Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Mark Emmert’s greatest value to the NCAA as president is the fact that he can say just about anything with a straight face, no matter the ridiculousness of his statement. In March of 2012 he said paying college athletes is “so antithetical to what college athletics is.” He made that remarkt in Houston less than eight…Read more...

Christmas approaches quickly, but college football fans are acutely aware that the real late December holiday is bowl season. Just when visions of the CFB content stream finally slowing to a crawl is dancing in your head, the NCAA presents the most meaningless postseason tradition in American sports. Aside from the…Read more...

For the second straight year, this pipe dream of Luka Dončić being NBA MVP seems to be going up in flames already. Dallas started the season well, but now they’re a game under .500 (11-12) and have lost eight of their last 10 games. It’s not so much Luka’s statistical production, although his shooting percentages are…Read more...

The Los Angeles Rams demolished the Jacksonville Jaguars last Sunday. I guess the Rams were tired of losing after going winless through November. The Rams took their frustrations out on rookie head coach Urban Meyer and rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Matt Stafford threw for three touchdowns in the second half,…Read more...

Oklahoma Sooners fans are mad, including Oklahoma state Sen. Bill Coleman, who is looking to “honor” Lincoln Riley with by renam — wait what?! Say that again, internet, Coleman (R-Ponca City) is an Oklahoma State fan? And his planned backhanded slight of renaming a desolate 3-inch stretch of highway after the…Read more...

It’s not that it was surprising. Back when WWE announced it was completely reshaping it’s junior brand, NXT, I wrote that it would be the end of what fans of the black and gold had come to love. I guess I’m just impressed (while simultaneously depressed) at how ruthlessly and efficiently it came to pass. It only took…Read more...

Eighteen years ago, the most prejudiced sports league in American professional sports (Major League Baseball is a close second) created their version of “affirmative action” when they came up with the Rooney Rule — named after the legendary Steelers owner Dan Rooney — in hopes of helping diverse candidates by…Read more...

Coaches pushing their services like politicians trying to nab a presidential bid is my favorite part of any busy offseason. The season isn’t even over, and schools and coaching are already rushing to ship each other for that rose to keep them on The Bachelor: Sex Island.

Mario Cristobal is taking his talents to South Beach and is out the door at Oregon after Utah hit him in the ass with it. (Looking at the judges to see I get credit for two cliches in a lede. And… yes, “taking his talents to South Beach” qualifies.) The hire for Miami is seemingly a home run because his best trait…Read more...

It looks like USC used up their entire athletic budget on Lincoln Riley’s $100 million contract. The video of his introduction as the Trojans’ new head coach is making the Twitter rounds, an introduction that can truly only be described as a combination of an SNL skit, a vivid melatonin-induced dream, and a poorly…Read more...

At first glance, it should be go without asking that assigning sex workers to media members is not a perk of traveling to bowl games. And yet, here we are. And the story of how we got here is a journey.Read more...

Monday night, we saw a familiar outcome in the NFL: the New England Patriots beating the Buffalo Bills. Despite horrid weather conditions and having to play on the road, the Patriots continued their dominant play as of late, thus lengthening their lead in the AFC East and doing so while having their rookie…Read more...

I don’t really know what I was expecting, going to a bowling alley that’s two names removed from what it was called when my grandparents used to take me there, and thinking that maybe there would be something special about the fact that the old namesake, finally, many years late, had been elected to the Baseball Hall…Read more...

The Lakers’ Russell Westbrook-LeBron James experiment hasn’t exactly worked out how everyone in Los Angeles had hoped coming into the season. But if Westbrook had been able to persuade Kawhi Leonard to bring him along on his way to LA a couple of years ago, Westbrook would have been a Clipper and not a Laker this…Read more...

Life is about evolving, and economy of motion is one of those things we strive for. How do we do the things we have to do every day in the cleanest way possible? Mostly it’s about financial budgeting, but there comes a part in everyone’s life when you decide what you really need in your house and in your life (people,…Read more...

The IOC admitted yesterday that the charade they tried to pull was pretty much full of shit, without saying it was full of shit, to try and save whatever face it could. You see, the IOC doesn’t want anything to hurt its precious Games that are just two months away and in Beijing, even if that means being in cahoots…Read more...

Bill Belichick is the AFC’s Thanos. He’s inevitable.Read more...

In yet another measure of how irrelevant horse racing has gotten, Kentucky Derby “winner” Medina Spirit collapsed and died at Santa Anita yesterday. He had a heart attack after a workout, which 3-year-old horses don’t tend to do. It does happen, though, but is rare.Read more...

Pittsburgh Panthers quarterback Kenny Pickett had college football fans and the internet buzzing over his fake-QB slide and subsequent touchdown run in a 45-21 smashing of Wake Forest. Let’s be honest, in real-time, this might be one of the illest plays of the college or pro football season. But there is a…Read more...

It’s not that anyone should have expected the Joe Biden administration to pull the big card and keep U.S. athletes away from Beijing in February. It would have led other nations to do the same, and might have actually been the rare instance of someone standing up to China for all the atrocities it commits. But given…Read more...

It’s Week 13 of the NFL season, and rookie quarterbacks are front and center, with some living up to the hype and others not as much. With that, let’s look at how the 2021 rookie class fared in Week 13.

It was all over for the Miami Dolphins after the trade deadline. They were willing to sell all of their credibility and goodwill to trade for Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson, despite the whole “Tanking for Tua [Tagovailoa]” hashtag in 2019. The No. 5 overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft did not have a proper…Read more...

Every fandom has their cult heroes who seemingly drop in out of the sky and provide a lifelong memory. Phillies fans have Matt Stairs. Bulls fans have Steve Kerr, to an extent (Kerr was a fine player but he does seem an odd choice from the gods to hit a title-clinching shot, no? Then again, he did it with the Spurs…Read more...

Getting that middle finger tattoo may pay off in the long run for Tyron Woodley, because he got the fight that he wanted. Tommy Fury has pulled out of his Dec. 18 pay-per-view bout against Jake Paul. Fury, the former Love Island UK star, sent out a statement through his promoter, Frank Warren, announcing that due to a…Read more...

A few times throughout the season, randomly, there’s a night where it feels like hockey players across the league lose their mind. It’s like a hive mentality, perhaps when the banality of the regular season sinks in or becomes too much to deal with and they have to break out in the only way they know how: trying to…Read more...

If you want to know who has the sweetest gig in America right now, look no further than John Wall of the Houston Rockets. Wall isn’t rehabbing an injury for the first time in years, he’s supposed to be 100 percent healthy, yet he has not suited up for one of Houston’s first 23 games this season.

Look, French is hard. As a French major, I know this. I studied the language for 8 years and still can’t wrap my tongue around some of the sounds my mouth is supposed to make when speaking it (badly). And foreign languages are not easy for some people, and hey, kudos to new Montréal Canadiens Executive Vice President…Read more...

The Philadelphia Flyers fired coach Alain Vigneault on Monday, and the truth is it should have come sooner, and it’s probably not enough.

They got played by an 18-year-old.

We don’t think any of the current seasons taking place now as “COVID seasons” like we did of the previous ones played in empty stadiums/arenas or in weird, neutral venues altogether. But it still very much is, which the Philadelphia Union learned the all-too hard way yesterday.

America’s favorite hipster quarterback is making his return to the field today. Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is out with an ankle injury, so for the first time since Week 14 of the 2020 season, Gardner Minshew II will be starting in an NFL game.

The tell-all book business is booming, and Robert Griffin III is jumping into the ring with his book due out in August 2022, titled Surviving Washington. Griffin is set to dish up his recollection of all the dirt that went on behind the scenes during his time in the Nation’s capital as quarterback for the Washington…Read more...

While more and more American players populate the playing squads of clubs across Europe, that hasn’t spurred more esteem for American managers in the game’s bedrock. After today, only Pelligrino Matarazzo of Stuttgart remains in the Big 5 leagues, or really anywhere significant. That’s because, after just four months,…Read more...

The weekly player prop is starting to become a curse of sorts, after another player succumbed to injury and cost us. Fortunately, it didn’t cost a winning week.Read more...

Is there any better representation of American society than the annual championship Saturday halftime Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway? Hey kids, here’s a chance to throw some footballs in a can for the chance to not graduate in crippling debt!Read more...

The news that Ben Roethlisberger “expects this to be his final season playing quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers,” as Adam Schefter reported, is some big-time “duh” stuff.

For weeks, we’ve been dissecting, diagramming, and divining what the College Football Playoff might or should look like at the end of this zany season, and then Saturday’s conference championships came along and made everything pretty darn clear.

“The best defense is a good offense.” — George Washington — Michael Jordan

Mark Turgeon’s ouster at Maryland, just eight games into the season, is a good reminder of how quickly a college program can stumble into irrelevance, as well as the outsized influence of football in conference realignment.Read more...

In 2020, a survey of several Gen Z Americans revealed that only 53 percent considered themselves sports fans, and only 21 percent considered themselves to be “avid” sports fans. Both these figures are the lowest of any age demographic. Gen Z has shown a general disinterest toward professional sports with more of their…Read more...

If you watched Oregon get steamrolled again by Utah on Friday night, you were watching the wrong football game, because the Conference USA title game was where all the action was.

All news is local, and The Columbian got a doozy of a local story out of now-LSU coach Brian Kelly’s sudden decision to bolt from Notre Dame this week.Read more...

On Nov. 4, ESPN published a report detailing the racist and misogynistic culture created by Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver within the organization, which had reached a point where one former executive was quoted as saying “there’s literally nothing you could tell me about him from a misogynistic or race standpoint…Read more...

Do you remember the movie Thank You for Smoking? It was a satirical look at cigarette spokesman Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart aka Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight) who tries to remain a role model to his son despite promoting/defending lung darts.

Brian Kelly’s been down South for all of 72 hours and is ready to challenge every last person who said that he wouldn’t be a culture fit at LSU. You want a culture fit? How’s a brand-spanking-new Southern accent for a culture fit? As Kelly took the floor at halftime of the LSU basketball game Wednesday night, he…Read more...

Week 13 is normally when we start seeing the NFL playoff picture unfold. However, in 2021, we’re still unsure if there are even any good teams in the league. The NFL is so tightly knit nowadays that even the 0-10-1 Detroit Lions still have not been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.

In high school, I skipped my ninth-grade team and started on JV. It’s still – top to bottom – the most talented team I’ve ever played on. We were even better than the varsity team. But, in one game we were just going through the motions. At halftime, our coach made us do cardio in the locker room – even though we were…Read more...

Stop the free agent talk! The lockout has commenced and with it there will be no more free agent signings until MLB and the MLB Players’ Association agree on a new CBA for the next five years. That being said, there are still several big-name free agents who remained unsigned through the Wednesday CBA deadline, the…Read more...

Gonzaga freshman Chet Holmgren was the top high school recruit in his class and is the presumptive No. 1 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft. As such, he’s subject to a lot of scrutiny.Read more...