et Page 2313 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jim Boeheim Hates Your Guts
In the type of game that gets us so freaking excited for the tournament next week we almost wet ourselves, Syracuse pretty much just clinched a NCAA tournament big by beating No. 1 Connecticut 86-84. The key, not surprisingly, was guard Gerry McNamara, who had 13 assists and hit a huge 3-pointer t...

Four Tiny Tidbits On: The Athletics
We re less than a month from Opening Day, so it s time to start previewing the season. Inspired by an old feature on The Black Table, we re going team-by-team and distributing Four Things You Don t Know about them. If you have suggested oddities on your team, send them to us at [email protected]. ...

Ah, Duke Girls
We've been enjoying Sports Illustrated On Campus' new section that features college students — including our own Jenn Sterger — writing columns, but, frankly, we're really glad they didn't have this feature when we were in college. We would have assuredly tried to write something for it, and had w...

Online March Madness Sure To Be Maddening
We were hesitant to even mention this to you — for purely selfish reasons — but you've surely heard about it anyway: The NCAA Tournament will be available On Demand on your computer for free this Thursday, all games, streaming onto your desktop. That's great, right? We mean, that's the American dr...

The Final Four Sleeps With The Fishes
Fascinating story in The New York Times this morning; an economist postulates that, in college basketball, point shaving takes place in about 5 percent of all games with big spreads. The economist, Justin Wolfers from the University of Pennsylvania, has collected results from nearly 16 years of co...

Revisiting A Truly Great Prank
We did a very brief bit on this a couple of days ago, but we didn't give it nearly enough of a heads-up, since, frankly, it's one of the best examples of fan subterfuge we've ever seen....

Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Rosie DiManno
We don't know what the Canadian eqivalent is of the Navy SEALS, but whatever agency trains underwater commandos in the Great White North probably has Rosie DiManno on their payroll. It takes strong lung capacity to read a DiManno column — even silently. Try this typical passage (warning: take a la...

Bruce Pearl Coaches Crackheads. Yeah! Take That!
As longtime readers know, we never miss an opportunity to knock around Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl. We know this isn't fair — he's a great coaching story, he's done a great job and the man is a world champion sweater — but Bruce Pearl's fate was sealed with us back in the early '90s when he was an...

Who's Got Bracket Fever?
We're just five days away from Selection Sunday — which, in combination with the season premiere of "The Sopranos," is pretty much more fun than any day should be allowed to be — and we're still working on our big NCAA Tournament Project. (All teams remain signed up for. Honestly, you guys rule.)...

Myles Brand Makes Himself Richer
The Wizard Of Odds brings us a little bit of info we hadn't heard about: NCAA president Myles Brand made $870,000 in compensation last year. That's a figure that's higher than what a single public university president makes. And they actually pay the people who make them all their money....

We've Got Spirit, Yes We Doooooooooo ...
College cheerleading, an object of ridicule since it was discovered that our President did it, has new respect in our eyes. Southern Illinois basketball cheerleader Kristi Yamaoka, who fell 15 feet off of the top of a human pyramid onto her head on Sunday, suffered a chipped neck vertebra and a co...

Remembering Kirby Puckett
As you've surely heard by now, Twins Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett died last night at the age of 45. Puckett was a player who was impossible to dislike; he played baseball the way we all imagine we would, if we had the chance. His post-retirement career was smeared by Frank Deford's famous Sports Il...

Athletes Know Their Bodies Better Than Anyone
We're no experts on matters of human gestation, but we have to say, we were pretty amazed to hear this story: A New Mexico girls basketball player, called a "star" by local observers, scored six points (two 3-pointers) only hours before giving birth....

Gammons And Morgan: A Team For The Ages
We're not sure if this will make the folks at Fire Joe Morgan leap in bliss or slip into madness, but it appears everybody's soul-crushing Sunday Night Baseball analyst Joe Morgan is gonna have some company in the booth this year: Peter Gammons....

Coach K Fights The Man, Man
We hope everyone enjoyed somewhat well-publicized loss to North Carolina on Saturday. You know who really enjoyed it? The media. You might not have known this, but Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has uncovered the wretched, worldwide anti-Duke bias in the media....

Ashley Cole Is Not A Rear Gunner
Ashley Cole, soccer star for Arsenal (known to cool people as the "Gunners") and England, is suing a couple of London newspapers for alleging that he was involved in a gay orgy. Cole is pictured there with his fianc , pop singer Cheryl Tweedy, who is smoking hot....

Kirby Puckett Suffers Stroke
I've gotta bring you some sad news to bring you this afternoon. The Minnesota Twins have announced that hall of fame centerfielder Kirby Puckett has suffered a stroke and is undergoing surgery in Arizona....

Eagles, Bruins, Racers Do The Dance Of Joy
Congratulations go out to Winthrop, Belmont, and Murray State for becoming the second, third, and fourth teams to get themselves into the NCAA Tournament. We won't know until next week if any of them are getting #1 seeds, though....

College Basketball Games Worthy Of Just One Network
Observe as I attempt to do this without using the b-word that rhymes with "stubble."...

Authors With Pure Hearts: Will Blythe
We've taken some time off from the Authors With Pure Hearts series, but we gleefully return with Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever, a hysterical, slightly crazed book about what it means to hate so much that it becomes purifying. In the case of Blythe, born and bred in North Car...