Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

What brought back Big Ten football from the brink? Was it pressure from state legislators? Democrats overplaying a hand? Money?Read more...

The Big Ten is back from the dead.

Well, the Big Ten finally cracked.Read more...

In five weeks, the most historic conference in college football history will return. The Big Ten is back.Read more...

Rob Manfred says this season’s expanded baseball playoffs are likely to remain in place for 2021 and beyond, and everybody hates it.Read more...

Maya Moore helped free an innocent man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 22 years – and got a husband in the process.Read more...

There will be no greater takedown of the Los Angeles Clippers, who blew a 3-1 series lead in which they held leads of 16 and 19 points in Games 5 and 6, than the one delivered by Magic Johnson, the only completely sincere and benign person on Twitter.Read more...

Mike Ditka did a phone interview with Newsmax, the halfway house for wayward Fox News personalities and dollar store version of Mike Gundy’s favorite ultra-Trumpy “news network” OAN, and told kneeling NFL players to “get the hell out” of America.Read more...

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education Labor & Pensions convened today for a hearing on college athlete compensation. Among the many babbling voices in the room, player advocacy was scarce.Read more...

The six-month mark came and went with hardly any notice, but it did come and go. It’s now been more than half a year since Rudy Gobert, days after jokingly touching all the microphones at a press conference, tested positive for COVID-19 and effectively shut down the sports world.

It’s Trash Talking Tuesday and today I’m trashing Bucs’ QB Tom Brady.Read more...

This isn’t a column about kneeling.

What happens when free tuition and free labor collide?Read more...

It seems wild that a department benefiting from nearly $3 billion in funding is asking civilians for financial help to do its job.Read more...

[Update: 2:22 pm ET] Dan McNeil has been fired from WSCR 670 The Score. The station sent the following statement to its employees this afternoon:Read more...

The Vegas Golden Knights were eliminated in overtime by the Dallas Stars on Monday night, 3-2, and an ugly racial incident on the ice appears to have gone mostly unnoticed and unreported.Read more...

Amid western wildfires and hazardous air quality, the MLB and NFL continue to play on. But for how long?

The 2020 U.S. Open will be played for the sixth time at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York this week. The tournament offers a different kind of New York Fall Classic, if you will, and one that everyone will be forced to watch from home, as spectators are still not allowed on site. I will not be playing in…Read more...

There are two games left in Week 1 of the NFL.

Let’s get a few things straight off the jump.Read more...

We need to talk about Conor McGregor.

Marlin Briscoe must have been beaming with pride.Read more...

The NFL season is here.Read more...

For as long as we can remember, sports fans have been on the wrong side of history.Read more...

Future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning will sponsor six endowment scholarships at historically Black colleges and universities in Louisiana and Tennessee through his charity foundation.

Yes, he is still around.Read more...

Ten Black quarterbacks will start on the opening weekend of the 2020 season, the most Black QBs to start in an opening week in NFL history.Read more...

Last Wednesday, the Oakland A’s played a night game hours after as the Bay Area turned into an orange hellscape. The stunning visuals, and the underlying poor air quality, made national headlines. Now, the air quality is even worse — and while it probably won’t stop the San Francisco 49ers from kicking off their…Read more...

What if I told you that we knew that this was going to be an unusual NBA season before a single game was played.Read more...

Today, every sports outlet will give you a deluge of betting guides, pick em’s, predictions and an obligatory ULTIMATE LOCK OF THE WEEK.Read more...

Over/Under: 41.5Read more...

This House no longer has a home in The Bubble.Read more...

Some folks come from the scum of the earth. They belong on the bottom of your shoe.

The NFL will never be the same.

While the NFL was once again showcasing the worst America has to offer, Serena Williams took the court to show the best it has to offer. It was her 11th straight U.S. Open semifinal, itself a ridiculous record that gets lost in Serena’s 23 Grand Slam titles.Read more...

Every metric-follower of any sport has an imaginary dragon lurking to torment, if not slay, their favorite player and/or team. In baseball it’s the BABIP Dragon, causing your pitcher to give up hits on soft contact simply because he hasn’t in a while. Or your favorite hitter to hit screamers right at the third-baseman…Read more...

I don’t know what we expected.

The thing is, I know I’m giving Skip Bayless exactly what he wants by writing this. By even considering writing it. Bayless doesn’t exist to be right or wrong. He’s just there to emit. He’s a smokestack. That’s all. Bayless has made his career by making everything an argument. It doesn’t matter if it defies all logic,…Read more...

Here comes the bullsh*t.

If you were to tell Renee Montgomery in January that this year she would start racial justice initiatives, join a voting rights group, co-host a TMZ show, appear in countless media outlets, all while not playing basketball, she would call you a “troll.” At least, that’s what she called me when I asked the question.

It’s Trash Talking Tuesday (The Thursday Edition).Read more...

The skies in northern California right now can best be described as burnt sienna, or something that you’d expect to find swirled in the whipped cream of your pumpkin spice latte.

The continuing case of South African runner Caster Semenya and her fight against the IAAF’s restrictions on her, and others’, bodies reached its likely conclusion Tuesday.Read more...

What’s next?

Jerry Jones is a fraud.

Outside of Tom Brady stunning the sports world by joining the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the NFC South will be a key watch for plenty of other reasons.Read more...

The AFC South likely will not be a division at the top of most people’s radars to start the year.

Without Giannis, the Milwaukee Bucks always faced a mountain to keep their series going against the Miami Heat last night. So it proved, as they simply ran out of gas, weapons, and ideas and exited stage left out of the bubble in five games. It’s the second year in a row having the league’s best record has gotten them…Read more...

If you took MLB’s heavy desire to contract minor league baseball by a fourth from last fall, and combine it with the pandemic that saw this minor league season never start, you probably figured that MiLB’s fight against contraction was utterly doomed. With the announcement today that Minor League Baseball president…Read more...

Legislators in battleground states are once again pushing for the Big Ten to resume college football this fall.