evolution Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

It’s no less a referendum on Neymar — World Cup 2022 Group G preview
This World Cup is setting up as either a treatise or a coronation for Lionel Messi. He recently collected his first major trophy with Argentina — 2021’s Copa America — but still needs the World Cup to stand on the same pedestal as Diego Maradona in most’s eyes. He’s coming to Qatar with unquestionab...

The casual American soccer fan's guide to the best international players ahead of the World Cup
For the fair-weather soccer fan, and let’s be real, that’s 99 percent or more of American sports fans, the World Cup is the one event taking place over multiple weeks where general interest is at a high. The United States men’s national team didn’t make the world’s best 32 in 2018, and a huge chunk ...

AEW always gets away with it
The days of AEW running out “perfect” pay-per-views, where everything hits and the length is manageable, are probably over. The roster has grown to the point where a lot has to go into them, and not all of them are going to be collecting star-ratings like a hoarder. No company has amazing booking th...

Colin Kaepernick may return to the NFL while America asks itself what is it that the police do, exactly
Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance - Mahatma Gandhi...

No, Sasha Banks wouldn’t see AEW as a better opportunity
We’ve all done it the past couple days. Even though it’s pretty much impossible, we’ve all dreamed of WWE executives losing their minds, or Sasha Banks finding some loophole in her contract, and somehow instantly getting out of it. And then at Double Or Nothing, Thunder Rosa successfully defends her...

So what will MLS do about its TV ratings?
When setting up for the current MLS season, which started the last weekend of February, one of the major themes was the league locking in its new TV deal sometime in March. MLS’s TV deal has been paltry when compared to the other sports leagues ($90m a year), and there was a feeling that while the n...

Cody Rhodes got what he wanted, but what’s next?
When you get Cody Rhodes’s entrance at WrestleMania this past weekend — the drawn out silence before to build anticipation, the house lights being cut, importing his elevator through the stage from AEW, and 70,000 people losing their shit, it would be impossible to argue that Cody Rhodes was wrong i...

AEW out-Manias <em>WrestleMania</em>
AEW has been such crazy fun and so ridiculous that it pretty much makes me a hypocrite on a weekly basis. I’ve said, on more than one occasion, that trying to compare AEW and WWE is pointless and a bit too cynical. They’re two different things, even if they’re in the same general industry. And yet y...

Your AEW Revolution Preview
It seems like every time we gather to preview an AEW PPV, we marvel at how it’s the biggest card they’ve put together. I’ve said “Jiminiy Jillikers!” so much the words have lost all meaning! But we can’t help it, as this card is probably as stacked, maybe more so, than September’s “All Out.” I guess...

Centers aren’t extinct, they’ve just evolved
As humans, we tend to eulogize the extinct with reverence. The Dodo Bird. The Rocky Mountain Locust. The Golden Toad. And why wouldn’t we? It was us who eradicated these precious, sentient creatures. Some theorists would argue it had to do with their inability to adapt. But what if things are adapti...

MLS is just silly, and it loves it, apparently
The MLS playoffs concluded their second round last night, with some of its trademark goofiness. And in true nothing-means-anything fashion of the whole league, both No. 1 seeds failed to win a game....

AEW must not confuse bloat with genius
Because I know how hardcore AEW fans get, and I’m one of them, let me get this out of the way at the top. I do not think Saturday night’s Full Gear PPV was bad. Far from it. It was good. Maybe even very good. And any show that ends with the culmination of the two-year Hangman Page storyline is by de...

The New England Revs are going to set the league points record, and they’re not going to play any defense to do it
While MLS still has its fair share of issues, the one thing you have to give it credit for is that during the regular season, the league rewards teams that just say, “Fuck it, it’s free cake.” They don’t generally live on in history, because wonky defensive teams get found out by the extremely callo...

Britt Baker match finally gives AEW a signature moment in its women’s division
For the past few weeks, or months, the frustration with AEW among some fans had begun to be unavoidable. The ignoring or dismissal of the women’s division was becoming too much, and it was impossible to watch an episode of “Dynamite” and not count the segments that could have, and should have, been ...

The Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, in all the best ways
They actually went through with it....

Daryl Morey got a new job, but he still hasn’t addressed his Hong Kong tweet
Daryl Morey is Teflon....

Five Years Later, Sasha Banks vs. Bayley is Still the Gold Standard
It’s SummerSlam weekend in the WWE, essentially serving as its calendar’s counterpoint to Wrestlemania. It’s almost at the opposite end of the year, and it’s seen as the show and weekend for the “real fans,” whereas ’Mania is seen as for the masses. Included in this weekend’s festivities is NXT’s 30...

Five Years On, Wrestling Women’s Evolution Has Come Far, Still Has Far To Go
Last night marked the five-year anniversary of WWE’s “Women’s Evolution,” the night they called up Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks and Charlotte to the main roster and decided they were going to completely alter their women’s division. It was the culmination of the #GiveDivasAChance movement, which had spa...

Zlatan Assists Zlatan For A Typically Stupendous Zlatan Bicycle Kick Goal
Zlatan Ibrahimović has been consistently Zlataning since coming to MLS, scoring 32 goals in 38 games, but it’s been a while since his last truly memorable Zlatan moment. Possibly in recognition of this relative drought, Zlatan pulled off a spectacular Zlatan on Sunday, with a Zlatan-y sequence of sk...

"Evolution" Was The Night WWE's Women Deserved. It Also Kicked Ass.
WWE Evolution started with a bang and ended in a torrent of cheers on the same Sunday night, but the promotion’s first-ever all-women’s pay-per-view event began in earnest some time before that. At a match in Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Sports City Tennis Stadium last December, Alexa Bliss and Sasha Banks, bo...