leg Page 50 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Mike Babcock sets a land speed record for being fired for being Mike Babcock
It has to be asked what did the Columbus Blue Jackets think they were going to get by hiring Mike Babcock? ...

Lack of parity in college football playoff system has made the whole thing a bore
Entering the 10th and final year of the 4-team College Football Playoff, we have a 2-time defending national champion in Georgia, who is one of only five teams to win a title in the post-BCS era. It’s been an oversaturation at the top with the same teams playing in the most important games of the y...

Ben Shelton's moment has arrived
I went to the US Open last night. First time inside Arthur Ashe Stadium and on the grounds in Flushing. It was also my first professional tennis event since attending the semifinals of the 2003 Legg Mason Tennis Classic and watching Andre Agassi lose in a third-set tiebreaker. The US Open dangles be...

College football on Labor Day has always been a sick joke
Labor Day Weekend serving as the official kickoff for college football is still the biggest oxymoron in sports. For decades, college football was the most abhorrent, openly accepted form of free labor. Unlike their basketball counterparts, NFL-caliber athletes are forced to push themselves through t...

NIL and the reckoning of college athletics
When you give someone an inch to placate their desire for a mile, don’t be surprised when they still ask for a mile. For college football players and other student-athletes, name, image, and likeness deals were not the final step in fixing the flawed system that is college athletics, but rather a fi...

The ACC is the least powerful Power 4 Conference — even with Cal, Stanford, SMU
It’s better to be proactive than reactive, right? Unless you consider what the Atlantic Coast Conference is already doing to be reactive, scraping up the leftovers from the Pac-12 Conference instead of having enough power in the college athletics landscape to attract more lucrative schools of their ...

It’s Georgia’s schedule vs. the field this college football season
It’s abnormally weird for the University of Georgia to be odds-on national title favorites. I’m not saying Kirby Smart’s group is unworthy — they won the past two College Football Playoffs, and appear to be every bit the juggernaut Vegas thinks they are. It simply takes a beat for perception to catc...

College football is back, and Nebraska is still gonna suck
The obsession with college football led to the creation of “Week 0” and it’s an American oxymoron to which no one will object. The tribalism compared to the NFL’s fandom spreading to every corner of the country that comes with having a longer season – that will only get longer next season with the e...

Newcomers at USC, Notre Dame could impact College Football Playoff
Notre Dame and USC both debuted Saturday, and with it, a couple roster additions who could alter the playoff picture this season. Wake Forest transfer Sam Hartman had as many touchdowns as incompletions (four) for the Irish during a 42-3 romp over Navy in Ireland. Trojan true freshman Zachariah Bran...

Just give Reggie Bush his Heisman Trophy back
The court of public opinion cleared Reggie Bush of any wrongdoing years ago, but that still doesn’t put the Heisman back in his hands. The long-retired running back is now planning to sue the NCAA and ESPN for defamation of character surrounding the reporting of the alleged improper benefits that le...

Big Ten athletes should be on the hunt for NIL deals with airlines
Soon, Big Ten teams from the Midwest and East Coast will have a “West Coast road trip,” like they do in the pros, and vice versa. But unlike professional athletes, these players won’t be getting compensated for their “jobs,” and some of them will be on commercial airplanes as they fly across the cou...

Stanford is the most vulnerable school in college athletics because of conference realignment
The domino effect of Oklahoma and Texas leaving the Big 12 for the SEC (leading to the dismantling of the Pac-12 two years later) is a turn of events that would’ve been nearly impossible to predict. The catalyst for the Power Five’s west coast entry point being almost no more wasn’t UCLA and USC tra...

Conference realignment, NIL deals, and the end of loyalty in college sports
The recently prophesied collapse of college athletics is being attributed to the transfer portal, and name, image, and likeness deals. The chaos caused by player movement and an unregulated free market has caught the eye of politicians, quick to offer assistance with a handout for universities that ...

NIL deals are flawed, but Tommy Tuberville is not the solution
The latest proposed “bipartisan” piece of federal legislation to regulate name, image, and likeness deals for college athletes is being roundly applauded by the NCAA, the college coach-turned-senator who proposed it, other college football coaches, Power Five conferences, and a bunch of people who s...

Patrice Bergeron was your favorite player’s favorite player
When Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young in 2010 while his record was only 13-12, it was seen as something of a first strike for the new way of analyzing baseball. There was no question that Hernandez was the best pitcher in the AL that year, he had a 7-WAR season for fuck’s sake, but the fact that for...

The NFL’s program for diversity in sports medicine is something this league finally got right
Doing right by diversity isn’t in the NFL’s DNA. But their venture with the league’s Physicians Society (NFLPS) and the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (PFATS) is a great diagnosis. ...

Only one thing is going to fix college athletics, and it’s not Congress
There’s a problem facing college athletics that cannot be solved by the NCAA, the courts, the states, or the conferences. This immoral predicament of the greatest consequence — unregulated name, image, and likeness money — can only be solved by Congressional oversight, according to SEC commissioner ...

Dak Prescott calls his shot — but do his words ring hollow?
The 2023 NFL season is right around the corner, with the start of training camps just days away. As usual, there are plenty of storylines for fans to follow all over the league, and of course, “America’s Team” is never lacking in that department. As if there wasn’t enough pressure on the Dallas Cowb...

Women's World Cup Group F Preview: Can happiness buy France the whole thing?
Sadly, the story for a lot of teams in this World Cup are those taking the field in spite, or directly to spite, their FAs. Canada, Spain, England, Nigeria, Haiti don’t even complete the list of teams that are having problems with their governing organizations as they enter the biggest tournament in...

NCAA treating violations with the leniency of a Boulder beat cop on 4/20
The University of Tennessee was hit with an $8 million fine, among other penalties, on Friday for “hundreds” of NCAA violations. Former coach Jeremy Pruitt and his staff committed north of 200 infractions, and while pretty much all of them weren’t a huge deal individually, when you rattle them off i...