sat Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Josh Gibson and the Long Gone Summers That Should Have Been
The following is adapted from the podcast script for Stick to Pods Episode 11, “Josh Gibson,” which originally aired on April 12, 2018...

As The WNBA Draft Will Show, Sabrina Ionescu Is Far From Oregon's Only Superstar
Oregon’s former floor general, Sabrina Ionescu, has become the face of women’s college basketball. Deservedly so, from the shifty way she slices and dices defenses to her Kobe Bryant-esque approach to the game and her acknowledgement of the bond they shared....

College Athletes Finally Will Be Compensated For Commercial Use Of Their Likeness
The NCAA takes a step towards ending shamateurism in college sports....

Alyssa Thomas Couldn't Lift Her Arms Above Her Head, But She Carried A Team To Victory
The Connecticut Sun left the first game of their best-of-five semifinals series against the Los Angeles Sparks Tuesday night not only with a 84-75 win, but also with a narratively sweet one. For a season, the No. 2 Sun have felt like the WNBA’s most underrated team, beloved by their women’s basketba...

Nigeria's Asisat Oshoala Finally Shows The World Who She Is
The World Cup is a showcase—of the sport, its teams, and its individual talents. It’s also a competition that crowns the best soccer nation in the world, but only a handful of teams realistically can lift the trophy, and only one will. As a month-long tournament that primarily pits teams with no sho...

How The Rise Of Comp Picks Is Chilling NFL Free Agency
Compensatory picks have been a low-key feature of the NFL draft since 1994, the year after free agency finally became a thing. But this offseason, more and more teams appear to be finessing the free agency system in an attempt to to stockpile comp picks. And it’s created something of a freeze on the...

Andreas Athanasiou Is So Frickin' Fast<em></em>
At this point late in the season, it behooves the Red Wings as a franchise more to lose for Hughes than it does to play good hockey. But that hasn’t stopped Detroit’s players from winning six of their last seven games, and it hasn’t held young speedster Andreas Athanasiou back from enjoying a spring...

USA Track & Field Has Shot Itself In The Dick Yet Again
No one in the world is better at creating needless controversy and riling up its own athletes and fans than USA Track & Field. Their latest hit: nuking by far its single greatest asset, the Olympic Trials....

Sweaty Blue Jays GM Offers Desperately Flimsy Pretext For Keeping Vlad Jr. In The Minors
It will suck for everyone when the Blue Jays make the inevitable, cynical-as-shit decision to plug Vladimir Guerrero Jr. back into their minor league system at the start of this season, in order to rig his MLB service time and extend team control for as long as possible. Young Vlad will be getting s...

Jean Lopez, Previously Banned After Multiple Reports of Abusing Taekwondo Athletes, Can Coach Again
Less than a year after the U.S. Center for SafeSport declared that it was banning Jean Lopez from taekwondo for a “decades long pattern of sexual misconduct,” the center has said Lopez can go back to coaching. Today, SafeSport notified Heidi Gilbert and Kay Poe, who had reported to SafeSport that Lo...

Arbitrator Lifts Ban On Taekwondo Star Steven Lopez After Woman Who Accused Him Of Sexual Abuse Declines To Testify
Three-time Olympic taekwondo medalist Steven Lopez, whom the U.S. Center for SafeSport declared permanently ineligible because of “sexual misconduct involving a minor” in September, has been reinstated following an arbitration hearing, reports USA Today....

In Shocking Betrayal, Penn Basketball Ditches Cheesesteaks For Fish Burritos
The Penn men’s basketball team is 5-2 so far this year; freshman Michael Wang has been particularly impressive. Their losses are to Kansas State and Oregon State. The only blip this season so far is losing Ryan Betley for the season five minutes into the opening game. (Penn rallied to win at George ...

There Should Always Be A Big Game On Saturday Night
One of my friends hosted a Halloween party at his house on the same night as Game 4 of the World Series. Many people, in fact, were hosting parties on the same night as Game 4 of the World Series, because the game occurred during Halloween weekend on a Saturday night. Parties, as I hope you know, fr...

This Tennis Ball Passing Through A Racket Is A Blessed Sports Moment
The Oddly Satisfying video might be the great viral genre of our time, and it has the potential to make serious inroads into sports. There’s free fodder everywhere, what with all the synchronized movement, strangely curving projectiles, scalp-tingling bat sounds, and so on. So here’s a good one, fro...

Gosh, I Really Hope The Red Wings Can Manage To Win A Game This Year
They tried really hard. That’s really the best thing you can say about the Red Wings’ relatively close but still inevitable 3-1 loss to the Lightning on Thursday night. The Wings hung with the Bolts throughout the whole game, but eventually found themselves outdone by just a top-notch performance fr...

Another Empty Congressional Hearing About Sexual Abuse In Sports Came And Went
With many of the cameras and reporters gone, the fourth Senate hearing about sexual abuse in Olympic sports took on a different tone. There was no yelling. There was no demanding of answers. CEOs of the organizations that oversee Olympic sports had a few chuckles. The grandstanding was gone, just th...

SafeSport Bans Taekwondo's Steven Lopez, But Will It Last?
The U.S. Center for SafeSport has banned three-time Olympic taekwondo medalist Steven Lopez, declaring him permanently ineligible earlier this week for “sexual misconduct involving a minor.” According to a copy of the notice of the director’s decision and other SafeSport records, which Deadspin revi...

Former WWE Personality Threatens To Kill Himself At Monday Night RAW In Extremely Ill-Advised Joke
Former WWE personality Jason Sensation, who made a name for himself in wrestling during the late 1990s by doing solid impressions of famous wrestlers—most notably Owen Hart during an infamous skit with D-Generation X—threatened to kill himself inside Scotiabank Arena in Toronto during tonight’s RAW:...

Taekwondo Coach Reinstated By SafeSport Following Brief Ban Over "Decades Long Pattern Of Sexual Misconduct"
Jean Lopez—the former U.S. taekwondo coach who was banned in April 2018 following a report from SafeSport that described “a decades long pattern of sexual misconduct by an older athlete/coach abusing his power to groom, manipulate and, ultimately, sexually abuse younger female athletes”—will be rein...

Leaders From Gymnastics And The USOC Sat Down For A Congressional Grilling
The heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, USA Gymnastics, USA Swimming, USA Taekwondo, USA Volleyball, and the U.S. Center for SafeSport were grilled today by members of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee about their roles in protecting member athletes from sexual abuse....