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Eleven months after his prior title defense against Conor McGregor—and the post-match brawl that led to a lengthy suspension—Khabib Nurmagomedov reasserted himself as one of, if not the best fighter in the world. Against the interim UFC lightweight champ Dustin Poirier, Khabib dominated all 12 minutes of the fight,…Read more...

It almost seemed too obvious to be possible, but malcontent former Raiders wide receiver Antonio Brown is headed to the Patriots to become yet another in what feels like a whole roster’s worth of talented yet difficult players who have found a home with Bill Belichick through the years. The terms, on the surface, look…Read more...

There were certainly some jitters in the Michigan fanbase about facing a bizarre, tough-to-crack team like Army in Week 2, but only the most cynical of Wolverines could have predicted the struggle that unfolded on Saturday afternoon in The Big House. Plenty of Michigan mistakes and just straight-up poor offensive play…Read more...

Ross Bowers’s mother coached the women’s gymnastics team at the University of Washington for 10 years, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when her son, the starting quarterback at Northern Illinois, gets to the endzone, he takes the most acrobatic route possible.Read more...

In the second quarter of Cincinnati’s game against Ohio State, Bearcats safety Kyriq McDonald collapsed on the field and appeared to shake uncontrollably, forcing him to be carted off the field. McDonald was conscious and got up on his feet before exiting the game, but video of the play (which ABC did not show replays…Read more...

The problem with simply double-teaming Giannis Antetokounmpo or clogging the paint to thwart him is that when the ball is not in his superhuman hands, it’s usually in Khris Middleton’s very capable hands or Brook Lopez’s or Eric Bledsoe’s, or hell, Pat Connaughton’s.Read more...

It’s finally over. After a seemingly endless month of drama that included nightmare feet, a global search for an acceptable helmet, plenty of missed practices, a heated argument with his GM, a video that may have used an illegal recording of his coach, a hefty fine and loss of $30 million in guaranteed money, and…Read more...

The Mets have to play near-flawless baseball in the final month of the season if they’re going to sneak into that Wild Card game, and on Friday against the Phillies, even if the game threatened to go off the rails in the ninth inning, it all ended in tasty, shrimpy fashion. With the Wild Card-leading Cubs and…Read more...

It was always going to get even worse. While Jon Gruden helplessly did his best to write a happy ending to the saga with his clearly frustrated receiver Antonio Brown by laughing off a taped phone call released by Brown and saying yesterday that Brown will avoid a suspension for Crackergate, it was all for naught.…Read more...

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Antonio Brown’s had one of the most eventful weeks of an NFL offseason a superstar receiver has had in a long time, and the Raiders receiver has a desire to keep it going.

When news broke that the Kansas City Chiefs signed wide receiver Tyreek Hill to a contract extension earlier today, NFL reporters confirmed what everyone following the sport should have suspected for some time. The team did what professional sports teams do with such news, issuing a press release packed with stats…Read more...

Our old pal Alex Pareene has it right, of course: The New York Times, despite its pose as the one universal press outlet of humankind, ultimately is for a very narrowly defined class of East Coast rich people.

All Elite Wrestling’s All Out, the promotion’s fourth event and the last before their weekly TV show launches on TNT on October 2, ran on Saturday night in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates. One of the key storytelling aspects of the show was setting up the match to determine the first AEW Women’s Champion for…Read more...

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No high schools in America offer a girls tackle football team. If a girl wants to play football, she has to go out for the boys’ team. There’s no guarantee that she’ll make the team, but Title IX guarantees that every sport offered only to boys at the high school level has to allow girls a fair shot at tryouts.Read more...

Year after year, move after move, hire after hire, the Raiders outdo their own capacity for abject humiliation, and every time you think they’ve bottomed out, they bring in a new excavator. And now, with the start and also pending end of the Antonio Brown era, they can honestly say that the earth’s crust appears up to…Read more...

The Raiders are three days away from their first game of the season, and as is now tradition, they’re getting caught up in bullshit. The team has reportedly considered whether to suspend Antonio Brown for most of the week over a heated argument he had with GM Mike Mayock, sparked by the team’s decision to fine Brown…Read more...

For as long as there have been ticketed events, people have tried to inch their way to better seats, and the people tasked with maintaining order at these events have tried to stop them. It happens at every sporting event, all the time, and the scene usually plays out like this: Person sits down in an empty seat out…Read more...

“Football seems like the worst sport,” my friend Anna said to me as we shared drinks on a hot evening in August. “Yes! It is,” I responded. “And it is also the best sport.”

Despite losing a tight first set on a tiebreaker, Belinda Bencic was in complete control of her U.S. Open semifinal. The 22-year-old Swiss had bounced back against 19-year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu to take a controlling 5-2 lead in the second frame, highlighted by two early breaks. It sure looked like we were…Read more...

An Anker projector Gold Box, FURmintor grooming tools, 128GB microSD card, and an Express sale lead off Friday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

It was already well-known that Blue Jays rookie Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the complete package at the plate. After a slightly rough start to his career, Baby Vlad has been mashing the ball—since the All-Star Break, he’s hitting .319 and slugging .530. And in the first inning on Thursday against the Rays, after fellow…Read more...

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH — Laura Goetz is really good.Read more...

2019 is the final year of 40-man rosters in September. Beginning next year, teams will only be allowed to max out at 28 players. There is a lot we won’t miss about the bloated rosters, chief among them four-hour games extended by countless pitching changes made possible by a team carrying 600 relievers...

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Yes, it’s Week 1. Yes, the Packers defense is expected to be much improved this season, after general manager Brian Gutekunst dedicated big bucks during the offseason to improving the personnel. Still. Chicago’s offense Thursday night was totally punchless, even amateurish, outside of a few nifty plays by rookie David…Read more...

Thursday night’s regular-season opener between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears was a real dog. Fancy camera angles and old-timey costumes could not lift the sloppy, disjointed mess on the field. It would be generous to describe it as a defensive battle, but defense had little or nothing to do with poor,…Read more...

The NFL is back, and we already have our biggest storyline of the season: Who said “I never had my butt fingered” on the NBC broadcast of the season’s opening Packers-Bears game?

Early in the first quarter of Packers-Bears, Tony Corrente, the game’s referee, announced a defensive holding call against Green Bay. At the end of it, he paid tribute to late former NFL referee Red Cashion by doing his own version of the classic elongated “first dowwwwwwwn” call.

A sophomore at a high school in southwest Missouri died on Wednesday after he collapsed following an indoor football practice. In a statement made on Facebook, the Joplin School District described the incident in detail:

One of the first major moves that the NFL and Roc Nation’s “Inspire Change” program will make is donate $400,000 to two Chicago groups that position themselves as local service organizations aimed at helping keep children in low-income neighborhoods off the streets, according to TMZ. The recipients of this money will…Read more...

Last week, New Orleans Saints QB Drew Brees appeared in a brief video promoting “Bring Your Bible To School Day,” which, whatever. In itself, it’s probably a 3 on the scale of odd things an athlete can do with his free time. What’s actually frustrating—though frankly not too surprising—is Brees did the promo for Focus…Read more...

It can be difficult to remember given that he routinely appears on television with toilet paper on the soles of both his shoes and at least one of his hands stuck in a big jug of peanut butter, but Donald Trump’s opening position in all things is that he has never been wrong. He has been wronged, and is in fact…Read more...

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

Michigan State has agreed to pay a $4.5 million fine for its failure to protect students from Larry Nassar, a former school employee and former doctor to the USA Gymnastics national team, who is now serving more than 100 years in prison for sexually abusing young girls under the guise of medical treatment. The fine,…Read more...

Here’s Raiders GM Mike Mayock addressing the latest developments in the never-ending Antonio Brown opera buffa:Read more...

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

If you don’t like karaoke, you will soon. The next time you’re dragged to grown-up singalong, you can bring down the house with one trick: Sing the Weird Al version instead.

Tyler Williams was a guard on the D-II University of Arkansas-Fort Smith Lions men’s basketball team as recently as last month, and he was set to come back for his senior season as the program’s leading returning scorer until he was abruptly dismissed from the team by new head coach Jim Boone on August 16. Williams…Read more...

Let us start with a hearty LOL. The Oakland Raiders traded for downfield savant Antonio Brown during the offseason, handed him $30-plus million in guaranteed money, and now stand ready to piss that investment away in the quickest, most Raiders-like fashion possible. Adam Schefter is now reporting that after Brown …Read more...

Canadian 19-year-old Bianca Andreescu doesn’t walk around the court so much as she swaggers. She doesn’t just yell, “Come on!” and fist pump when she wins a big point; she’ll stare straight across the net at her opponent while she does it. She’ll toss her racket when she loses a point and impatiently smash the ball…Read more...

Leave it to Chris Jericho to make himself the biggest story in professional wrestling by virtue of partying too hard. The 48-year-old legend won the inaugural All Elite Wrestling world heavyweight championship at the company’s All Out pay-per-view on Saturday, defeating Hangman Adam Page in a solid-if-unspectacular…Read more...

We blog plenty of impressive sports catches around these parts—centerfielders robbing dingers, wide receivers reaching out for one-handed grabs, or dads snagging foul balls. But I’ll go as far to say that not a single one is as cool as the quick-thinking, high-speed catch made by New Zealand fistball player Samuel…Read more...

Like most Oilers—or “Earlers,” as they were known as their star galloped his way to Rookie of the Year and two MVP trophies his first couple of years in the league—Earl Campbell loved playing for the cowboy-hatted, easy-going Bum Phillips, who was always easy with a wisecrack. Bum once said of the team’s reliable…Read more...

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Lotta homers getting hit these days, right? Lotta homers. One guy who has been contributing his fair share of bombs to this record-setting era of dinger-mashing is Jorge Soler. You know, Jorge Soler! The six-year veteran who was a hot prospect with the Cubs for a bit, and then went to Kansas City after he washed out…Read more...

MLS has been in a season-long game of chicken with its own fans, and that feud has now entangled one of the more high-profile fanbases in the league. As first reported by ESPN and then confirmed by Portland Timbers supporters group Timbers Army, a “handful” of Portland fans have been banned for three games due to…Read more...

On a daily basis, professional athletes do things that normal people couldn’t dream of doing. But at least most of the time they seem kind of excited about their superhuman feats! Not Phillies outfielder Adam Haseley, though. In Wednesday night’s game against the Reds, with his team down a run in the eighth, Haseley…Read more...

You may not have heard about it because the National Football League has fought heroically to keep this information out of the public, but this season the NFL celebrates its 100th year of whatever it is that they do. Toward that end, commissioner and dictator-for-life Jerry Jones was invited to the New York Stock…Read more...