state Page 85 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Reformatting the NBA Playoffs could solve the league’s injury issue
The NBA Playoffs are gradually winding down, and to be honest, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag where quality is concerned. Despite the rating increase early in the postseason, some of these games have been hard to watch. Injuries to stars and the lack of downtime between games have some thinking it m...

Landry Shamet hath brought a plague upon every house he’s entered
Athletes and fans are a very superstitious lot, and if rituals and patterns are to be taken seriously, Suns’ guard Landry Shamet should be forced to play for lottery teams for the rest of his career. If your team is contending for a championship, needs a piece in the offseason, and picks up or trade...

American Athletes who gave their lives in service
It may be rare these days, but there was a time when some of the best athletes in America went off to fight in wars. Some did so willingly, others were drafted....

Marcus Mariota gets what Ryan Tannehill doesn’t
Yes, I understand that Ryan Tannehill clarified his comments on Malik Willis just a few days ago, but his excuse for how those words got twisted just doesn’t make any sense....

Colin Kaepernick may return to the NFL while America asks itself what is it that the police do, exactly
Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance - Mahatma Gandhi...

Shaq has some interesting thoughts on Uvalde
It can’t be easy to be Shaquille O’Neal. I remember meeting him many years ago, and thinking, “that’s the biggest human being to ever live.” Factually, of course that’s not correct, but for those who have a friend who is 6-foot-5, and your life does not intersect with professional basketball often, ...

The man who could help Brian Flores in his lawsuit vs. the NFL is … Jon Gruden
Against all odds, disgraced former Raiders coach Jon Gruden has garnered some support from the public — grudging and conditional though it may be — in his fight against Roger Goodell and the NFL. You wouldn’t think he could come back from the racist, sexist, homophobic, slur-filled emails that got l...

Nick Saban just bought — I mean flipped — a former Texas A&M QB commit
Last week, Nick Saban said that NIL is how former assistant and current Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher “bought every player on their team.” This week, Saban got an ESPN 300 quarterback recruit to commit to Alabama after he was originally supposed to play for Fisher in College Station....

Hope springs eternal, justified or not, for Texas fans
Lift up the annual refrain: “This is going to be our year! No, we know we said that last year after Sark got hired and then promptly went 5-7, and the year that Tom Herman got hired and we went 7-6, and just about every year for the last decade with nothing much to show for it, but 2022? Yeah, it’s ...

Lane Kiffin tells the truth about college football
Lane Kiffin isn’t the hero college football wanted, and certainly not the one we thought we’d get, but he may just be the hero college football needs. The 47-year-old Ole Miss coach has watched the SEC drama of the past week play out in a sort of shocked delight (a man of the people), and in an inte...

NBA expansion talk heating up
While the NBA’s Conference finals are making surface-level headlines, tectonic plates are shifting underneath the NBA’s crust. On Tuesday, the NBA’s scuttlebutt radar detected signals that could alter the composition of the league. If a report from Portland 750 AM host and Oregonian sports columnist...

Does Deebo Samuel have an infatuation with Dallas or merely trolling to get what he wants?
Deebo Samuel might have 19 problemz, but his contract is the biggest one. In pursuit of a big-money extension or trade, Samuel is taking the troll route. Deebo was in Dallas for Game 3 of the NBA Western Conference finals, surely showing support for the Golden State Warriors, and was seen shaking ha...

We have parity in the NBA playoffs, and be honest, it’s making you miss the 2017 Warriors
For those who were sick of the Golden State Warriors and LeBron James winning all the time, you finally have what you wanted in the NBA: parity. Going into the playoffs there were at least six teams who had a legitimate shot at winning the championship. But one question: has it been fun?...

Is the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy curse real?
The Florida Panthers breezed through the first round of the playoffs and then got bounced from the second round so fast we barely had time for the annual discourse about the Presidents’ Trophy and whether it’s a curse for a team’s Stanley Cup hopes....

Jets and Lions fans battle for delusional offseason preeminence
Two teams who had top four picks in the 2022 NFL Draft and still have long histories of imbecilic incompetence are getting loads of love for their offseasons. If you listen to the way some media personalities present it, the Detroit Lions and New York Jets have a chance to not send their fans into a...

The NFL is hosting a useless ‘diversity’ program for Black coaches this week in Atlanta
This week, the NFL’s spring meetings are happening in the same city — Atlanta — in which the league tried to throw a sham of a “workout” for Colin Kaepernick just three years ago....

HBO's going to show us the Arizona Cardinals imploding in real time
HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” covering the preseason and training camps, can step aside as HBO’s premier network docuseries. “Hard Knocks In Season” is where the true drama lies. In training camp, everyone is upbeat and pollyannaish. Emotions are more volatile during the season when expectations ram into rea...

Jason Kidd’s flippant attitude toward the Mavs’ playoff fines shouldn’t come as a surprise
The Dallas Mavericks theme song should be Drake’s “In My Feelings” for the remainder of the playoffs. That is, because head coach Jason Kidd is all in his feelings over the team being (repeatedly) fined for bench violations. Kidd’s team has been hit three times by league authorities during this post...

Winning fourth ring and first finals MVP would quiet critics and crush many narratives surrounding Stephen Curry’s legacy
On the cusp of returning to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2019, Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors find themselves in prime position to silence critics. With a 3-0 lead, the Warriors are all but guaranteed to have a spot saved for them on June 2 when the Finals begin. Winning a four...

College football teams have always bought players
The Nick Saban-Jimbo Fisher feud is a microcosm of the two schools of thought in college football right now. Texas A&M beat Alabama for the top recruiting class in the nation this year and one coach, Saban, was none too pleased, saying, “A&M bought every player on their team.”...