professional Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Capping NCAA coaches’ pay isn’t the answer
Brian Kelly just left a Notre Dame team in playoff contention for $95 million. Lincoln Riley said good-bye to his SEC future and reportedly took $110 millon to attempt to revive a mediocre USC program. Ed Orgeron can sit at home doing nothing but drinking beer and eating gumbo for the next four year...

WWE using its talent to propagandize layoffs is no less gross than the layoffs themselves
WWE’s writers have never had a problem importing strife from real life into its storylines. About the time I was getting back into the whole thing, Paige was referencing the death of Charlotte Flair’s brother in the build-up to a match between the two. Jeff Hardy’s problems with drinking and getting...

Why is it still so hard to find coverage of women’s sports?
Sedona Prince started it this year with an uncomfortable truth. The Oregon basketball player, famous for a TikTok video earlier this year that pointed out the discrepancy between the workout palace provided at the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the meager triangle of dumbbells for the women, h...

‘Fire Nagy’ chants popping up everywhere — including at his son’s HS game — is going too far
Bears fans, I know you’re upset. This season has been a disaster. They haven’t won a game since Oct. 10, and their most recent loss is to the Baltimore Ravens sans Lamar Jackson. Chicago’s defense has been disappointing, and the offense… has been somewhere between atrocious and promising all season,...

Bears look like Lions’ best shot at a win this year
It’s been nearly a year since the Detroit Lions won a football game. In early December 2020, they managed a 34-30 victory over the Bears, before dropping the last four games of the season. In 2021, Dan Campbell’s squad dropped eight straight — until, rejoice, rejoice, a tie against the Steelers a fe...

So what is WWE’s plan for Roman Reigns?
I’ll admit to watching Survivor Series last night hoping that it would be an unmitigated disaster. Through WWE’s terrible promotion and build to the event, spiced with the disheartening and cold releases of wrestlers due to “budget cuts” even though the company keeps trumpeting record profits, there...

The favorites disappointed again in Week 11, but there is still reason for hope for the Packers, Cowboys, and Chiefs
Another Sunday, another case of the upsets in the NFL. The AFC and NFC leaders both fell to division rivals yesterday, and they weren’t the only teams expected to bring home a victory that disappointed....

Look at Tiger Woods saying good morning… from the golf course!
Tiger Woods is swinging golf clubs again. It’s not at a tournament, or what even looks like a practice round, but a club is technically making contact with a ball. On Sunday morning, Woods posted a brief, three-second, clip on Twitter of him with a basket of golf balls, and taking practice cuts. The...

Someone please think of the children of Chicago and spare them from Matt Nagy's coaching
Can Bears’ head coach Matt Nagy do anything right? The supposed “offensive genius” currently has Chicago ranking second to last in total offense — more than 20 yards behind the third-worst team, Seattle — and tied WITH DETROIT for the third-fewest points scored in the NFL this season. Nagy has more ...

Even WWE wrestlers think <em>Survivor Series</em> sucks
Generally, the fall has always been the downtime on the WWE calendar. Before SmackDown on Friday nights became the A-show, WWE was happy to cede the floor to Monday Night Football and let its booking from September through the end of the year get even lazier and more banal than it normally is, which...

Back to the future with the USFL
Mullets, mom jeans, the United States Football League — you’d be forgiven for thinking you woke up back in the ’80s this morning. Fox Sports announced its sponsored relaunch of the short-lived league, scheduled for the spring of 2022. With an eight-team, two-conference model, spring football will re...

Adam Silver doing his best Vince McMahon impression in NBA’s new deal with UAE
I’m not sure what’s more obvious: A media outlet taking the NBA to task for a multiyear partnership with the United Arab Emirates, or the inevitable controversy that will come of it. It doesn’t take long to unearth copious amounts of dirt about the UAE’s record and ongoing pursuit of human rights vi...

The NBA future is... WOWZA!
The NBA has never felt younger and more reliant on up-and-coming stars than it does today. Teams are beginning to utilize the draft more and more. We’ve seen plenty of tank-a-thons by teams in the last five years, and these efforts have panned out to varying degrees. For some, it has materialized in...

Cris Collinsworth peers into his crystal ball, sees New England playing in Super Bowl LVI
NBC Sunday Night Football color analyst Cris Collinsworth stepped out on a limb Monday on Twitter when he willingly offered up his Super Bowl prediction and strongly implied that the Patriots make it back to the big game this year....

A-Rod, listen close, if you want your baseball career to end with the ultimate honor, you need to stop the cheating
Come on A-Rod, for once you’re on everyone’s good side. We’re ignoring the year-long ban from baseball for performance enhancing drugs and not raising any stink about you bringing that stain to America’s pastime when we turn on ESPN and Fox baseball broadcasts. J.Rod was cool while it lasted. We wer...

AEW must not confuse bloat with genius
Because I know how hardcore AEW fans get, and I’m one of them, let me get this out of the way at the top. I do not think Saturday night’s Full Gear PPV was bad. Far from it. It was good. Maybe even very good. And any show that ends with the culmination of the two-year Hangman Page storyline is by de...

AEW <em>Full Gear</em>: Fantastic <em>All Out</em> could look like a community board meeting compared to this
I’m not sure how AEW has put together a card that is the equal, or maybe even better than All Out in September. But this Full Gear one could easily surpass it. The stories are a little more fleshed out, and it also has Bryan Danielson in the ring instead of just making his debut. This has a chance t...

WWE and pro wrestling have always needed a union, but will it ever happen?
Talk of unionizing professional wrestling pops up at least once a year, with it usually coming on the heels of another needless round of WWE releases due to “budget cuts” like my colleague Sam Fels wrote about regarding their most recent cuts last week....

How do you screw up someone like Keith Lee?
If it feels like I come here every four to six weeks or so to bemoan WWE’s latest release and wonder how they could waste such a talent so thoroughly that they’re simply discarded like the recycling, it’s kind of because I do. We could do this all day, and by now you probably already have your own l...

Who is Seiya Suzuki, and where will he land?
The Atlanta Braves won the World Series, and, after going through a comically horrible championship parade, they now have the daunting task of attempting to become the first repeat World Series winner since 2000. The 29 other Major League clubs are all looking to knock the Braves off their throne, a...