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Brand-new Mississippi State sports reporter Jake McMahon moves to Starkville, checks a score while unloading a U-Haul, and suddenly ends up on a midnight roadtrip to Oklahoma City to cover the Women’s College World Series. That’s where we start, because it says a lot about college athletics right now: chaos, speed, and the kind of joy that still breaks through when a team catches fire.

Zack is on vacation this week so Dispatch columnist Slim Smith joins David and Jake to discuss how sports journalism has changed as access gets tighter and why the best work still comes from writers who avoid the herd, show up early, and paint a scene. 

David and Slim then turn to a local headline that surprised us: a Bitcoin mining operation in Columbus, running thousands of machines and drawing megawatts of power, raising real questions about the grid, rates, and what crypto “value” even means.

We close with Moak Griffin, CEO of BankFirst, on what community banking looks like after 138 years, why their Columbus headquarters and training campus matter, and how to protect yourself from fraud.