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Here is an endlessly strange sentence: Blake Bortles will lead the Jaguars in a home playoff game this weekend against the Buffalo Bills. The Jags won the AFC South, looking at times like a legit Super Bowl threat, largely thanks to an all-time defense, a powerful rookie running back, and Bortles’s improvement from…Read more...

Two days after his team won its College Football Playoff semifinal and advanced to the national title game for the third straight year, Alabama head coach Nick Saban groused that there was only one week between semifinals and the championship. This has more or less been the case since the College Football Playoff…Read more...

Back when it came out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens played like a straightforward homage to 1977’s Star Wars. It was plenty fun, but wasn’t all that deep. Now that I’ve seen its follow-up, The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens seems a lot more interesting.

The second-biggest pro wrestling event of the calendar year is already upon us, and you should probably brew a pot of coffee. At 3 a.m. ET on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, New Japan Pro Wrestling’s 12th annual Wrestle Kingdom supershow will air live from the Tokyo Dome on their NJPW World streaming service; the…Read more...

Southern Mississippi baseball is a frequent NCAA tournament team. Last year, the Golden Eagles went 50-16, and for the 2018 season, the team has a preseason All-American in sophomore outfielder Matt Wallner. But the upcoming season will be slightly shorter than usual: A planned February series against Stony Brook had…Read more...

Tonight the Celtics and Cavaliers will meet for the second time this season, and ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan marked the rematch of the East’s two best teams with a feature on Kyrie Irving. Irving’s first half-season out from under LeBron James has been an unquestioned success, an especially impressive feat given that…Read more...

It’s “Dione.” Which I guess is somehow a dumber name than “Thanos” because, uh, it’s traditionally the name of a goddess instead of a male god? I don’t know. He looks like a thumb with Rob Dibble’s face tattooed on it. Comic fans are not nearly embarrassed enough about this.Read more...

The US and North Korea seem to be on the brink of starting a nuclear war almost every single day here in 2018. But even if a nuclear bomb is used and millions die, whatever humans left surviving will try to achieve some level of normalcy in the aftermath. How do I know that? In 1946, American troops played a football…Read more...

Georgetown forward Marcus Derrickson might have thought he had less time on the shot clock than he actually had in Tuesday’s game against DePaul, because his sloppy Dirk Nowitzki tribute sadly clanked off the front of the rim. Head coach Patrick Ewing carefully tore into Derrickson during a timeout.Read more...

Gizmodo Report: All Intel Processors Made in the Last Decade Might Have a Massive Security Flaw | Jalopnik Why Drivers Overwhelmingly Choose To Lease Hybrid And Electric Cars Instead Of Buying | Kotaku Japanese TV Rings In The New Year With Blackface | Lifehacker How (and Why) to Replace Your iPhone Battery | The A.V.…Read more...

The Phoenix Suns are basically toast in the Western Conference playoff race, and they were going up against the lowly Hawks at home last night. But that lack of high stakes doesn’t mean there can’t be any thrilling late-game drama.Read more...

Scottish second-tier club Falkirk issued a club statement on Tuesday apologizing and condemning the behavior of “a small number of individuals” at that afternoon’s match against Dunfermline. During the match, some Falkirk supporters threw fake eyeballs at Dunfermline’s Dean Shiels, who was blinded in his right eye…Read more...

Alexander Ovechkin took over the NHL lead in goals with a late pair, the first tying a sloppy, high-scoring game, and the second giving Washington the 5-4 OT win in Carolina. “It’s almost like whenever he decides to end it,” said his linemate Devante Smith-Pelly,” he can just go do it.”

Grab deals on a Nokia smart scale, Eero’s mesh Wi-Fi mesh router, a 3-piece luggage set, and many more.Read more...

Sperry is ready to outfit your feet in fall styles with a couple deals for you to choose from. Right now, they’re taking up to 60% off a ton of things, no code needed. That includes the boat shoes we all know and sometimes love, snow and rain boots, and even sweaters, coats, and hats for the upcoming weather.

If you’re starting to work off your winter blubber, the ever-popular Nokia (formerly Withings) Body+ smart scale can help you monitor your progress. $60 is the best price we’ve ever seen on this thing, and a whopping $40 less than usual.

Pittsburgh coach Kevin Stallings responded to a heckler at the end of tonight’s blowout loss to Louisville with a nice topical reference to the FBI sting that caught the Cardinals funneling $100,000 to former top recruit Brian Bowen:Read more...

Arizona fired Rich Rodriguez as head football coach tonight after a former athletics department employee accused him of sexual harassment; a university investigation into those accusations found “information” that led the department to be “concerned,” according to a statement from the university.Read more...

In the closing seconds of tonight’s third quarter against the Knicks, Manu Ginobili tried lobbing a pass to LaMarcus Aldridge. But instead of getting the ball to Aldridge for the alley-oop, he put a little too much cheese on it and did something way cooler—he tossed it straight into the net.Read more...

The Miami Herald is publishing a five-part series on the Marlins’ new front office’s plans for the team, and per today’s introductory piece, the essence of CEO Derek Jeter’s strategy is something like this: Make big payroll cuts by trading away the team’s most popular players, increase gate revenue by selling more…Read more...

Nick Spicher was embroiled in the Jeopardy! equivalent of an NFL replay review when he gave an incorrect response to the following before/after clue in Monday’s episode: “A song by Coolio from ‘Dangerous Minds’ goes back in time to become a 1667 John Milton classic.”

Though all the evidence pointed Marvin Lewis finally leaving the Bengals—the usually reliable Adam Schefter reported on Dec. 17 that Lewis would be gone after the season—the team announced today that Lewis will receive a two-year extension. What?

Last week, we ran staffers’ nominations for shitty things of 2017 that should stay in 2017. Because we are bad at organization, we left out some things. Here they are.

The Steelers said today that offensive coordinator Todd Haley was injured in “a fall” after the team’s New Year’s Eve 28-24 win over the Browns in Pittsburgh. It only took a couple hours for a slightly more honest version of that story to come out:

This young man kicking a ball past the keeper and into the net while also kicking his shoe up and through the nearby basketball hoop is the apex of simultaneous multi-sport excellence—which his stunned and elated buddies react to appropriately by losing their minds:Read more...

Christian Pulisic—the wonderteen, the nation’s best and most favored soccer man, an elite athlete blessed with speed and agility and hops we don’t normally associate with slight, diminutive whiteboys—had himself a (mostly) great 2017. To commemorate his metaphorical ascent to the heights of the sporting world, he…Read more...

I was hoping to start 2018 off with a positive blog, like some of my colleagues, but then I glanced at my feeds and saw ‘chocolate extinction’ all over them.Read more...

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking steak sauces, Italian names, shitbags, and more.Read more...

Dec. 31 was the deadline for BBWAA members to put their Hall of Fame ballots in the mail, which means the 2018 inductees are fixed—we just won’t know who they are until the ballots are counted and then announced on Jan. 24. But we can predict, and with more and more media members announcing their votes ahead of time,…Read more...

The Buffalo Bills did everything they could to get into the playoffs on Sunday when they beat the Dolphins, 22-16. But the man who made the most important play in sealing Buffalo’s first postseason appearance since 1999 was Bengals QB Andy Dalton. With under a minute to play in a game that was meaningless for his own…Read more...

What’s your favorite Conor McGregor title defense? Since catching Eddie Alvarez reaching a few days after the 2016 election to nab the lightweight championship, the Irishman hasn’t fought in the UFC. He earned the featherweight belt in 2015 by unhooking Jose Aldo’s jaw in 13 seconds, but the UFC re-appropriated that…Read more...

Welcome to Bad Quarterback Performance Of The Week, a recurring feature in which we celebrate the worst quarterback play the NFL has to offer.

Isaiah Thomas back! After missing the first 36 games of the season recovering from a hip injury, the wee scoring machine will make his Cleveland Cavaliers debut tonight, against the Portland Trail Blazers*. To be honest, I’d nearly forgotten him.Read more...

Before first-round play at the Brisbane International Monday, an announcer chopped up Canadian wonderteen Denis Shapovalov’s name into tiny pieces and then spit them out as an incoherent mess.Read more...

Pawel Babicki finished 67th out of 67 competitors at a downhill race last week in Bormio, Italy. He trailed eventual winner Dominik Paris by 36 seconds, which is all the more impressive considering that Babicki lost his left ski before the halfway point of the famous Stelvio downhill run.

During Monday’s Winter Classic, USA Hockey revealed the rosters for next month’s Olympics. And because of the NHL’s refusal to release its players (though the IOC is more deserving of the blame), the men’s team is weird as hell:

Kotaku YouTuber Apologizes After Uploading Footage Of Apparent Suicide | Jalopnik The Tesla Model 3 Makes The Future Feel Normal | io9 Gillian Anderson Reconfirms Her X-Files Future | Lifehacker What to Know About the Major Cryptocurrencies Besides Bitcoin | The A.V. Club Our most-anticipated albums of 2018 (that we…Read more...

Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan has always been able to score—he’s averaged more than 20 points a night in each of the past four seasons, with his 2016-17 points per game average of 27.3 putting him fifth among all NBA players. One way he was never able to do it, however, was from long range. Since his career began in…Read more...

It was a day of statements, with Alabama emphatically proving they belonged in the playoff and Georgia delivering a classic 2OT win. But no statement was louder than Central Florida’s 34-27 win over No. 7 Auburn, and UCF’s players and coaches weren’t shy about making the subtext text.

It’s almost hard to remember, given how much happened from halftime on, but there was a point in Monday’s Rose Bowl when it looked like Oklahoma had the game all locked up. As Georgia desperately tried to make a goal line stand while down 24-14 in the final minute of the second quarter, OU pulled out a gorgeously…Read more...

Alabama manhandled top seed Clemson 24-6 in a downer of a Sugar Bowl unworthy of being the headliner to the double-OT Rose Bowl opening act, and now you’re all going to enjoy a week of gripes about the SEC and the Tide vs. Georgia national championship matchup. Our response to those complaints is the above GIF and a…Read more...

Alabama’s Da’Ron Payne pushes well past 300 pounds and bench presses 500. He is a large man. Here’s the large man catching two passes in five minutes—one of them from his own team, for a touchdown—and making us all very happy to be alive. Except for those of us who went to Clemson, and I didn’t go to Clemson.Read more...

Sony Michel’s touchdown in double-overtime gave Georgia a 54-48 Rose Bowl win over Oklahoma and made up for a late fumble that resulted in six points for the Sooners. Here are how both teams’ radio announcers as well as national and international broadcasters called the winning touchdown:

One day after falling to the Lions and locking up their first losing season since 2008, the Green Bay Packers will make several changes. Ted Thompson has been with the team since 1992—save for a four-year spell in Seattle—and he served as the team’s general manager from 2005 until today, when he was reassigned within…Read more...

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the New Orleans Saints 31-24 Sunday, and although the game didn’t carry too much weight, there were clearly feelings left over from the two teams’ first divisional matchup in November. During the postgame handshake, Saints head coach Sean Payton gave Bucs head coach Dirk Koetter more of a…Read more...

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With a 34-27 win over Auburn in the Peach Bowl, the UCF Knights confirmed their status as the only undefeated team in this season of college football, improving to 13-0 in head coach Scott Frost’s final game before leaving for Nebraska.Read more...

The Bills on Sunday ended an 18-year playoff drought, the longest active postseason dry spell in major U.S. sports. Understandably, Bills players and fans were pretty stoked. Some of this cathartic merriment was caught on video, and the spontaneity and genuine joy of it all makes for some fine hangover viewing.Read more...

Arizona head coach Bruce Arians is retiring after five seasons at the helm of the Cardinals and after 42 total years as a football coach.Read more...

If Christmas is all about putting stuff up butts, New Year’s Day is the day to read about the many methods of absolute destruction of America’s dick and balls, and to be thankful it wasn’t you. Unless it was.Read more...