It wasn’t idiotic for Yoenis Cespedes to opt out of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, but he could’ve been more efficient in handling the situation. Back in August, Cespedes no-showed for an afternoon game between his New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves. He was missing. Some feared the worst, especially given how everything this year has been terrible. Ultimately, after eight games and 31 at bats, he just left the team… without telling anyone, and in a contract year, no less. This came after his salary was reduced by over $23 million following an abrupt 2019 season-ending ranch incident. On top of that, he’s still a free agent, and we don’t know if he’ll play again. Presumably, he wants to, but hasn’t helped himself over the last year, or really, the last two years.

Sadly, Ronaldo only tested positive for COVID-19, instead of testing positive for “being in prison for one or all of the multiple rape accusations against him.”

The Houston Texans wide receiver finally had a chance to prove to the NFL that he could stay on the field after playing in no more than 11 games in each of the last four seasons. He was seemingly piecing it all together in the absence of DeAndre Hopkins, was having a career year heading into free agency this offseason… then he was suspended for six games for using performance enhancing drugs. In true idiot fashion, Fuller blamed his doctor for the ban, claiming he had been too trusting of the medical regimen prescribed for him. Guess how many games Will Fuller played in this year? That’s right, 11. Good luck with that offseason, bud.

Do you remember the name Gary Condit? If you don’t, that’s okay. Condit was the California representative whose affair with Chandra Levy, a woman 30 years younger, was revealed after Levy was murdered in May of 2001. It was a huge story for that whole summer, and even though Condit never was a suspect in the still-unsolved case, he was the subject of a world of negative attention and got primaried out of office. But the reason you wouldn’t remember Condit is that 9/11 happened, he slinked away, and nobody really heard from him again until he went on Dr. Phil, 15 years later. Jeff Luhnow, the disgraced former Astros general manager, could’ve taken a similar route out of the public eye thanks to 2020 being, well, 2020. Instead, this idiot did a 37-minute interview with Houston’s NBC affiliate, proclaiming how good and virtuous and not a mastermind of a cheating scheme he was. Either Luhnow was lying, and was way more involved in the cheating than he said, or he was telling the truth, and he was a horrendous executive with no idea what was happening in his organization. That’s definitely something you want to come back into the public eye to get out there, right?

It was once startling, then depressingly common, that leagues love to champion their female fandom numbers when presenting spreadsheets to stockholders, and yet these same organizations let their broadcasts, the very vehicle carrying their product to said fans, insult them stupidly. Milbury was just one of the latest to label women something other than, y’know, people. To Milbury, women were merely a distraction, and NHL players were better off without them in the sealed-off bubbles of Edmonton and Toronto. Even if you can ignore the broad swipe at womankind as a whole, painting them merely as walking orifices to tease and corrupt these saintly hockey players, there were probably a few players themselves who didn’t exactly appreciate their wives and girlfriends being presented merely as obstacles to their work. But Milbury has been spewing drivel for decades now, especially when he had a job with a team, and yet we can’t seem to get rid of him. In nature, you do need vents for noxious gases, lest they build up to dangerous levels. But until Milbury has proven that’s what he is, let’s just keep him in storage.

While most of the recent attention around the Rockets has been on James Harden’s dadaist interpretation of Punky Brewster, the Rockets got here by way of their billionaire owner’s crippling phobia of the luxury tax. Thanks to his penny-pinching, the Rockets have been able to amass two superstars at the top of the roster, Harden and either Chris Paul or Russell Westbrook or now John Wall. But they haven’t been able to build depth, which has seen them crash out of the playoffs and sour Harden on the whole operation. While Fertitta will claim the pandemic has crippled his restaurant-based worth, he’s still worth $4B.

Days before the NFL season began, Kirk Cousins — a media-trained, $24 million-a-year quarterback — said he was cool getting the coronavirus… even if it killed him. “I’m gonna let nature do its course. Survival of the fittest kind of approach,” he told The Ringer. “If it knocks me out, it knocks me out. I’m going to be OK. You know, even if I die. If I die, I die.” We can happily report that Kirk Cousins is alive, well, and still a mediocre QB. He just didn’t choose the best words when he broke the universe with his stupidity.

The New England Patriots made an odd decision to take a kicker in the fifth round of the draft. It was odder still that the kicker they picked wasn’t Georgia star Rodrigo Blankenship, but Justin Rohrwasser of Marshall. Then, it turned out that Rohrwasser had a tattoo representing the white supremacist “III%” group. This idiot’s explanation didn’t pass the smell test for a minute, although a lot of the media was willing to roll with it (wonder why). Rohrwasser said he’d get the tattoo removed, and then it turned out that it hardly mattered anyway, as Nick Folk wound up winning the kicker job in New England. Meanwhile, the undrafted Blankenship has been solid all year for the Colts.

See Ronaldo, Cristiano.

If you were writing a humorous yet cringeworthy coffee table book for the COVID-era titled “50 ways not to wear a mask,” then Gruden could be the inspiration for roughly three quarters of the book. The saga of his mask ineptitude started on September 14, when the league sent a memo to all clubs after Week 1 of the season, which saw Gruden and others struggle. Gruden responded by saying “I’ve got to do a better job of keeping my mask over my face. It was really hot…” Whoo boy. The next week, he tried to get away with essentially wearing a thong over his nose. On October 5, Gruden and the Raiders were fined $565,000 for mask violations. Apparently that wasn’t enough. A month later, on November 5, the Raiders were fined another $500,000, Gruden a separate $150,000, and the NFL took their 2021 sixth-round pick. Gruden cost his team over a million dollars and a draft pick because he can’t wear a damn mask.

Remember earlier in the year when this idiot wore a gas mask on the House floor in mockery of the pandemic? Well, now, after a summer full of prodding Florida college athletics to continue unimpeded, Gaetz is not going anywhere near the House floor, out of concern for the pandemic.

When COVID hit on March 11 and 12, forcing stoppages all throughout the country, the UFC powered on with their Brazilian-based UFC Fight Night headlined by Charles Oliveria vs Kevin Lee. The event took place behind closed doors on March 14 with no attendance. White then tried to power on, shuffling around events, scrambling to keep the show rolling despite the worldwide outbreak. They returned in May with UFC 249, and even that was a hectic process. The event was originally scheduled for April 18 at Barclays Center, and Khabib Nurmagomedov couldn’t leave Russia to finally face Tony Ferguson because of COVID, so Justin Gaethje stepped in. Gaethje destroyed Ferguson, and with Khabib’s retirement, fight fans are once again robbed of the super-fight that never was. There was also the encouraging of sports leagues to come to looney ass Jacksonville to get their competitions off the ground in May, and this was after Jacare Souza tested positive for COVID, canceling his fight with Uriah Hall. And then, in a stroke of true American stubbornness, Fight Island.

What do you do if you have perhaps the American League’s most exciting young team poised to go on a run of years of contention? Well, if you’re a bewildered old man who still thinks it’s 1987, you try and right wrongs that are over 30 years old and hire an even more bewildered old man to manage said team! And he’s a drunk-ass racist who had just been arrested for his second DUI! Hey, in 1987 we found baseball managers drunkenly crashing their car charming and funny, so you gotta give Ol’ Jerry a break. Fans will have a lot of obstacles to return to the park comfortably in 2021. Sox fans will also have to find a way around their owner’s giant middle finger at every gate.

If you run into a burning building, you’re a hero. If you run into the husk of a building that’s already been burned to the ground and you have to engage in a Gangs of New York-style tussle with angry, squatting raccoons to declare it your new home, you’re an idiot.

It’s fun to blame Theranos for bilking millions and millions of dollars out of rich dopes. But hey, if those rich dopes want to toss around their money without doing any research, that’s a yo’ fault. Same with John Chayka, as he packed up and left the Arizona Coyotes high and dry after a run as GM that was a total swindle. Sure, Chayka is just a nice-looking airhead who put on a good presentation about analytic ways to run a hockey team and then proceeded to turn the Coyotes into a capped-out Beverly Hillbillies-car of mediocrity going nowhere. But it’s the Coyotes that paid him to do so before he hightailed it for...well, whatever shysters do with their pocketed booty. And it’s the Coyotes who will have to pick the acorns out of the shit he left behind.

Clay Travis could be on this list for multiple reasons but the most egregious one is because he continuously downplayed a deadly virus that has now taken the lives of over 315,000 people in this country and severely impacted millions of others. Travis has continuously said that Americans have overreacted to the virus and even compared it to the flu even though reports have proven that COVID is much worse. Travis has used his platform to try to prove he’s been right about this virus instead of using it to help thwart the spread by listening to CDC guidelines.

He’s a man! He’s… 53 now! Which means he’s somehow been at Oklahoma State for almost a decade and a half since “I’m a man! I’m 40!” Go back and watch that old rant, by the way, because you can see the seeds sown of a guy who became a T-shirt wearing fan of the far-right One America News Network. Gundy said that it was just a t-shirt, although he’d previously praised the network as “refreshing.” Gundy’s embrace of OANN did not sit well with his Black players, including star running back Chuba Hubbard, and Gundy had to apologize… then apologize again… then eventually take a million-dollar pay cut, to once again have a three-loss season and lose a sixth straight Bedlam game to Oklahoma, the Cowboys’ 14th in their last 16 meetings with the Sooners.

Lou Holtz literally compared the return of college football to the storming of Normandy. Holtz found a way to trivialize the lives of both servicemen and American civilians trying to survive a deadly disease. What makes it even crazier is that Holtz is a part of the demographic most likely to be greatly impacted by COVID-19, and guess what happened a few months after his comments? Yeap, you guessed it, Holtz got COVID. And then he got a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Coonrod was tapped as the early favorite in the field of idiots, and him not even being in the top 25 is a sign of how idiotic this year was, becuase Coonrod is the idiot who said that “I’m a Christian, so I just believe that I can’t kneel before anything besides God,” to explain why he wouldn’t take a knee, not for the National Anthem, which, whatever, that’s anyone’s personal choice, but for a pre-anthem moment of unity, the entire point of which was to… show unity… by all taking a knee. Instead, Coonrod bashed Black Lives Matter and asked that he get “respect.” Answer: no.

Notre Dame’s president wrote a stupid New York Times op-ed back in May, headlined “We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk.” An August COVID outbreak quickly shed light on just how risky a proposition that was, but it didn’t seem to bother Jenkins much. Then he caught the virus. Then he expressed his “disappointment” in November that students would rush the field in South Bend following an Irish victory. Jenkins, apparently failing to realize that kids are dumb and do dumb things, easily could have prevented that crisis months in advance by shutting down school athletics, like sensible people had been shouting at him to do all along.

Picking any MLB owner over another one for this esteemed honor is truly sticking your hand in a pile of goo and trying to guess this chunk might be. But the Ricketts family has been particularly foul in every way, from incompetence to malice to their tightwad handling of the Cubs. They rolled out their new network along with societal pox Sinclair, and it had all the production value and creativity of a college station at 3am. They tried to claim that 70% of their revenue was lost thanks to having no fans. They’ve spent two years not adding to their contending team, and crying poor and threatening to strip it down because they can’t afford it, even though they laugh about their ballpark and neighborhood improvements running $500 million over budget. One of them was the fundraising chair for Donald Trump. They got landmark status for Wrigley which will get them tens of millions in tax breaks, and yet still held the city of Chicago up for a delay on a $250,000 payment on minor improvements on the property around Wrigley until 2024. They are the crystalized symbol of modern sports wealth—incompetence feeling entitled thanks to money they had nothing to do with earning and utterly shocked that the majority don’t see the world the way they do, and yet facing no consequences for any of it.

The National League Cy Young winner is a giant idiot who long ago became known for harassing a woman on Twitter, and still, even having said he’d learned his lesson, proved that he’s just a shitposter at heart who’s physically incapable of logging off. Then he decided to get into it with some yutz from a once-great website, and got himself plaudits from lickspittle bros nationwide for the effort. By the way, how did Bauer win the Cy Young in this shortened season, anyway? Surely not by any nefarious means, the likes of which he’d described in the past while accusing other entire organizations of malfeasance. Because if there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump’s acolytes, projection is just something that’s totally out of their wheelhouse, right?

Honestly, we don’t even need to write anything here. He does it to himself.

Oh, and his son’s an idiot, too.

Honestly, Robinson Cano, you’re the greatest. Because of your second PED suspension, getting yourself banned from the 2021 MLB season and robbing yourself of $24 million in the process, you made the New York Mets’ middle infield situation far less strenuous. Now, the Mets can play Jeff McNeil every day. If Amed Rosario and Andrés Giménez stay, they could continue developing as well. It even opens the door for more free agents, who should come any day now, ideally, except that baseball’s offseason moves at the pace of a Bartolo Colon powerwalk. Cano’s stupidity opens the door to a Francisco Lindor trade, and so many other options, as his massive deal inches toward its merciful end. Robby’s contract still runs for $24 million annually in 2022 and 2023, but in a twisted way, his ban is the most extraordinary dumb luck Steve Cohen and the Mets could ask for.

Some idiots struggle to wear their masks. Other idiots, like Haskins — a last-minute IDIOT OF THE YEAR addition — don’t wear their masks at all… while going to a strip club… in a pandemic. Haskins was already reprimanded for violating COVID protocols once this season, and has also been benched for his performance. For a guy trying to prove that he’s a leader and capable of being a starting quarterback in the NFL, endangering your team in the midst of a playoff push sure is a funny way to do it. Add to the situation that he’s currently the only healthy quarterback on the roster, and there are more layers to his idiocy than the stack of singles he was caught holding.

It’s hard to comprehend the balls, or lack thereof, to sit in a team meeting about how one of your teammates had endangered everyone by violating health protocols everyone had agreed to, all while remaining silent because you know you were also so desperate to go out to bars with your bro-tastic idiot teammate. But that’s what Mike Clevinger did, and his team was so pissed that they traded him to San Diego for his troubles. It was convenient for Cleveland, as they weren’t looking to have to pay him two years down the road anyway. And Clevinger wins, as he gets to call perhaps the country’s most bro-tastic idiotic city home now.

Joker could make this list every year for his cult-brained thoughts on fitness and health, so imagine what it must take to put that so thoroughly in the background. In the absence of tennis, Djokovic hosted a fully-attended tournament that saw himself and other players test positive for COVID-19 directly after, which is an ace look after multiple photos emerged of him and other players hanging out at clubs and the beach and such together. And even that might not have been his cake-topper! In a US Open without Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer, where Djokovic could have simply moonwalked to the title, he labeled a ball off a linesperson’s throat out of frustration and got himself defaulted out of the tournament. Perhaps the ball simply ignored his emotions? Cruel mistress.

Being a racist pudwhack isn’t a rarity in the NHL, and it feels as though the league is actually fine with that. But DeAngelo takes it to a whole new level, showcasing the dangers of giving anyone with a 7th-grade education a public forum. DeAngelo’s Twitter feed is a cataclysm of MAGA chudhead ooze, from COVID-denying to election-rigging, which dovetails perfectly and disgustingly with his use-of-slurs past in the OHL. Perhaps the most satisfying moment of the NHL’s return was Sebastian Aho putting him on his ass as the Canes violently punted the Rangers out of the bubble.

It’s been a week or so since Aubrey Huff trended on Twitter, which means right about now he’s itching to say something so monumentally racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright ignorant that even the cesspool that is social media in 2020 will take notice. This is no easy task, which is why Aubrey is forced to become increasingly -ist and combative about it with each passing day. Disagree with him? You’re probably a beta cuck! Oh, you’re a woman? Then you’re undoubtedly fat, ugly, and have no sexual market value (Aubrey’s sexual market value, he tells us, is very high!). It’s hard to choose just one of the things that have landed dear Aubrey here on this list, so consider this a body of work award for an aging white man who can no longer play baseball, has been shunned by his former team, and is increasingly terrified of irrelevance with each passing day. How is it that Barstool hasn’t snapped him up already?

2020 may be the first year in recent memory where Dolan was not the worst thing to happen to New York. Still an idiot, though.

Jason Whitlock is the epitome of someone desperately grasping for relevance. Whitlock has always been a controversial media figure for years but in 2020 he became downright intolerable with some of his takes. He said LeBron James was a bigot, attacked ESPN’s Maria Taylor and Katie Nolan because they were just doing their jobs, and then unleashed on Black college football coaches. It’s crazy to think that someone can do everything they possibly can to tick people off and rarely becomes a footnote in his industry. But that’s been Whitlock’s career for years now and likely won’t change any time soon.

Dan Mullen could make a strong case for being the idiot of the year in all of college football and that says a lot in a sport that puts Dabo Swinney on television every week. In the middle of a deadly pandemic, Mullen said he wanted Florida’s home stadium packed with 90,000 people and then he proceeded to test positive for COVID before the team’s next game. Around the same time that Mullen got COVID, the program went through one of the worst outbreaks in college football. The Gators were forced to stop football activities for nearly two weeks and dozens of athletes tested positive for the disease. Recently, it was announced that his recruiting violations put Florida on a one-year probation. Not to mention his team’s defense was trash all year and one of his starting defensive backs ended their playoff chances by throwing a shoe twenty yards.

Where do you start? The pandemic kicked off with DeSantis granting WWE special status as an essential business so they could continue to film live shows in Orlando, with the help of a large check to the local Republican party from the McMahon family. That was against the backdrop of Florida being a raging hotspot for the virus, which DeSantis barely lifted a finger to stop, and he will soon bend over to whatever whims the NFL and WWE have to stage the Super Bowl and WrestleMania in the coming year. That doesn’t even get into the borderline war-crime level offense of fudging or simply lying about actual statistics concerning the virus, and then firing and intimidating employees who crossed the line by presenting “truth.”

The team doctor for the Los Angeles Chargers punctured the lung of Chargers starting quarterback Tyrod Taylor when giving him a cortisone shot on September 20, just minutes before their game against the Kansas City Chiefs. The plan for head coach Anthony Lynn was to let the sixth overall pick in the 2020 draft, Justin Herbert, sit in the wings and learn. Apparently, the team doctor had different ideas, and was at fault for throwing the rookie into the fire against the defending Super Bowl Champions. It takes a special kind of stupid to essentially ruin what looks to be the last chance Tyrod Taylor had at a starting gig in the NFL. Poor Tyrod.

Oh, Bill. Good ol’ Bill. How does a head coach and acting General Manager screw over a team as bad as this guy did? After sending star wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins to the Arizona Cardinals for an oft-injured and expensive aging running back and the equivalent of a bag of moldy peanuts, it’s a miracle good ol’ Bill kept his job to start the season. After an 0-4 start and O’Brien thinking, “Ya know, I really should take on even more responsibility” — while also managing to give away the Texans’ first- and second-round picks in the 2021 draft — it was really beyond time for him to go. Bill O’Brien was really, really bad at his job, and nothing against the guy personally, but he really should just stay gone from the NFL.

House has the unfortunate distinction of being the only player kicked out of the 2020 NBA bubble, catching the boot after league officials got wind of his ill-advised booty call with a female COVID testing official. As the league bent over backwards to not completely screw everything up in Orlando — and, honestly, they did a pretty good job — House’s indiscretions stuck out like a sore thumb.