nf Page 249 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Remember the Ickey Shuffle?
For me, the highlight of my week has been Ickey Woods doing the griddy....

Top 10 Super Bowl one-hit wonders
We all know Tom Brady, Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, and Roger Staubach. People like them made a name for themselves by coming up big in the Super Bowl on numerous occasions. Their ability to stay calm and play phenomenal football on the game’s biggest stage is what made them all-time NFL greats, but...

Can Joe Cool solve the NFL’s Gen Z problem?
Much has been written about how deeply cool Joe Burrow is — and that’s really the only word anyone can come up with to describe him. Sometimes, there’s no further adjective that can really capture the appeal of a public figure than the simple, self-explanatory “cool.” As OBJ said, “If you look up co...

Hey commish, love the universal DH idea, but when will the season start?
Earlier today, Rob Manfred held his first public press conference since the MLB lockout began at the start of December last year. With the future of the 2022 season hanging in the balance, one would assume the commissioner would address the many concerns fans have, and detail the steps that he and M...

The colorful but forgettable history of Bengals-Rams
The way that NFL scheduling works, Super Bowl opponents are always teams that don’t have a lot of regular season history. Still, Bengals-Rams feels particularly unfamiliar as a matchup, for a couple of reasons....

I just want to watch Keith Lee throw people out the building all the time
When you boil down what people love about AEW so much (and Tony Khan’s running of it), it’s that the company and he usually just do the simplest thing. Just give the people what they want. It sounds like it should be obvious, but there are a lot of ways to overthink it....

The best (worst?) Super Bowl celebrations
For all the cultural impact the Super Bowl has built up, from the game itself to the ridiculous ads to the high-budget halftime show, it’s honestly a crime that the following Monday hasn’t been declared a national holiday yet. While the average watcher may be going into work not feeling quite in tip...

Possible Super Bowl one-hit wonders
The Super Bowl is the most covered single sporting event on the American sporting calendar every year. No pregame leaf unturned by the gaggle of broadcast and print media, tugging at the heartstrings of even the most jaded sports fans. There’s going to be a package about how Bengals quarterback Joe ...

A Matt Stafford victory is a win for all mid-career professionals
During the summer of 2006, I was a fledgling student journalist baking under the blistering sun at a preseason practice at UGA, capturing B-Roll of a fellow pimply-faced true freshman from Texas. The quarterback phenom was about to be the talk of the SEC. Matthew Stafford’s singular talent created r...

The Canadiens are so weird
When you still consider yourself the league’s signature franchise, maybe things just have to be weird. The pressure the team is putting on itself year after year just warps things, and that’s before you even get to the media that considers itself some sort of modern version of the Knights of the Rou...

Prop bet season is here: Wacky Super Bowl wagers for you to lose some money
As legal gambling spreads further across the country, the Super Bowl is bigger than ever for betting, and of course that doesn’t just mean betting on whether the Rams cover the 4-point spread....

People want Roger Goodell to be better at his job — he can’t
It was 85 degrees in Los Angeles on Wednesday, but that wasn’t the reason why Roger Goodell was sweating....

Arkansas will pay for fans rushing the court after beating Auburn, but who cares?
It was a matter of if, not when, Auburn men’s basketball lost another game. As its football team, the biggest draw of the athletic department that overshadows every other sport combined, goes through unsettling offseason turbulence, the fightin’ Bruce Pearls are putting together the school’s best re...

Avert your eyes, either Stan Kroenke or Mike Brown will get to hoist the Lombardi
Mere mention of the names Stan Kroenke and Mike Brown, owners of the two NFL teams facing off in the Super Bowl on Sunday, triggers largely negative emotions from fans of teams they own. (LA Rams fans are nihilists, dude, so discount them.) Talk to Bengals fans, former St. Louis Rams fans, Arsenal f...

Are we sure that defense still wins championships?
The saying goes, “Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.” Having a flashy offense with a quarterback who can throw the ball 80 yards through the air is great and all, but a defensive unit that can counteract those talents is arguably more valuable, or at least you’d think....

Dan Snyder knows no shame
Under Dan Snyder’s stewardship, the Washed Football Team has become a tired, dull reflection of the burgundy and gold of old. Each offseason is replete with a stream of allegations, controversies, and criminal investigations. Oh, and the team is rudderless....

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf deserves an apology
Now that the NBA’s social justice pomp and circumstance have faded away, it’s past time the league officially apologized to former player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf....

Automated offside is here, and it’s pretty damn cool
Even through its many, many bumps and hiccups (the kind of hiccups where you feel like you’ve pulled an oblique) I have been pro-VAR. It is hardly perfect, and far too much of it still depends on the whims and judgements of people. Except now being in the hands of whatever is floating between one pe...

If Lillard and McCollum didn’t work, then why was it so much fun?
I just saw CJ McCollum in Chicago like a week ago. He seemed fine — he had 29 on 13-of-23 from the floor and played well — but the team wasn’t itself anymore. It was a Sunday morning, and I was in bed when my girlfriend asked, “Hey Portland’s playing today. Want to go?”...

Meet Deadspin’s Super idiots
The Super Bowl is the biggest stage in sports, where stars are made, legends are born… and embarrassment lives forever. There are plays that just don’t get made, sure — like Scott Norwood’s field goal at the end of Super Bowl XXV — but there’s a difference between not getting the job done, and screw...