This Week was Personal : March 21, 2026
Spring, the Oscars, basketball, and angry sheriffs: what's not to like about this week?
Spring started this week in Atlanta. Not the calendar version, but the version you can see and feel. The one where the light changes, the temperature warms, the flowers start blooming and we all get reminded by Mother Earth that it’s time to try again.
Conan O’Brien said something at the Oscars that I won’t soon forget. He gave me words for a feeling I’ve had for a long time, but never been able to name. It’s the feeling of opening a bottle of champagne on a random Tuesday night for no particular reason. As he lead off the broadcast he said, “We celebrate not because we believe all is well, but because we work and hope for better times.” It’s not optimism. It’s a practice. And it hit different because he wasn’t performing it. He has such a huge personality, it’s easy to tell when he isn’t acting. Thank you Conan; that meant a lot.
That’s what this week felt like. BTS came back after mandatory service and a quarter-million people showed up in the rain. Afroman wore a flag suit to court and won. College kids nobody recruited ran back a 19-point deficit on national television. None of those people waited for permission. They just kept working.
I don’t know what your version of that is right now. Maybe it’s small. Maybe it’s just getting through the week without losing your mind. That counts. The point isn’t scale, it’s direction. Keep pushing toward good, even when good doesn’t seem to be pushing back.
We’ll be here next week. Same place. Still standing.
What we carried this week...
This week brings Episode 15 where we have a conversations ranging from labor unions collaborating to fight league products to how we even tell time.
We get into CBAs (MLB and WNBA), the NBA’s watchability problem, Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, March Madness, and NIL’s quiet reshaping of college basketball.
Will continues to post cryptic messages and screen shots about his March Madness simulator, so we still don’t really know if it’s real or not.
And the world kept moving. BTS came back with ARIRANG and a quarter-million people in Seoul.
Afroman beat seven deputies in court.
And the college basketball tournament opened with the kind of chaos that makes you remember why you filled out a bracket in the first place.
CBAs: Same Word, Completely Different Fight
Two collective bargaining agreements are happening at the same time, the MLB and the WNBA. The comparison reveals more than either story does alone. MLB’s current CBA expires after the 2026 season, and ownership is pushing a hard salary cap in the $260–280 million range with a floor around $140–160 million. The MLBPA, led by Tony Clark, remains firmly opposed and the last time a cap fight went this far, it cost the sport the 1994 season. Meanwhile, the WNBA and WNBPA reached a verbal agreement on a new CBA after more than a year of negotiations. The new deal jumps the salary cap from $1.5 million to $7 million, with the supermax rising from $249K to $1.4 million. Housing, a flashpoint when the league tried to remove it from the deal, is guaranteed through at least 2028.
MLB players are negotiating how to split massive revenue. WNBA players are still fighting over whether the system reflects the value they’re already creating. Same word, completely different reality.
Bam scored 83 Points and pretty much everyone hates it
Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Wizards on March 10, which is the second-highest single-game total in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100. He shot 20-for-43 from the field and set NBA records with 36-for-43 from the free throw line. But the conversation wasn’t about the number. With the Heat up 27, the team began intentionally fouling Washington to stop the clock and feed Bam. Much the same happened with Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 (but we don’t talk about it like that anymore). Every record is engineered to some degree. We just don’t like seeing how it’s made.
The NBA Is Hard to Watch Right Now
The Bam conversation opened up a bigger one: the NBA’s product feels broken. Too many games, too much content posing as competition, officiating that feels designed for gambling optics rather than basketball. The regular season has become background noise and we find ourselves checking highlights for rather than sitting down for a watch (and forget buying tickets). Steph proposed solutions: shorten the season, keep the in-season tournament, create real stakes, stop optimizing for volume.
Fans don’t want more basketball. They want basketball that matters.
March Madness Opened With Chaos
The tournament’s first day delivered. VCU erased a 19-point second-half deficit to beat North Carolina 82-78 in overtime. It’s the largest first-round comeback in tournament history. High Point knocked off Wisconsin 83-82, with a player whose stat line all season was built on threes hitting the shots that mattered most. Meanwhile, ESPN published a piece arguing that NIL and the transfer portal are making upsets rarer by concentrating talent at the top and then the bracket immediately proved it wrong.
BTS Came Back, and 260,000 People Showed Up
BTS released ARIRANG on March 20, which is their first album in nearly four years. Why you ask? They had to complete mandatory military service. The next day, they performed a free public concert at Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, live-streamed globally on Netflix, with an estimated 260,000 people in attendance. An 82-date world tour is already sold out, with Live Nation projecting it could rival the Eras Tour in scale.
Like not understanding the scale of soccer on the global scale, BTS and K-POP are something many American’s just don’t quite get.
Afroman Won
An Ohio jury cleared Afroman (Joseph Foreman) on all 13 claims after seven Adams County sheriff’s deputies sued him for $4 million. In 2022, they raided his house on drug trafficking and kidnapping allegations, found nothing, left him $400 short, and filed no charges. Afroman used his home surveillance footage to make a series of satirical music videos including the viral “Lemon Pound Cake.” The deputies sued for defamation and invasion of privacy. After a three-day trial, the jury sided with Afroman on every count. He wore an American flag suit to court.
They raided his house, found nothing, and then spent three years trying to make him pay for having a camera and a sense of humor about it. Go see the videos yourself.
Thanks for reading — we’ll see you soon.
— Will, Steph, & Jamie