red Page 111 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

I hope Evan Mobley is as true as he is in my dreams
While often depicted, lamented, and sanctified as liberating, hope can also be a virus. It can rot rationality from the inside. It can lead to danger, injury, and death. As Ellis Boyd Redding, best known by his friends and fellow convicts at Shawshank State Prison as Red, once said… “Hope is a dange...

Athletes-turned-broadcasters have too many conflicts of interest to be fully trusted
J.J. Redick is Exhibit A why you can’t trust most former athletes to tell you the truth....

Every NBA team’s Super Fan
With the NBA season about to kick off, let’s do a Super Fan roll-call!...

Bombs win in the playoffs, plain and simple
It’s not underground baseball science to say that home runs are the determining factor this time of year. Everyone has known it, and yet every so often someone tries to fool themselves into thinking that there can be another way. Generally, it’s someone clinging to the past, “the way baseball used t...

Catching up with the soap opera drama of the NBA
The NBA is one of the longest-running unscripted nighttime soaps on television. Even outside of tip-offs and the final buzzer, its headliners are some of the most accessible figures in professional sports. The rosters are smaller, their faces aren’t obstructed, their games air nightly for at least h...

An Eagles-Cowboys rematch on Christmas Eve, yes please
Happy spooky season to all of you with pumpkin emojis in your social media names. May your costumes get you all of the likes, loves, eye emojis, and finally noticed by your crush....

Yeah, Brady vs. Manning has nothing on Mahomes vs. Allen
Surely many of you believe that Kansas City Chiefs vs. Buffalo Bills should’ve been the Sunday Night Football matchup. It’s arguably the two best players and best teams in the league, played in front of a crowd that would be worked up into a lather no matter the weather....

It’s never been easy to win a World Series
The past 24 hours or so have been filled with shrieking referendums on the MLB playoffs and its structure. Not that this structure is really all that different from what came before. But the hope, expressed by yours truly as well, was that making the lower-seeded teams play one or two more games bef...

10 NBA preseason takeaways that provide insight into the regular season
The NBA will give everyone their first real look at the league’s rapidly transforming landscape and its latest rookie class when the regular season tips off on Tuesday, but the preseason is a window into what to expect from certain teams. Wins and losses are mostly meaningless, so don’t read into th...

The rest of the bill is coming due for the Rams’ Super Bowl
In professional sports, it’s understood that if a team has a legitimate chance to win a championship, the front office needs to operate as if they’re in the final frame of play, and down by one score....

Philly fans need to put a cork in it
The city of Philadelphia is rocking right now, and quite frankly, it’s a little sickening. Their beloved Phillies advanced to the NLCS Saturday night for the first time since 2010. The Eagles are the lone standing undefeated team in the NFL entering Week 6, and of course, the NBA is gearing up again...

The Raiders may have lost on Monday night, but going for two was the correct decision
OK I’ll say it, Josh McDaniels was right when he went for that 2-point conversion late in the game against the Kansas City Chiefs in their Week 5 Monday Night Football matchup....

The Maple Leafs are going to try again with Matt Murray and that’s great for the rest of us
The NHL season kicks off for real tomorrow night (the two appetizer games in Prague don’t count, especially because they involved the Sharks), or as it’s known for most of the hockey covering world, “Six months of how does this affect the Leafs?” Yep, the sport’s biggest soap opera, the question of ...

Victor Wembanyama is the NBA’s basketball comeuppance
Victor Wembanyama is the evolution of basketball personified. But evolution requires a catalyst. Sure Wembanyama’s genes play a significant part, but decades earlier he could have been Frédéric Weis. Weis was the first French center whose name was seared into the memories of American basketball fans...

MLB Wild Card Series predictions: Rays-Guardians, Mariners-Blue Jays, Phillies-Cardinals, Padres-Mets
The MLB playoffs begin today, and with that, eight teams will battle for the chance to compete against the Dodgers, Braves, Astros, and Yankees. Yikes! What an awful prize that is, am I right?...

The Yankees should be stripped of the Evil Empire moniker if they let Aaron Judge walk
No one could’ve predicted that Aaron Judge’s contract season would feature 62 home runs and enough memories for Yankees fans to blubber on about for seven lifetimes. I’d be interested to see what the non-New York fan reaction would have been if Judge’s historic season came in a different uniform. ...

Old school football is making its return to the NFL in 2022
Ever since the NFL listened to the Indianapolis Colts’ complaints about the contact from the New England Patriots’ defensive backs in the mid-aughts, it has felt like passing in the league went to a new level. No longer was a 25-touchdown season with a 60 percent completion percentage good enough. A...

Micah Parsons declares Dallas Cowboys’ ‘Doomsday Defense’ is back
The Dallas Cowboys are playing the best defensive football we’ve seen from them in quite some time. Last year the defense was good at creating turnovers, but this season they’re barely giving up anything to opposing offenses. Comparisons to past Cowboys defenses are beginning to emerge, and one pers...

Rob Manfred strikes again!
MLB entered its last series of the season on Monday, and there wasn’t a game on the schedule worth watching. Wild-card seeding doesn’t really get the blood going, y’know....

Sports would be all right if it wasn’t for the organizations that run them
Yesterday was just a banner day for the governing bodies of sports. We know that people in power will do just about anything to protect what little fiefdom they have. In the grand scheme of things, having a seat on the organization running whatever league or game is a pretty small fiefdom. But that ...