don’t get a bye, but they had the same amount of time off as first-round opponent Indiana. And perhaps most importantly, Notre Dame earned the maximum $20 million in payouts from the CFP for reaching the title game. Unlike schools in most conferences, they don’t have to share any of it.

The school arguably has less incentive today to join a conference than it did when it first struck its NBC deal 34 years ago.

14. Here’s another thing I was wrong about: Both the Orange and Cotton Bowls were packed. It did not matter that the Miami Gardens game was played on a Thursday in the first full work week of the year. Notre Dame and Penn State fans figured it out and filled Hard Rock Stadium. Even a snowstorm in the Dallas area that caused more than 1,000 canceled flights the day before the Cotton Bowl did not stop Ohio State fans from occupying roughly 45 percent of AT&T Stadium, and Texas fans the rest. (The official attendance of 74,527 was about 5,000 short of a sellout but empties were hardly noticeable.)

I should know better by this point: College football fans always find a way.

15. Finally, CFP and ESPN officials must be giddy beyond belief at the Ohio State-Notre Dame matchup. The former is the biggest TV draw in the sport, and the other the most prestigious brand. As I said off the top, people will have been following their respective stories for a month by the time we get to Jan. 20.

The CFP TV record for a national championship was 33.4 million for Ohio State-Oregon in 2014. That’s … a lot. By comparison, last year’s Michigan-Washington game drew 25 million. My guess is this one falls somewhere between the two.

But I’ve underestimated a lot of things throughout this CFP — including both Ohio State and Notre Dame.

(Top photo: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)

Quentin Lake got the news on the field after practice, so there was no other place he wanted to pass it along.

The Rams’ safety trotted into the locker room, picked up his phone and waited until teammates had filed in and left the field empty.

Then he quietly made his way back outside, took a deep breath and placed the call.

“Dad,” he said, trying to hide his excitement, “I was elected a team captain.”

Carnell Lake choked up a bit.

“You’re only in your third year!” he told his son, pride rippling through the connection. “‘I didn’t get elected captain till I was 10 years in. Man, I’m proud of you.”

The emotional August exchange, on the eve of the Rams’ season, was another bonding moment for father and son.

Carnell, a star at Culver City High and UCLA, played safety and cornerback for 12 NFL seasons, 10 with the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1989 to 1998. He was an All-Pro, a five-time Pro Bowl selection and was named to an NFL 1990s All-Decade team.

Quentin, who also played at UCLA, is a leader and something of an ironman for a Rams team that rebounded from a 1-4 start to make the playoffs.

“Football,” Quentin said of his relationship with his father, “is our love language.”

Quentin’s lineage comes through in his approach, his maturity and his play, Rams coach Sean McVay said. A love for the game, understanding of nuances and “emotional intelligence,” as McVay put it, enables the 25-year-old to navigate situations and connect with other players.

“You definitely feel that pedigree based on the love that he has and that relationship that he has with his father,” McVay said.

Carnell played in 17 playoff games, including a Super Bowl XXX defeat by the Dallas Cowboys in 1996.

On Monday night, Quentin will start his second postseason game when the Rams play the Minnesota Vikings in an NFC wild-card game at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

Because of safety concerns related to the wildfires in Southern California, the NFL moved the game from SoFi Stadium.

“You want to remind guys that when stuff like this happens, it’s bigger than the game of football,” Quentin said of his role as a captain, “but at the same time we can use this game to give L.A. hope.”

By design, Quentin’s journey to the NFL was made without a push from his father.

Despite Quentin’s request for his father to coach him in youth sports — “I wanted to learn all the tricks of the trade,” he said — Carnell declined.

“If you grow up enjoying it without feeling pressure,” Carnell said, “I think it’s going to be more about him.”

Carnell never pushed football. He told his son that if he wanted to be an engineer, be an engineer. If he wanted to be a doctor, be a doctor.

“He always said, ‘It’s your life, and you’re going to have to one day make a decision of what you want to do,” Quentin said. “Luckily, he was such a good role model that that’s exactly what I wanted to do was be a football player and go to the NFL.”

Quentin played at Santa Ana Mater Dei before following in his father’s footsteps to UCLA. Carnell, who had coached for seven seasons with the Steelers, left his position so he could watch.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to miss that,’” Carnell said.

Carnell, though, continued to keep his distance.

“He never wanted to overstep,” his son said.

But in 2018, after watching a Bruins practice where Quentin played a coverage incorrectly, Carnell offered a bit of unsolicited advice.

“He was kind of listening like, ‘Hey Dad, you played a long time ago,’” Carnell said, laughing. “So I looked at it like, he’s not listening to me.”

Not much changed after USC receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown burned the Bruins for a long touchdown late in the season.

Quentin Lake warms up before a game between UCLA and Fresno State at the Rose Bowl in September 2021.

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

The next week, however, St. Brown’s brother, Osiris, scored on a similar play for Stanford.

“At that point, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to listen — he knows what he’s talking about,” Quentin said, chuckling. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

“So from that point on, we started really diving into the film and how can I improve my game — and my game took off.”

The Rams selected Lake in the sixth round of the 2022 draft. He was sidelined for much of his rookie season because of a knee injury, but last season his versatility helped the Rams rebound from a 3-6 start to make the playoffs.

As the Rams prepared for this season, first-year defensive coordinator Chris Shula regarded Lake as a building block for a unit making up for the loss of retired star defensive lineman Aaron Donald. After linebacker Troy Reeder suffered a hamstring injury, Lake assumed signal-calling duties.

“We had that vision of being able to move him around and play wherever we needed to fit the defense,” Shula said. “He’s excellent in coverage. He’s a physical player. He is obviously really smart, so he is a guy that you can do a lot of different things with.”

Quentin, 6-foot-1 and 196 pounds, said he has benefited from the expertise of Rams coaches as well as his sessions with his father.

Carnell recalled one they shared during Quentin’s down time.

Rams safety Quentin Lake, left, and cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon celebrate an interception against the Bengals in September 2023.

(Emilee Chinn / Associated Press)

“We stayed up till 2 in the morning watching film, and he showed me his notebook,” Carnell said. “I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ He’s already ahead of me. His penmanship and his notetaking skills are impressive.

“Mine is like chicken scratch.”

Quentin disagrees. His father had “multiple notebooks for one team,” when he was a player, and now offers “full Power Point presentations” to his son.

“My notes are good,” Quentin said, “but his notes are far and beyond.”

Lake has applied the lessons. He went into the final week of the season as one of only four NFL players to play every defensive snap. The streak ended only because McVay rested or minimized snaps for starters in the season finale.

Lake’s success does not surprise defensive backs coach Aubrey Pleasant.

“He’s such a stickler for the details that sometimes I have to tell him to give himself some grace, allow himself to be a little more kind to himself,” Pleasant said. “That’s something you want as a coach. You want to be able to pull back on the reins, as opposed to feeling like you’re always pushing them to move forward.”

Lake, a role model for teammates on the field, he also strives to lead by example in other areas.

This season on his off days, Lake was on hand for the dedication of a football field the Rams installed at the Nickerson Gardens housing complex in Watts. He also was among a number of Rams players that pitched in at a construction site in North Hollywood that will eventually be homes for military veterans.

Rams safety Quentin Lake helps with construction of a site that will have homes for multiple military veteran families in North Hollywood.

(Gary Klein / Los Angeles Times)

Rams safety Quentin Lake instructs a youngster during the dedication of the Rams football field at Nickerson Gardens in Watts.

(Gary Klein / Los Angeles Times)

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“It’s being able to take a step back really from football and saying I’m a human first, how can I help other people,” he said after mixing and moving wheelbarrows full of cement.

Rams rookie safety Jaylen McCollough attempts to follow Lake’s example.

“You want to be an all-around pro, and that’s on the field and off the field,” McCollough said. “And so any nuggets you can take or just learn from Q, you just got to be a sponge.”

That is how Quentin approaches the lessons his father passes along.

In honor of Carnell, Quentin has always worn jersey No. 37, the number his father wore.

“I thought about changing it when I got drafted,” Quentin said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m on my own journey.’ But you know what, 37 is just me.”

Former Steelers coach Bill Cowher, a studio analyst for CBS, apparently recognizes the similarities between father and son.

After Quentin and Rams defensive lineman Kobie Turner taped a television segment this season, Cowher sent Lake a video message, relaying a story about a sideline conversation he had with Hall of Fame safety Troy Polamalu.

“Troy was having a tough time, and Troy came back to the sideline and coach Cowher was like, ‘Troy, you’re good. You’re good,’” Quentin said. “And Troy said, ‘I’m just trying to be like Carnell Lake.’

“I was like, ‘Wow. That’s crazy.’”

Now Quentin hopes to one-up his father.

He wants to not only play in a Super Bowl but be a captain for a team that wins a ring.

“I’d come home and be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this,’” Quentin said, shaking his ring finger. “That would be cool.”

And another proud moment for father and son to share.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Just as it did 12 months ago, the tennis gods gave the Australian Open the men’s singles draw it craved. On the steps of Margaret Court Arena, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz emerged in opposite halves, setting up the possibility of a first Grand Slam final duel for the matchup that defines tennis on the ATP Tour.

The 23-year-old Italian and the 21-year-old Spaniard split the four majors 2-2 in 2024. They hit the ball as hard as anyone and cover every inch of the court, laterally and vertically, inside the lines and out.

For their opponents, their tennis feels like a different sport to the one they signed up to at the start of their journey to the professional circuit.

They also do not lack for confidence.

“I’m an ambitious guy,” Alcaraz said during a visit to New York in December for an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. “I’m sure sooner or later I’m going to be the Australian Open champion.”

Sinner said his goal last year was to gain a better understanding of what he might be able to achieve in his career. With two Grand Slams triumphs and the No. 1 ranking he got some hints, though ticking those boxes was not a specific goal.

“It’s going to be the same next year,” he said after winning the ATP Tour Finals in Turin and finishing the season 73-6. “Whatever we can catch, we take, and the rest we learn.”

Sinner and Alcaraz have intermittently played tennis like it’s a fantastical computer game since their 2022 U.S. Open quarterfinal and its five hours and 15 minutes of spellbinding shotmaking. In 2024, they fully reconfigured the sport, overtaking the baseline call and response honed by Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic and the reactive development of players like Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev, who arrived armed with huge serves and counterpunching groundstrokes.

Sinner and Alcaraz have reconfigured tennis into a hyper-aggressive game of chicken. To hit a neutral ball is to be on defense and to be on defense is to lose (against each other) or to steal the point (against pretty much everybody else). Their ATP Tour rivals, from Zverev and Medvedev to Taylor Fritz, Casper Ruud and all the way down, are at a loss. The tennis they knew has vanished before their eyes.

Great players win lots of matches and championships. The greatest ever players change how their sport is played, redrawing the tennis court to create new shots and angles that few thought were possible before. Think of the way the basketball stars Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark normalized three-pointers from way beyond the stripe, extending defenses, creating offensive space where it wasn’t supposed to exist, and redesigning the toolkit that top-level basketball required.

Sinner and Alcaraz are having a similar impact on their sport. Tennis courts are still 78 feet long and 27 feet wide. They have not grown. These two just make it seem like they have.

In most tennis rallies, the player that forces their opponent into or outside the tramlines — where the width of the singles court expires — is likely to win the point. Either the ball won’t come back because the angle is too sharp, or it will come back soft and floating, ready to be dispatched into space.

There is a massive difference in what happens when Sinner and Alcaraz are outside the tramlines. This supposed zone of no return is where they can show off. It’s where Alcaraz can display his blazing speed and rocketing forehands blasted on a full sprint over or around the net post. It’s where Sinner embodies the junior skiing champion he once was, bending low as he swings his racket then pushing back into the court like he has just come around a slalom gate on icy slope.

Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have pushed each other to extremes since their 2022 U.S. Open quarterfinal (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

Far more often than the rest of the tour, Sinner and Alcaraz are winning points or getting on the attack from places where they are supposed to lose. It has created a paradox, most visibly with Alcaraz, in which stressing and pressing them is a bad idea. They win one impossible point, and then another, lifting the crowd and pointing to their ears, and the avalanche starts to rumble down the mountain.

Zverev, who knows he is world No. 2 in rank but not in spirit, knows what this feels like. He rarely gets tired during tennis matches, even the longest five-set duels at Grand Slams. The 2024 French Open final against Alcaraz was different. By the fifth set, his legs were gone, his body wilting from the relentlessness of the challenge that he expects will shape tennis for many years.

“Everybody talks about how great they are defensively,” Zverev said after defeating Alcaraz at the ATP Tour Finals in Turin. He doesn’t buy it.

“Tennis is not about defense anymore,” he added.

“It used to be a few years back, but I think those guys, 90 percent of the time they’re only playing offense. It’s about making sure that you can keep up offensively with them, being able to keep up with their speeds of groundstrokes as well. That’s the No. 1 thing. Not backing off, going for your shots in the most important moments. That’s maybe where I struggled, as well, in my career, trusting my shots and going for them when I need to.”

He and just about everyone else. This is where Sinner and Alcaraz are taking tennis. Movement, specifically in and out of the corners, has become as important as the serve and the return. Ben Shelton has realized his 150mph serve and lashing forehand will only take him so far, hiring Gabriel Echevarria, a movement specialist, early last year. Naomi Osaka hired a ballerina to help her gain more surety and speed in the corners. Nearly every player wants to master an open-stance backhand, to save a split second on the pivot back to the center of the court.

Fritz, who has long known that he struggles outside the singles line, spent much of the off-season working on moving out to the farthest reaches of a tennis court to chase down balls. His coach, Michael Russell, has seen a version of this movie before. At 46, he’s three years older than Roger Federer, eight years older than Nadal and nine years older than Djokovic. He watched those three players change the sport’s equation, just as Sinner and Alcaraz are doing now.

“There’s no room for uncharacteristic errors,” he said during an interview in Italy in November. “Literally, they’re not giving you an inch.”

Carlos Alcaraz thrives on winning points from seemingly impossible positions (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

When Russell uses the word “error,” he’s not talking about a ball that flies long or dumps into the net, unforced or not. He’s talking about any ball that doesn’t have enough speed, depth, or width to stop Sinner and Alcaraz from exploiting it. For decades, a first principle of tennis has been resetting a point, changing its state from attack to neutral, or defense to neutral. Sinner and Alcaraz don’t allow for this. There’s a reason Fritz and Zverev, the two players closest to Sinner and Alcaraz in the rankings, have spent so much time the past months learning how to dictate the terms of engagement.

“Even if it’s only one or two points a match, that can be the differential. Applying that psychological pressure that the guy can’t just float the ball back and reset,” Russell said.

This is what Alcaraz and Sinner do so well and so much better than their ATP Tour contemporaries.

That flip of a point from defense to attack has been codified by data specialists TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations as a “steal score,” measuring how often a player wins a point from defense. Alcaraz is top. Sinner is not far behind.

Across the ATP Tour, players are hitting shots outside the singles sidelines around 17 percent of the time, but Sinner and Alcaraz win around 45 percent of the points they play from there. Their opponents win around 30.

From outside the doubles lines, Alcaraz wins 43 percent of points and Sinner 42. Alcaraz’s opponents win around 22 percent; Sinner’s around 29.

Casper Ruud, who like Zverev and Fritz spent most of 2024 with his head spinning, doesn’t recognize the tennis that took him to three Grand Slam finals in 12 months in 2022 and 2023. After spending years perfecting his balance between patience and a lethal forehand, he could feel Sinner and Alcaraz making tennis pass him by. Those deep, looping shots he has long used to hang in points simply don’t work against them. He needs to change, or perish as a force at the top of the game.

“They can turn around the point with one shot on the run, even from the forehand or backhand,” he said in an interview Italy in November. “I feel like that is something definitely missing in my game on the faster hard court.

“That’s something in the next weeks and months I’ll try to keep working on. But I’m not going to change my game in one day or one week. It’s going to take time.”

Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz’s meetings inevitably descend into games of tennis chicken (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

Ruud is 26. Fritz and Zverev are 27. They and the rest of their contemporaries, who have spent most of their tennis lives banging on the Big Three ceiling, are now having to make a mid-career adjustment based on how two youngsters who have achieved their dreams before them play the sport.

Younger players, even juniors, may be at an advantage. Just as so many of them are trying to master Alcaraz’s drop-shot-lob combinations, they are growing up knowing what they have to be able to do to reach the top of tennis. For the rest of the ATP Tour, it can feel like climbing a mountain that dissolves just before the apex, then re-forms with new terrain and a higher summit.

Sinner and Alcaraz are remaking tennis for everybody else, but what happens when the unstoppable force goes up against the immovable object? What would the Australian Open final that everybody wants to see look like?

“You have more tension. You have more eyes on us because this is a match most people want to see,” Sinner said Friday in a Melbourne news conference.

“First, you have to arrive to this stage where you play against Carlos, which is a very difficult part to go through. When this happens, the feeling — I think he also feels the same way — it’s a bit different. We usually play a high-quality match because when two players face each other and you bring out your best, the quality of the match usually is very high.”

Sinner spent most of the year as the world No. 1, even though Alcaraz holds a 6-4 edge in their rivalry. Alcaraz won all three of their meetings last year, most recently in the final of the China Open in Beijing, edging Sinner 6-7(6), 6-4, 7-6(3) from 3-0 down in the deciding tiebreak with seven points from another galaxy.

Alcaraz said in New York in December that he and his friends think it’s pretty funny that Sinner is No. 1 without beating him last year. Sinner is besting him on serve right now; Alcaraz is the better player in the forecourt, with the vertical movement to go with the lateral magic tricks they share.

GO DEEPER

Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner go head to head in their own tennis galaxy

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That might have a little bit to do with the edge he holds in the nether reaches of the tennis court. They are about even in their performance on points when they move each other beyond the singles line, with Alcaraz winning 36 percent of those points and Sinner 38 percent.

Outside the doubles lines, Alcaraz has a clear advantage, winning 36 percent of the points against 30 percent for Sinner. In general, their pushing each other to greater heights also forces them to lose a few points that they would win against anybody else.

Once they get in attack, they are the two best players on the ATP Tour at closing out the point. Sinner wins 74 percent of the time; Alcaraz 73.

Against each other though, when they are pulling off their acrobatics on points that send the opponent off the court, those rates drop. However, Alcaraz’s doesn’t drop as much. He converts 66 percent of the time against Sinner, while Sinner converts 62 percent of the time from his end of the court.

That still leaves a sizable number of those highlight reel points, when they both put on a version of tennis as escape art. It’s their ability to do the extraordinary against the only other player in their orbit — though don’t count Djokovic and his 24 Grand slam titles out just yet.

“Insane,” Fritz said in Turin.

He’s the one who has to try and beat them.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design:Will Tullos)