Athletics Page 50 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Just give Reggie Bush his Heisman Trophy back
The court of public opinion cleared Reggie Bush of any wrongdoing years ago, but that still doesn’t put the Heisman back in his hands. The long-retired running back is now planning to sue the NCAA and ESPN for defamation of character surrounding the reporting of the alleged improper benefits that le...
Hello, my name is America, and I have a sports gambling problem
The current handling of sports gambling in this country is American exceptionalism at its most American. Investigations, or suspensions, are cropping up almost weekly, but due to the nature of the violations, or the parties involved, nothing has seriously resonated. One offensive lineman didn’t know...
Stanford is the most vulnerable school in college athletics because of conference realignment
The domino effect of Oklahoma and Texas leaving the Big 12 for the SEC (leading to the dismantling of the Pac-12 two years later) is a turn of events that would’ve been nearly impossible to predict. The catalyst for the Power Five’s west coast entry point being almost no more wasn’t UCLA and USC tra...
Playing football at Northwestern University haunts me to this day: Ex-Wildcat lineman
Ramon Diaz hasn’t watched a football game in more than 10 years, since he abruptly left Northwestern University’s football team in 2008. Wednesday morning, standing in a room of reporters, Diaz, a former offensive lineman, detailed why he didn’t return for his fifth season, why he snuck into the loc...
Deadspin Investigation: Another Brandeis basketball coach accused of racial animus toward Black players
Five years after a Deadspin investigation prompted Brandeis University to fire its men’s basketball coach following allegations of blatant racism, the school finds itself once again facing allegations of racism, and unequal treatment, this time in its women’s basketball program....
Colorado’s impending Big 12 reunion signals chaos for the Pac-12
Last week at the Pac-12 Conference’s annual football media days, Colorado was considered by far the league’s biggest flight risk. It’s USC and UCLA’s last season affiliated with the West Coasters before, let’s be honest, being promoted to the Big Ten. The Power Five is truly a supreme duo, with the ...
NIL deals are flawed, but Tommy Tuberville is not the solution
The latest proposed “bipartisan” piece of federal legislation to regulate name, image, and likeness deals for college athletes is being roundly applauded by the NCAA, the college coach-turned-senator who proposed it, other college football coaches, Power Five conferences, and a bunch of people who s...
Only one thing is going to fix college athletics, and it’s not Congress
There’s a problem facing college athletics that cannot be solved by the NCAA, the courts, the states, or the conferences. This immoral predicament of the greatest consequence — unregulated name, image, and likeness money — can only be solved by Congressional oversight, according to SEC commissioner ...
'Vacating' wins is the dumbest punishment of all time — do better, NCAA
The kids might not realize it, but in 1997 the movie of the summer was Men In Black. In the ‘90s, Will Smith was the king of summer blockbusters, especially if they opened July 4th weekend — or included aliens. One of the best parts of the MiB franchise was the Neuralyzers, a device that was used to...
NCAA treating violations with the leniency of a Boulder beat cop on 4/20
The University of Tennessee was hit with an $8 million fine, among other penalties, on Friday for “hundreds” of NCAA violations. Former coach Jeremy Pruitt and his staff committed north of 200 infractions, and while pretty much all of them weren’t a huge deal individually, when you rattle them off i...
Northwestern’s problems go beyond the football program
What is going on in Evanston, Illinois? Northwestern’s perception as a pristine academic university that plays sports on the side had already gone through an inferno over the last week with the firing of football coach Pat Fitzgerald on Monday due to hazing allegations. Turns out, that wasn’t the on...
The NFL and NBA players associations are taking questionable leadership routes
The first collective bargaining agreement in the history of professional sports was signed by the MLB and MLBPA in 1966. At that time the executive director of the MLBPA was the late Marvin Miller, formerly a union negotiator for workers of U.S. Steel. His fierce advocacy for labor rights is largely...
Stop hating on the NCAA for being spineless
Criticizing the NCAA is the lowest of low-hanging fruit. You can essentially pick the apples up off the ground, and have a roiling take. The latest punishments, or lack thereof, handed down to LSU football and men’s basketball last week were predictably lax and anything but a hindrance for schools t...
Mike Dunleavy Jr.'s job is to keep aging Golden State Warriors at a championship level
Monday was the introductory press conference for Mike Dunleavy Jr., the new general manager of the Golden State Warriors. Three days later he gets the privilege of hitting the ground running with the Warriors holding the 19th overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft....
The least Rob Manfred could do is leave the Athletics name in Oakland
I don’t like to be fatalist, or wave a white flag to unchecked capitalism. I want to believe, at some point, that the fans’ voice matters. That the runaway chase for profits and growth that ignores and bulldozes everything around it eventually crashes into a wall. And certainly, Oakland A’s fans’ vo...
EA’s new NCAA College Football video game is already outdated
The two groups most often on the losing side of college athletics’ neverending lust for revenue are its unpaid workforce and the fans. The latest example is the alleged payout system, or lack thereof, for those who opt-in for the rebirth of the NCAA College Football video game franchise. Reports hav...
Texas Rangers don’t need Jacob deGrom to be one of MLB's best teams
The weirdest part of the news of Jacob deGrom’s impending season-ending Tommy John surgery, which in all likelihood could keep him out of the Texas Rangers’ rotation until the beginning of the 2025 season, is that the first-place team in the American League West doesn’t need him. Is deGrom a massive...
Clemson’s fancy NIL facility is working with latest commitments
According to ESPN, five-star linebacker Sammy Brown and four-star wide receiver Bryant Wesco have decided to play their college ball at Clemson. Brown comes in at No. 17 in ESPN’s rankings of the top 300 players in his class, while Wesco comes at No. 23. Nothing about two really good football player...
Who does Hunter Dickinson think he is — a football player?
Guys like Hunter Dickinson give do-good gaslighters, who love to rail against NIL deals and the transfer portal, more content to shove in our faces as evidence that unpaid athletes making money is fostering a Wild West culture in college athletics. That’s not exactly true. The underbelly is just exp...
Iowa and Iowa State are now also wrapped up in college athletics’ gambling activity
Turns out Alabama firing baseball coach Brad Bohannon for being allegedly connected with betting on the Crimson Tide’s games might be the tip of the iceberg of gambling by current athletes and coaches in college athletics. As if the NCAA needed more problems to tackle because it’s doing swimmingly w...