owl Page 81 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Predicting college football’s New Year’s Six teams
College football starts in a little more than two weeks. And for 135 days, the jostling to become a national champion will be ongoing. Obviously, only four teams will compete in the College Football Playoff but a dozen teams will be selected to the most lucrative bowls, otherwise known as the New Ye...

Here’s Aaron Rodgers’ path to a third straight MVP award
Aaron Rodgers can win his third straight NFL MVP this coming season....

6 FBS teams are favored to win all of their regular season games — and one is not like the others
As Vegas oddsmakers start trickling out their predictions for the 2022 college football season, the murkiest of pictures becomes a little clearer. Benchmarks become tangible for each team. It’s easy bulletin board material. Most of the people making these props never played the sport at a high level...

Exploring QB options for the Rams if Stafford’s elbow keeps him sidelined
All eyes are on Matthew Stafford and his nagging elbow injury as the defending Super Bowl champs navigate training camp. ...

How many times does old man Brady have to teach us a lesson?
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: “Brady’s gonna fall off this year.”...

Analyzing Jimmy Garoppolo’s next-team odds
Most people thought Jimmy Garoppolo would be traded long ago. Yet, with barely more than a month until the start of the NFL regular season, Garoppolo is still a 49er. At this point, it’d be easy to assume that Garoppolo will remain on the team for at least a few weeks of the season. Some sportsbooks...

Three fights in three days got a Saints rookie removed from practice
I know football is a physical sport, but when it’s your first time at OTAs, and you’re trying to make an impression that will keep you on an NFL roster for years to come, getting in fights with your teammates doesn’t seem like the best course of action....

Russell Wilson’s oft-mocked ‘try too hard’ persona is just what the Broncos need
Do you know how we can tell Russell Wilson has that “it” factor? Because everything he does this offseason seems to spark a chain reaction on the wavelength of a butterfly causing a hurricane. It might be that Pennywise the Clown “It” factor to some, but “it’s” something, nonetheless....

Romeo Doubs is doing his best Davante Adams impersonation at Packers camp
The initial star of the Green Bay Packers training camp was, of course, the NFL’s highest-paid player, Aaron Rodgers, arriving at training camp doing a cosplay of Nicolas Cage in “Con Air” — because of course Rodgers would do that. However, almost a week in camp, the star of the show for the Packers...

Vin Scully was the voice of baseball
When you think about baseball, who do you think of? Maybe a favorite pitcher or hitter, maybe your favorite team’s all-time greatest manager. For me, it’s Vin Scully. It has been for a long, long time. Growing up I always wanted to be a baseball announcer, and even before I knew what made great play...

Reminder to everyone employed by the Bills: Never touch Josh Allen
Maybe the Buffalo Bills need to string Christmas lights onto Josh Allen’s red practice quarterback stop sign jersey. It’s 2022, there has to be a way to put a sensor on the defensive players so it beeps when Allen is approaching like a blind spot device on a new car....

Deshaun Watson and the Cleveland Browns got away with it — and a white female judge let them do it
The Cleveland Browns went all in and won....

The Ravens need to pay Lamar Jackson his worth
We can only hope that Lamar Jackson will fight, not cave....

Looking back at the NFL's QB roulette
Who will win this year’s NFL quarterback roulette?...

Get your torches and pitchforks ready, it’s time for Bengals slander
The Cincinnati Bengals were every analyst’s nightmare last season. Nobody expected them to win the AFC North. They did. Nobody expected them to reach the Super Bowl. They did. Now, in 2022, everyone is expecting similar results, maybe not another Super Bowl appearance, but at least 10 wins and a pla...

Tom Brady is the first quarterback that can finally get Julio Jones more than 10 touchdowns in a season
John Parker Wilson, Greg McElroy, A.J. McCarron, Matt Ryan, and Ryan Tannehill. Those are the men that are responsible for why one of the best wide receivers over the last decade-plus has underwhelming touchdown numbers....

Moving to a 16-team College Football Playoff isn’t easy — but may very well happen
“Sixteen just seems to be out there,” Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director, said at the Big Ten media days. “You can’t ignore it.”...

NFL training camps are open and the leadership porn is sizzling
One of the more annoying things in life is when a person thinks a job title denotes leadership. Whether it’s newly-promoted assistant manager Greg trying to rally the staff during the lunch rush at Jimmy John’s, a CEO expecting underlings to laugh at all his jokes, or quarterbacks buying their offen...

NFL reminds Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, and Kyler Murray that, despite being QB1s, they’re still second-class citizens
During the spring of 2019, New York Giants’ former general manager Dave Gettleman made a declaration during the pre-draft process after falling in love with a certain prospect. “After the three series I watched, I saw a professional quarterback. So that’s when I was in full-blown love,” he said abou...

BIG Conference needs to ask itself some BIG questions before proceeding
College football is changing faster than it can handle. There are no playbooks or 100-level courses for what’s next in the sport. It feels like when I took a journalism business class after the Recession, and the professor was asking the students for suggestions. ...