media Page 71 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Does The NFL Think Ray Rice's Wife Deserved It?
A week ago, we got news that the NFL had suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice two games for the events of Feb. 15, when he allegedly knocked then-fiancée Janay Palmer unconscious in an Atlantic City casino elevator. The punishment fell well outside the usual disciplinary regime of commis...

Dumb Person Has Bad Idea For How To "Control" College Athletes
This, by Matt Hayes at the Sporting News, was actually published yesterday, but since I haven't seen any angry reaction to it yet, I can only assume it's because we're all still so taken aback by the strangeness of a screed that wouldn't be out of place scrawled on a bathroom wall in feces. But you ...

Arian Foster Gave The Same Answer 11 Times In A 90-Second Interview
Arian Foster formally talked to media today for the first time since last season ended, but he didn't give them anything useful. The Texans running back basically repeated the same answer, about trying to be the best teammate he can be, for a minute and a half before peacing out. Though some Texans ...

The Ravens Are Trying To Make Us Like Ray Rice Again
For various obvious reasons, the Ravens would be wise to highlight basically any player other than Ray Rice right now. Focusing on C.J. Mosley, Torrey Smith, or even Joe Flacco would be a good idea. The team site, however, is not pursuing this strategy....

News Anchors Reporting Plane Crash Can't Say "Ouagadougou"
Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso. It's also the origin of Air Algerie flight 5017, which crashed last week in Mali killing 118. With the disaster coming so soon after the MH17 tragedy, coverage of the crash in West Africa deserved high placement in local newscasts across the U.S.—and, in t...

D.C. Station Remembers The Good Times, When Radio Guys Could Say "Fag"
WJFK, a CBS-owned sportstalker serving the D.C. market, made a big announcement last week. LaVar Arrington, the former Washington Redskins star and longtime co-host of the station's afternoon show, LaVar and Dukes, had moved to Los Angeles to join the NFL Network. Instead of hiring a big-name replac...

ESPN's <em>First Take</em> Opens With Horseshit Apology From Stephen A. Smith
This morning's Very Special Edition of First Take began with a scripted and seemingly pre-recorded apology from panelist Stephen A. Smith regarding the very dumb things he said about domestic violence last week. It was ... unconvincing....

ESPN On Stephen A. Smith Firestorm: Tune In To <i>First Take</i> On Monday
ESPN has issued a response following Stephen A. Smith's rant on/enabling domestic violence from Friday's episode of First Take. Here it is, in full:...

Stephen A. Smith Leaving ESPN Radio For SiriusXM Mad Dog Radio
In an interestingly-timed move, the New York Daily News is reporting that Stephen A. Smith will be leaving his ESPN Radio gig in New York and head to the uncensored airwaves of SiriusXM. And, also interestingly, he will be joining Chris "Mad Dog" Russo's stable of hosts on Mad Dog Radio. ...

Denver Sports Anchor Can't Help But Notice All This Alzheimer's
Here's 9NEWS Denver's Drew Soicher with maybe not the best lead-in to today's sports report: an Alzheimer's joke....

How <em>First Take</em> Poisoned ESPN
This is exactly what First Take was designed to do. That's not hyperbole. First Take's reason for existence is to reduce every subject, from the incredibly complex to the totally uncontroversial, down to a binary issue that can be debated. Is Tim Tebow a good quarterback? Is LeBron clutch? Should Ra...

ESPN Spent The Past 24 Hours Carrying Water For The NFL Over Ray Rice
On occasion, the invisible hand of the NFL taps ESPN on the shoulder and reminds the Worldwide Leader who really runs the show. We saw it with Playmakers. We saw it with the Frontline concussion documentary. More often than not, though, what you see is something like the video above, taken from the ...

<em>First Take</em> Discusses A Woman's Responsibility To Avoid Being Beaten
First Take panelists Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless continued to discuss the Ray Rice suspension on this morning's episode, and Smith seized on the opportunity to say some deeply stupid things about the responsibility women have to not provoke men into violently attacking them....

NFL Network On Ray Rice Suspension: "The Iron Fist Of The NFL"
Nearly every sane sports fan is offended by the leniency of Ray Rice's two-game NFL suspension for domestic abuse, but don't let anyone at NFL Network know that. They described the suspension today as "dealing with the iron fist of the NFL."...

We Live In The Golden Age Of Sports Documentaries
A piece in this week's SportsBusiness Journal is nominally about how HBO Sports has lost its preeminence in the sports documentary biz, and sure enough, it has gutted its in-house doc unit in recent years. But it's heartening to realize that even as the former biggest player scales back, the sports ...

Tennis Writer Neil Harman Is Guilty Of Weapons-Grade Plagiarism
Earlier today, we told you about tennis writer Neil Harman admitting that at least some portion of the official Wimbledon yearbook he publishes every year was plagiarized. The full breadth of The Times of London's chief tennis correspondent's plagiarism is now beginning to come into focus, thanks to...

Respected Tennis Writer Cops To Plagiarism; There's Likely More To Find
Neil Harman has been The Times of London's chief tennis correspondent since 2002, during which time he has been awarded the Sports Journalist Association's "Sports News Reporter of the Year" award, as well as the ATP's Ron Bookman Award for Media Excellence. He is also, as he admitted in a letter ...

Idiot's Apology To Erin Andrews: "15 Lbs. Heavier, She'd Be A Waitress"
WEEI/NESN personality Kirk Minihane apologized on-air today for calling Erin Andrews a "gutless bitch," only to immediately follow it up with the assertion that "if she weighed 15 pounds more, she'd be a waitress at Perkins."...

The Top 200 Ways Bleacher Report Screwed Me Over
A month before I turned 21, I returned home from the Bay Area, where I was attending college, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family in Minnesota. On a Tuesday evening, I was sitting in the living room, about to head upstairs to go to bed, when my phone buzzed with a text from Dave Finocchio, fo...