Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

College football gimmicks are fun. Everyone loves Miami’s turnover chain and touchdown rings; Florida State’s turnover backpack was ... okay, and who could forget Kennesaw State’s wonderful turnover plank? Unfortunately, it is possible that Georgia Tech killed the entire sideline gimmick industry during last night’s…Read more...

As often happens when you work with highly opinionated idiots, the Deadspin staff got into a lengthy argument yesterday over, what else, a Twitter question:Read more...

On Tuesday, the wife, son, and mother-in-law of Rays pitching prospect Blake Bivens was killed in a triple murder: Joan Bernard, 62; her daughter and Bivens’s wife, Emily Bernard Bivens, 25; and Cullen Bivens, 14 months. Charged with three counts of first-degree murder is 18-year-old Matthew Bernard, Emily’s brother…Read more...

PC Gaming Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

The kicker competition at Bears training camp has been an ongoing delight for anyone who is neither a Bears fan nor a kicker auditioning for the job. Nine—one two three four five six seven eight nine—kickers were initially rounded up and cast in Matt Nagy’s weirdly self-loathing quest to somehow banish all traces of …Read more...

It didn’t take long for Aristides Aquino to hit another home run and attach his name to yet another record. On an 0-1 pitch from Miami’s Robert Dugger, the Reds rookie smoked one into the stands in left for his 14th dinger of the month, officially breaking Cody Bellinger’s NL rookie record of 13 set in June 2017. This…Read more...

An obscure and confusing rule sent the game-winning run across for the Athletics in their 9–8 win over the Kansas City Royals Thursday afternoon. I hate this rule. It punishes the defense for making a cool play when a thing that baseball can’t possibly want to discourage right now is cool plays.Read more...

Year 2 of UCLA’s Chip Kelly experiment began on Thursday with a trip to Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati to take on the Bearcats. Like any sophomore year, the preseason conversation around the team focused on significant improvement from last year, with some promises of an offensive explosion.

23-year-old American Taylor Townsend dropped the first set of her second-round match with reigning Wimbledon champ and No. 4 Simona Halep Thursday, looking sloppy and flustered and easily pushed around. Undeterred, Townsend roared back for a dominant second set and outlasted Halep in a tense third-set tiebreak for a…Read more...

“Don’t count your reps, make your reps count.”Read more...

The Mobile Police Department has issued an arrest warrant for Lakers center DeMarcus Cousins this afternoon on a third-degree harassing communications charge, as first reported by USA Today. Cops issued the warrant one day after TMZ published audio made by Cousins’s ex-girlfriend, Christy West, that includes a man…Read more...

“As flies to wanton boys, we are for the gods. They kill us for sport,” was how soccer legend Eric Cantona, quoting Shakespeare, began his wholly and fittingly insane acceptance speech after being handed the UEFA President’s Award today. And it only got weirder from there:Read more...

I’m not saying that you don’t want to get a text message from Drew Magary on a Saturday night. For one thing it’s easily the quietest way to interact with him, and it’s also a good source of breaking news if you are avoiding your computer at a time when a prominent NFL quarterback abruptly plays the Fuck This,…Read more...

Conservative institutions in the Donald Trump era have often sought to portray themselves as shocked and appalled by the so-called “alt-right.” White nationalists have also engaged in their own efforts to differentiate themselves from the neoconservatives who dominated the GOP for decades. But neither narrative is…Read more...

Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

And we’re back! After a summer of international tournaments and preliminary rounds, the Champions League group stage is up next, following the completion of the draw earlier today in Monaco. As is tradition, now we can shift to figuring out who got boned by the draw, and who will have a cakewalk to the round of 16:Read more...

Jadeveon Clowney is still not under contract, owing to his refusal to sign the franchise tender offered by the Texans, who were unable to sign him to a long-term contract by the tag’s July 15 deadline. But it’s nonetheless been a busy few days for Clowney, who:Read more...

Murdy the Dawg is a well-known figure in the skating world, and Thrasher magazine actually released this part in February, but he has only just now rolled into our purview, which is as good enough a reason as any to share this video. What, are you not going to watch a skateboarding dog who also knows how to fist-bump?

VAR keeps hitting never-before-seen low points in ways that were hard to imagine when it was first implemented. The Vancouver Whitecaps experienced a new version of outrage during their match against the Montreal Impact on Wednesday night, when replays ruled out one of their goals, due to both the new goalkeeper…Read more...

While most of Wednesday’s U.S. Open slate was rained out, unseeded Venus Williams still battled No. 5 seed Elina Svitolina under the roof on Louis Armstrong. The centerpiece was a Williams service game at 5-3 in the second that spanned 15 minutes, eight deuces, five match point saves, and several insane rallies.…Read more...

If nothing else, the surprise retirement of former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck demonstrates just how close to the gutter so many solidly mid-tier NFL teams actually are. One day you’re preparing for a season with the expectation that your franchise quarterback will make good on those playoff aspirations, and the…Read more...

Every now and then comes a reminder that The System works precisely as everybody suspects it does and wishes it didn’t. The situation now roiling the youth sports scene in the Nation’s Capital is one of those. The D.C. government recently agreed to let the Maret School, one of the more elite private schools in town,…Read more...

The first time I visit the “ass-kissing booth” at Butt-Con, the bizarre marketing party for entrepreneur Miki Agrawal’s latest venture, the ass asks me to kiss it. The booth is pinstriped and flimsy, a gag on the more chaste version you’d find at a country fair: A self-described “friend of Miki’s” is on her knees with…Read more...

Aristides Aquino is a phenomenon. But with every home run the Reds’ rookie outfielder hits and just keeps hitting, he makes it slightly harder to dismiss as a late-season, Kevin Maas/Shane Spencer–type smash-in-a-pan, and adds evidence that he might just be a young dude who’s really, really good at hitting.

In what is quickly becoming a late-summer tradition, another frustrated player had to be separated from a coach in the Orioles dugout as tempers flared during a loss. This time it was reliever Richard Bleier, who had something to say to O’s infield coach José David Flóres about defensive positioning on his way off…Read more...

Shaq, that lovable character you can’t get enough of in his capacity as the grumbling grouch on TNT’s NBA studio coverage, apparently has a new docuseries—a fancy word that means “reality television show”— coming up on TNT. The show, apparently already hard-up for content, is hoping to put together a series of…Read more...

Rhys Hoskins has been having a bad time of late. His current slump—he’s batting .130 in August coming into Wednesday night—was at the heart of Sean Rodriguez’s ill-advised rebuke of Phillies fans; Tuesday night, in a stupid and disheartening loss to the horrid Pirates, Hoskins dropped the relay throw on what would’ve…Read more...

The air at North Cove Marina, a small slip amid the towering high rises of Lower Manhattan, felt pregnant. With rain. With hope. With anticipation.Read more...

NBA 2K20 is supposed to be a game primarily about playing basketball, but you wouldn’t know that from the game’s latest trailer, which makes the game look like something you might see in a casino.

UFC Hall of Famer B.J. Penn was part of an extended bar fight with a shirtless man on Hawaii’s Big Island Tuesday night, and TMZ has obtained a pair of videos showing the various stages of the bout. Penn, who has lost seven straight fights in the UFC since 2011, was out at the Lava Shack in Pāhoa when he got into a…Read more...

There are going to be somewhere around 10 in-season openings for NFL placekickers this year because there have been somewhere around that many every year since the rules were changed to make kicking more stressful. The chance that one of them will go to Carli Lloyd is minimal.

On the same day that Bury were officially expelled from the English Football League, Bolton Wanderers have narrowly avoided a similar fate. The club announced on Wednesday that it had been sold to Football Ventures (White) Limited, and thus will avoid expulsion:

Honestly, don’t even watch this video where I definitely won the Texas Exes Chili Cook-off in New York City using the Magary family chili recipe. If you do, you’ll just see that I had a super easy and not sad time gathering the votes it took to annihilate the competition and validate my hubris.Read more...

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

On Tuesday night, incoming Virginia Tech lineman Brock Hoffman announced that the NCAA had denied his final appeal for immediate eligibility, which meant Hoffman will be forced to sit out the upcoming season. Hoffman has been scuffling with the NCAA over the particulars of his transfer from Coastal Carolina to…Read more...

Empathy isn’t one of football’s commanding virtues. You don’t play because you care about the other guy’s pain. You play because you want to crush him. Same goes for watching—either you disconnect from the consequences, or you can’t really enjoy it.

TriggerPoint’s GRID foam rollers are the most popular on the market, and Amazon just discounted the 26" extra long model to $45, from the usual $60. Foam rollers use compression from your body weight to simulate a sports massage after you work out, and they hurt like hell, but they really work!

ESPN reported this morning that the wife, child, and mother-in-law of Blake Bivens, who pitches for the Tampa Bay Rays’ Double-A affiliate, were murdered in Keeling, Va. on Tuesday. An 18-year-old named Thomas Bernard, who is the brother of Bivens’s wife, was arrested and charged with the murders after leading police…Read more...

Funko Marvel 80th Anniversary Advent Calendar | $40 | AmazonRead more...

A game console coffee table book sale, Hulu subscription, Perry Ellis, and Borderlands 3 pre-order bonus lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Sometime in the middle of August, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen quietly launched a spicy chicken sandwich that gripped the nation. I first became aware of the sandwich thanks to Jezebel’s very own influencer, Clover Hope, who quietly shared with the group one day that she had tried a spicy chicken sandwich at Popeyes and…Read more...

ESPN’s Adam Schefter is a reporter who reports on the NFL. That implies certain things, or at least it used to, namely that a reporter should not have a personal financial stake in the NFL, a business they ostensibly cover objectively, making more money. This seems uncontroversial to me, and for decades upon decades…Read more...

The deadline came and went, and now one of England’s oldest soccer clubs has been kicked out of the English Football League. Bury had been on the ropes financially for the majority of this year, and with neither a sale nor a proof of financial stability coming through before Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline, the EFL has…Read more...

Yesterday, while attempting to beat her own land speed record, the 52,000 horsepower jet-powered car driven by racer, fabricator, and television personality Jessi Combs crashed in the Alvord Desert in Oregon, killing her, as local news reports. Combs was 39 years old and held the title of “fastest woman on four…Read more...

I regret to inform you that the Los Angeles Dodgers, a powerhouse that always seems to find new sources of talent whenever it needs, have a new shutdown reliever on their hands. He’s short, he’s Canadian, and he simply cannot be touched.

Labor Day Sale | Perry Ellis | Promo code AFFILIATE10Read more...

Baseball, for all its supposed problems, must still be a pretty good business to be in. Prior to the Marlins’ sale two years ago, an MLB franchise hadn’t gone on the market since 2012. But the Kansas City Royals are now on the block, with owner David Glass reportedly in advanced negotiations to sell the team for more…Read more...

The Los Angeles Sparks, to be sure, are no scrubs. They’re sitting near the top of the WNBA standings, with a future Hall of Famer in Candace Parker, All-Star forwards in the Ogwumike sisters, and one of the league’s greatest perimeter threats in Chelsea Gray. Alas, none of it was enough to prevent the 95–66…Read more...

Perfectly serviceable rotation guard and tough-luck injury casualty Jeremy Lin was deeply bummed to find this summer that NBA teams had for the most part lost interest in him as a free agent. Now, a month later, Lin has made the decision to move on from the NBA and continue his basketball career elsewhere.Read more...