Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

This piece originally appeared on Victory Journal.Read more...

John Cook is an asshole. You are almost certainly a more pleasant and sensible person than John Cook, but you would not be here if it were not for what a colossal asshole he is.

Professional wrestling since 2001 has existed in two silos: the mighty WWE, and everyone else. No promotion is likely to catch the ever-growing WWE anytime soon (in 2016 it brought in $729 million in revenue and had its highest profit since 2010, according to the Wrestling Observer). At the same time, the WWE is no…Read more...

Often, when wrestling reporters cover mixed martial arts or vice versa, their readers revolt, wondering what the hell the sport and the pseudo-sport actually have to do with each other beyond the occasional crossover athlete like Brock Lesnar, Ken Shamrock, or CM Punk. The reality is that the history of MMA is…Read more...

Apologies if you expected the channel to change after the two greatest split the year’s four majors evenly between themselves. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s enduring dominance, and the inconsistency of their most dangerous threats, have frozen everything in place. The hypothetical Next Generation of men’s tennis…Read more...

Cowboys owner and NFL shadow commissioner Jerry Jones isn’t happy that a federal appeals court vacated Ezekiel Elliott’s injunction, thus clearing the way for the running back’s six-game suspension. Jones’s mood is to be expected, but—surprise!—he also isn’t happy about the extrajudicial process that led the league to…Read more...

Here’s Ayesha Curry, acclaimed Twitter user, on today’s episode of The Real discussing Steph Curry’s desire to see the feet. “My husband really loves my feet,” she explained, “So, when he says to send nudes, he gets a picture of my bare feet!” Aww!

Over the last seven centuries, the Knights Templar have left the realm of history and entered the realm of pop culture. They’re a major plot point in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the villains of the Assassin’s Creed series of games, and feature in an astonishing array of pseudo-history and conspiracy theories.

After Thad Matta abruptly left Ohio State this summer, incoming freshman Braxton Beverly was granted his release by the Buckeyes and he transferred to N.C. State. The four-star point guard recruit (who once scored 70 points in a single high school game) hadn’t played for the Buckeyes or anything, and he’d only been at…Read more...

It may not be a YETI, but it does have wheels. This Coleman cooler can hold up to 84 cans, claims to keep ice for up to 5 days, and is, of course, a portable seat with cup holders - all necessary features for the best tailgating experience. Plus, it’s about $10 less than usual today.Read more...

Bruce Arena, the U.S. men’s national soccer team coach who never should have been “in” in the first place, is now out. U.S. Soccer allowed him to tender his resignation, three days after the the U.S. team failed to qualify for the World Cup after losing to Trinidad and Tobago in the country’s biggest embarrassment…Read more...

Maybe shaggy Serbian guard Miloš Teodosić, the Clippers’ new 30-year-old rookie, will turn out to be a matador defender. Maybe he will be an asshole who smokes clove cigarettes in the locker room and sneers at his teammates about the vulgarity of the American cinema. Maybe he will rip egg farts with no mercy! So long…Read more...

On Wednesday afternoon, or maybe before that, someone created a document that named men who work in media and listed various allegations of their behavior toward women. It was crowdsourced and open access; anyone who had the link could read or add to it, which was both its foundational flaw and the only way it stood…Read more...

After three-and-a-half years of investigating fake classes in North Carolina’s African and Afro-American Studies department that dated back over 18 years, the NCAA announced on Friday that it does not have the jurisdiction to charge the university with violations of either academic fraud or providing “impermissible…Read more...

Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly, who has missed parts of each of the last two seasons after suffering concussions, left last night’s game against the Eagles in the second quarter. The hit that knocked Kuechly out of the game looked like it may have hurt his shoulder, but afterwards it was revealed that he is once…Read more...

If you want to get a feel for just how cruel the game of baseball was to Max Scherzer last night, watch a little bit of his postgame interview, in which he stood shell-shocked in front of his locker and tried to explain how a fifth inning that started with two quick outs ended with four runs crossing the plate.

We kick off this Friday the 13th with scary-good deals on refurbished Lenovo Thinkpads, a LG OLED TV, a home security camera, a leaf blower, and more.

Here is an Instagram video from last night’s game between the Eagles and Panthers in Charlotte, in which a raging bro in a Cam Newton jersey punches an old man in the face:

If you don’t know about Dallas-based Breda, you need to. The watch brand creates minimalist, easy-to-wear styles of watches that aren’t overworked or over priced. And we’ve got 35% off on three different styles, including different colorways. Use the code KINJA35 and grab the Valor, the Rand, or the Belmont for 35%…Read more...

Twitter, a social media site that verifies Nazis, is legally required to hide Nazi content and symbols in Germany and France. You can take advantage of this without moving to Germany.Read more...

It’s not often that Amazon features a laptop as one of its deals of the day, so anyone who uses a desktop at home or work should definitely check out this pair of refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga for their portable computing needs.

The Nationals continued their existence-long stretch of playoff futility tonight, falling to the Cubs in an NLDS Game 5 that combined a shaky Gio Gonzalez start, a blown lead, a historically weird inning-long meltdown, some very intense replay review and a failed attempt at a comeback before finally losing, 9-8. It…Read more...

There are seven different ways to allow a baserunner, and the Nationals engaged in far too many of them in a nightmarish fifth inning that saw their 4-3 lead turn into a 7-4 deficit.Read more...

Last Saturday, Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy were six miles into a backcountry skiing hike up to the top of Imp Peak, a mountain in Montana’s Madison Range, when they triggered an avalanche. The slide was 300 feet long and 150 feet wide at a depth of one to two feet, and both Perkins and Kennedy were swept up in the…Read more...

Winnipeg Jets center Matt Hendricks and defenseman Dustin Byfuglien have both been dealing with minor injuries, a foot problem and a “soft-tissue issue,” respectively. Their rehab of choice this week involved taking advantage of a mandatory off-day to head out on British Columbia’s Fraser River and catch a 600-pound…Read more...

Vox journalist Dylan Scott, you will get no argument here: that chart, showing the reported opinions of Trump voters on the NFL, is indeed pretty nuts! The data, compiled by an online survey company called Morning Consult and laid out at the New York Times’s Upshot blog, tells the story of how the opinions of Trump…Read more...

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell takes frequent criticism across many mediums, but according to the Wall Street Journal, former Fox News anchor Jane Skinner Goodell stood up for her husband’s bumbling through an anonymous Twitter account with the absolutely perfect handle @forargument.Read more...

Though the majority of the national coverage regarding athlete protests was dominated by the responses of NFL owners and the president this past weekend, several small colleges followed the blueprint set forth by Roger Goodell and Jerry Jones and took steps to silence athletes under the guise of promoting team unity.Read more...

The United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the NFL today in the ongoing Ezekiel Elliott case, writing that Elliott’s lawsuit contesting his six-game suspension was “premature.”Read more...

The NFL’s approach to players protesting racial injustice during the national anthem has moved to a whole new level of attempting to please everyone. In a matter of weeks, the league has gone from supporting the players, to co-opting and marketing their protests, to trying to squelch the demonstrations entirely, to…Read more...

If you read the press release announcing the construction of a new ballpark out in Summerlin, Nev. for the Las Vegas 51s, you might have thought that the construction would mercifully be completed without use of public money. The Raiders’ stadium deal is the worst heist in American history, and one may have thought…Read more...

One of the bad things about the USMNT missing out on the World Cup is that there will now be a generation of youngsters who won’t fall in love with the team and the sport. And while it’s only been days since the U.S.’s ouster became official, we’re already seeing examples of this phenomenon. Case in point: the above…Read more...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.Read more...

The other week, during a lunch break, I went into the Jezebel studio and recorded a fictionalized conversation with a man. I’d like to say it was cathartic, a way to erase all the one-sided exchanges (when I managed to say “totally” not once but twice to the man interviewing me for some assistant job, the time I…Read more...

Last weekend, UFC flyweight Henry Cejudo was attending a charity event in Santa Rosa, Calif., which largely no longer exists. Cejudo narrowly escaped his hotel after the Tubbs Fire roared into town and devastated the area. He told Yahoo Sports that he ignored an alarm around 2:00 a.m. before having to evacuate his…Read more...

Here is exactly how the Republican tax scam works, as explained clearly by one of its proponents.Read more...

Giants cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie met with coach Ben McAdoo this morning in an attempt to smooth out has recently become a tempestuous relationship. Rodgers-Cromartie tossed his helmet after he was taken off the field during the team’s loss to the Chargers last weekend, and he later clarified that he was…Read more...

Corey Kluber was great against eight out of nine Yankees last night. To those eight hitters, over 3.2 innings, Kluber gave up one hit, and he struck out six. In the biggest game of the year, he was almost fine. The problem was, one guy was a big problem for Kluber: A 27-year-old shortstop from Amsterdam, one who spent…Read more...

The Yankees managed to erase a 2-0 series deficit and advance to the ALCS, which is great news for Yankees fans and even better news for Aaron Judge, who has a lot less attention on him today than he would if the Yankees had fallen last night.

Corey Kluber’s shortest start of the season came in Game 2 of the ALDS. His third-shortest start game in last night’s Game 5. In between, his second-shortest start of the season, was a May 2 outing in which he was pulled after three innings with a lower back strain, with which he was placed on the DL and missed a…Read more...

On a Sunday morning in September, Typhoon Talim was flooding the western part of Japan with a torrential downpour, but at Todoroki Station in Tokyo on the other end of the country, its effects were limited to a light rain. A 20-minute ride south of the city’s famous Shibuya crossing, Todoroki is a sleepy residential…Read more...

Jahlil Okafor likes movies. A new profile of him at SB Nation opens with Okafor watching Home Again with his girlfriend. And he mentions at curious fact: Okafor has “been known to take a train from Philadelphia to Manhattan just to catch a flick or two at the iPic.” That wording doesn’t explain how often he does this,…Read more...

As you know, shopping is a migraine. It is a brutal conglomeration of terrible parking spots, high prices, slow-moving old people, heavy bags, and shoddy merchandise. But which store is the worst of them all? Which store—and we’re talking about any store that sells any type of good—is the one that brings out your…Read more...

The A.V. Club The owners of the Breaking Bad house put up a fence to stop people throwing pizzas onto their roof | Gizmodo It’s Hard Not to Love the Google Home Mini | Jalopnik Here Are Five Major Performance Benefits Of An Electric Car | Kotaku John Carpenter Is Dedicating His Life To Destiny 2 | Lifehacker You Must…Read more...

Kyrie Irving plays for the Boston Celtics now, and based on an interview he recently gave to the Boston Globe, he’s come to realize something that a lot of young people who leave the midwest have: that big cities are fun to live in.

For the length of 26 batters, from the moment the Indians chased CC Sabathia from the game in the fifth and got the Cleveland crowd back into things, until the moment Brett Gardner worked—and there is no better word than worked—an epic at-bat in the ninth, Game 5 of the ALDS was about as tense as games get: A…Read more...

The Indians’ catalogue of postseason failure is fairly lengthy, but it is not especially varied. There are, after all, a lot of different ways to lose—blowouts and gentle fades and attempted comebacks that can’t come back enough. But Cleveland’s recent history of loss here is almost exclusively defined by singular…Read more...

Two days ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tweeted the following:Read more...

NBA preseason games are not fun to watch, but when they give you the opportunity to see a singular talent whose appearances on the court are far too scarce, then it’s time to tune in. The 76ers’ Joel Embiid, ostensibly somewhat healthy, lent his game some value tonight when he hit the court for the first time since…Read more...

Alyssa Labrie first posted on Facebook privately over the weekend, saying New England Sports Network anchor Marc James exploded at her in a string of angry text messages after she said she didn’t want to get drinks with him. Labrie told me that after she heard from people saying it needed to be known, she made the…Read more...