george Page 23 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

IDIOT OF THE YEAR 2021: Party rolls on with Gerrit Cole, John Stockton, and Mark Davis
Happy holidays, you filthy animals, and welcome to Deadspin’s annual IDIOT OF THE YEAR extravaganza. Within these hallowed slides are 50 of the year’s least bearable dorks, whose transgressions range from “just kinda silly,” to “dangerously stupid,” to “Trevor Bauer.”...

The Coach Prime Predicament: Why Deion Sanders’ success at Jackson State is a slippery slope for HBCUs
Being a controversial figure that evicts strong emotions on both sides of the coin is what Deion Sanders has always been the best at — outside of shutting down your favorite wide receiver. From his playing days to his past and current job as a coach/leader of young athletes, Sanders’ resume shows a ...

The NBA once led sports in defending COVID — now it’s getting dunked on and crossed over by the virus
Last year, between the Bubble and a season full of mandates that included no fans, or only the vaccinated ones, the NBA did a pretty good job at protecting their league against COVID-19. ...

Amanda Nunes became the latest big favorite to get Buster Douglassed
Julianna Peña put on the performance of a lifetime on Saturday night at UFC 269. Few predicted that she had a chance against UFC women’s flyweight and bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, a woman with hands of sheet metal. Nunes had dispatched of her last 12 opponents dating back to 2015. This includ...

Replicating Pickett’s fake slide? No Ken do
If you liked Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett’s fake slide on the way to a 58-yard touchdown run in the ACC championship game last week, you’ll need to savor it, because you’re not going to see it again....

Pac-12 commissioner accurately refers to CFB scheduling games years in advance as ‘insane’
The new Pac-12 commissioner is ready to shake up college football scheduling, and thank God he is. George Kliavkoff entered the world of college sports just this summer, so maybe it’s his outsider perspective that’s allowing him to think outside the box, but he has put forward the suggestion that pe...

5 totally realistic trade destinations for Damian Lillard
Any rational Trail Blazers fan would avoid watching the team right now. Damian Lillard, C.J. McCollum, and Anfernee Simons are all injured. ESPN.com’s promotion for its Portland-Golden State matchup Wednesday is a “Top five Lillard trades they’d love to see” article, and a clip of Stephen A. Smith s...

CJ and Dame have been fun, but if the Blazers want to salvage this season it’s time to say bye to McCollum
It’s far from all CJ McCollum’s fault the Portland Trail Blazers are struggling, and currently the 10th seed in the Western Conference with an 11-14 record. His field goal and free throw percentages are down, but he’s still averaging 20.6 points per game and shooting nearly 40 percent from the 3-poi...

Russell Westbrook is tired of hearing about his alleged phone call to Kawhi Leonard in the summer of 2019
The Lakers’ Russell Westbrook-LeBron James experiment hasn’t exactly worked out how everyone in Los Angeles had hoped coming into the season. But if Westbrook had been able to persuade Kawhi Leonard to bring him along on his way to LA a couple of years ago, Westbrook would have been a Clipper and no...

Who needs D? Not the NHL
“The best defense is a good offense.” — George Washington — Michael Jordan...

These are not your daddy’s showtime Lakers
As one of the cornerstone franchises in the NBA, it’s a rarity to see a Los Angeles Lakers game bumped from a scheduled National television slot the day before that game. But that’s what’s happened to the Lakers-Clippers matchup that was set to tip-off Friday night on ESPN. Instead, we get the remat...

Now that you’re probably sick of those leftovers and I have your attention, I have some dark horse Super Bowl contenders for you
Happy late Turkey Day. I hope those who enjoy Christmas music were at least able to hold out until after the Thanksgiving meal. ...

I’m almost free
When you’re a fan of a team, you can’t really identify some threshold or benchmark before you know a coach will be fired. You can say before a season that this record wouldn’t be good enough, but you can never be sure, especially when it comes to the Chicago Bears. After all, all of us Bears fans we...

LaMonte Wade Jr. got an MVP vote? Explain yourself
Come here. Sit down. Let’s have a talk. I’m not angry, just disappointed....

Every player can’t be the MVP, so let’s stop chanting it at everybody
There’s a growing trend that’s gained too much momentum lately in arenas around the NBA. Fans chanting “MVP” for any player that gives even a halfway decent performance on a given night. This isn’t meant to discourage fans from chanting, but I’m only asking if we can think of something more suited f...

Marcus Stroman cuts the Yankees instead of his hair
The Yankees’ policy on personal appearance has long been worthy of mockery, and mockery it has received, for decades, going back to Don Mattingly’s appearance on The Simpsons, when Montgomery Burns kept telling the first baseman to cut his sideburns....

The NBA future is... WOWZA!
The NBA has never felt younger and more reliant on up-and-coming stars than it does today. Teams are beginning to utilize the draft more and more. We’ve seen plenty of tank-a-thons by teams in the last five years, and these efforts have panned out to varying degrees. For some, it has materialized in...

Steve Ballmer has done it this time, giving Clippers fans money to cheer
It took seven years, but Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has finally resorted to paying fans....

Mets searching for that elusive GM who likes big market, big stage
Mets team president Sandy Alderson offered up a Michael Scott-ism on Tuesday to explain why his team hasn’t been able to hire a general manager yet, saying their greatest strength — massive market — also is their greatest weakness....

Drumming up some interest: Boilermaker coach making a name for himself with upsets
Outside of Ohio State, it’s hard to definitively say what’s real and what’s Iowa in the Big 10. The conference has had six teams ranked in the top 10 — Penn State twice, Iowa twice, Michigan and Michigan State — lose over the past five weeks. Two of those six upsets have come at (and due to) the han...