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Six Thoughts Ahead of the 2026 Midterm Elections
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The 2026 midterms take place this week, which means two things.
Number one, the political ads will finally stop. Hooray! And number two, it’s a good time to reflect on some current events.
Here are six thoughts, in no particular order:
1) Anfernee Simons is that dude
The Sixers are 6-1 after beating the Hornets on Saturday evening in the second half of a back-to-back. They didn’t have Joel Embiid or LeBron James.
But they did have Anfernee Simons to score 19 points off the bench on 6-12 shooting. He was 5-9 from three and has scored 60 points in his last three games, playing 27, 31, and 25 minutes off the pine.
When’s the last time the Sixers had a high-volume shooter in a 6th man role? You’d probably have to go all the way back to Lou Williams, right? Lou Will back in 2011-2012, when he was scoring 15 points off the bench on the last Sixers team that went to the playoffs before the Process era. Funny enough, he finished second in the 6th man voting that season to James Harden of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Before Lou, you’d probably say Aaron McKie was the most impactful guy coming off a Sixers bench. McKie won 6MOTY back in 2001, though he did start 30+ games as well. And he wasn’t some sharpshooter back then, but he gave the Sixers 11.6 points on average and finished 4th on the team in regular season PPG, behind Allen Iverson, Theo Ratliff, and Dikembe Mutombo.
Imagine if the Sixers had a high-volume shooter coming off the bench between 2018 and 2023. Maybe they get past the second round.
2) arguing about Travis Konecny
The Flyers beat the Mammoth 6-3 on Sunday and they’ve got Owen Tippett and Travis Konecny back in the fold. There was some grumbling because there’s a portion of the fan base that wants to see the young guys stay up and doesn’t really care about the veterans, which was probably highlighted by this on Twitter:
Konecny has been the best point producer for the Flyers over the past half-decade, but the Flyers have also largely been terrible for the past half-decade. That’s the rub. You can go Posidelphia or Negadelphia with that. TK was 26 years old when he signed his 8 x $8.75 million extension, and he was sitting firmly on the fence when the organization was getting off of guys like Kevin Hayes and Cam Atkinson. He was arguably too young to jettison but some believed he was too old to be part of the rebuild. He was dead in the middle on those fan and media-conceived timelines.
This is going to be a theme this entire Flyers season, this type of “enough with the veterans” talk.
3) Penn State has to run the football
Matt Campbell won his first Big 10 game at PSU, beating Purdue 31 to 17. The Boilermakers are nothing special, and Penn State should always beat a team like that at Beaver, but for the first time in conference play they actually ran the ball well, going for 269 on the ground at a 5.3 clip with a bunch of chunk gains.
This is what a Penn State game needs to look like:
Rocco Becht only had to throw the ball 24 times in the win. If they can replicate this run/pass ratio and find success on the ground, they might have a chance to get to 7-5. Washington and Minnesota are middle of the pack in the Big 10 and Rutgers and Maryland are hopeless. Even just splitting with the Huskies and Gophers gives them a path to 7 wins and a bowl game. If you win that one and finish 8-5, it’s not a horrible season considering the circumstances of firing James Franklin and not having a great plan in place.
4) the responses to Sean’s column were dumb
Sean wrote this story last week:
Half of the replies went something like, “this was already Maxey’s team, you’re an idiot.” The other half went, “this is Embiid’s team, you’re an idiot.“
The caveat is the addition of Jaylen Brown and LeBron James. Now you’ve got four guys who can do something in the halfcourt. You’d feel comfortable with any of them starting with the ball in their hands at the end of a game. But only one guy can close on a nightly basis, and it was a legitimate question coming into the season. Sure, they share the ball incredibly well for the first three and a half quarters, but who takes the final shot? It’s been Maxey, and it’s been consistent every night. So yeah, it’s “becoming increasingly clear that the Sixers are Tyrese Maxey’s team” when you look at his fourth quarter differentials and clutch time numbers. That’s the point Sean was making in the story.
5) now the Temple offense stinks
K.C. Keeler said and did all of the right things after the Owls lost to 0-6 Charlotte back on October 17th. He fired one defensive coach and relieved another of his play-calling duties.
Coming out of the bye, Temple went down to Greenville to play 3-4 East Carolina, and the defensive changes seemed to work. The Owls gave up just 17 points on nine possessions before the Pirates took a knee. They held ECU to a 4-12 mark on third down, got a big stop on a 4th down, picked off a pass, and really buckled down in pass defense.
Sadly, the offense is now ass, and played it’s worst game of the year, scoring a grand total of 9 points on three field goals. Ajani Sheppard, who had played well through the middle portion of the season, threw three picks while completing 11 of his 20 passes for 118 yards. They converted just 1 of their 7 third down attempts and mustered 249 yards against an ECU team that gave up 71 points to UAB in Memphis in consecutive weeks.
It was a hideous football game. The Owls now have to end the season on a four-game win streak to improve on their win total from Keeler’s first season and make their first bowl game since 2019.
6) Halloween was kind of lame this year
We took our girls around the neighborhood with a handful of other kids on Saturday night. There was barely anybody out. Maybe 40% of the houses on our street (suburban development type of deal) had their lights on. Others just put out the candy bowl with the “please enjoy” sign taped to it.
My theory is that fewer people participate in Halloween on Saturday night because they have plans. They’re out doing stuff. There are more people participating on Wednesday night, for instance, because they aren’t going anywhere or doing anything on a work or school night.
But I’m not sure. It felt kind of lame this year. Is Halloween fading? It’s a secular thing and it’s easy and fun. Just walk around with your kids or greet the neighborhood kids and say hello. People don’t even come to the door anymore. Are we so antisocial that we can’t even spend 2-3 hours welcoming little kids to our front doors?
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com