In April, NFL vice president of officiating Dean Blandino surprised a lot of league people by leaving to take a job with Fox Sports. Blandino’s role with the NFL was to eat shit whenever an official or an officiating crew screwed up. Now, he gets to serve as an in-game rules analyst alongside Mike Pereira.

Last week, after former Ravens linebacker Zach Orr announced he hoped to return to the NFL just five months after retiring with a congenital spine condition, ex-Packer Jermichael Finley said that Orr’s story “hits very close to home.”

Tony Reali, the host of ESPN’s Around the Horn, always wanted to be a dad: “I wanted a whole team of kids. I’ve said this to everyone with ears.” So when he experienced what he called an attack of postpartum anxiety one Sunday afternoon in September 2015 when he was home alone with his one-year-old daughter,…

Last night, the Pirates’ Gift Ngoepe became the first African-born player to appear in a major-league game. He came in to play second in the top of the fourth and hit a single off Jon Lester in his very first at-bat in the bottom of the inning. Later, he walked and helped turn the game-ending double play in the…

Mike Cation heard a moan, and figured it was just two people in the stands talking loudly. The tennis announcer, working the USTA Pro Circuit’s Sarasota Open on Tuesday, looked at the crowd and saw everyone looking around. Then it became clear: This wasn’t two people talking. This was two people fucking.

Sami Grisafe just might be the best quarterback in the history of women’s football. In 2000, she became the first female to play quarterback in a Varsity Division I high school game for Redlands High School in California. She played professionally for the Chicago Force of the Women’s Football Alliance (WFA) and Team…

Craig Breslow is a little surprised that the media has made such a big deal out of his offseason reinvention. After a decade of pitching effectively in the major leagues, 2016 saw him demoted to the minors in May and released by two different teams before the season’s end. The way he looked at it, if he didn’t want to…

Last month, offensive tackle Eugene Monroe retired from the NFL at 29 years old, after seven seasons with the Jaguars and Ravens. Monroe’s retirement came just a few months after he declared his advocacy for medical marijuana as a way to combat the constant pain that comes with life as an NFL player. It also came…

Bobcat Goldthwait’s career as a director (Shakes the Clown, God Bless America, World’s Greatest Dad) continues to reduce our memory of him as a comedian and actor (Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Police Academy 3: Back in Training, Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol). His latest film, Call Me Lucky, is a…

Another year, another February; another parade of dogs coming to a gray and bitter New York in hopes of winning the big ribbon at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Of all this year's upsets, few were as touching as the toppling of Flessner's International S'Cess, a handsome bloodhound from Maryland who won Best…

At 4 p.m. EDT, Jeff Ma, of the original Bringing Down the House blackjack team, and David Frohardt-Lane, who won last year's Las Vegas Hilton SuperContest, will be here to talk about the ins and out of high-level sports gambling.