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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...

It’s been more than two weeks since All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey requested a trade from the Jacksonville Jaguars, and even though he hasn’t been playing much football in the meantime, he seems to be getting further and further away from his goal.

Dozens of staffers at Sports Illustrated are expected to be laid off as early as Thursday, according to sources and published reports, and the cuts could be as deep as 50 percent of staff.

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I suppose this is one of those good problems, but it’s still a problem! Fox Sports Florida sideline reporter Tricia Whitaker keeps getting mercilessly drenched by celebrating Rays players, who seem to view live postgame interviews as opportunities to dump truly gargantuan quantities of beer and champagne over her head.Read more...

Liberty University, a regular clearinghouse for disgraced idiots, has once again reached into the scrap heap to create a job opportunity for someone who was rightfully booted out of their chosen profession due to a spectacular professional failure. This time it’s via their media apparatus, and the person being hauled…Read more...

Lots of things have not gone well at the IAAF’s World Athletics Championships in Doha. Everyone competing is either spooked by the ghostly silence of almost no spectators in attendance or half-dead of heat exhaustion. Here is one more thing not going well: a bunch of athletes have been criticizing the IAAF for its…Read more...

Aurora, the regal old gyrfalcon who’d served as the Air Force Academy’s official mascot for 23 long years, died Wednesday, according to a statement from the university. Aurora had already been serving for four years when that photo up there was taken, in September 2000. This was a good old bird.

Elena Delle Donne left Game 2 of the WNBA Finals with back spasms after just three minutes in the first quarter Tuesday night, not 24 hours after I (a blithering, cheeky idiot!) proclaimed the Washington Mystics more or less invincible. The Connecticut Sun managed to steal the game on Washington turf, 99-87 to even…Read more...

A shitty thing about baseball, stretching back to Bob Costas’s largely wrong-headed conditional invocation of socialism and beyond, way back into the sport’s dusty past, is it has a way of making the teams that pay their players lots of money out to be the bad guys. For one thing, those teams appear to be plundering…Read more...

Recent USMNT debutante Sergiño Dest played all 90 minutes of Ajax’s 3–0 romp over Valencia in the Champions League today. Under normal circumstances, that would be cause for unbridled celebration, since Dest is just 18 years old and has already risen through the ranks of one of Europe’s best academies to assume an…Read more...

Andy Murray has been to hell and back this year. At the Australian Open, the Scot tearfully announced his retirement at age 31, due to hip pain so severe it interfered with his daily life. A rare hip resurfacing surgery left the rest of his career in question. At the time of that announcement, Murray’s modest target…Read more...

There are currently two cable news networks devoted to celebrating and defending Donald Trump. Both are widely watched by the most distraught elderly people in the United States, including the president himself, and Trump has made a point of involving various personalities from that network—haunted candy apple Lou…Read more...

Okay, so I can’t show you what it would look like if the Miami Dolphins played a college football team. But I can show you what it would look like if the Miami Dolphins played in a college football game, and were the college team.

Linebacker Roquan Smith, who didn’t have an injury designation, was a last-minute scratch this past Sunday before the Bears played the Vikings. As mysterious as his absence was, it seems that it’ll only be a one-week blip.Read more...

One of Chicagoland’s great murder mysteries, the one surrounding the 2007 killing of Rhoni Reuter, the pregnant girlfriend of ex–Chicago Bear Shaun Gayle, may have new life. Marni Yang, another girlfriend of Gayle’s who is now in prison for killing Reuter and her unborn child, has filed a petition seeking to have her…Read more...

Bill Belichick: masterful strategist, Patriots legend, nude hot tubber. That last image is now unfortunately stuck in your brain, never to get out, because of Pats wide receiver Julian Edelman.Read more...

Who the hell knows with the Skins. At the organizational level, they’ve spent the past 20 years blasting away at their own dicks with shotguns, and there is no reason to expect they’ll abandon the effort anytime between now and when the seas rise to reclaim Landover. Maybe they will name poor, hapless Jay Gruden head…Read more...

The Wall Street Journal reported today that several federal government agencies are in the process of investigating USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, over a variety of alleged misdeeds, following a report last month that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating several U.S. Olympic…Read more...

It took zero days of Miami Heat training camp for cheese to continue cascading out of Jimmy Butler’s pores. In truth, the cheese began to flow T-minus 6.5 hours before camp even started: Butler got up at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday to squeeze in a morning workout, per the Miami Herald, and he made sure everyone knew how…Read more...

Major League Baseball saw attendance decline for the fifth straight year, falling to a mere 28,198 fans per game, the lowest mark since 2003. It’s a trend that has already prompted much public hand-wringing from baseball barons and the sportswriters who care about them: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said the sport…Read more...

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An Acer Gold Box, our reader-favorite Repel Windproof Travel Umbrella, and a final chance to get a 1-Year Costco Gold Star Membership from Groupon lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

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Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins was very bad last Sunday, and wide receiver Adam Thielen, who finished the game with two receptions for six yards, saw his production suffer greatly for that badness. Thielen tried very hard to not say anything directly mean about Cousins after the game, but was incapable of fully…Read more...

It’s here! The hockey is finally here! Tonight, on this most special of nights, we’ll see meaningful puck drops across North America for the first time since June, and I could not be happier. Thank you for clicking on this preview, and in doing so choosing to enjoy or learn about the best game you can name.

Trent Grisham, welcome to October. The 22-year-old midseason call-up, who was such a big part of the Brewers’ postseason push, especially after Christian Yelich went down, learned quickly and the hard way that the reason the crowds are bigger and louder is that every play’s import is magnified, and that if you make a…Read more...

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Foam-brained brand remora Darren Rovell spent the first half of his day blowing a disturbing but unsurprising amount of hot air about California’s SB 206, fretting stupidly over billboard valuations and the dangers of “sham endorsements.” Having worked up a mighty appetite, Rovell then treated himself to $84 worth of…Read more...

The Milwaukee Brewers had it. They had it! For seven-plus innings, their pitchers successfully shut the Nationals down with a steady diet of high heat, and preserved a two-run lead that started to feel like 50 or 100 runs as the game progressed. The Brewers got to Josh Hader in the bottom of the eighth inning still…Read more...

The Washington Mystics were likely feeling confident heading into Tuesday’s WNBA Finals Game 2, as they looked all-around fantastic in their Game 1 win against the Connecticut Sun. But just a few minutes into tonight’s match-up, the Mystics would experience a disturbing flashback to last year’s Finals, when they got…Read more...

Sports Illustrated is currently transitioning ownership and corporate leadership, from Meredith Corp. to Authentic Brands Group, where it will be operated by ad platform and digital media company TheMaven. That transition logged its first major editorial upheaval Tuesday, when it was announced that Editor-in-Chief…Read more...