Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Liberty Flames head coach Hugh Freeze was so committed to attending the first game of his team’s season that despite recovering from a recent surgery, he was wheeled into a booth Saturday and did his job anyway. Liberty lost to Syracuse, 24-0.Read more...

The enthralling run of 15-year-old prodigy Coco Gauff had to come to an end eventually. She fell in straight sets, 6-3, 6-0, to No. 1 Naomi Osaka in the third round Saturday at the U.S. Open. Osaka did everything she could to make the disappointment hit Gauff as softly as possible.Read more...

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You’d be hard pressed to find a better distillation of the bone-deep dysfunction, ineptitude, and LOLJetsiness of the New York Jets than this: On Saturday, the team cut promising pass rusher Jachai Polite just four months after drafting him in the third round.Read more...

“The backlash would be amazing,” a source told the Miami Herald on Thursday regarding how the Dolphins locker room would react should rumors that the team might trade star left tackle Laremy Tunsil prove true. “Guys would legit revolt.” Well, Viva la revolución, because the Dolphins have reportedly agreed to trade…Read more...

This May, Jessica Andrade won herself the UFC strawweight championship with one of the most overwhelming displays of athleticism you’ll see all year when she picked up Rose Namajunas and slammed her on her head. Andrade lost the first round of that fight, yet once she picked up on Namajunas’s timing and movement, she…Read more...

Cristiano Ronaldo thought he’d scored his first goal of the new Serie A season last week, only for VAR to erase it due to one of those maddeningly marginal offside calls. In today’s match against Napoli, the Juventus forward once again found the back of the net, only this time the goal stood. In acknowledgement of the …Read more...

One of the more endearing qualities of LeBron James is his relentless pursuit of maximum corniness, especially when it’s around his family. This has been on display throughout the summer in the form of Instagram stories of his family celebrating Taco Tuesday—or, more accurately, TA-CO TUEEEEESDAYYY. For the…Read more...

ESPN’s College Gameday took a brief step away from pregame analysis of Nebraska-South Alabama to mention what’s been happening with Cornhuskers running back Maurice Washington. The sophomore is currently facing a felony child pornography charge for sending a video from 2016 of his then-15-year-old ex-girlfriend being…Read more...

Jadeveon Clowney’s time with the Houston Texans is coming to an end as the team has shipped off their underappreciated edge rusher to the Seattle Seahawks. Jay Glazer first reported the news that the two teams had “agreed to trade parameters,” while Aaron Wilson of the Houston Chronicle added some detail about the…Read more...

In the final match of the evening on Friday, Daniil Medvedev defeated Feliciano Lopez with a 7-6 (1), 4-6, 7-6 (7), 6-4 victory. His third-round win at the U.S. Open was rewarded with a shower of boos as the 23-year-old Russian approached center court for his post match interview. Like any good sports villain, he not…Read more...

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The Los Angeles Times is reporting that a toxicology report has revealed the cause of former Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs’s death. The report says that Skaggs, who was found dead in his hotel room on July 1, had fentanyl, oxycodone, and alcohol in his system, which caused him to choke on his own vomit.

Feeble elbow-skin sculpture Jerry Jones has ramped up his folksy PR campaign against holdout running back Ezekiel Elliott this week, as the regular season draws ever closer and Zeke’s attempt to negotiate a contract extension with ownership appears no closer to an agreement. Jones has already talked himself into hot…Read more...

It wasn’t even late on Thursday morning during Memorial Day weekend when things got weird. I was unable to sleep on my overnight flight from New York to Las Vegas, passed out for several hours of desperate sleep, then met England’s Maffew Gregg, the mastermind behind long-running online wrestling video series…Read more...

Tevin Biles-Thomas, the brother of three-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, was arrested yesterday and indicted on a variety of charges stemming from his alleged role in a New Year’s Eve shooting in Cleveland that left three men dead. According to local Cleveland outlet WKYC, two people showed up uninvited to a…Read more...

Good day, readers. It’s the Friday before Labor Day, and if you haven’t yet completely checked out from work for the long weekend, you have my permission to do so as soon as you finish reading this blog. I’ve already cleared it with your boss, so no worries. Also, this blog needs your help.Read more...

After a prodigious run at Wimbledon earlier this summer, 15-year-old American Coco Gauff earned a tough three-set win (6-2, 4-6, 6-4) over 26-year-old Timea Babos of Hungary on Thursday night, becoming the youngest player to reach the third round of the U.S. Open since Anna Kournikova in 1996 and making her the…Read more...

Inherent in the ridiculous human condition is the necessity that we continually relearn lessons of the past, the hard way. Such is the case today. Guess what happens when the government and power structure forsake labor peace? Labor war.Read more...

A Sunday Scaries sale, Laptop Gold Box, and Clear the Rack lead off Friday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

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...

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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.