ball Page 1699 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Diamondbacks Lay Off Dozens of Employees (Not Including Adam Dunn)
The purge of off-field employees has started in earnest this Credit Crunch offseason, with the Arizona Diamondbacks releasing 31 employees (around 10% of the entire front office), mostly from the broadcast side of the business as a result of selling all their games to Fox Sports Arizona. Yet again, ...

HS Championship Game Delayed Due to Lack of Referees
Sure, game officials are the bane of existence and they're all out to cheat for the other team and they're incompetent and corrupt and love being the center of attention and cause eczema in laboratory rats. However, unless someone figures out how to call their own 12-men-on-the-field penalties, you ...

Have You Burned Your Former Head Coach In Effigy Lately?
We didn't get to this yesterday, but anything involves college students and fire is usually good copy for the next day. Some of the LSU peeps got together for what looked like a bonfire with a set of clothes as a centerpiece. But it was actually a burning in effigy of former LSU head coach Nick Saba...

Texas Tech Sticks Up Cowboys, BCS Picture Looks Surprisingly Stable
No. 2 Texas Tech 56, No. 8 Oklahoma State 20. Could Graham Harrell and Michael Crabtree actually split the Heisman? Harrell completed 40 passes for 456 yards and 6 TDs. Ten Red Raiders caught at least one pass, including Crabtree, who caught 8 passes for 89 yards and three TDs. The win should cemen...

Saturday Night Live Blog: #9 Oklahoma State at #2 Texas Tech
The Big XII has thirteen teams in the Top 10, and this is just another night in which two of them square off on a Saturday night. The undefeated Red Raiders get their second straight prime-time big game against the once-defeated Cowboys. Brent Musberger and Kirk Herbstreit brand cows with their init...

Install Texas Stadium End Zone in Your Back Yard (Cheerleaders Included)
In a blatant effort to rearm the Salvation Army in order to fight street to street in the urban centers and rural battlegrounds of America, Jerry Jones and a Coalition of the Willing to Appear Charitable in a Very Public Fashion have offered a unique combination of the gauche and the gaucho to the w...

New York HS Team Beefs Up At QB
Usually, "freak of nature" is a moniker reserved for an overly-gifted athlete with little regard for his teammates or the intricacies of game. But Ellenville (NY) High's Tony Casamento is a little bit different. Tony has to be the heaviest quarterback in America, checking in at a svelte 309 pounds. ...

Beckett, Lester Take Aim at Charity (and Pull Trigger)
Josh Beckett, putative Red Sox ace, believes the best charity comes at the end of a shotgun. Therefore, he has gathered all his rowdy friends (including fellow hurler Jon Lester-Who-Once-Had-Cancer, comedian Bill Engvall, and singer Troy Gentry) to his ranch this weekend, where they will hold the fi...

All-Purpose Pitching Machine Also Teaches Kids Not to Lie
We had this one really hard teacher in junior high. You know the type of teacher that thinks they're preparing you for the harsh realities of adulthood through tough love, including random screaming and no late papers and picking books about four grades higher than your class' skill set and wonderin...

The College Football Playoff You've Been Pining For? It's Happening Right Under Your Nose
For those of you that clamor for a nice, tidy bracket of four, eight, or 16 teams in the last week of November, pay attention. That method of eliminating teams from consideration of BCS Championship goodness has been transpiring over the past few weeks. Ohio State is veritably eliminated after their...

How Much Do LSU Fans Hate Nick Saban? The Coonass Bowl Is Upon Us
Wright Thompson of ESPN hung out with some LSU fans two weeks ago for the Georgia-LSU game. Not surprisingly LSU fans were focused less on Georgia and more on their hate for Nick Saban. The result is a rollicking story of what happens when you get dumped for a hated rival and then your former coach...

Ryan Leaf Has Gone and Ryan Leaf'd Himself Yet Again
And...scene. Former inept NFL quarterback Ryan Leaf seemed poised for success while coaching at DII West Texas A & M , but thanks to a recent pill-popping scandal, that career path might also be over for good. At first, Leaf was given a leave of absence by the university for him to work on his "pers...

Gator Chomp: Drunken Florida Chick Gets Bitey, Is Thrown In Hoosegow
Meet Veronica Hairston, frequent motel guest and passionate Florida Gators fan. Yep, that's a temporary Gators tattoo on her cheek there. On Saturday Hairston and her husband were enjoying the Florida-Georgia game at a Neptune Beach Day's Inn when things got out of hand. As Florida began putting the...

College Football Preview: John Parker Wilson's Cell Phone Belongs to the Cajuns
Alabama's John Parker Wilson is the latest SEC player attempting to overcome the LSU fans snagging his cell phone number and listing it everywhere on the internets. Confounding Cajuns. You'll recall that earlier this season Knowshon Moreno and A.J. Green were the victims. They joined Tim Tebow from...

High School Kids Choose Phillies Over Football
Much like the site you're reading now, there were some attendance problems last Friday in certain Philadelphia area school systems. Reports say that as much as 20 percent of the area's students licked their palms and skipped school so they could be sworn at by Chase Utley. Among that group are nine ...

Buck Burnette Just Can't Stop Apologizing for Absent-Minded Facebook Racism
After Texas backup center Buck Burnette was kicked off the team for his idiotic Facebook status comment, he issued a sincere apology that, at the very least, proved he knew what he did was wrong. The online contrition tour continues for Burnette, and now he's fired off another apology via Longhorn f...

Lute Olson Soap Opera Gets A Little More Creepy
It's safe to say that the last couple years of Lute Olson's life have been difficult. Health problems and a nasty public divorce led him to miss most of last season on the bench at Arizona and walk out on his team just before this one began. But it seems that the split from his wife, Christine, is e...

Steve Spurrier Inspires Great Art
This one I call, Man Being Aggressively Clawed By Chicken. But it's not that at all. It is of course South Carolina coach and football god Steve Spurrier, who just happens to inspire the artist in all of us. In this portrait he is watched over by the SC Gamecock, just as St. Michael the archangel wa...

Texas Lineman Gets Kicked Off Team for Racist Facebook Message to Barack Obama
The big galoot pictured here is Buck Burnette, back up center for the University of Texas Longhorns. Check that — former back up center. You see, good ol' boy Buck here thought it would be funny to update his Facebook profile status with this message soon after Barack Obama's election: ...

Thursday Night Preview: Maryland at Virginia Tech and #12 TCU at #8 Utah
Remember how I said that Versus stole a march on ESPN back when TCU played BYU and Florida State was playing N.C. State on Thursday October 16? Yeah, it's happened again. Only this time the game is on CBS College Sports. Which, if you're like me, you don't get on your television package because Com...