koblin Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Watch UMass Football Players Beat Each Other Up In Team-Building Drill
Last week, the Daily Hampshire Gazette posted a video shot during a UMass offseason session in 2012 that features a bunch of football players beating the shit out of each other. Or, as UMass coach Charley Molar would later describe it, a "team-building" exercise that instills "mental toughness." ...
How Roger Goodell And ESPN Use Each Other
The NFL Network may not be the monolith the league once envisioned, but Roger Goodell likes having it around for what it forces others to do, particularly ESPN. Goodell alluded to this on Monday while speaking to Hearst employees—Hearst owns 20 percent of ESPN—during the media company's regularly he...
NBC Sports Network Cancels NRA-Sponsored Elephant Hunting Show
NBC Sports Network is dumping the show that featured a guy shooting an elephant in the face. The show—hosted by NRA lobbyist Tony Makris—isn't being canceled for that episode with the elephant shooting, exactly (though that didn't help). Instead it's because Makris compared his critics to Hitler ea...
Michelle Beadle's <em>Crossover</em> Is Finished
Crossover, the troubled NBC Sports Network studio show hosted by Michelle Beadle, is "donzo," tweets Beadle. Beadle: out. Shooting elephants in the face: in....
Knicks Owner Takes Beat Reporter's Question For First Time In 6 Years
According to Bleacher Report's Howard Beck, history was made at an otherwise routine press conference announcing New York as the host city for the 2015 NBA All-Star Game....
9 Things You Should Know About Skip Bayless, According To Skip Bayless
Skip Bayless told Michael Smith and Jemele Hill yesterday that he gave a Washington Post journalist a list of bullet points of "how I would try to capture me." (The Post recently published a profile of Bayless.) ...
The New <em>SportsCenter</em> Commercial You're Going To See Everywhere
It's been a rough stretch for ESPN and SportsCenter. Ratings for ESPN's flagship show have been sagging, bringing in about 828,000 viewers this year, down from about 1 million last year. Primetime ratings for ESPN and ESPN2 have seen declines too. ESPN's gotten really defensive about it, especially...
"Football Rain Delay" Drew Higher Ratings Than <em>MNF</em> And <em>60 Minutes</em>
The 49ers-Seahawks rain delay—a weather delay—was the second-highest-rated block of programming this week, according to Nielsen. The hourlong delay drew 17.84 million viewers, five million more than the viewership for 60 Minutes and nearly double that of America's Got Talent. Six of the week's seven...
Why Howard Beck Left <em>The New York Times</em> For Bleacher Report
"I understand the reactions," Howard Beck said over the phone, "because of where I have been working for the last nine years and because of where I'm going." ...
The NFL Wants $1.5 M. From M.I.A For Flipping The Bird At Super Bowl
Remember when M.I.A. flipped the bird at the Super Bowl halftime show? Yeah, it's sorta fuzzy for me, too. The NFL apparently does remember, and being that this is the NFL, the offense will not go unpunished....
Bleacher Report Poaches Howard Beck From The <em>Times</em>
Well, then. Six weeks after Bleacher Report poached Mike Freeman, Turner's flagship sports site has gone and hired New York Times basketball reporter Howard Beck. ...
How An MMA Fighter Faked His Own Death
The Times has produced another intimidatingly pretty story this morning, in the "Snow Fall" vein. This one concerns a low-rent mixed martial arts fighter in Michigan, and unlike with "Snow Fall," you will actually read this and enjoy it immensely and not merely pretend to. ...
So What Was That All About? Ask <em>SI</em>'s Editors About Their OSU Series
A week ago, Sports Illustrated began publishing its much-discussed, much-criticized five-part investigative series on Oklahoma State's football program. Yesterday, SI managing editor Chris Stone and executive editor Jon Wertheim provided a coda, explaining the intent of the package:...
Meet John Tomic, The World's Craziest Tennis Dad
John Tomic, father of Bernard Tomic, is a wacko. He fits nicely in tennis’s fine tradition of belligerent, obsessive, control-freak helicopter parents. Sometimes he yells at his son. Sometimes he head-butts his son’s hitting partner, knocking him unconscious. ...
SI managing editor Chris Stone and executive editor Jon Wertheim put a bookend on the magazine's five-part Oklahoma State investigation, saying at the very end of the series what they should've said at the beginning: "We weren't interested in following what one colleague calls the 'NCAA scandal tr...
![OK State Registrar: <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Still Hasn't Called Us [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/19026rd6xv6vgjpg.jpg)
OK State Registrar: <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Still Hasn't Called Us [Update]
Over the last day, one of Sports Illustrated's main sources for the second part of its five-part investigation into Oklahoma State has been under attack. Fath' Carter claimed that he graduated from the university with a degree in education, and, more significantly, that he and former Cowboys runni...
ESPN: Whitlock's Thayer Evans Comments "Not Acceptable."
Jason Whitlock torpedoed SI's Thayer Evans on Tuesday—"It wouldn’t shock me if Thayer Evans couldn't spell 'cat'"—and now he's running into trouble with his persnickety soon-to-be employers at ESPN. ...
<em>Sunday Night Football</em> Producer: No Need To "Glorify" Big Hits Anymore
The producer of the NFL's flagship broadcast, NBC's Sunday Night Football, said he's getting super-cautious about showing repeated replays of rough hits, especially those of the helmet-to-helmet variety....