out Page 44 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Bill Belichick in Atlanta would be absolutely marvelous
Bless the Atlanta Falcons’ heart: They are shooting their shot. There are reports from national and local Atlanta insiders that the Dirty Birds want Bill Belichick to be their next head coach. On Wednesday, ESPN’s Dan Graziano and Jeremy Fowler reported that the Falcons have a strong interest in Bel...

These are the biggest flops of the 2023 NFL season
The NFL is a small-sample league. Before you can even blink, 18 games have flown by and we’re left trying to make sense of everything that happened. It means that luck can play a massive part in whether a team succeeds or fails, with a few bounces of the ball defining the entire story for an entire ...

The NFL’s Black coaches are turning Wild-Card Weekend into a diversity showcase
There’s one storyline the NFL hasn’t highlighted heading into the postseason, and that’s probably for legal reasons. At least, I can’t imagine the league’s attorneys would advise them to showcase its entire roster of Black head coaches making the playoffs, considering Brian Flores’ lawsuit is still ...

Every team in the NFL playoffs, ranked
The NFL playoffs are officially set. All the ups and downs, laughs and years, improbable comebacks and unprecedented collapses, none of those mean anything now. All that’s left is a four-week sprint to immortality. ...

The playoffs will not be easy for the Ravens and 49ers
The end of the NFL regular season is always a sad day. It signals that only four weeks of NFL games remain until the second week of September. That means I have to spend my next seven months of Sunday afternoons with commercials since there is no RedZone for the rest of the season. (Also, RedZone on...

Everyone has a gimmick in the NFL. Until they don’t
The NFL season zips by, which might be one of the hundreds of reasons it remains our national religion. There isn’t really time to get bored with it and everything that happens in it feels truly important. Which means any team that can string a few good weeks together has turned some mythical corner...

Oscar Pistorius being released from prison is spit in the face of Reeva Steenkamp's memory
South African Olympic track and field star, and convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius was released from prison today after serving seven and a half years for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp....

Convicted killer Oscar Pistorius out of prison, will live in uncle's luxury mansion
Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter who shot and killed his girlfriend, was quietly released from a South African prison today, and was allegedly warned he could be assassinated in retaliation....

From Jerry Richardson to Dave Tepper, the Carolina Panthers have written the manual on trash owners
Three million dollars (total) in fines. Two atrocious owners. One franchise. The Carolina Panthers are a mess....

Why has MLB free agency ground to a halt?
We were told that once Shohei Ohtani signed, or promised to the Dodgers that he can take all his money after the ocean reclaims Los Angeles as a whole, the rest of the free agents would start to fly off the shelves. It’s now Jan. 3, spring training is about six weeks away, and most of the free agent...

What’s going on at Harvard with Claudine Gay is similar to how the NFL, sports, and America operate
Claudine Gay is the new Nikole Hannah-Jones in the same way that Eric Bieniemy is the latest version of Sherman Lewis. And while there’s a big difference between being a leader at an institution of higher learning and coaching football, the common denominator remains the same — excluding Black peopl...

The wacky ways these NFL teams can make — or miss — the playoffs
As the NFL heads into the final week of the regular season, there are still division titles and playoff berths to be decided....

IDIOT OF THE YEAR 2023: The complete rankings
Welcome to the grand finale of Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR festivities. Here’s hoping 2024 will be better. It probably won’t....

IDIOT OF THE YEAR: More dumbasses (Nos. 20-11)
WHY? Why must professional athletics function as such a powerful magnet for stupid, impetuous people? Ugh....

Aaron Rodgers and the biggest transactions of the 2023 NFL season
With just a handful of weeks left before the end of the NFL regular season, it’s time to evaluate the moves that defined the year in review. Everyone makes big deals about offseason moves and trades, but only in hindsight can we truly find the moves that defined the year. ...

Lamar Jackson might win MVP, yet no other teams wanted him during the offseason?
It was about nine months ago when Lamar Jackson wanted to be traded from the Baltimore Ravens. The best quarterback in the history of two forever-linked franchises — the Ravens and the Cleveland Browns — was on the open market. Jackson is the only player besides Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes to ...

IDIOT OF THE YEAR: 10 more for the worst of 2023 (Nos. 30-21)
Oh, the hell with it, you know the drill by now. Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR continues on, as does the meaningless treadmill of existence. All is for naught and free will is an illusion!...

Let’s hand out some NHL awards. It’s Christmas after all!
Generally, this comes up at the quarter-mark or halfway through the season. But hey, it’s Christmas, so let’s hand out some Christmastime NHL awards just to get into the spirit of the thing! Who is leading in the various categories that the league likes to hand out some weird looking silverware for ...

Behold: My list of most memorable wrestling matches from 2023
The best time of year, when you get to go back through all the wrestling you watched and definitely not think your life has a sum total of jack and sh*t. Better to focus on trying to get back to the feeling that these matches generated inside of you when you were watching live, because that’s the wh...

The Flyers are good right now, but having faith in them might be like believing in Santa Claus
For the past 10 years or so, the Flyers have just muddled. There has never been any particular direction. Sometimes they’ve been kinda good, but nowhere near good enough to do anything that mattered. Sometimes they’ve been kinda bad, occasionally really bad, but never by design with their sights set...