and Page 417 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Aaron Rodgers doesn’t owe the fans a damn thing
The Green Bay Packers’ front office continues to squirm. As Aaron Rodgers doesn’t show up for mandatory OTA’s the Packers are getting dangerously close to having to live off the merits of their own decision-making in the form of Jordan Love starting Week 1....

Euro 2021: Can Poland rise to meet Robert Lewandowski?
No. What’re you, new? No one rises to the level of Robert Lewandowski. It’s Robert Goddamn Lewandowski. Dude just scored 40 goals in one league season, which is utterly insane. That’s after he scored 34 last year. Seventy-four motherfucking goals in two seasons in just the Bundesliga. That’s four se...

I just want to keep hearing the raucous din of Islanders games
I don’t have a real affinity for the New York Islanders. Great jerseys, ones they should have never abandoned, but other than that, whatever. Barry Trotz is maybe the best at getting his players to buy into his system, which is why it works so well, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that entertaining t...

There’s a reason all this ‘sticky stuff’ talk is happening now
There are pretty much just five things going on across baseball Twitter nowadays:...

Ravens will take to the air
I’m going to keep talking about it until people start understanding what’s happening, because the clues just keep on coming: The Baltimore Ravens and Lamar Jackson are going to throw the football a lot more this year. ...

Euro 2021: So how is England going to screw this up?
The English are the Chicago Bears of international soccer. Even though they basically created the sport, and have one of the biggest fan bases as well, they have sat by and watched others pass them as the game changed and evolved, still clinging to what they believed, all the while bleating about th...

Brandon Crawford deserves more love than he’s been getting
When the 2021 MLB All-Star Game polls opened on June 3, I filled out five ballots. I’ve voted at least once every day since. And every time, I voted for pretty much the same team with a few minor adjustments. ...

Gerrit Cole gives away the game
Were you in the mood for an extremely uncomfortable two minutes of media interaction to kick off your day? I bet you were. Who wouldn’t be? This will probably look like any meeting you’ve had with upper management. Step up, Gerrit Cole, and give the people what they want!...

The 2018 NBA Draft class could rank among best of the decade
It’s time for us to take a good look at the 2018 NBA draft class....

Surely, Ukraine’s latest soccer kit won’t incite any international controversy
On Sunday, the president of the Ukrainian Football Administration, Andriy Pavelko, revealed his country’s newest kit, which included a yellow shirt with a few Ukrainian slogans and an outline of the country — wait… is that Crimea?...

Grumpire to home run admirer... Stop gawking and run!
Dallas Baptist University was down by three in the bottom of the seventh. With two outs and the bases loaded in the NCAA regional, redshirt freshman Andrew Benefield came to the plate. Then, well… just watch....

Euro 2021: Memphis Depay gets to try again
To make it to the very top levels of any sport as an athlete, it must take an unfathomable reservoir of self-belief. With all the obstacles, the sheer amount of work, and all the days where the dream must seem as close as one of Saturn’s moons, one would have to be able to call on a never-ending sup...

Things aren’t looking so hot in Green Bay
Have you ever seen “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly?” No, seriously. The 1966 Western starring Clint Eastwood is a classic, featuring horses and gunfights and bravado and all that toxic Hollywood macho “this is what a man is” stuff. The movie reaches a boiling point in a three-way standoff between E...

Ryan Fitzpatrick has been doing this football thing for a minute
With the 250th pick in the seventh round of the 2005 NFL draft, the St. Louis Rams (’memba them?) selected a quarterback out of Harvard — not exactly a football powerhouse. His name was Ryan Fitzpatrick, and of the 13 quarterbacks taken before him, only one (Aaron Rodgers) still plays in the league....

THAT is exactly what the Suns need to keep doing
If your entire starting five is at least a +12 or higher, then you’ll look like the Phoenix Suns did in their 122-105 Game 1 victory over the Denver Nuggets last night. And their balance is precisely why they have the edge on a shorthanded Nuggets roster....

Is Brooklyn's rout of Milwaukee meaningful?
The Bucks lost by 39 points in Brooklyn on Monday night, and it felt like something of a denouement for this current Milwaukee team, which has gone 162-65 over the past three seasons but disappointed in the playoffs....

Euro 2021: For the last time, is this Belgium’s time?
For European teams, the lack of opportunities to actually win a trophy can muddy the results they do get. There’s only a trophy on offer every two years (when there isn’t a pandemic), and perhaps Spain at the beginning of the last decade altered our perception of what’s success and what isn’t....

The Avalanche are granny shifting
It’s hard to think of a series the past few years that has been more anticipated than Avalanche-Golden Knights. Rarely do the two best teams in the NHL meet up before the third round, or more likely at all given the vagaries of hockey. But with the divisional setup this year, it was going to be hard...

How do you solve a problem like Weston McKennie?
There are about 400 lessons that fans could have learned about the U.S. Men’s National team last night. And they spread over the entire spectrum of endless hope of things we’ve never imagined to complete and total disaster we’re sadly all too familiar with. Projecting this team into the future, beca...

U.S. beats Mexico in some combination of soccer, whirlyball, and Fury Road
The CONCACAF Nations League isn’t really supposed to be anything. It’s something of a cheap mockery of Europe’s Nations League, which was really only conjured to get rid of meaningless friendlies in years between major competitions. So, even that’s not really a thing. The CONCACAF version is basical...