Tiger Woods announced yesterday on X that he’s ending his historic 27-year partnership with Nike. The news marks the end of one of golf’s most iconic images: Woods in a red Nike polo on the Sunday of a PGA Tour event.

A deal for the ages: Nike signed Woods in 1996, the year he turned pro as a 20-year-old, in a $40 million contract that at the time was the largest golf endorsement deal. The signature Nike swoosh stayed with him throughout his illustrious career: Woods earned $500 million over the nearly three decades of the relationship, per estimates.

But all good things come to an end…the sports world had speculated that Woods would hang up his Nike hat for good when the deal expired at the end of 2023. Since Nike shut down its golf equipment division in 2016, Woods has been using other brands’ clubs and balls and was most recently spotted on the course not in Nikes but in FootJoy shoes, which he’s said offer more stability as he recovers from an injury sustained during a car accident in 2021.

What’s next for the Big Cat?

Woods will likely play at the Genesis Invitational next month, his first official PGA Tour event in almost a year as he recovers from injury. But as far as brand deals go…no one knows for sure. Sports reporters think he’ll either start a brand within the golf company TaylorMade or create an entirely new brand.

Some in the golf world thought Woods might take a page from tennis star Roger Federer’s book and sign a deal with On Running, the Swiss shoe brand. Federer separated from Nike in 2018 to join Uniqlo and invested in On Running—which gave him a $300 million payday when the company went public three years later. But the company’s chief executive shut down those rumors yesterday.

Not the only departure from Nike…Jason Day left Nike just last week for the Malbon brand. While Nike has plenty of other big-name golfers donning the swoosh logo, its long-term future in the sport is uncertain.—CC

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The fallout from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 continued. Three days after a panel blew out midair on the Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft, hundreds of flights were still grounded as the FAA directed US airlines with Max 9s—Alaska and United—to inspect their fleets. During those inspections, both airlines said they found loose bolts on plug doors. Meanwhile, federal officials revealed that the plane involved in the incident was restricted from flying long flights over water due to a known pressurization problem, though that may have been unrelated to the door plug incident. The cockpit voice recorder, which could have helped investigators determine how the panel came off, was overwritten because it was not retrieved within two hours. Here’s what else flyers should know about the Boeing 737 Max 9 as the story develops.

The Peregrine moon lander suffered a propulsion system failure. The malfunction means the spacecraft—built by the private company Astrobotic Technology and financed by NASA—will likely not make it to the moon as intended. After a successful launch on Monday, Astrobotic posted on X that an anomaly led to a “critical loss of propellant,” forcing the company to change its mission objective. Peregrine was supposed to be the first American spacecraft to land on the lunar surface in more than 50 years. The mishap raises questions ahead of NASA’s crewed Artemis mission in November about the space agency’s approach to funding startups to send experiments to the moon rather than launch its own spacecraft.

Go Blue: There are a lot of happy people in the Brew office today, because Michigan took down Washington 34–13 for the school’s first college football championship since 1997. The game marks the end of an era for the sport, because next season will look very different. The College Football Playoff is expanding to 12 teams, and realignment will further obliterate conferences’ regional flair. Among the changes: Michigan and Washington will be Big Ten rivals, the University of California is joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Pac-12 will have two teams.

The world’s smallest Stradivarius is playing for Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who says Sotheby’s bamboozled him into overpaying $1+ billion for art treasures.

The Monaco-based fertilizer mogul is taking the storied auctioneers to a Manhattan court this week for allegedly conspiring to defraud him. Rybolovlev claims Sotheby’s abetted his longtime art advisor, Yves Bouvier, in deceitfully inflating the prices of a Modigliani sculpture, as well as paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, René Magritte, and Gustav Klimt.

The trial will give humble museum-goers a rare glimpse under the hood of the notoriously shady and unregulated private art market.

The fine strokes

Rybolovlev spent $2 billion snatching up Louvre-quality masterpieces between 2002 and 2014 via purchases arranged by Bouvier, with 12 of them brokered by Sotheby’s. But then Rybolovlev allegedly learned that…

• The 38 artworks he bought actually belonged to Bouvier, who pretended to negotiate the prices with nonexistent sellers.
• In some instances, the oligarch might have been overcharged: He paid $127.5 million for a 500-year-old da Vinci a day after Bouvier obtained it for $83 million (perhaps this wasn’t such a rotten deal, since Rybolovlev later sold it for $450.3 million).

A fierce legal battle ensued between the two art connoisseurs, spanning multiple jurisdictions in Europe and Asia. They recently settled their differences out of court, and Bouvier stressed that investigators found no criminal wrongdoing.

Sotheby’s is taking off its white gloves…one of its lawyers said there’s “zero evidence” that the auction house knew Bouvier was lying to Rybolovlev.—SK

Bills Mafia could get even louder and prouder this year now that the city with the eponymous spicy wing is on its way to the NFL playoffs and to the top of young professionals’ house-hunting lists.

Buffalo, New York, will be the hottest housing market in the US in 2024 thanks to affordable home prices and strong employment rates, Zillow projected. So, if watching Bills fans welcome the team home yesterday from their AFC East title win doesn’t give you the urge to move there, you’re heartless this might:

• According to Zillow, the average cost of a home in Buffalo is ~$248k, well below the national average of ~$347k. The typical Buffalonian pays about $1.8k monthly for their mortgage, or $1.3k in rent.
• Buffalo also has the highest rate of new jobs per new home out of the 50 biggest cities in the US, according to Zillow, which uses this metric to determine expected housing demand.

Get ready for Silicon Billy. In October, the Biden administration named Buffalo a “tech hub” for semiconductor manufacturing, which means the city could get billions of dollars in government funding via the CHIPS Act.

Other hot housing markets include…Cincinnati, Columbus (we tried to tell you Ohio is in), and Indianapolis. Zillow predicts a great real estate year for the South, Midwest, and Great Lakes region. Sorry to everyone else.—ML

Stat: A lot of the people who felt the urge to adopt a dog during the pandemic are now saying er, actually, nevermind—and it’s throwing shelters into crisis. Bloomberg reported that the number of stray dogs in US shelters has increased by 22% since 2021, per data from the Shelter Animals Count database. And it’s not just older dogs losing their homes—shelter workers say they’re seeing more puppies, too. Worst of all, canine deaths in shelters are up 27% from last year and 78% from 2021 as they deal with overcrowding. Experts attribute the crisis to return-to-office mandates, the rising costs of petcare, and the end of pandemic-era eviction restrictions that are allowing landlords to enforce pet policies.

Quote: “Thank you Bob.”

It’s not every day that you come across a chunk of a Boeing 737 Max 9 in your backyard, but then again, not everyone is Bob. The teacher from Portland, Oregon, alerted the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Sunday that he found the door plug that fell off Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 last week, which should help the agency investigate how exactly a piece of a plane can just blow away midflight. The NTSB was quick to thank Bob in its press conference announcing the discovery of the door plug.

Read: This US shale magnate is trying to sell oil and gas jobs to Generation Z. (Financial Times)

Go far: What to know about travel prices, requirements, and safety in 2024.

Go watch: Film critic David Ehrlich’s annual video countdown of the top 25 films of the year that was.

Go deep: Why left-handed quarterbacks like Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. are still so rare.

Go fish: Nutritionists explain why salmon is so good for you.

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