sam Page 15 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

No one does goodbyes, or hellos, like baseball
The MLB playoffs start tomorrow, which still gives us a day to reflect on the season gone. MLB more and more would like its fans to focus on only October so they can demean, and hence pay less for, the regular season. But that’s not how the game works, it’s not how baseball fandom works, and there i...

The Commanders shouldn’t lose until they play the Eagles again
What is it about when Washington plays in Philadelphia? They have an even record at Lincoln Financial Field over the last four years and I get that’s not impressive by itself. The Eagles have been one of the NFL’s best teams over the last few seasons and dominant against the NFC. The public meeting ...

Let’s NOT blame Taylor Swift for the Chiefs’ middling play
Women NFL fans everywhere knew the tweet was coming. A superstar female paramour, an NFL player, middling play from his team. We’ve all seen this play before. It was ESPN’s Mike Greenberg who showed up, right on time:...

VAR performs its coup de moron
Whether VAR is still in its teething stages, and this is season five so it’s really debatable whether or not it should still be having growing problems, it will never be able to escape its fatal flaw. And that is it is still administered by humans. So it’s still going to be susceptible to human erro...

Week 4 NFL Takeaways: Tis better to receive
The offensive struggles from the first week of the NFL season feel like they were three months ago instead of three weeks. Points were piled up at a furious pace during the Week 4 slate of games. The Miami Dolphins did not repeat their Week 3, 70-point performance. Instead, Josh Allen played his bes...

And now we get to the question that has plagued society: Can the Minnesota Twins win a playoff game?
Saturday night completed the field for the MLB postseason, and then Sunday sorted out some seeding and matchups. And while most of the questions will be can Atlanta cap off one of the more dominating regular seasons we’ve seen, or Houston turn it on once again in October, or which start will Clayton...

Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce and other high profile athlete-celebrity romances that make you go, 'Hmmm'
Even if you’re famous, having someone to cuddle with at night is still a priority. It’s harder in the public eye to keep who your bedmate is on the down low, and in some cases, wondering how these pairs came together is more interesting than their relationship itself. Have we seen a more notorious a...

COVID may have given us a better way to develop quarterbacks
One of the unintended side effects of the pandemic as it relates to college football is the extra year of eligibility for players, especially quarterbacks. There are a number of transfer portal QB1s making a name for themselves, and a case for an NFL team, with an added year of experience. Notre Dam...

Apparently, it’s Inter Miami fans who are going to foot the bill for Lionel Messi
What, you thought Apple was going to pay for Lionel Messi’s deal? The other MLS owners? C’mon now, you know how this works. ...

There's a pretty good chance of Lightning crashing this season in Tampa
Whatever happens to the Tampa Bay Lightning this upcoming season, it’ll all have been worth it. ...

Barcelona might prove every fan’s conspiracy theory to be true
You’ve heard that guy at the other end of the bar. It’s impossible to miss, given the volume, and sincerity with which that particular message is always delivered. It’s always along the lines of, “These refs are in the bag!” Here in Chicago, it’s pronounced more like, “Dese jagbag refs are in da baa...

Our national nightmare is over, the San Diego Padres won a game in extra innings
What gets to the heart of baseball, and to the heart of a baseball season, is that 162 games is supposed to be enough for any anomaly or bit of screwiness a long enough timeline to flatten out. Anyone can get hot, but no one can get unreasonably hot for 162 games and six months. Every team is going ...

First rule of team social media: Don’t s**tpost your own player
It didn’t take long for SSC Napoli to crash from the dizzying heights of their third-ever Scudetto last spring. First, manager Luciano Spalletti left the club and eventually took the Italian national team manager’s job. And then the team got off to a very wonky start this season in Serie A, collecti...

Colin Kaepernick’s letter to the New York Jets is the norm for successful Black Americans
Colin Kaepernick did two very important things by allowing rapper J. Cole to publicize the letter he wrote to the New York Jets in pursuit of being signed as a practice squad quarterback. One, he painted Jets owner Woody Johnson into a corner. Two, he showed white people what almost every successful...

This time the Cubs can't blame Billy Goat
Though I no longer belong to the Wrigleyville parish, it doesn’t mean I have any more patience for tired and overused narratives about the Cubs. I do not find “#Cubes” any more entertaining or pertinent than I did when I bled blue. Most, if not all, should have been washed away by the 2016 World Ser...

Final 2023 NFL passing yards leaders
This article is based on data from Sportradar....

Damian Lillard would just be the marquee player on another middle-of-the-pack team if traded to Toronto
A decade of experience indicates that Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri despises rebuilding. This became immediately apparent after he refused to tank for Andrew Wiggins back when he was still being referred to unironically as Canada’s “Maple Jordan” before the 2013-14 season. After watching the...

The Washington Capitals only exist for one reason now
The NHL spent a good decade trying to revolve their league around a Pittsburgh Penguins-Washington Capitals rivalry, and more to the point, a Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin one. Unable to come up with any original ideas, because it’s the NHL, it did its best to copy the Bird-Magic dynamic from the NBA ...

Magic Johnson and the Showtime Lakers not liking HBO’s <i>Winning Time</i> is what made it so good
On Oct. 1, 2006, Marlo Stanfield infamously told a security guard at a grocery store on Monroe Street in Baltimore, Maryland, “You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.” Who would have known that 17 years later, the words from one of the most important characters from HBO’s best show — The ...

Someone should look into this agreement Justin Verlander has with Father Time
If you’ve watched enough Justin Verlander starts, there’s always a feeling he has one last card to play when he absolutely needs it. That mostly comes from his habit of keeping his fastball velocity just low enough to be a tease early in his starts, and then somewhere later when he really needs it h...