Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Former Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin will not face any jail time for the charges brought against him for threats he made on an Instagram post in February 2018. According to a report from Nancy Dillon of the New York Daily News, Martin was instead granted a mental health diversion program where he’ll be…Read more...

For a Power 5 team in a rut, playing Rutgers can have the equivalent effect of a hangover cure or some kind of miracle exfoliant. Michigan, following a wounding loss to Wisconsin, dismantled the Scarlet Knights so unsparingly last week that Rutgers fired their head coach and replaced him with, I think, the CEO of…Read more...

In the dying embers of the first quarter of Auburn-Florida, Gators quarterback Kyle Trask lost the football and it landed straight into the arms of 6-foot-5, 315 lb. defensive tackle Derrick Brown. It didn’t matter that he’s not the type of player whose body type screams “speedster.” Thanks to some helpful blocking…Read more...

Kent State’s Office of Compliance, Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action announced on Friday that it found no violation of Title IX, or evidence of any sort of gender bias, from the school when officials shut down a game of field hockey the school was hosting for the football team’s pregame fireworks, according to…Read more...

*Record scratch* *Freeze frame* Yup, that’s Oklahoma. So, you’re probably wondering how they ended up punting from fourth-and-goal at Kansas’s 44-yard line late in the second quarter of Saturday’s game. After a shaky first quarter, Jalen Hurts and the Sooners were working their way downfield, and lined up for…Read more...

Saturday’s junior middleweight title fight between two-time Olympic champion Claressa Shields and Ivana Habazin was cancelled after James Ali Bashir, Habazin’s veteran trainer, got sucker punched in the back of the head at the weigh-in. Bashir was knocked unconscious for about 20 minutes, according to ESPN, before he…Read more...

When the Kansas athletic department hired Snoop Dogg to perform at its annual “Late Night in the Phog” kickoff event for the school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, they expected, as anyone does when hiring the artist behind “Gin and Juice,” some good, clean fun for the whole family. Imagine their shock, then,…Read more...

It would be nice, albeit utterly ridiculous, if the Washington Nationals decided to have Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer pitch every inning in the team’s series against the Dodgers, but considering how the two performed in Game 2 of the NLDS, fans would be forgiving for wanting something akin to that game plan…Read more...

Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted an image that read “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” on Friday night, but deleted it after the team’s owner, billionaire Tilman Fertitta, publicly clarified that Morey was “NOT” speaking for the Rockets and that the organization was “NOT” political.Read more...

Videos featuring Washington football coach Jay Gruden out on the town smoking a cigarette of some kind, as well as spitting game at what appears to be a much younger woman, have been making the rounds online over the past day or so.

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The Trump administration has run roughshod over environmental laws in a rush to build an unnecessary border wall. And in footage that emerged on Friday, construction efforts are just running roughshod over the environment, period.

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

Bianca Andreescu, a 19-year-old apparently blessed with every tennis gift besides consistent health, has enjoyed one of the most surreal debuts in tennis history. Her season’s been so good that she can toss off a quote like “I kind of forgot how to lose” and no fair observer bats an eye. Consider a few gaudy measures…Read more...

Just about every time the Washington football team parts ways with an employee, the move occurs after a pattern of smears or innuendo that seems designed to tip everyone off that it’s coming. So it is now with head coach Jay Gruden. The Skins are going to shove Gruden into a volcano; at this point, it’s less a matter…Read more...

Now that Sports Illustrated’s three owners, Meredith Corp., Authentic Brands Group, and TheMaven, have completed the callous layoff of half of Sports Illustrated’s newsroom and finalized a deal that gives control of the publication to TheMaven, a wannabe tech company helmed by notorious scumbags Ross Levinsohn and…Read more...

Barring a disaster next week and beyond, everything in pro wrestling has changed. All Elite Wrestling, the biggest competitor to World Wrestling Entertainment’s stranglehold on the American and broader international pro wrestling scenes, made its television debut on Wednesday night, directly opposite WWE’s NXT. While…Read more...

The Gilroy (Calif.) High School Mustangs have canceled the rest of the varsity football season in the wake of an accusation of locker room sexual assault. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Gilroy Police opened an investigation last week after a varsity player complained to administrators that he had been…Read more...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — All Elite Wrestling, WWE’s stiffest challenge since the Monday Night War years around the turn of the millennium, made its cable television debut on Wednesday night, kicking off a new era in professional wrestling that has already been dubbed the Wednesday Night War. The head-to-head competition…Read more...

We all miss one or two life lessons. Lifehacker reader lllcoco never learned to shave with a manual razor. So we’ve made a step-by-step video guide, for lllcoco and for everyone else who’s been relying on electric shavers only.Read more...

Not all NFL holdouts are created equal. This is especially true for running backs, who have seen their value decline in recent years, even as the salary cap has jumped prodigiously. This summer, a pair of backs began training camp by withholding their labor in attempt to leverage a strong second contract. One, Ezekiel…Read more...

The road cycling season is basically done and dusted, with the world championships wrapped up and the cyclocross world cup kicking off. There are still a few races going on, however, which brings us to the Sparkassen Münsterland Giro. It’s a race in Germany that I was not aware of until this week, and I only became…Read more...

NBC’s Sunday Night Football uses a standard set of visual effects to spotlight key players in that evening’s matchup. Take the clip above, which briefly profiles Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp.Read more...

Fans who showed up to Thailand’s pleasantly named 80th Birthday Stadium for Wednesday’s match between Nakhon Ratchasima and Buriram United were in for a treat when two Nakhon players executed a move no one watching had likely ever seen before: the tandem bicycle-kick goal.Read more...

Bad news, Jets fans: Sam Darnold is officially out for Sunday’s game against the Eagles. The team gave Darnold reps in practice this week, but in the end that pesky, mononucleosis-bloated spleen of his just would not cooperate. The initial prognosis warned it might be as long as six weeks before Darnold could handle…Read more...

How long do you think it will take the national debasement of the Trump era to play out to its gruesome conclusion? It won’t be too long now. You can feel it. The weight of inevitability.Read more...

When I was a kid, anything glossy and gold meant fancy. It meant expensive. The first premium baseball card set was 1989’s glossy Upper Deck set, which was the one with the Griffey rookie card. Pretty soon everyone got in on it. Fleer and Topps soon released glossy sets. A sort of arms race ensued in which card…Read more...

The gutting of Sports Illustrated was pointless, needlessly cruel, stupid and thoroughly corporate. It is what we do now—from an agrarian society to an industrial one to an informational one and now to the strip-it-down-resealable-parts one. Hurray for progress! See you in hell!

“The feeling that the future does not exist, that it is only more of the same, means all utopias are meaningless. Literature has always been relegated to utopia, so when utopia loses meaning, so does literature.”

It is not too early, nor too late to get on the Hurricanes bandwagon. Carolina, a motley crew without a true star that shocked the world with a 99-point season (and underlying numbers that said they should been significantly better than even that) and a trip to the conference final, are back with more seasoning,…Read more...

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Seahawks safety Tedric Thompson ended a late Rams drive in Thursday night’s 30–29 Seattle win with a truly bonkers defensive highlight. Rams quarterback Jared Goff rifled a ball to receiver Gerald Everett late in the fourth quarter; Everett mishandled Goff’s excellent throw, and the ball deflected away and fell…Read more...

The Cardinals are mad at Braves superstar Ronald Acuña Jr. for how he ran the bases in Game 1 Thursday night. You can probably guess, that’s some musty “play the right way” bullcrap. But it turns out Acuña’s own teammates are mad at him over a completely different baserunning issue, and when your teammates are angry…Read more...

Game 1 of the NLDS between the Braves and the vile Cardinals did not represent the best that either team had to offer. There were slick plays and dingers, and there was some gutsy pitching, but there was also some sloppy defense, lots of glaringly bad luck, and some spectacularly crappy late-innings pitching. The…Read more...

One of two things happened on this incredible play from the Seahawks. Either Russell Wilson completed one of the most amazing throws of the early season to a teammate with the kind of pinpoint accuracy that even computers would struggle to comprehend, or Wilson, with his view of Lockett in the back of the end zone…Read more...

Fresh-faced Rangers forward and silver medal hater Lias Andersson made the team’s opening night roster for this season, which is neat for him. This earned Andersson an appearance during Thursday night’s big pregame player introduction ceremony, which was probably also pretty neat for him, right up until some clown…Read more...

Before he got a chance to throw his first pitch of the postseason, Chris Martin of the Atlanta Braves was taken off the mound with an athletic trainer by his side just as the top of the eighth inning was officially about to begin. Martin appeared to injure himself during his initial warmup pitches, which is the type…Read more...

After setting then canceling “transition meetings” today amid reports of substantial layoffs, Sports Illustrated management rescheduled the two meetings and finally went through with them just before the end of the day. This was despite a last-minute public plea from employees to nix a deal with TheMaven, a seedy…Read more...

The Los Angeles Sparks’ 2019 season ended in ignominious fashion, as they were swept by the Connecticut Sun while their best player, Candace Parker, inexplicably sat on the bench for almost an entire half of a closeout game. After the loss, Parker raised an eyebrow toward her head coach Derek Fisher for his strange…Read more...

A group of Sports Illustrated employees, still uncertain what their fates will ultimately be given the sudden scheduling and then cancellation of today’s “transition meetings,” have released a statement calling on their owners to “save Sports Illustrated” by canceling their licensing deal with TheMaven, a gross…Read more...

While Vikings QB Kirk Cousins somewhat patched things up with his WR Adam Thielen on a podcast this week, the other prominent guy who catches his passes is in a different mood. Stefon Diggs, who was also frustrated about the offensive strategy during Sunday’s loss to the Bears, was absent from Wednesday’s practice for…Read more...

Importing a car into the U.S. is hard enough. You have to worry about getting it here, getting it past U.S. safety and emissions regulations, and then you still have to worry about getting parts for something that maybe wasn’t ever sold here. But it’s entirely different—and in some ways surprisingly easier—to import a…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.

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...