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Kentucky basketball fans have invaded Nashville in an attempt to overwhelm Vanderbilt fans ahead of today's matchup between the Wildcats and Commodores, one which ESPN chose as its College GameDay site of the week. (They're not-so-cleverly calling it "Occupy Memorial.") More »
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Every week, ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas releases the "Bilas Index," his ranking of the top 68 teams in college roundball. He provides a short blurb with each team to justify their place in the index, for example: More »
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We've been dipping into the Bill Simmons archive, a salvaged cache of the Sports Guy's old columns from AOL Digital Cities, none of which survives online. Today's jaunt down memory lane is a field trip Simmons took to Bristol in 1997, under the auspices of his friend Gus Ramsey, a SportsCenter producer. It was an uneventful August day, with one minor news story and few highlights, and it's a fascinating look at how SportsCenter is assembled when nothing really happened in the sports world. And, as with a goodly number of Simmons's AOL columns, it takes the form of a running diary. More »
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Once again, John Buccigross is in the middle of daytime SportsCenter antics, this time with Dwayne Johnson, who may or may not still be using "The Rock" professionally. Johnson was on ESPN to promote some lame-ass Jurassic Park ripoff titled Journey 2, which sounds more like the name of Steve Perry's backup band than a legitimate film, but whatever. [ESPN] More »
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Jezebel alerted us to this on Tuesday: ESPN's feedback page allows you to pick from a menu of presumably common complaints, sorted by sport. For both men's and women's college basketball, for instance, your choices include "Schedule," "Bands/Halftime Performance," "Technical - Audio/Video," and—until Wednesday—you could select the following: More »
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This is a regular feature breaking down, minute-by-minute, the content that appears on ESPN's 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter throughout the week. Graphic by Jim Cooke. More »
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(He's talking about his own acrimonious exit from ESPN.) [NBC] More »
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A longtime Boston media beef came to another head last night, one which has WEEI broadcasting personality John Dennis blasting ESPN's Scott Van Pelt Show co-host Ryen Russillo as an alcoholic and alleging Russillo was forcibly ejected from ESPN's own Super Bowl party. More »
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I hate those faux walls they put up behind basketball announcers during booth shots. You know what I'm talking about, those screens they erect to make it look like the broadcasters are in a studio while simultaneously blocking the view of people up front who are trying to watch Quick Change or Frisbee Dog or the Zooperstars or whatever else entertainment is happening on the court during the break. They're deceptive and silly and overall an annoyance. More »
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Here's a ridiculous segment by the usually-reliable Michael Smith on ESPN's Numbers Never Lie* in which he recites a series of absurd statistics about the Super Bowl (without citing where they got the information, of course). More »
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It's one thing to have no chance. Quite another to not even have the chance to show the world you have no chance. ESPN has since made a correction, but they probably had it right the first time. [HardballTalk] More »
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We're not sure exactly what this is, but a spectator outside the set of The Herd With Colin Cowherd was engaged in some bizarre activity with a foam finger earlier today during Cowherd's conversation with Matt Forte. Is he playing guitar? Pretending it's a shotgun and he's on a rampage? Something more prurient (perhaps a commentary on Cowherd/Forte)? The world may never know. [ESPNNEWS] More »
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While I'm hesitant to praise ESPN First Take blowhard Stephen A. Smith for anything, an exception can be made for moments of distinguished valor—or at least doing something every single one of us has wanted to do on multiple occasions, like flipping Skip Bayless the bird. Last week Terrell Suggs called Bayless a douchebag, which means we're on a bit of a roll here. Maybe next week will bring the words to Skip Bayless on which we've been waiting far too long: "You're fired." [ESPN2] More »
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Weird Al Yankovic claims no responsibility for influencing college basketball outcomes, but assures us if he had any part he'd attribute the artists whose work he parodied in the attempt. Otherwise, people might get upset. [ESPNU] More »
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Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com. More »
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ESPN's initial courtship of Bill Simmons has the air of an urban legend. Simmons wrote a column excoriating the bloated and self-congratulatory ESPY Awards, and that column was rapidly forwarded around Bristol, putting the Boston Sports Guy on ESPN's radar. Much like Aeschylus's lost plays, the ESPY diary was known only from a reference in another work. In one of his early Page 2 columns, Simmons wrote: More »
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So says ESPN's player page about the retired Steelers, Patriots, and Chiefs linebacker, who looks an awful lot like Browns wide receiver Jordan Norwood, who is black and Filipino-American. At least Vrabel's lost some weight. [ESPN Player Stats, h/t Emil and Aaron] More »
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This is a regular feature breaking down, minute-by-minute, the content that appears on ESPN's 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter throughout the week. Graphic by Jim Cooke. More »
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Langely McNeal is a US skier competing in this year's X-Games. Earlier today, she posted a status update on her facebook page indicating that she had been disqualified from the Women's Skier X final as a result of the French team protesting a Sarah Burke band around her thigh and a hair tie around her boot. More »
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As an Ohio alumnus, I'm overly sensitive to fans & the media confusing my alma mater with that school in Columbus—or certain coaches who refer to the Buckeyes as "Ohio." More »
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"He is by far one of the most hated men in West Texas." Now that's a catchy campaign slogan. [The Post Game] More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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It's the rare SportsNation poll with a nearly perfect geographical split, somewhere around the Central and Mountain time zones. A question we had never pondered before—Which day would you prefer to watch the Super Bowl?—tears a nation asunder. More »
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Hey, look! It's hockey on SportsCenter! More »
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This is a regular feature breaking down, minute-by-minute, the content that appears on ESPN's SportsCenter throughout the week. Graphic by Jim Cooke. More »
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In what might be the first honest and accurate analysis ever presented on ESPN First Take, Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs called out Skip Bayless this morning, telling him to "be an analyst, not a douchebag." Suggs plans to next order Bayless to squeeze blood from a rock. More »
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It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. After seeing last week's newly unearthed column from Simmons's AOL Digital City days, a reader sent along another Boston Sports Guy entry rescued from the dustbin of history. If you've got any old Simmons columns lying around, please send them to us. More »
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This is a screen grab from the ESPN front page taken earlier this morning. Go ahead and file it in the Really, Really Poor Timing folder. More »
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Maybe Digger Phelps spends the time before ESPN goes to air with its basketball version of College GameDay in quiet meditation. And maybe he uses an orange highlighter as his focus object, I don't know. But just as Notre Dame was polishing off an upset of undefeated and top-ranked Syracuse, the former Fighting Irish coach seemed awfully melancholy in the shadow of all the attention Rece Davis was getting. [ESPN] More »
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The Knicks and the Heat are not playing this weekend. They play next Friday—on ESPN. That did not stop Sportsnation from asking if it was the best non-NFL game. Nor did it stop the fine citizens of New York and Florida from responding that yes, of course, it is clearly the best game this weekend. Missouri-Baylor be damned. More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. The formative years of one of the country's most successful sports writers are lost forever, all because AOL Digital City preserved nothing. But even then the "Boston Sports Guy" had fans devoted enough to save some material for future generations. At SonsOfTheSportsGuy.com, a message board devoted to all things Simmons, one reader dug up an old 3.5" floppy disk with a column from September of 2000. He posted it, and we're reprinting it here. More »
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Cuba Gooding Jr. appeared on SportsCenter today to promote his new film Red Tails (which, as far as we can tell, is fully unrelated to sports) and performed some awkward impersonations, including one of Allen Iverson which ended in an aborted-too-late "rock out with your cock out!" We're pretty sure that's an impossibility for Linda Cohn, though only our former editor would know for sure. [ESPN] More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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ESPN's just one of the prominently featured supporters of SOPA, the law that has your favorite non-Deadspin sites going black today. More »
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The Houston Chronicle has the former ESPN analyst polling lower than Michele Bachmann in Iowa in his run for a Texas U.S. Senate seat. When James made his intention to run known last month, his "name recognition" figured to be among his assets. So how's that working out? More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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What is ESPN prattling on about right now? We condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence. More »
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ESPN basketball analyst Stephen Bardo tried to link the story of Missouri basketball star Kim English—who battled a speech impediment—to last year's Academy Award-winning film The King's Speech, but got a few details wrong. Like, for example, that a king was involved. More »
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