champ Page 44 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Tabloid Mails it in on coverage of trans athlete
Lia Thomas, the Penn swimmer whose teammates tried to get her banned from competition because she’s trans, turned in a dominant swim at the Ivy League championships Thursday. Her performance, along with that of Yale’s Iszac Henig, sparked coverage by the Daily Mail, and writer Alex Hammer provided a...

Phil Mickelson doesn’t care about Saudi Arabia’s awful human rights record
Phil Mickelson will stop at nothing to spite the PGA Tour — not even willingly joining up with the Saudis’ new golf league while simultaneously acknowledging their human rights abuses....

Kylian Mbappé continues to bend Champions League to his will
Kylian Mbappé is only 23, but his plunge into the world soccer scene keeps growing. The French dynamo, playing for his home country’s most successful club over the last dozen years, Paris Saint-Germain, as well as being an integral member of France’s national team, keeps scoring critical goals. Two ...

Cody Rhodes is nuts
Cody and Brandi Rhodes must be insane, right? The couple integral to the founding of All Elite Wrestling, with a strong family heritage inside the squared circle, has left the upstart promotion they helped lay brick and tile for and could head back to their former employer, World Wrestling Entertain...

The path to an NBA championship is increasingly volatile
Neil Young gets credit for the line, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” but Kurt Cobain made it infamous. That dichotomy stuck with me, and it’s impossible not to see it in sports....

Shameless LeBron tries to steal spotlight from Los Angeles Rams
LeBron James has no shame....

Kamila Valieva’s saga sets a dangerous precedent for skaters
It wouldn’t be a proper Winter Olympics without a figure skating melodrama. It’s earned a reputation as the Olympics’ closest equivalent to soap opera. In 2002, a judge cheating scandal led to a reform of the entire scoring system. Tonya Harding’s sabotage of Nancy Kerrigan before the ‘92 Olympics a...

Should Wolves be the fans’ favorite to finish in the top four?
The Premier League might not have much of a title race at the moment (a lot is going to have go right for Liverpool and a lot wrong for City to change that), but it’s relegation fight will be, to quote Jim Ross, “A Saturday night on payday weekend in Muskogee.”...

Joe Cool after the loss
Not many outside of Southern Ohio have seen a year No. 3 from Joe Burrow as a starting quarterback. He never started a game in his three seasons at Ohio State and had two superb years at LSU. His second year taking the mantle of the Cincinnati Bengals ended with a 23-20 loss in Super Bowl LVI to the...

Raheem Morris is the latest Black coordinator to win a Super Bowl who did not get a head coaching job
Raheem Morris got a bonus, but he won’t be getting a promotion....

Rooting for Stafford because ‘Burrow will be back’ is a dangerous game
There are a lot of good reasons to cheer for both sides in this Super Bowl. Perhaps you like the underdog story of the Bengals so you cheer for them. Maybe you like the incredible career arc of Matthew Stafford so you’re opting for the Rams. It could be the emergence of Joe Burrow, the greatness of ...

Grab your Detroit Rams gear while it’s still relevant
Matt Stafford leading the Rams this Sunday is the closest that Detroit has ever been to being in a Super Bowl — and some fans are embracing that fact more than others. ...

Lindsey Jacobellis and Nick Baumgartner’s gold is more than Super
Lindsey Jacobellis’ gold medal, 16 years after she stumbled to silver in Turin, and after three other Olympic disappointments, was a good enough story on its own, but now it’s even better....

Hey NFL awards voters, you forgot Nick Bosa
For the first time in several years, I don’t think anyone was too upset with any of the award recipients during the NFL Honors ceremony last night. Sure, some salty Packers fans might be upset that Tennessee’s Mike Vrabel won Coach of the Year — just as I predicted I might add — but aside from that,...

When a Super Bowl is in town, the unhoused are unwelcome
LOS ANGELES — If you saw Eugene at a Chevron station or a 7-Eleven in Los Angeles, at first glance you might not notice anything out of the ordinary. He is a Black man with a dark complexion clear enough in the early evening light that some might ask for his skincare routine. He’s under 6 feet tall,...

Lia Thomas wins right to compete at NCAA Championships
Since University of Pennsylvania senior Lia Thomas crushed her competition at the Zippy Invitational with the nation’s fastest times in the 200- and 500-yard freestyle, she became a cause célèbre in the crosshairs of the NCAA’s latest transgender athletes brouhaha....

Enough of the Super Teams, it’s all Killer Bs
NFL America should root for the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday....

Top 10 Super Bowl one-hit wonders
We all know Tom Brady, Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, and Roger Staubach. People like them made a name for themselves by coming up big in the Super Bowl on numerous occasions. Their ability to stay calm and play phenomenal football on the game’s biggest stage is what made them all-time NFL greats, but...

Possible Super Bowl one-hit wonders
The Super Bowl is the most covered single sporting event on the American sporting calendar every year. No pregame leaf unturned by the gaggle of broadcast and print media, tugging at the heartstrings of even the most jaded sports fans. There’s going to be a package about how Bengals quarterback Joe ...

A Matt Stafford victory is a win for all mid-career professionals
During the summer of 2006, I was a fledgling student journalist baking under the blistering sun at a preseason practice at UGA, capturing B-Roll of a fellow pimply-faced true freshman from Texas. The quarterback phenom was about to be the talk of the SEC. Matthew Stafford’s singular talent created r...