ill Page 354 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

South Dakota’s Gov. Kristi Noem wants an anti-trans bill that’s even more anti-trans
It’s not worth pretending, even for a minute, that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem had a sudden change of heart and developed a sense of humanity that led her to reject the state’s anti-trans sports act, House Bill 1217, one of many such initiatives being pushed in Republican-run states....

Urban Meyer might have a point about NFL free agency sucking (really)
Urban Meyer’s derision for the NFL’s free agency process seems like easy fodder, but there’s a lot of truth to his complaint about signing players without meeting them. It’s not good for the players, either, because they wind up making a critical decision about their career without having a full pic...

Oregon’s Sedona Prince lays bare on social media the second-rate conditions of NCAA women’s tourney
Thank you to Sedona Prince for thinking of all of the old folks who aren’t on TikTok and sharing your video on Twitter. As you say, it really does need the attention of a wider audience....

The lie that politicians are seeking to protect women with transgender exclusion bills
Soaring in like a phalanx across state legislatures, this has been the year of bills designed to keep transgender boys and girls from participating in sports....

TAKE THE QUIZ! Here's an 'Elite Eight' trivia questions for NCAA Tourney's opening day
Welcome, welcome. Come on, sit down — you know you’re not leaving your couch for the next four days. The first game tips off in a few hours, which gives you some time to test your Men’s March Madness knowledge. Are you up for the task? We have assembled an “Elite” list of eight questions that you ma...

Which NCAA conference has cut down the most nets since '85 bracket expansion?
Brace yourselves. For once, Carolina and Duke can celebrate together, because the ACC has been the conference of champions since the tournament expanded in 1985. ...

Tanks a lot! Rockets going from 44-28 to 11-28 is putrid, but not most historic NBA drop-off ever
On Feb. 4, the Rockets went to Memphis and beat the Grizzlies by 12 points for their seventh win in eight games, moving to 11-10 for the season. Certainly, Houston was outperforming expectations after trading away James Harden, but nobody knew how bad things were about to get....

Duke? UNC? UConn? Ranking the best NCAA national champs over the past 20 years
Selection Sunday will be the first time we’ve been able to fill out a bracket in two years. A lot has changed since then, especially in college basketball, as it’s been as upside down as the rest of the world is. Juniors and seniors are the biggest draws this season, as only a few freshmen like Okla...

The content you need: Jeff Van Gundy’s cat joins the ESPN broadcast booth
In this era of video conferencing, our personal lives can blend with our professions. You’ve been on Zoom calls where a child interrupts their parent. You’ve been on others where the dog won’t quit yapping, or a cat just… appears. Well, meet Neatsy (is that how you spell it, Jeff?), one of Jeff Van ...

Only people worse than Indianapolis Colts are sports writers who take part in sham press conference
Shame on the Indianapolis Colts. Shame on the NFL. And most of all, shame on the sports writers willing to go along with a bogus press conference....

Top scorers in Tournament include all-time greats and one other guy ...
The list of all-time leading NCAA Tournament scorers is a who’s who of legends. Guys who threw teams on their backs and hacked a trail with a machete to a title. Glen Rice still tops the list with his transcendent performance in 1989, leading Michigan to an unlikely title over Seton Hall. His 184 po...

Deadspin Presents: Our National Champ Bracket of the 32 most recent NCAA Tourney winners
We love a good bracket around here. And not just in March, but especially in March. So we’re paying tribute to the reason we’re doing brackets in the first place with a bracket based on 32 previous brackets....

Stupid ways to fill out your NCAA Tournament bracket
Your well-considered bracket is try-hard garbage. Admit it. With all your esoteric knowledge of basketball — and possibly even due to it — you will inevitably sit slack-jawed in the coming weeks as your “lock” of a team gets melted by a 5-foot-3 point guard from Southwest Rando State University....

The Minnesota Wild have a fun player in Kirill Kaprizov, and suddenly everything seems possible
Even if you’re a hockey fan, it always takes a second to remember that the Minnesota Wild exist and what their jerseys look like. In all of the four major sports, the Wild are the most guy-in-the-work-kitchen that no one really knows. You see him there, he might nod to someone once a month, and then...

Ranking the greatest college basketball championship teams of the 2010s
There are a lot of words you could use to describe a college basketball season that has been wrecked by COVID-19, but the best one is “weird.” Besides the blue bloods of Duke and Kentucky missing the tournament, and North Carolina and Michigan State having subpar years with even lower seeds than usu...

Can properly kicked, as Andy Dalton will not fix a single problem for the Bears
The Chicago Bears are officially the Bad News Bears of the NFL. Their free-agent signing of quarterback Andy Dalton was hardly a solution to this franchise’s ongoing QB dilemma....

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Feast your eyes on some really cool, and really ugly, green uniforms
As everyone knows, the St. Patrick’s Day tradition is to wear green. While Ray Ferraro and the 1989 Hartford Whalers did this for every road game, what can a sports fan pick out of the closet to garner the luck o’ the Irish and avoid the dreaded pinches for those who forget to don the right apparel?...

The best NCAA Tournament performances ever
The NCAA tournament is one of the most captivating sporting events of the year. For an entire month, the world of college basketball takes center stage and the world is introduced to young, new stars trying to make a name for themselves. Many players have had great NCAA tournament performances over ...

Damian Lillard was back on his… whatever voodoo that was… last night
If there’s one thing Twitter is good for, and it might not be, it’s alerting you when you might miss something. The Blazers were down 17 last night to the Pelicans with just six minutes to go. They won by one, thanks to a 25-7 run, in which Damian Lillard was involved in 18 of those points. He finis...

Bill Belichick is your drunk friend at the NFL fantasy draft, hoarding the tight ends
Remember that article I wrote yesterday about Jonnu Smith signing with the Patriots, and how Bill Belichick finally had an athletic tight end to build his offense around again? Well, good ol’ Bill woke up this morning and chose violence, asking himself, “What’s better than one tight end? Two tight e...