afterball Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Why Do Coaches Always Beat Up On The Little Sisters Of The Poor?
The Little Sisters of the Poor are in the news again, but surprisingly not as a sports metaphor for a patsy opponent. But now's as good a time as any to wonder: Where did this ubiquitous metaphor come from?...
Auburn's Field Goal Return Was Even Rarer Than You Think
The insane ending to last week's Iron Bowl had sports fans wondering if any college football game had ever ended in such an improbable fashion. NCAA records show that even in the missed-field-goal-returned-for-touchdown department, Chris Davis's score was especially rare....
How The NFL Used To Punish Teams For Crowd Noise
Last month, Kansas City Chiefs fans broke CenturyLink Field's record for world's loudest stadium. Not long ago, however, that kind of in-game crowd noise was explicitly forbidden in the NFL rule book. This isn't all that surprising, as the NFL has a habit of hating its fans....
Children's Song Will Teach Young Knicks Fans How To Face Despair
The fight for the future fandom of New York's children has finally been memorialized in the instant classic, "Who Do You Like Better, The Knicks or the Nets?" As expected, the lyrics prepare today's youth for the existential agony that is being a Knicks fan, without addressing that other team at all...
Remembering Ashley Whippet, History's Best Frisbee-Catching Dog
The Ashley Whippet Invitational is the world's premier athletic competition for dogs that excel at catching frisbees, and it wouldn't exist if not for the contributions of its namesake. On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang up and Listen, Josh Levin takes a look back at the career of the greatest...
Who Made The Not-Quite-Baseball-Hall-Of-Fame In 2013?
So we know who made up the class of 2013 at the Baseball Hall of Fame: no one. Well, OK, the veterans committee voted in Hank O'Day, Col. Jacob Ruppert, and Deacon White. But they all died in the 1930s; we wouldn't expect much in the way of induction speeches....
Meet Fred Ettish, The Folk Hero Of UFC 2
Saturday's UFC card featured one helluva beatdown: Jon "Bones" Jones turned Chael Sonnen into a bloody mess. But at least Sonnen was ready for what eventually hit him....
A Curious List Of Things That Floyd Landis Is Not Allowed To Say About Pat McQuaid
Pat McQuaid, former president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), has long been at odds with disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis. Recently, McQuaid filed a proceeding against Landis in a low-level Swiss court. The court ruled in McQuaid's favor, and Landis was given a list of things that he, acc...
What Happens When You Try To Buy Or Sell Counterfeit NFL Jerseys?
Slate's Josh Levin attended the Seahawks-Redskins game on Sunday, and, while he saw a lot of genuine RGIII memorabilia, he also saw plenty of knockoffs. So, in this week's excerpt from the Hang Up and Listen podcast, Josh dives in to this nefarious underworld. Where does counterfeit memorabilia come...
Dear ESPN Announcers: Please Stop Inventing Merits Of Terrible Bowl Games
We can understand why so many mediocre bowls line our on-screen guides every December and early January: They're lucrative for everyone (well, almost everyone) involved. Local dignitaries in moderate-sized middle American metropolises gotta eat. But we could really do without all the specious shilli...
Meet Godfrey Chitalu, The Zambian Lionel Messi
Barça's Lionel Messi scored a lot of goals this year. 86 of them, apparently.* That's a record for a soccer player. Or is it? Zambia's Godfrey Chitalu—whose heyday as a player came in the late 1960s and 70s, before he began coaching in the 80s—may have scored 116 goals in 1972. On this week's excerp...
Lots Of NHL Players Have Headed To A Russian City That Is Essentially A Toxic Waste Dump
Magnitogorsk, Russia. Our kind of town. They've got one hell of a hockey team, with Evgeni Malkin and Nikolai Kulemin, and all the rest. They just added the Avalanche's Ryan O'Reilly. What's in the latest headlines over there?...
A Story About College Sports Conferences, Told Through One School's Many Entangling Alliances
You want to know what conference realignment looks like? We've told you about how it works at bigger schools, but how does it work at smaller schools, like, say, the University of Denver? Most of its teams are headed to the Summit League. Where are they coming from? Mike Pesca explains, in this week...
Oh No, Caffeinated Cracker Jack ("Cracker Jack'd") Is A Thing Now
Oh no, oh no, oh no. Not only do the folks at Frito-Lay want to ruin your childhood, they want to ruin baseball too. They recently unveiled Cracker Jack'd, or, caffeinated Cracker Jack. Yeah. On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen, Slate's Josh Levin sings (literally sings) of Cracke...
We Love You, Verne Lundquist, But It's Time To Go
On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Josh Levin makes a simple, fair case for why cuddly Verne Lundquist, CBS's lead college football play-by-play announcer, ought to call it a career. Lundquist makes a lot of mistakes on air. Levin captures many of them here. Listen up:...
This Is The Best Sports Internet Rabbithole You Can Find
On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Stefan Fatsis found a place on the internet where you can waste so, so much time. Lucky's Amazing Sports Lists. Go now, or some other time, when you have a big project to do. Lucky himself has an unusual story, too-the man is obsessive....
An Interview With Ove Johansson, The Man Who Kicked The Longest Field Goal Ever
We're in a glorious age for placekickers. St. Louis's Greg "The Leg" Zuerlein wows us every Sunday. David Akers hit a a 63-yarder in September, and Sebastian Janikowski never stops doing Sebastian Janikowski things. A Spokane high schooler was good from 67 earlier this month....
FIBA Really Wants Three-On-Three Basketball In The 2016 Olympics
Olympic basketball is fun. But doesn't it look a little too much like NBA basketball? Sure, the lanes are were trapezoidal, and the three-point line's a little bit closer, but those tweaks are minor when compared to the upheaval that FIBA's proposed three-on-three basketball brings. Watch the clip...
A Major Match-Fixing Scandal Is Rocking French Handball
Handball: it's not just a sport to watch on CNBC at 7:45 a.m. in early August every four years. Apparently there are leagues and teams, and those teams play important games, on which people bet money. Not very much, though, as Stefan Fatsis explains, on this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and L...
An Exhaustive Audio History Of The "Yankees Suck" Chant
This week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast is super-timely. It's got the Red Sox, the Yankees, and people who say the Yankees suck. Can't ever get enough of them. Massholes, like Sully. Gotta love Sully. And there's politics! There's some kind of political affair tonight, isn't ther...