fl Page 303 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Fixing MLB's Broken Economics Is About More Than Free Agency<em></em>
There have been a number of significant hints that MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association are headed for some very combative collective bargaining in 2021, but the two sides being willing to talk about economics ahead of schedule will stand out to anyone who has ever been through thi...
The Women Who Nod At Death And Say <i>Let's Go</i>
BULVERDE, Texas — Bronc riders’ bodies are wreckage sites, but they are also evidence of lucky streaks on the roulette wheel of survival. Daryl McElroy’s body is like that. He has broken too many bones to remember. He has fractured more lumbar vertebrae than not and come perilously close to rupturin...
AAF Majority Owner Tom Dundon Threatens To Fold League If NFL's Union Doesn't Help Him Out
Alliance of American Football majority owner Tom Dundon told USA Today that his league might have to fold after only one season without more direct support from the NFL. Dundon, who also owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, specifically called out the NFL Players Association for not pushing more youn...
Baseball Will Outlive These Complaints Too
When His Exalted Malignancy Magary I churned out his latest Funbag under the headline “Would You Rather Be Born Old Or Die Young?” I thought of baseball, and how it has become this new battleground for the end of one generation at the neglectful hands of the next. That’s the New Narrative, ladles an...
The Best Way To See America Is To Visit Every Last Minor League Ballpark
Not long after the 2017 World Series ended in a dogpile of happy Houston Astros, Bart Wilhelm began planning his first big trip of the 2018 season. For more than half a decade, Wilhelm has been “chasing” Minor League ballparks, with the goal of attending a game in all 159 of them. Wilhelm began the ...
The 2019 NFL Coaches' Class Photo Features Matching Grudens And A Smiling Bill Belichick
Twenty-six head coaches showed up for the class photo at this week’s NFL meetings in Phoenix. Look at all those bright, squinting faces! (Here’s the hi-res version.) This year’s absences: Bruce Arians, Pete Carroll, Sean Payton, Mike Tomlin, Adam Gase, and Sean McVay, who said he didn’t mean to miss...
How Much Longer Will Baseball Stadiums Be For Baseball Fans?
MLB’s attendance, you might have heard, was down last year, around four percent by season’s end. The league’s front office, represented by anthropomorphized wet blanket Rob Manfred, has operated under the assumption that pace of play is the issue, arguing that “putting the best entertainment product...
NFL Owners Vote To Make Pass Interference Calls And Non-Calls Reviewable
That replay review would be expanded to include pass interference ahead of the 2019-2020 NFL season seemed inevitable. The question, then, was whether it would be expanded in such a way that it could hope to address the kind of situation that befouled the NFC Championship game in January, when the S...
Ah Jeez, The Video Of UCF's Locker Room After Losing To Duke Is Heartbreaking
UCF was so, so close to upsetting Duke in Sunday’s second-round game, but the Knights fell, 77-76, and were instantly, visibly crushed by how they lost. (As Aubrey Dawkins’s putback attempt rimmed out and time expired, you can see Terrell Allen, No. 2, put his hands on his head as he falls to the fl...
Did Le'Veon Bell Make The Right Decision?
The Le’Veon Bell contract saga was always going to be about much more than Le’Veon Bell. Bell refused to play the 2018 season on a second franchise tag—after passing on a long-term contract offer from the Steelers that would have made him the league’s highest-paid running back, but was short on full...
WrestleMania 35 Will Feature First-Ever Women's Main Event
The last time WrestleMania was in East Rutherford, in 2013, there wasn’t even a women’s match on the card. Six years later, WrestleMania is back in New Jersey, and this time three women will make history as part of the first-ever women’s main event of wrestling’s biggest show, as WWE announced on Mo...
The NFL Isn't Quite Sure How To Fix Pass Interference
The NFL acknowledges that pass interference is kind of a mess. Not only is it perhaps the most subjective of judgment calls officials are asked to make, but the very nature of it—often with more than five or 10 or even 15 yards in the balance—means it has the potential to swing games more than any o...
Mike Smith Flopped So Hard His Mask Flew Off
Calgary Flames goalie Mike Smith is no stranger to the fine art of flopping, but when you really want a call to go your way, you can’t just flail your arms and hope an official notices. Sometimes, you have to up your game and add some practical effects, like Smith did towards the end of Saturday’s g...
The Ja Morant Show Is Over—For Now
Ja Morant had an absurd season. He averaged around 24 points, 6 boards and 10 assists a game. ...
Mike Francesa Makes Statement Regarding Outright Lies, Outrageous Misinformation
At 3:12 p.m. on Saturday, Mike Francesa was watching Wofford lose to Kentucky. We know this because he was analyzing the game as only the surly monarch of sports talk radio can—by burping some lordly and not especially insightful analysis onto his Twitter timeline....
Everyone Fell For Robert Kraft's "Apology" <em></em>
In a vague and carefully worded statement that sounds like a mea culpa but is decidedly not, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft today made his first public comments since he was charged last month with two counts of solicitation in connection with a prostitution sting in Florida....
As I Lay Me Down To Sleep, I Pray For Liberty To Freaking Lose
In case you missed it, your bracket probably got a little worse last night thanks to Liberty University’s upset 80-76 win over Mississippi State. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s infamously strict and alarmingly retrograde university won its first game ever in the NCAA tournament ever and I, for one, am praying ...
The 7 Laws Of Vaportecture, Stadium Art's Fever Dream
For sports team owners seeking new stadiums or arenas—which is to say, for sports team owners—there are certain tools of the trade at their disposal for convincing fans and politicians to support (and pay for) a new building. They have economic impact studies, ideally compiled by friendly consultant...
Let's Remember Some Guys: NFL Legends Of The '90s
As business challenges go, Everyone Wants To Buy Our Shit For Some Reason is a pretty good one to face. And yet, when presented with that challenge/“challenge” in the early 1990s, every trading card company absolutely duffed it in more or less the same way. Adults—not annoying booger-y fan-kids but ...
NFL Competition Committee Recommends Subjecting Another Several Parts Of The Game To Replay Review
The NFL Competition Committee, headed by Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay and totally coincidentally including New Orleans head coach Sean Payton, recommended an expansion of replay review today, addressing among other things exactly the circumstance that recently screwed the Saints and sent the...