mediameltdowns Page 69 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jay Cutler: The Antihero Who Looks A Lot Like A Hero
On Sunday, during ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown, Tom Jackson went on a mini tirade about Bears quarterback Jay Cutler that was as needless as it was brainless. Here was a grown man dispatched into sputtering agitation by a 10-second clip of another guy walking into a stadium. We've been down this road...

Robert Griffin III Is Basically The President Of The United States, Only Better, According To <em>New York Times</em> Columnist Maureen Dowd
This incredibly stupid column, which was written by Maureen Dowd and published in Sunday's edition of The New York Times, and which compares rookie Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III to President Barack Obama, does not prove that sports and politics should never mix. It just demonstrates the w...

T.J. Simers Believes UCLA Threw The Stanford Game, And Hijacked Jim Mora Jr.'s Press Conference To Prove It
UCLA already has the Pac-12 South clinched. Their opponent in the championship game would be either Stanford or Oregon, depending on whether the Bruins won or lost against the Cardinal on Saturday. Well, UCLA lost, 35-17, and they'll have their rematch in just four days. Where the rest of us see o...

Media Experts Dan Okrent, Jack Shafer, and David Carr Discuss ESPN's Plagiarism Problem: "If I Were Them, I Would Be Embarrassed"
It's now been 138 days since we turned up ESPN entertainment writer Lynn Hoppes's extensive habit of copying and pasting from Wikipedia. If you click today on any of those stories—10 that we found, covering 12 examples of plagiarism—you'll find them just as they were several months ago. The plagiari...

South Carolina Gamecocks Top Clemson, Violent Sexual Predators
Sometimes things happen and we don't realize they are happening. That's how you wind up with a "Sexual Predators: The Numbers Are Rising" headline immediately beneath a picture of the streaking and dominant University of South Carolina football program....

Tom Jackson Bizarrely Attacks Jay Cutler For Not Saying Hello To People
Sitting alongside Chris Berman as he has for so long, Tom Jackson has escaped criticism because the easy target gets hit the most. But Tom Jackson is just as awful and this is but one example. Jay Cutler was concussed two weeks ago and was just named the starter for the Bears today. Rather than a ...

Mitch Albom Was "Phony Sweet" And Other Highlights Of <em>PTI</em>'s Accidentally Released Behind-The-Scenes Audio
ESPN helpfully publishes an audio podcast of its popular Pardon The Interruption program daily for viewers who can't find their way to a television at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. Yesterday, though, we received numerous emails alerting us to the bizarre nature of yesterday's podcast. For one, it was more tha...

Official <em>Monday Night Football</em> Twitter Account Accidentally Links To German News Story About Brutal Nightclub Death
Apparently, ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcast runs some Twitter contest that amounts to "What player is Jon Gruden thinking of right now?" Last night, Gruden was thinking of San Francisco's NaVorro Bowman, which user @DanShedd correctly guessed. The MNF crew congratulated Dan on Twitter, told h...

Peter King Got A New Phone Number, So Stop Calling The Number He Accidentally Tweeted
On Saturday, NFL writer Peter King accidentally tweeted out his phone number. We wrote about it. King brought up his phone number fiasco in this week's Monday Morning Quarterback column, in a section titled "The End of the 973-650-0966 Era":...

Why Does Everyone Care Which Exit Lane Kiffin Used When He Left The Visitor's Locker Room Last Night?
Yesterday afternoon's much-hyped grudge match between USC and UCLA went in the Bruins' favor immediately, and for good; the score was 24-0 midway through the second quarter, and, despite a spirited comeback to bring the Trojans within three, UCLA won by 10. The Bruins have the better record in the P...

The Mismanaged, Crazy Jets Might Be Keeping Tebow On The Bench Because They Can't Afford The Incentives In His Contract
One of the great things about the Jets this year—the only great thing, perhaps—is that by dealing for Tim Tebow, emphasizing the extent to which they'd use him (they said it would 25% of snaps), and not using him nearly that much (it was 10.1% before week ten and inched slightly higher after), they'...

Hey, David Canter? Peter King Is Trying To Get In Touch, So Here's His Phone Number
Yeah, we called. It rang only once, and then straight to voicemail: "It's Peter King. Leave a message." Very mellifluous. Maybe David Canter will have better luck?...

A Frustrated Neil Everett Muttered "Son Of A Bitch, Goddammitdangit" Live On <em>SportsCenter</em>
An apparently rough episode of SportsCenter got the best of anchor Neil Everett tonight, as going to break a hot microphone caught the personality muttering some mildly inappropriate language at the end of tonight's 1 a.m. show....

Four Months Later, ESPN Still Hasn't Cleaned Up Lynn Hoppes's Wikipedia Plagiarism
This isn't the proudest period for ESPN's news division. We've spent a lot of time talking about First Take and Tim Tebow, but there's another little something that ESPN still hasn't dealt with: What's up with all those Lynn Hoppes stories?...

Which NFL Pundits Have Made The Worst Predictions So Far This Year? Grading ESPN, CBS, And Yahoo
Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com....

We Love You, Verne Lundquist, But It's Time To Go
On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Josh Levin makes a simple, fair case for why cuddly Verne Lundquist, CBS's lead college football play-by-play announcer, ought to call it a career. Lundquist makes a lot of mistakes on air. Levin captures many of them here. Listen up:...

Philly Weatherman Who Got Roofied And Robbed By Latvian Escorts Allegedly Shit His Pants
John Bolaris is nothing but a former Philly weatherman with a Twitter account. His real skill has always been his ability to keep his name in the city's gossip pages by turning up at some Center City nightspot with pretty young ladies on his arm. Bolaris is now unemployed and engaged to be married a...

Dolphins-Bills Is "A Test Of Manhood," Reporter Writes In Earnest
Here is the Sun-Sentinel's Chris Perkins on tonight's Dolphins-Bills game:...

Even ESPN Deportes Is Subject To The Tebowization Of The Worldwide Leader
ESPN's Tebow obsession—one that even weaves its way into college basketball broadcasts—is so broad, it even extends to affiliate networks, as we saw yesterday during Cronómetro, the ESPN Deportes version of Pardon The Interruption. Stuffed into the rundown amongst coverage of soccer and baseball ne...

Steve Young Gamely Tries To Explain That He Was Just Giving Rick Reilly A "Bro Stare"
Safe to say the one person who emerged from Rick Reilly's "I had that first on Twitter" debacle relatively unscathed was Steve Young, who at least had the presence of mind to get (by all appearances) seriously pissed off at Reilly's crowing over due credit, misguided as it was, with a death stare f...