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

So, yes. The Oakland Athletics are dead again. The A’s finally got to host a winner-take-all playoff game after losing last year’s Wild Card Game in New York but, for the ninth time in as many tries, they biffed it, losing 5-1.Read more...

Baseball is good when it’s good, and sometimes even more powerful when it’s bad, and maybe especially when it doesn’t matter, which makes it more concerning that we are running out of it at an alarming rate. This is normal seasonal stuff, but it’s upsetting nonetheless. Teams’ seasons are dying out an alarming rate,…Read more...

It’s been so bad for so long that it’s time to stop worrying about when or whether it would happen and just admit that it already has: Manchester United have Liverpool’d themselves.Read more...

Staffers at Sports Illustrated lived out an employee’s worst nightmare last night, when they received an email from management instructing them to report to one of two meetings at 12 p.m. today. It was clear that the employees at one of those meetings, perhaps as much as 50 percent of the staff, were going to be laid…Read more...

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On a recent Thursday evening in August, a 40-year-old MMA gym owner in Beijing named Xu Xiaodong activated his VPN, hopped over the Chinese government’s internet firewall, and began his first-ever live YouTube broadcast. He wanted to talk about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, in which hundreds of thousands of…Read more...

This is what I’ve been waiting six months for. Though there were some questions about the health of his knee, which he injured in Edmonton’s season finale back in April, Connor McDavid returned to the ice in style on Wednesday night, scoring the game-winner on the first night of the season as the Oilers beat the…Read more...

It’s been more than two weeks since All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey requested a trade from the Jacksonville Jaguars, and even though he hasn’t been playing much football in the meantime, he seems to be getting further and further away from his goal.

Dozens of staffers at Sports Illustrated are expected to be laid off as early as Thursday, according to sources and published reports, and the cuts could be as deep as 50 percent of staff.

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I suppose this is one of those good problems, but it’s still a problem! Fox Sports Florida sideline reporter Tricia Whitaker keeps getting mercilessly drenched by celebrating Rays players, who seem to view live postgame interviews as opportunities to dump truly gargantuan quantities of beer and champagne over her head.Read more...

Liberty University, a regular clearinghouse for disgraced idiots, has once again reached into the scrap heap to create a job opportunity for someone who was rightfully booted out of their chosen profession due to a spectacular professional failure. This time it’s via their media apparatus, and the person being hauled…Read more...

Lots of things have not gone well at the IAAF’s World Athletics Championships in Doha. Everyone competing is either spooked by the ghostly silence of almost no spectators in attendance or half-dead of heat exhaustion. Here is one more thing not going well: a bunch of athletes have been criticizing the IAAF for its…Read more...

Aurora, the regal old gyrfalcon who’d served as the Air Force Academy’s official mascot for 23 long years, died Wednesday, according to a statement from the university. Aurora had already been serving for four years when that photo up there was taken, in September 2000. This was a good old bird.

Elena Delle Donne left Game 2 of the WNBA Finals with back spasms after just three minutes in the first quarter Tuesday night, not 24 hours after I (a blithering, cheeky idiot!) proclaimed the Washington Mystics more or less invincible. The Connecticut Sun managed to steal the game on Washington turf, 99-87 to even…Read more...

A shitty thing about baseball, stretching back to Bob Costas’s largely wrong-headed conditional invocation of socialism and beyond, way back into the sport’s dusty past, is it has a way of making the teams that pay their players lots of money out to be the bad guys. For one thing, those teams appear to be plundering…Read more...

Recent USMNT debutante Sergiño Dest played all 90 minutes of Ajax’s 3–0 romp over Valencia in the Champions League today. Under normal circumstances, that would be cause for unbridled celebration, since Dest is just 18 years old and has already risen through the ranks of one of Europe’s best academies to assume an…Read more...

Andy Murray has been to hell and back this year. At the Australian Open, the Scot tearfully announced his retirement at age 31, due to hip pain so severe it interfered with his daily life. A rare hip resurfacing surgery left the rest of his career in question. At the time of that announcement, Murray’s modest target…Read more...

There are currently two cable news networks devoted to celebrating and defending Donald Trump. Both are widely watched by the most distraught elderly people in the United States, including the president himself, and Trump has made a point of involving various personalities from that network—haunted candy apple Lou…Read more...

Okay, so I can’t show you what it would look like if the Miami Dolphins played a college football team. But I can show you what it would look like if the Miami Dolphins played in a college football game, and were the college team.

Linebacker Roquan Smith, who didn’t have an injury designation, was a last-minute scratch this past Sunday before the Bears played the Vikings. As mysterious as his absence was, it seems that it’ll only be a one-week blip.Read more...

One of Chicagoland’s great murder mysteries, the one surrounding the 2007 killing of Rhoni Reuter, the pregnant girlfriend of ex–Chicago Bear Shaun Gayle, may have new life. Marni Yang, another girlfriend of Gayle’s who is now in prison for killing Reuter and her unborn child, has filed a petition seeking to have her…Read more...

Bill Belichick: masterful strategist, Patriots legend, nude hot tubber. That last image is now unfortunately stuck in your brain, never to get out, because of Pats wide receiver Julian Edelman.Read more...

Who the hell knows with the Skins. At the organizational level, they’ve spent the past 20 years blasting away at their own dicks with shotguns, and there is no reason to expect they’ll abandon the effort anytime between now and when the seas rise to reclaim Landover. Maybe they will name poor, hapless Jay Gruden head…Read more...

The Wall Street Journal reported today that several federal government agencies are in the process of investigating USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, over a variety of alleged misdeeds, following a report last month that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating several U.S. Olympic…Read more...

It took zero days of Miami Heat training camp for cheese to continue cascading out of Jimmy Butler’s pores. In truth, the cheese began to flow T-minus 6.5 hours before camp even started: Butler got up at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday to squeeze in a morning workout, per the Miami Herald, and he made sure everyone knew how…Read more...

Major League Baseball saw attendance decline for the fifth straight year, falling to a mere 28,198 fans per game, the lowest mark since 2003. It’s a trend that has already prompted much public hand-wringing from baseball barons and the sportswriters who care about them: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said the sport…Read more...

Please look at Nikola Jokic.Read more...

An Acer Gold Box, our reader-favorite Repel Windproof Travel Umbrella, and a final chance to get a 1-Year Costco Gold Star Membership from Groupon lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

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Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins was very bad last Sunday, and wide receiver Adam Thielen, who finished the game with two receptions for six yards, saw his production suffer greatly for that badness. Thielen tried very hard to not say anything directly mean about Cousins after the game, but was incapable of fully…Read more...

It’s here! The hockey is finally here! Tonight, on this most special of nights, we’ll see meaningful puck drops across North America for the first time since June, and I could not be happier. Thank you for clicking on this preview, and in doing so choosing to enjoy or learn about the best game you can name.

Trent Grisham, welcome to October. The 22-year-old midseason call-up, who was such a big part of the Brewers’ postseason push, especially after Christian Yelich went down, learned quickly and the hard way that the reason the crowds are bigger and louder is that every play’s import is magnified, and that if you make a…Read more...

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Foam-brained brand remora Darren Rovell spent the first half of his day blowing a disturbing but unsurprising amount of hot air about California’s SB 206, fretting stupidly over billboard valuations and the dangers of “sham endorsements.” Having worked up a mighty appetite, Rovell then treated himself to $84 worth of…Read more...

The Milwaukee Brewers had it. They had it! For seven-plus innings, their pitchers successfully shut the Nationals down with a steady diet of high heat, and preserved a two-run lead that started to feel like 50 or 100 runs as the game progressed. The Brewers got to Josh Hader in the bottom of the eighth inning still…Read more...

The Washington Mystics were likely feeling confident heading into Tuesday’s WNBA Finals Game 2, as they looked all-around fantastic in their Game 1 win against the Connecticut Sun. But just a few minutes into tonight’s match-up, the Mystics would experience a disturbing flashback to last year’s Finals, when they got…Read more...

Sports Illustrated is currently transitioning ownership and corporate leadership, from Meredith Corp. to Authentic Brands Group, where it will be operated by ad platform and digital media company TheMaven. That transition logged its first major editorial upheaval Tuesday, when it was announced that Editor-in-Chief…Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.Read more...

Hot girl summer is all but over, but fat bear fall has arrived.

When it gets late enough in any long baseball game and every long baseball season, it is natural to start looking for omens. The baseball stuff is usually failing pretty badly by that point, or at least dramatically eroded by all the innings and incidents that have washed over it in the preceding months. It’s natural…Read more...

Even though Real Madrid have been ass all year, no one would’ve expected anything other than a comfortable win when the Blancos hosted Club Brugge in the Champions League today. And yet the Belgian team spent the vast majority of the match in winning position, thanks to two goals from Emmanuel Dennis, who somehow…Read more...

The NBA will start its season soon, and its behemoths are running rampant across the nation. Boban Marjanovic is busy flipping-a-chick at the State Fair of Texas, and Joel Embiid is back on the public playgrounds of Philadelphia.

Ravens cornerback Marlon Humphrey and Browns receiver Odell Beckham Jr. were getting chippy all game Sunday during Cleveland’s 40-25 victory. There were no ejections, only offsetting penalties, when the two locked up, Beckham took a swing, then Humphrey threw him to the ground. Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens …Read more...

Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar had been suspected of plying his runners with shady and illegal performance enhancing substances for years before he was finally hit with a four-year ban by USADA for “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct.” The agency’s report has also revealed a shocking…Read more...

So California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, a bill permitting athletes at the state’s colleges and universities to seek endorsement deals and make money off the use of their names and likenesses without losing their eligibility or scholarships, became law yesterday. People have concerns!Read more...

Very tall man Boban Marjanovic, who signed with the Dallas Mavericks, is back in Texas. He wore an extra cool cowboy outfit to his team’s media day earlier this week, and he attended the State Fair of Texas this past weekend. A tipster sent along photos of Marjanovic playing a carnival game. He’s both tall as hell and…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about un-Googleable band names, your groin, mustard-drenched testicles, and more.

Ligue 1 side OGC Nice released Lamine Diaby-Fadiga on Tuesday, after the 18-year-old admitted to stealing teammate Kasper Dolberg’s €70,000 watch last month. In a statement released on their website, Nice announced that they were severing their contract with the youngster over the theft: