il Page 573 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

It pays to have a top target
Do you remember the wide receiver carousel of the offseason? Do you remember when star wideouts were being moved like they were 30-year-old NBA players with a salary-matching contract (looking at you Trevor Ariza)? Do you remember when teams elected not to pay their best pass-catchers because they d...

Geno Smith bucks Broncos, rides into winner's circle
Is Geno Smith back? Or did he finally arrive?...

Get your ‘Let’s Ride’ jokes in now while Russell Wilson is still in the fetal position
The Broncos might end up being good. Russell Wilson didn’t look terrible, the team fumbled on the brink of the endzone multiple times, and receivers who wiggled open got the ball. For one night though, everyone — mostly Seahawks fans — who rolls their eyes at Russ’ well-manicured public image and da...

NFL Week 1 Powerless Ranking: Sloppy play ruled the day
Week 1 of the 2022 NFL season is officially in the books and it’s time to look at the teams that stunk it up. Week 1 gave us plenty of sloppy football to process and some of the teams in this first ranking might surprise you. Then there are the others you probably predicted in the preseason....

2022 Rookie Wide Receiver Ranking Week 1: Washington’s Jahan Dotson doubles up
Last season we did our weekly rookie quarterback tracker, but with only one taken in the first round in 2022, we’ve moved onto another highly coveted position. This season we’ll keep up with all six first-round wide receivers and track their progress throughout the year. In Week 1, we’ve already see...

You get eight months to come up with better than that
There is more that goes into being a head coach of an NFL team than I can possibly imagine. But then, no one’s paying me several million (feel free to though!) to learn all the things it takes and be good at them. Not only do you have to manage the side of the ball that you have been as a coordinato...

Should the Rays, Jays, and Mariners race to the bottom?
We knew the new baseball playoff system, with the addition of a third wildcard team, would create quirks. In a vacuum, it works because all division winners are considered equal. But in reality, where people play the games, they very much are not. Teams are hard to judge on just their record, becaus...

Week 1’s most and least valuable players
Saquon Barkley had never won a season opener in the NFL prior to Sunday. If it weren’t for his 24 touches and 194 yards from scrimmage, Barkley would be starting an NFL season in a 0-1 hole for the fifth time in his career. Instead, Barkley’s high usage day kept the New York Giants afloat in their 2...

Scott Frost was destined to be college football’s ‘Great White Nope’
Scott Frost’s whiteness kept him employed for as long as it could. But, when you suck as bad as he did, even your “All-American” charm can’t save you....

The thing about Barcelona’s wackiness is it just might work… on the field at least
This is where you’d stick the video of Jesse Pinkman screaming, “He can’t keep getting away with it!” That depends on how you’d define “getting away” and also ignore the fact that Jesse was just a whiny loser. But the feeling is familiar to all, the lamentation that there are just some forces or bei...

Falcons coach, not the media to blame
Well, that didn’t take long....

Week 1 Takeaways: The garbage kicking, field-goal missing, place-kicking phenomenon that opened the 2022 NFL season
I firmly believe that I’m not the only person who had a warm feeling all inside the chest region on Sunday. That lovely feeling wasn’t provided by a lovely smelling indica from the dispensary. It came from the reality that the NFL had finally returned....

The WNBA Finals are A’ja Wilson’s to lose
Candace Parker’s repeat bid being squashed by the Connecticut Sun in Friday evening’s winner-take-all Game 5 against the Connecticut Sun was the sort of hoops history-altering that will reverberate more than Queen Elizabeth. Sue Bird is the all-time point god, but her career also arrived at its firm...

There’s losing to Kentucky and Marshall, and then there’s losing to App State and Georgia Southern
The unassuming weeks are always the most dangerous for college football, but especially so early in the season when the rankings are more guesses than earned distinctions. Still though, when you schedule an FCS school and pay them to come play non-conference patsy during homecoming or whatever else,...

Here's what you missed from college football while watching Alabama-Texas
To begin the Saturday marathon of college football most of us were watching the shitshow in Austin that turned into an early Heisman resume builder for defending-award recipient Bryce Young. Plenty of other weird stuff went down in the early window of intercollegiate gridiron. Aside from Alabama, th...

Stephen A. Smith forgets the basics of football
Stephen A. Smith is great television. The way he casually cascades between idioms in an excited, commanding voice is magnificent. I get jealous of his inflection just watching him. That said, he’s also had a series of brain farts that can’t be overlooked. Whether it’s ranting about nonexistent ties ...

Rockies’ C.J. Cron helps baseball beat mountain traffic
C.J. Cron’s rise in Major League Baseball has been slow but steady. He’s 32 and has played for five teams and is in the middle of his second year with the Rockies. He made his first All-Star game this summer. Yet, the biggest, or should I say longest, individual play of his career took place Friday ...

Oh great, they’re letting humanoids play tennis now
The US Open could’ve fizzled out after Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal lost. Casual fans are conditioned to look for those four names when following a Grand Slam. While we weren’t watching for Williams’ pursuit of her 24th Slam, we were still watching for Serena. The men’s bracket was more of the s...

It was Molina and Wainwright, not Pujols, making Cardinals fans verklempt Thursday
The issue I have with nostalgia is it makes people sentimental. Having a deep conversation with anyone is right next to “root canal” on my list of things that I actively avoid. If you’re going to melt into a puddle of tears, I need a 5-foot buffer minimum, and I’m going to slowly back peddle to the ...
