eifling Page 12 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

This Heartwarming Story About A Small-Town High School Basketball Game Will Warm Your Heart
The Oregonian just published a story (with video!) that the reporter realized wouldn't jilt the planet off its axis. The lead, after all, reads: "In a small gym in the middle of nowhere, two boys locked eyes last fall in the final seconds of a meaningless, one-sided high school basketball game." Su...

Retired NFL Players Are Depressed And Don't Even Know It: Study
The most striking aspects of the new head-trauma study of former NFL players published in JAMA Neurology are not the formal findings per se. In many ways, those merely quantify and validate suspicions that even casual fans likely hold. The rub is that 40 percent of the retired players that researche...

This Flaccid <i>Times-Picayune</i> Write-Up Of The Playboy Super Bowl Party Confirms The Death Of The Printed Word
While the most odious piece of Super Bowl journalism was achieved, flagrantly, when Rick Reilly decided it was his place to tell Colin Kaepernick how to run his complicated family life, the silver-medal podium had remained fallow until today. We can all thank the scorched shell of the Times-Picayune...

Pro Football Hall Of Fame Calls Up Sapp, Parcells, Ogden, Allen and Carter
The NFL's next Hall of Fame class, just announced, has a few dudes the TV made famous. There's Bill Parcells, who made a coaching career of winning two Super Bowls with the Giants and then convincing other teams believe he might ever do it again; Cris* Carter, who just proved that even Jerry Rice Li...

If Your Super Bowl Party Doesn't Have A Grid Pool, You're Just Getting Fatter And Watching Commercials
The first time I heard a grid pool described, my father was coming home with a pocketful of bills he'd just won down at his favorite watering hole. Essentially you make a 10-by-10 grid, strip numbers vertically and horizontally, buy a square, and if the last digit of the score matches your square, y...

<i>Forbes</i>'s "Best Sports Blogs" Of 2003 Are A Portal To A Time You're Glad You Forgot
The shortest increments of time known to humanity are the following, beginning with the most brief:...

Bob Costas's Eulogy For Stan Musial Was Midwestern Sports Reverence At Its Finest
The gee whiz school of sports coverage has lost ground for years to the aw nuts crowd, largely because fans and media alike don't like playing the patsy to athletes' bogus lore. Lance was doping. Bobby Thomson stole signs. Manti was mourning a photograph with a nice voice. What's the world coming to...

Expensive Cable Sports Are Always Expensiver Than Ever
Today the New York Times's Brian Stelter crunches the (preposterous) numbers and finds runaway sports-programming costs weighing down the cable bill of everyone in America, whether or not they give Shit One about sports. The phrase "impending $7 billion deal with the Dodgers" should give you an idea...

H, Y, and Z Are Your Money Letters: How To Beat Scrabble's Flawed Points System, Using Google-Powered Math
This week the director of research at Google, a fellow named Peter Norvig, published on his blog the results of a fascinating deep-dive into the English language. If you're at all interested in letter frequency or word frequency, you owe it to yourself to at least skim Norvig's post. Essentially the...

No. 1 Duke Suffers First Loss To Some Team Or Other As Nation Revels In Annual Guilty Pleasure
It's not the Yankees losing in the divisionals, nor a conference rival pantsing Alabama midseason. Nor is it quite the Lakers fizzling in May, or the Cowboys losing year after year after year after delicious year....

New Browns Head Coach Rob Chudzinski May Have The Clevelandest Surname In The NFL
As strange as it was to see the Browns fire Pat Shurmur after a 5-11 season—after all, isn't that merely upholding The Browns Way?—it seemed even more peculiar for them to hire in his place a 44-year-old without a lick of NFL head-coaching experience....

The Definitive List Of Actual, No-Bullshit College Football National Champions; Or, Why Alabama Is A Liar
Monday night, the Alabama Crimson Tide mercilessly clobbered Notre Dame in the BCS championship game. According to Alabama, it was the school's 15th national football title. Football has been an intercollegiate sport for 142 seasons, starting in 1869 (no one played in 1871). So that should mean that...

Adrian Peterson Says He Will Run For 2,500 Yards In 2013, So Naturally He Will
We'd scoff if anyone other than Adrian Peterson were to say, as Adrian Peterson did this week, that he doesn't just want to break the single-season rushing record, he wants to obliterate it. Actually, the way he put it to Marshall Faulk on the NFL Network was:...

<em>Newsday</em>, Like Twitter Users, Simply Cannot Tell Brian Kelly And Chip Kelly Apart
Two college football coaches, both named Kelly. Chip has just completed a marvelous season marred only by the fact that his Oregon Ducks did not get to compete for a national championship and stand to finish third or perhaps second in the final polls. Brian has one of the two teams playing for the n...

The Original Quote For Vancouver's $514 Million Stadium Renovation Was A Mere $100 Million
The $514 million renovation of Vancouver's BC Place stadium, home to the BC Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps as well as the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, was more than 400 percent over budget, a Vancouver business paper is reporting....

The Bengals Really Could Break Their 8,400-Day Playoff Winless Streak Today
For a summer in college I interned for the sports department of the Columbus Dispatch, which sent me for a few days to cover Cincinnati Bengals training camp. The 1990s had just come to a close—a dismal era even by the Bengals' standards—and the beat writers killed time during practice by stumping o...

Anderson Varejao Wig Night Was Exactly The Whimsical Clown-Nightmare You Would Hope For
The Cleveland Cavaliers on Friday gave away 10,000 wigs to fans for "Wild Thing Wig Night," a.k.a. Anderson Varejao Wig Night, a.k.a. Sideshow Bob Appreciation Night, a.k.a. Bill Walton Merkin Night, a.k.a. Beyoncé Perm Re-enactment Night, a.k.a. Mad Hatter Cosplay Night, a.k.a. Will Ferrell as Ja...

"Occupy Steubenville" Gathers To Support Rape Victim, Call For Coach's Job
Protestors in Steubenville, Ohio, today braved crappy weather to rally at the county courthouse and call for further investigation into an alleged sexual assault. In August a 16-year-old girl, in a state of blackout intoxication, was lugged about by two Steubenville High School football players who ...

33 Bowl Games Ranked As If They Were Dishes
The custom of calling post-season collegiate contests "bowl" games stems from the granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl, so-called for the eponymous bowl-shaped stadium. But our first association with the word "bowl" of course is as a container, most often for food, keys, change, or cereal milk and ...

Harry Carey Jr., The Actor Who Gave Us Player In Dugout, Has Died At 91
Harry Carey Jr., an actor best known for his work in Westerns, died Thursday at the age of 91. Like many long-lived character actors of both silver and small screen, he was nothing if not prolific, and it's likely that anyone who watched much TV since the '40s managed to see him at some point, somew...