Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

We’ve come to the last of our offseason previews, where all eyes are basically on one team and everyone might react off of that. It’s time for the NL East, or as it may be known from now on, Days of Our Steven Cohen.

One of the pastimes of my college football fan experience was sneaking booze into the stadium. A lot of venues nixed alcohol sales after crowds devolved into angry mobs in the ’90s. A few rolled back those policies recently, and whether it’s due to the unending greed of universities, or a sense of helplessness because…Read more...

The University of Virginia’s athletic department shouldn’t be dominating headlines for something like this.Read more...

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In professional sports, team executives and coaches can over-complicate a situation by attempting to outthink the room. This frequently happens in the NBA when general managers are building teams. Or they just become so blinded by certain players that they fail to see their inadequacies clearly.

Justin Fields may be evolving into the franchise quarterback Chicago Bears fans have been waiting for since Al Capone was alive. Jim McMahon was a capable Super Bowl-winning game manager, but Fields is demonstrating his potential to introduce Chicagoans to a higher caliber of individual quarterback play. The…Read more...

It happens every season, and maybe if no one mentioned it or paid attention maybe it would cease to be a tradition of an NFL season. The last undefeated team loses its first game, and the 1972 Dolphins are all over your timeline and whichever ones are left alive and haven’t filled their diapers with their own shit (or…Read more...

It’s time to check in on the teams that can’t get out of their own way. We’re halfway through the 2022 NFL season, and much of it has been unpredictable, but there are always a few teams we expect to disappoint their fanbases. Now let’s get into the powerless ranking for Week 10.

The Washington Commanders’ strongest unit is their defensive line. Even without Chase Young, the group is big, athletic, and dependable. On Monday Night Football tonight they will be going up against a team with one of the strongest offenses in the NFL — the undefeated Philadelphia Eagles.

Let’s be brave. For most, it’s a foregone conclusion that Germany and Spain are going to come out of this group. Except neither’s recent World Cup history is all that glossy. Yeah, Germany won the tournament just two editions ago. They were also rightly kicked into the trash in the group stage last time out, and went…Read more...

The Crypto craze has infiltrated the sports realm for years, however, no crypto firm has been more ubiquitous of late than FTX. Franchises, athletes, and venture capitalists who advise these figures all rose for the bullish crypto market. FTX sniveled its way into mainstream culture through brand sponsorships with…Read more...

The Jimmy Garoppolo experience, a ride with far fewer thrills than the Michael Vick one from the Nike commercial. Riding with Jimmy Garoppolo has gotten the San Francisco 49ers to the doorstep of the franchise’s sixth Super Bowl Championship, but he hasn’t been able to get them inside the building.

Josh McDonald’s, er, McDaniels should be fired.

November has rolled around, and like clockwork, the Dallas Cowboys proved once again why they can’t be trusted once expectations are placed on their shoulder pads. Nobody outside Wisconsin gave the Packers a chance to beat the Cowboys Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, Dallas must’ve missed the email that they were…Read more...

The GM Meetings are in the books, the Winter Meetings aren’t in the distant future, and the rumors are beginning to fly. You can be sure your favorite team is talking to agents for players! Does that mean anything? Nope, sure doesn’t! But you’ll take anything at this point, and they know that. So we’d better get…Read more...

It wasn’t a coincidence. It was evidence.Read more...

For the fair-weather soccer fan, and let’s be real, that’s 99 percent or more of American sports fans, the World Cup is the one event taking place over multiple weeks where general interest is at a high. The United States men’s national team didn’t make the world’s best 32 in 2018, and a huge chunk of American fans…Read more...

Three members of the University of Virginia football team were gunned down on the Charlottesville campus late Sunday night and two more were injured, according to police and university officials.

For all of the press that Romeo Doubs received during the summer, the wide receiver from the Green Bay Packers 2022 draft class who they had their hopes set on the most was Christian Watson. This FCS star put an exclamation point on his evaluation at the draft combine.Read more...

Yesterday was most certainly not the most entertaining Sunday of NFL games ever played.Read more...

The Buffalo Bills continue to find more excruciating ways to break their fans’ hearts by losing. This time they did it in the closing seconds and overtime of their Week 10 matchup against the Minnesota Vikings.Read more...

There had to be some law of nature or human capability that was broken by Justin Jefferson’s catch.

You’d be severely challenged to come up with a duo more up their own ass than Cristiano Ronaldo and Piers Morgan, so it was kind of perfect and perfectly puke-worthy that Ronaldo carefully chose Morgan for his tactical masterplan to get booted out of Manchester as soon as possible. It was right as the Premier League…Read more...

Russell Westbrook’s first season in L.A. was an unmitigated failure. He was plugged into a lineup of non-shooters including LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and a confusing mix of ill-fitting pieces. Of Rob Pelinka’s misfit toys, though, nobody took last season’s debacle harder on the chin than Westbrook.

At the start of the fifth round UFC 281’s main event, the rapper with the Instagram handle @champagnepapi might have been ready to go get a ridiculously overpriced bottle. His $2 million bet on Israel Adesanya looked certain to be a winner.Read more...

It you ascribe to the theory that this will be a truly goofy World Cup — that the short run-up, the injuries everywhere (not clear the amount of injured is all that abnormal but let’s go with it), the odd setting — and that some team from out of nowhere could make a run, you’re probably sizing up your…Read more...

In the latest edition of “when trick plays go wrong,” we get Tom Brady falling flat on his ass while running a simple go route. Halfway through the third quarter of Tampa Bay’s game against Seattle in Munich, Germany, Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich decided to run a wildcat-looking play with Brady…Read more...

The Los Angeles Chargers are a very good football team. Even in the absence of Keenan Allen and Mike Williams for parts of the season, the downfall of JC Jackson, and the abysmal play of Jerry Tiller on the D-line — thankfully he just got waived — the Chargers have played their way to a 5-3 record and are very much in…Read more...

At the end of October, MLB announced their finalists for the Gold Glove awards. Every MLB fan collectively put palm to face at the sight of Juan Soto being named a finalist for the NL right field Gold Glove. Thankfully, he didn’t win the award. MLB coaches and managers dodged a huge bullet with that, because I don’t…Read more...

A few days ago, the New York Mets officially re-signed closer Edwin Díaz to a five-year deal worth $102 million, the largest contract ever for a reliever, by a wide margin. The details of Díaz’s contract are as follows:Read more...

When tickets for the NFL’s first game in Germany went on sale in July, the worst seats in the entirety of Allianz Arena were being sold left and right for upwards of $600. Germany has never had a mainstream NFL game in the country before, and although the first matchup would obviously be given a serious amount of…Read more...

Week 10 of the College Football season really shook things up. No. 1 Tennessee went down. Alabama and Clemson were all but knocked out of the College Football Playoff. And a few Heisman candidates had some good and not-so-good performances that changed things up in the rankings, including a newcomer entering the top…Read more...

We have something that just might make your day, weekend, or month, depending on how things are going in your life.Read more...

It’s not that the relationship between Jack Eichel and Buffalo Sabres fans will ever be good. Their union promised too much and delivered so little that there should be bitterness on both sides. The No. 2 pick the Sabres sold out for didn’t deliver them from the wilderness that they’ve been stuck in for over a decade…Read more...

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OK, I’m stretching to get a Rush reference into these. But the heart wants what it wants.Read more...

I don’t mean to go down a whole rabbit hole dive into corporate personhood, but team owners infuse their NFL franchises with personalities. The Dallas Cowboys exude Jerry Jones’ swashbuckling oilman bravado, the Pittsburgh Steelers have ingrained the Rooney family’s consistency and competence into their DNA and the…Read more...

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced Tuesday his office is going after Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder, the franchise itself, the National Football League, and league commissioner Roger Goodell, filing civil charges against the quartet.

There is a charm to a local sports broadcast. Sports is about energy, and passion, and a way to draw that out of fans is with the MCs of the event.

The MLB hot stove is not officially underway, but it’s warming up, and arguably the biggest name on the pitching market is two-time Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom. Earlier this week, deGrom officially opted out of his Mets’ contract — a decision most people saw coming — and almost immediately the rumors started…Read more...

It’s officially the offseason now, as we’ve gotten Scott Boras’s Fozzy Bear-in-the-college-dorm act at the GM Meetings. So let’s keep this record spinning right round and move to the NL Central, which I don’t feel personally about at all.

Dusty Baker “ought to be part of the conversation around MLB’s best-ever managers,” concluded Neil Paine from FiveThirtyEight after studying the most overachieving managers, and “shouldn’t need a ring to validate his career.” Agreed. Let’s go further.

The Golden State Warriors are far from the only team in the NBA that’s surprisingly struggling. Hell, there are surprises all over the league. The Utah Jazz gutted their team and have the best record in the Western Conference.Read more...

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From the clue package to both performances on Wednesday night’s edition of FOX ratings juggernaut The Masked Singer, anyone who’s a fan of the inaugural All Elite Wrestling world champion knows his signature growl and tone. Chris Jericho is the only current wrestler on American television to sing his own entrance…Read more...

With so much election news flying off the shelves, you might have missed this stunner out of California as voters rejected two propositions that would have brought sports betting to the state.Read more...

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Prior to the season, the NFL world was conflicted on Miami Dolphins starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s viability as a franchise quarterback. Even after his six-touchdown performance in Week 2, the world was still divided. Maybe it was just a fluke game. Hell, even I pointed out that bad quarterbacks have had games…Read more...

Any coach hired by U.S. Soccer, at least for the men’s side (though Vlatko Andonovski isn’t winning many fans these days either), is never going to have 100 percent buy-in. They just haven’t gotten it totally right in… well, ever? Berhalter being related to an exec at the time of his hiring didn’t help. U.S. Soccer…Read more...