owl Page 102 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The ending to the F1 season was impossible
It’s the kind of ending to any contest that feels scripted (and Mercedes might yet claim that it actually was scripted). It’s the thing you’d reenact in your living room when you’re a kid. Then, it’s not just the final AB in the bottom of the ninth. It’s the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 after comin...

Amanda Nunes became the latest big favorite to get Buster Douglassed
Julianna Peña put on the performance of a lifetime on Saturday night at UFC 269. Few predicted that she had a chance against UFC women’s flyweight and bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, a woman with hands of sheet metal. Nunes had dispatched of her last 12 opponents dating back to 2015. This includ...

Week 14 NFL Betting Primer: Best Over/Under, Spread, Teaser and Prop Bets
Writing these primers while sick isn’t fun. An instant cure all, though, would be securing another winning week. The streak is at five straight entering this slate....

NFL Week 14: The battle at the bottom of the NFC playoff picture
Most NFL fans will tell you that in recent years the AFC has been a better conference than the NFC. Despite an NFC team winning the Super Bowl last season, they also had a 7-9 team (Washington) reach the playoffs by winning their division, along with an 8-8 team (Chicago) as a wild-card. Meanwhile, ...

Former Broncos wide receiver Demaryius Thomas dies at age 33
Former Denver Broncos wide receiver Demaryius Thomas died in his home Thursday at 33 years old. ESPN reports that his family believes his cause of death to have been a seizure. Thomas played at Georgia Tech and was picked in the first round of the 2010 NFL draft. He played in the league for nine yea...

Mike McCarthy should choose his words carefully
Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy returned from his 10-day COVID-19 hiatus this week. And almost immediately upon returning, he said something that will assuredly become bulletin board material by the Washington Football Team in their upcoming NFC East showdown....

I can’t be the only one who thinks the Giants are an odd choice for Russell Wilson
Per reports, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson would strongly consider waiving his no-trade clause for the New Orleans Saints, Denver Broncos, or New York Giants. ...

Sorry, Sports Illustrated, but Time got it right — 2021 is the year of Simone Biles, not Tom Brady
Time Magazine has blown out Sports Illustrated in ranking its athlete of the year by a score of 45-10. Sports Illustrated decided to go with Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady as its “Sportsperson of the Year.’ It’s easy to see how they made that choice. He’s 44 years old, and still playing ...

It’s almost time for college football’s most vacuous tradition: Bowl season! We tell you which bowl games are worth watching and why
Christmas approaches quickly, but college football fans are acutely aware that the real late December holiday is bowl season. Just when visions of the CFB content stream finally slowing to a crawl is dancing in your head, the NCAA presents the most meaningless postseason tradition in American sports...

Major League Soccer has a better ‘Rooney Rule’ than the NFL
Eighteen years ago, the most prejudiced sports league in American professional sports (Major League Baseball is a close second) created their version of “affirmative action” when they came up with the Rooney Rule — named after the legendary Steelers owner Dan Rooney — in hopes of helping diverse can...

Spare thoughts for the former Gil Hodges Lanes
I don’t really know what I was expecting, going to a bowling alley that’s two names removed from what it was called when my grandparents used to take me there, and thinking that maybe there would be something special about the fact that the old namesake, finally, many years late, had been elected to...

The New England Patriots still rule the AFC — deal with it
Bill Belichick is the AFC’s Thanos. He’s inevitable. ...

So it really wasn’t necessary to blow up the Dolphins a second time after all
It was all over for the Miami Dolphins after the trade deadline. They were willing to sell all of their credibility and goodwill to trade for Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson, despite the whole “Tanking for Tua [Tagovailoa]” hashtag in 2019. The No. 5 overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft did ...

A Hall of Fame announcement we can all get behind
In the past, I’ve tried to remove myself from Hall-of-Fame debates. Because at the end of the day, they’re really no more useful or material than the Oscars or Grammys. You’re basically debating someone’s opinion. And because of the esteem these things have gotten over the years, you’re debating the...

Week 13 NFL Powerless Ranking: Detroit finally wakes from nightmare
Welcome to this week’s NFL Powerless Rankings. We’re closing in on the home stretch of the NFL season, and we know the contenders from the pretenders at this point. We’ll talk about the contenders later because this list is about the less fortunate teams in the league. Let’s check out the worst of t...

Robert Griffin III survived Washington, now he’s ready to expose the franchise from his perspective
The tell-all book business is booming, and Robert Griffin III is jumping into the ring with his book due out in August 2022, titled Surviving Washington. Griffin is set to dish up his recollection of all the dirt that went on behind the scenes during his time in the Nation’s capital as quarterback f...

CFP is as easy as 1-2-3… or 2-3-4
For weeks, we’ve been dissecting, diagramming, and divining what the College Football Playoff might or should look like at the end of this zany season, and then Saturday’s conference championships came along and made everything pretty darn clear....

Here’s a workaround for enjoying Alabama’s talent without enduring ‘Roll Tide!’ chants
As a life ethos, I don’t watch Alabama unless it’s the title game. Not the SEC title game, THE title game. I take that back, I watch the title game and as much of the Tennessee-Alabama game as my girlfriend can stand. They’re too good even for their loaded conference, so save for a title game or ups...

The NFL has a diversity coaching fellowship named after Bill Walsh – a white dude
The NFL sent out a press release this week that screamed, “Hey look, we did a good thing,” while being completely oblivious to the fact that their actions were shameful – which is very on brand for this league....

Rob Manfred is fertilizer
I can’t say that Rob Manfred is bad at his job, at least not entirely. Because his job is to make sure that all 30 owners squeeze the sport for every last dollar possible, and he’s done that. It doesn’t really matter if he kills the league in the process, because his bosses don’t care. It’s simply a...