The Middle

Four new pro football teams were announced last week, and none of them are in the NFL. The United Football League (UFL), also known as spring football, has been around a lot longer than most people realize, under a few different names and through more near-death experiences than any league should survive. This episode is a beginner's guide: where the league came from, how it works, some famous...

As the 2026 MLB regular season winds down, Megan welcomes back Courtney and Melissa from “Glove Actually” for a wide ranging recap: who's really the league's main character now that Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge have been sidelined, the surprise rise of the Chicago White Sox, a stacked rookie class, and the biggest narrative flips of the year (looking at you, Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette)....

A lockout could shut down Major League Baseball starting December 1, 2026, and into the 2027 season. Why? The MLB collective bargaining agreement expires this year, and owners and players are fighting over a salary cap and floor, revenue sharing, a draft overhaul, and more. Megan breaks down the MLB CBA negotiations in plain English: what the league wants, what the players want, and why it matters...

When J T. Ramsay wasn’t leading digital and marketing campaigns for brands like Ford Motor Company and Comcast, he was spending his nights doing something else: leading a campaign to bring Major League Baseball team the A's back to Philadelphia. In this conversation, Megan and JT unpack his grassroots and decade-long "Bring Your A’s Game" campaign, why ownership is (probably) basebal...

Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) changed college sports forever, but five years in, is it working? This episode breaks down what NIL is, how it started, and how the money moves now that schools, collectives, and athletes are all part of the equation. Megan covers the eligibility rules that keep shifting under everyone's feet, the growing gap between big and small universities, and what this new...

NFL insider Matt Lombardo joins Megan fresh off his 2026 training camp tour to break down what's happening across the league during preseason, from why he thinks the Green Bay Packers are due for a step back to why the Los Angeles Rams' aggressive offseason makes them this year’s team to beat. Megan and Matt dig into the quarterback situations making headlines, the Baltimore Ravens receive...

The 2026 NFL season is nearly here, bringing Super Bowl predictions, MVP debates, and plenty of data. This season, the NFL will collect more than 500 million data points by tracking every player, official, and football. But what can that data really tell us? Earlier this year, Megan sat down with NFL Network’s analytics expert Cynthia Frelund to explore how data and storytelling shape the way fans...

After a season filled with uncertainty due to Colorado wildfires, the Leadville Race Series has been given the green light to move ahead with their 2026 race season. Now, we're days away from the two most challenging and legendary races: the Leadville Trail 100 MTB and the Leadville Trail 100 Run. Earlier this year Megan sat down with race director Tamira Jenlink to talk about the race series...

What really happens inside NFL training camp? This episode goes behind the scenes of the NFL's most chaotic six weeks, from the official practices, what players actually eat, the rookie hazing traditions that have survived decades, and "the Turk," the mysterious figure who delivers the five words no player wants to hear. In between is a glimpse at preseason strategy and who to pay at...

Research shows 70% of kids quit youth sports by age 13, and it’s not because they got cut or lost interest in the game. Dr. Michael Berrebi joins Megan to break down what’s driving kids out: the professionalization of youth sports, the pay-to play system pricing out entire communities, and the burnout nobody’s trained to spot in younger kids. Dr. Berrebi explains what anxiety and stress look like...

The inaugural season of the Women's Pro Baseball League (WPBL) kicks off on August 1, 2026, marking the first professional women’s baseball league in the U.S. in decades. But history tells us this isn't the first attempt. This episode explores the deep, complex history of women’s professional baseball in America, from the iconic All American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s...

Clinton Sparks, founder and CEO of the new Global Gaming League, makes the case that gaming isn't a fringe hobby but the biggest sport nobody's calling a sport yet. He breaks down the real difference between esports and gaming, why the stereotype of the isolated basement gamer is wrong, and how players of all ages and genders (nearly half of all gamers are women, after all) are rewriting w...

In this episode, Megan walks through a beginner's guide to the Tour de France: how the race started, how it works, how the winner's jersey came to be yellow, how riders survive three weeks of racing (hint: it used to involve wine), the growth of the Tour de France Femmes, and why the 2026 race could make history. No cycling knowledge required! The Middle finds the sports stories the big ou...

We’re all told at some point to toughen up. But what if the version of toughness we celebrate is making us more fragile? Megan sits down with Dr. Dillon Small, the Director of Sport Performance Psychology at the U.S. Air Force Academy, to talk about athlete mental health and why the conversation around mental performance has moved beyond awareness… but still has a long way to go. They explore the...

Women’s sports are experiencing an unprecedented commercial boom, but is this sudden love affair a genuine cultural breakthrough, or are athletic gatekeepers just finally doing the math? In this episode, Megan looks past the triumphant headlines to expose a colder historical reality: women don’t break through in sports, they get let in. By tracing 100 years of history across five pivotal stories a...

Alexa Brabec is one of Team USA’s top women’s Nordic Combined athletes, and she’s competing at a pivotal moment for the future of her sport. Nordic Combined is the only Olympic sport that excludes women from competing in the Olympic Games. Women have built a World Cup circuit, competed at world championships, and grown the sport across multiple nations. Yet in 2026, the International Olympic Commi...

Professional sports is powered by a shadow world of people with special talents, and you probably don't even know their names. From the upside-down world of an NFL long snapper to a cricket role called the "the human sacrifice," sports has mastered the art of finding one person to do one incredibly specific thing brilliantly. In this episode, we dive into seven wildly unique, unsung...

Trey Rogers didn't know what the World Cup was when he got a call in 1992 asking if he could build a soccer pitch made completely of natural grass, put it over a concrete floor, and keep it alive in a domed NFL stadium over the course of several months. Trey and his Michigan State University research team accepted the challenge. They engineered a natural grass field, grew it in California, shi...

What if the golden age of sports fandom isn't in the past… it's right now? In this episode, we break down how the fan experience has undergone one of the most exciting transformations in sports history. From fantasy sports and RedZone to legal betting now live in 38 states, alternate broadcasts like the Manningcast, and stadium tech that lets you order food to your seat without missing a play, fan...

Picture this: you walk up to your favorite athlete at Yankee Stadium or Lambeau Field and have a real conversation with them. They’re standing next to you, life-size, answering your questions in real time… except, they’re hundreds of miles away. What if you could do that same thing in your living room? Proto Hologram founder David Nussbaum is building exactly that: AI hologram technology already o...

In July 2020, a grieving widower in Indianapolis signed up for a 500-mile walking challenge, not because he had a plan but because he needed to move. He had lost his wife to colorectal cancer 16 months earlier. He had a 5-year-old at home. And somewhere inside the grief and the uncertainty and the obligation of still being alive, he laced up and walked out the door. From that virtual start line to...

This episode breaks down what’s wrong with youth sports in America and why kids are quitting at record rates. Using research from Dr. Amanda Visek’s “Fun Integration Theory,” data from the Aspen Institute, and examples from Norway’s Olympic pipeline, we unpack the “Fun Gap”: the disconnect between what kids say they enjoy (effort, teamwork, playing time) and what parents are forced to spend money...

Most fans think they know baseball by April. According to former Colorado Rockies and Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, you don’t really know a team until game 40. And even then, you might be wrong. In this episode, Megan sits down with Clint for a conversation that goes far beyond baseball. From how long it really takes to evaluate a team in a new Major League Baseball (MLB) season to the...

A couple weeks into the 2026 MLB season, and already nothing is going the way anyone expected. In this episode, Megan sits down with the hosts of “Glove Actually Podcast” for an unfiltered conversation on early season storylines, surprises, and of course, the vibes. They dig into why Opening Day tells you less than you think, the teams (and players) already defying expectations, who might become t...

In this episode, Megan talks with Jerred Mace, founder and CEO of OneCourt, a device that lets blind and low vision sports fans experience live sports through touch. Using real-time sports data, vibration, and audio, the unique device turns movement on the field into something you can follow with your hands as the game happens. Megan and Jerred break down how fans without sight follow games today,...