Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

For whatever reason, RJ Barrett’s an easy target.Read more...

This hasn’t been the best year for college basketball’s blue bloods. Kentucky had its first losing record since 1989. Duke is missing the NCAA field for the first time since 1995. North Carolina has been unranked all year, and the only reason Kansas has avoided a similar fate is how weak the Big 12 has been in general.Read more...

Remember that article I wrote yesterday about Jonnu Smith signing with the Patriots, and how Bill Belichick finally had an athletic tight end to build his offense around again? Well, good ol’ Bill woke up this morning and chose violence, asking himself, “What’s better than one tight end? Two tight ends.”Read more...

They say time heals all wounds but even after nine years, I know Duke and Missouri fans are still salty after becoming victims to some of the biggest upsets in tournament history on the same day.

It’s been over a month since Britt Reid, a former outside linebackers coach with the Kansas City Chiefs and son of head coach Andy Reid, pulled onto southbound I-435 from Stadium Drive, near Arrowhead Stadium. Ahead, two cars were pulled off to the side of the road, one having run out of gas, the other there to help.…Read more...

As the NCAA Tournament returns next week after missing a year due to COVID-19, one of the conversations that have been hovering over the sport is when will the NBA get rid of the “one-and-done” rule.Read more...

Grabbag style today, as not a whole lot going on last night.Read more...

Hours before the Women’s Basketball selection show, UConn announced that head coach Geno Auriemma tested positive for COVID-19. According to the school, the coach received a positive test result on Sunday. As far as we know, he did not come into contact with anyone since Friday, March 12. All Tier I personnel…Read more...

Jimmy Butler is putting the Miami Heat on his back once again.

If you’re at all serious about it, you’ve probably taken your first stab at filling out a bracket by now. If you were as serious ludicrous as I am about it, you’d have done it in real time as it was announced. I’d hear Greg Gumbel say, “Now ... the 15 seed in the West…” and immediately see an entire regional battle…Read more...

It’s March Madness for coaches, too.

Erik Karlsson has always generated an infuriating debate amongst hockey observers, where the “old school” — i.e. Molson-filled and incontinent old Canadians who somehow fell out of a duck blind and into a TV studio — could never reconcile Karlsson’s style of not eating pucks regularly and his desire to get into the…Read more...

The Patriots were lost in the dark in the first year of their post-Brady era. The Cam Newton experiment didn’t work, in part because of his battle with COVID, and the roster proved to have incredibly uninspiring weapons to work with. In atypical fashion, Bill Belichick has stormed into the free agency legal-tampering…Read more...

The Madness is finally back, and the matchups are finally set for what will be one of the strangest NCAA tournaments in recent history. Not only will COVID-19 likely have an impact on the games within the Indiana “bubble,” but this year we are missing some of the most storied programs in all of college basketball.…Read more...

Almost four years ago, the FBI dropped a bomb on college basketball. It turned out to be more like a janky firecracker.

The November friendlies against Wales and Panama could have been the biggest tease ever. They kind of felt like that at the time. It was the first time the US had called together only European-based players, which is what a lot of fans had been clamoring for. After all, who didn’t have fatigue of watching yet another…Read more...

If you lived through the ‘90s then you understand just how important and historic that decade was. And if you didn’t, someone who did has probably tried to explain it to you over, and over, and over again.Read more...

Tampa Bay announced Brees’s retirement before he ever did. While someone with the career of Brees wouldn’t want to go out on his back like he did in the Divisional Round this past January, it was clear that he was past it that afternoon. Brees hadn’t been particularly good, or up to his usual standards, all season and…Read more...

You know that saying about how you should never put all your eggs in one basket? Well, that’s the only way the NCAA knows how to operate..Read more...

Drew Brees has announced his retirement 15 years to the day that he joined the New Orleans Saints. Brees posted a video on his Instagram of his four kids breaking the news.Read more...

If you haven’t noticed, Ja Morant is really good at basketball.

If you’ve ever held a golf club (mini golf included) you know how frustrating the game can be. The pros usually make it look easy, but in the span of 10 minutes, we got to see a reflection of our hopeless selves on the screen.

One of the features of being a devoted supporter of a team is developing a love for a player that the outer world doesn’t really understand or appreciate. It’s something you can pick up only when you watch your team every game, to witness the nuances and habits of everyone that those who only drop in every so often…Read more...

Tom Garvey’s story, captured in his autobiography that has made the headlines in the past couple days, should make for some wild, inconceivable reading. Because no one much wanted to even attend games at Philadelphia’s Veteran’s Stadium, and that was only a stay of a matter of hours. An afternoon or evening in a cold…Read more...

Arguably the best HBCU track program of the past decade just made history again.

Bill Walton wants you to know he’s smoked weed before. It’s a shocking development, I know.

It’s been two years since we got to have an NCAA Tournament, and this one is going to be different, staged entirely in Indianapolis and entirely without Duke and Kentucky. Oh, and even though it’s in one city, that doesn’t mean a pandemic isn’t still happening, so who the hell knows what will happen with that?

Darren O’Day has been in the major leagues since 2008, he was an All-Star in 2015, and he’s been to the postseason with Texas, Baltimore, and Atlanta. The well-traveled and well-decorated righty reliever signed with the Yankees this offseason, and his role in the New York bullpen is clear.Read more...

Updated, March 13, 2021 at 8:40 p.m.: I need to get something stupid off my chest. It’s been bugging me for years. And the unlikely title won tonight by Coach Paaaaatrick Ewing and No. 8 seed Georgetown, repping the old school Big East, over the more new-school, reshuffled conference squad Creighton, seems the…Read more...

On the day that Tiger Woods crashed his car in Los Angeles, winding up with a rod in his leg and several broken bones, sheriff’s deputy Carlos Gonzalez told reporters at a news conference that he regularly writes tickets to drivers on that stretch of road for going 80 miles per hour when the speed limit is 45.Read more...

This season has been a great big ball of suck for the Buffalo Sabres. They’re stuck in the loaded East Division, have played 25 games, won an NHL-worst six, and they don’t exactly have a lot of hope for the future.Read more...

Sigh.Read more...

There’s a moment in 1986 Mets: A Year To Remember, the greatest sports year-in-review video ever made, when, as Ray Knight hits a walkoff homer to beat the Astros on July 3, Tim McCarver crows, “They’re spreading the news that they are right now the dominant team in this game — in either league!”Read more...

Joel Embiid needs an MRI on his hyperextended left knee when the 76ers get back home. This after he just got back from health-and-safety protocols and having to (getting to?) sit out of the All-Star Game.Read more...

I’ve never seen racism blamed on blood sugar, but here we are. During the NFHS Network stream of a game between Norman High and Midwest City that was covering the Class 6A girls state quarterfinals on Thursday night, a hot mic caught a commentator being a disgusting human being and launching into a racist rant during…Read more...

One of the most asked questions of the last few weeks have probably been: What the hell is an NBA Top Shot?Read more...

I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s day.

P.J. Tucker’s never been a basketball player you could define solely by numbers.Read more...

It’s one of the oldest clichés in sports: There’s no “I” in team.Read more...

Small sample sizes are perilous for any kind of analysis, but sometimes, it’s all you have to go on.Read more...

Major League Baseball’s takeover of the minor leagues has paved the way for the 2021 season to be one of experimentation on the farm, with different rules being tested at different levels in the developmental circuits.

In the same week that the NCAA disclosed that they don’t really have a plan if anything goes sideways at their Indiana NCAA Tournament, and Les Miles and Jeff Long showed what kind of people are really in charge, Michigan State may have taken the cake. That is, if the cake were sponsored by Betty Crocker.

Remember when you heard that young, healthy people would have an easy time with the coronavirus? Looking back, it’s as ridiculous as comparing COVID to the flu or saying the country would open by Easter. But that’s what some thought around this time last year.Read more...

We are in the throes of NFL speculation season. So much so that, as I’m writing, I feel as though it’s entirely possible I will have to scrap this entire article because Russell Wilson may have been traded to the Bears. Seriously – Chicago Bears Reddit is literally tracking a private jet flight from Seattle to Chicago…Read more...

The March shenanigans are already underway.

Remember when we all made fun of Lonzo Ball’s shot?

I know that right off the top, being a Bears fan means that A) I assume everything will go wrong no matter what happens, and B) I don’t have a true appreciation of what it means for an NFL team to have a top-tier quarterback. I’ve never seen one up close. I thought I did once, and it turned out all that guy was really…Read more...

Mississippi State ended Big Blue nation’s hope of a tourney run this season after Iverson Molinar hit two clutch free throws to give the Bulldogs the 74-73 win over Kentucky.

The NBA has decided that using an antisemitic slur is worth the same fine as violating COVID protocols or violating anti-tampering rules.Read more...

It’s been a year since NBA player Rudy Gobert smeared his hands on reporters’ microphones at a press conference and then tested positive for the coronavirus. A year of lockdowns and masking and handwashing and flouting mask-wearing protocols.