championship Page 11 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Behold, the magic of the Blue Jays' face-plant!
It’s been a wonky season for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was supposed to be the one where they leaped from just a playoff team to AL East titan. Didn’t work out. Part of it is that Alek Manoah started throwing wiffle balls. Another part is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power went to the zoo for most of...

Name something dumber than Jay Norvell talking smack about Deion Sanders
This week, ESPN’s College GameDay is setting up shop in Boulder, Colo., for Prime University’s cakewalk contest against Colorado State. Colorado are 23-point favorites, but the Worldwide Leader needs a reason to hop onto the Deion bandwagon before it loses steam once the schedule toughens up. Even b...

The NBA can try all it wants, player rest is impossible to stop
Remember when the Dallas Mavericks concluded an embarrassing 2022-23 season by not dressing Kyrie Irving and Luka Dončić instead of attempting to qualify for the Play-in Tournament? The Mavericks were fined $750,000, and I think that the NBA reached a breaking point in its never-ending saga of star-...

The Astros are just going to win again, aren't they?
There’s been a lot to get excited about in the American League, and a lot of new....

Can the Detroit Lions live up to all the hype around them this season?
The Detroit Lions enter the 2023 NFL season on a wild hype train of high hopes and expectations after finishing strong last year, winning five of their final six games. Jared Goff looked like Detroit’s quarterback of the future, and Dan Campbell proved that he’s much more than a barbaric man who wan...

College football is back, and Nebraska is still gonna suck
The obsession with college football led to the creation of “Week 0” and it’s an American oxymoron to which no one will object. The tribalism compared to the NFL’s fandom spreading to every corner of the country that comes with having a longer season – that will only get longer next season with the e...

Maybe Noah Lyles was right about the NBA after all
The NBA announced Wednesday morning that the Dallas Mavericks will take on Euro League champions Real Madrid in a preseason exhibition on Oct. 10 in Spain. It isn’t unusual for the NBA to send teams to other countries for games before the start of the regular season, but this announcement’s timing ...

Green Bay’s patience with Jordan Love should make Trey Lance envious
Green Bay took the Jordan Year literally. Early in 2023, general manager Brian Gutekunst read all the stars and tea leaves, glanced at Aaron Rodgers’ advancing age — not to mention his diminishing mobility and prima donna behavior — and named the Packers’ latest first-round QB pick, Jordan Love, as ...

If Noah Lyles is confused about NBA superiority, he should buy a ticket to the Rondae Hollis-Jefferson show
You would think Team USA gold medalists would stick together. Instead, the newly crowned fastest man in the world, Noah Lyles wasted his coronation at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest by dumping on the NBA. More specifically, he took aim at the National Basketball Association taking the...

On its biggest stage ever at Wembley, AEW was its AEW-est
AEW took its big shot Sunday, putting on their first-ever stadium show and their first show in the UK at Wembley Stadium. It’s impossible to define what success would be for the show, other than selling a ton of tickets, which they did. Overall, the show was great, while also being everything else A...

Predicting the AEW All In London card
All Elite Wrestling’s first show in the United Kingdom was supposed to be in July 2020. Due to obvious reasons, that didn’t happen. It took three years for AEW to finally run a show in England, but what a way for them to make a debut, with one of the largest crowds in professional wrestling history ...

Trey Lance ends up behind Mr. Irrelevant, Jets draft bust on 49ers depth chart
Kyle Shanahan has been watching Trey Lance practice for three years. He knows a great deal more about the young man than I ever will. If Shanahan is willing to write off the loss of first-round draft picks in 2022 and 2023, and be done with Lance on the San Francisco 49ers, he must certainly have a ...

Sha’Carri Richardson had a <i>Rocky III</i> moment at 23 years old
Sha’Carri Richardson was on her way to becoming a rock star after the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2021. With the COVID delay, the upcoming Olympics were lacking enthusiasm and good stories. Richardson was on her way to Tokyo with a novel, but was not able to go due to a positive cannabis test. She went o...

Russell Wilson, Dak Prescott, and the NFL players facing a make-or-break year
One thing we love about the NFL is all the storylines that carry over from one season to the next and those that are created during the offseason. Whether we’re asking if this is the year Dak Prescott finally gets Dallas over the hump or if Jordan Love has what it takes to make Green Bay forget abou...

Women’s World Cup Day 23: It’s (probably) coming home to England
Sam Kerr got her first start of the World Cup. Possibly the best striker on Earth still wasn’t fully fit, but the Chelsea starlet at 80 percent is better than most in prime form. The Australian juggernaut scored one of the best goals of the tournament in the 63rd minute with her club teammate, Milli...

Niners could be in for a bumpy ride on their QB carousel
Championship urgency is more real in the NFL than in any other sport. When that window is open, teams have to climb up the ladder and jump in like Sam in Clarissa Explains it All. Any hesitation and soon that hard salary cap will not allow a contending team to satisfy every talented player who deser...

The 2023 Basketball Hall of Fame class represents 40 years of growth in the sport
The way that the NBA game is currently played — the spacing, position fluidity, the resting of stars during the regular season — all of that and more has been in the works for 20 years. Prioritizing 3-point shooting to maximize room for drivers and post players did not start and end with Mike D’Anto...

World Cup Day 21: This tournament will be remembered for how far the women’s game has come
We have our final four. When you get this deep into a tournament, anyone who’s not seen as chalk has done something grand, like Morocco’s men’s team last year and Colombia’s women’s team would’ve been this year. The South Americans entered as the lone surprise to make the quarterfinals. They benefit...

The power brokers of the ACC (and NC State) are against their own self-interest?
At first glance, the ACC leaning against adding Cal and Stanford is one of logic and tradition. Four brave institutions are standing tall, spitting in the face of realignment, and shouting “We’re not for sale!” Then you look at who those four schools are — Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina, and...

The Bengals had better hope Joe Burrow doesn’t have one of those NBA strains
Super Bowl Championship expectations are rare for the Cincinnati Bengals. Before Ja’Marr Chase was drafted they hadn’t won a playoff game since Bo Jackson played football. In 2023, the sports books have the Bengals as one of the top-five favorites to win the Super Bowl. However, they are currently d...