media Page 50 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Petros Papadakis Hams It Up

The Challenge with Fred Roggin is a Southern California post-game institution—something like a localized George Michael’s Sports Machine on ketamine and offering prizes to viewers—so here’s co-host Petros Papadakis celebrating the end of the season with a pig. I can’t really explain this, and it get...

Owning It

Reports: ESPN College Football Playoff Game Ratings Went Into Toilet [UPDATES]

Three months of annoying, Kimmel-led promos and awkward corporate tie-ins weren’t enough to keep ESPN’s college football playoff semifinal TV ratings from plummeting on a New Year’s Eve, the traditions of which have never featured watching college football at home....

ESPN Promo For Cotton Bowl Semifinal Features Michigan, Not Michigan State

ESPN has gone all-in on its Latin American programming strategy, with today’s college football semifinals airing on ESPN Deportes, a Deportes simulcast on ESPN2, and on the main ESPN in Mexico. Unfortunately, some confusion still reigns as you can see in this promo that ran on Deportes (and ESPN2) d...

“I’ve sat for months on end waiting for any assignment while I watched other Fox reporters working almost daily throughout the last year. It feels punitive, as if I did something wrong. I didn’t.” Colleen Dominguez writes about her age and gender discrimination lawsuit against Fox Sports. [San Diego...

Even Disney Jr. Can't Escape The College Football Playoff Cross-Branding

We noted last night that ESPN corporate parent Disney shoved a bunch of hilariously bad references to the college football playoff games on New Year’s Eve into yesterday’s episode of General Hospital. Commenter JortReform noted that even Disney Jr. had been running tie-in promos, and we caught one o...

One Of ESPN's "Hot Topics" Is A Football Game That Does Not Exist

Midway through tonight’s Russell Athletic Bowl, ESPN’s Mike Patrick introduced a sponsored segment intending to highlight the biggest stories in college football. One of these, strangely, was a game that did not happen....

Remembering Paul Gallico, The Sportswriter Who Hated Women But Was Okay With Nazis

For all her occasional beauty and unquestioned courage, there has always been something faintly ridiculous about the big-time lady athletes.—Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport, 1937...

CNN's Poppy Harlow Passes Out Live On-Air

Poppy Harlow’s Monday isn’t going so well; the CNN anchor passed out live on the air, returning after several minutes with the explanation that “I got a little hot and I passed out for a moment”:...

"WHERE'D THE BALL GO!??"

It’s a bright, sunny day in El Paso for today’s Sun Bowl, where the snow is coming down so hard the ball is disappearing:...

NFL Network Pregame Show Is Totally Blazed

We can only guess that Eisen & Co. have caught a whiff of a nearby stoner in Oakland as tonight’s NFL Network pregame devolved into a festival of giggles and Up In Smoke jokes. (Steve Mariucci is our favorite.)...

The Worst American Sportswriting Of 2015

As we’ve noted before, sportswriting tends to follow what you might call the Anna Karenina Principle. The good stuff—the stuff that makes year-end lists like Longreads’s and Richard Deitsch’s—is all, on a certain level, the same, similarly structured long profile after similarly structured long prof...

Great Moments In NBA Color Commentary

Color commentator Glenn Consor came up from the rear of Comcast SportsNet’s class today to fill Phil Chenier’s seat, and might have made an ass out of himself during tonight’s Wizards broadcast. Washington came back from behind to beat the Grizzlies tonight; we’re happy to make Consor the butt of yo...

ESPN's Ron Jaworski Would Like You To Ignore His Breaking News [UPDATED]

ESPN NFL analyst Ron Jaworski was all excited to drop a HOT SCOOP about the Odell Beckham Jr. appeal hearing this afternoon:...

Steve Harvey Announces Wrong Winner Of Miss Universe, Chaos Ensues

Steve Harvey, the host of tonight’s Miss Universe pageant, did the one thing that the host of any award show absolutely cannot do: he announced the wrong winner. It was hilarious....

The <i>Star Wars</i> Chronology Melted Mike Francesa's Brain 

Today, Mike Francesa talked Star Wars, and it was glorious. A simple question about how many Star Wars movies George Lucas actually directed led to one of his producers attempting to explain the chronology of the movies, and that’s when things got good:...

The Anatomy Of A Bogus Soccer Rumor, Starring Wayne Rooney

As any sports fan knows, rumors of trades, signings, suspensions, and lineup changes—almost always vaguely attributed to sources—dominate sports media reporting, and therefore our conversations about sports. (Perhaps the causal arrow points in the other direction?) But what the American sports fan m...

Mike Francesa, Live On Air, Just Counting To 42

I don’t think this latest example of Mike Francesa’s utter contempt for his listeners achieves the same level of majesty that 50 Seconds of Phone Scrolling did, but it’s still great:...

The NFL Wants To Stream <i>Thursday Night Football</i> Online Next Season

The NFL is hoping to sign a deal with a major tech company to stream every game of next year’s Thursday Night Football online, according to a report from SportsBusiness Daily. It is undoubtedly the future of football broadcasting, and it’s getting here very, very quickly....

Columnist Deeply Concerned Serena Williams <i>SI</i> Cover Is Too Sexy

Apparently it wasn’t just the horse people upset by Sports Illustrated’s sportsperson of the year, Serena Williams. Chicago Sun-Times columnist and friend to women Rick Morrissey is very concerned with the representation of women in the media. He believes that the SI cover shot of Serena sets women ...