Box Score: 9/26 - Ratings, Cosell, kitties and stadium names

Welcome to YB's Box Score, what we're reading while we wait for our New England Patriots quarterback tryout.

Happy birthday to Serena Williams and happy 20th anniversary to Barry Bonds joining the 40-40 club, nearly 10 years to the day after Jose Canseco first set the mark.

Around the League: 

• The ratings for tonight's presidential debate could be Super Bowl-sized. [NYT]
• SI has pulled 1983 profile of Howard Cosell by Frank Deford out of the vault that is worth revisiting. "In a way, it's not so much that Cosell has stepped on toes in the broadcast booth, but that he has usurped the territory formerly owned by the sports fans themselves. The whole point of being a sports fan is to have an opinion, and argue with other sports fans". [SI]
• FIFA has inexplicably closed their anti-racism task force ahead of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. [Deadspin]
• Ten years after Katrina the Saints still feel the weight of their first game back in the Superdome. [SB Nation]

YB IYCMI: 

"Perhaps the universe had a more severe punishment in mind for the New England Patriots than what the NFL had in mind initially, when they brought the Deflategate shenanigans to a close by curbing Tom Brady for the first month of the 2016 campaign." - Bill Belichick may be forced to get hilariously creative to fill his quarterback slot

"It would be nice if big-time sports scaled back on corporate naming rights, but once teams learned how to sell pieces of their identities to companies desperate to “connect to consumers,” that ship sailed." - Five sports stadiums that should be renamed

"I am a big believer that solid pitching throughout the rotation is the best way to win games (blame the San Francisco Giants, Curt Young, and Billy Beane for creating that belief), so you can bet the Blue Jays will be getting at least one of these pitchers." -Five MLB pitchers who need to be rescued from their teams

"Now what makes A Tribe Called Quest so influential, so memorable is also hard to suss out over the course of their short time on the scene. The best possible comparison could be that of the “comic’s comic”, the sort of performer that’s popular with other performers, thereby gaining their own sense of notoriety and legend without ever actually being number one (save for 1996’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, which did hit number one on the US charts)" - A 25-year award tour: Celebrating A Tribe Called Quest

"Who retires from the game and wins the Cy Young award the following season? Roger Clemens does." - Where does Landon Donovan's return rank among these notable athletes?

Monday morning, the best time to go back and check our Friday CFB picks and see what we got right and what we got so horribly wrong. CFB Crash Course: Week 4 - No ranking is safe

No. 

The Oilers have a new mascot.