states Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Black coaches must remain a priority in XFL-USFL merger
If you’re gonna do it, do it right. And, if the XFL and the USFL are on the verge of a merger, then the new league must continue the XFL’s trend of hiring and employing Black coaches....
Bobsledder Aja Evans is the latest Olympic athlete to accuse a trainer of sexual abuse
I was once discussing the Catholic Church abuse scandal with some friends. The main thrust of the conversation was this: Is there something about the Church that specifically causes priests to abuse children? Or are predators attracted to the Church because they know they can abuse there? We never c...
XFL, USFL wisely begin talks to merge leagues
Nearly everything Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has touched over the past 20 years in sports & entertainment has turned into gold. His Midas touch began in pro wrestling behind Vince McMahon and the WWF/WWE, then carried over to the big screen in Hollywood. Johnson revamped McMahon’s twice-failed XFL pr...
Here is what we kind of learned from the USMNT’s week
As we and many others stress, international friendlies are weird. Especially when everyone has to fly over from Europe for two games that don’t count for anything while trying to not get hurt. And for the USMNT, there weren’t really too many players trying to carve out a role, or a bigger role, with...
Michigan State thinks the answer to another public sexual misconduct scandal is more Mark Dantonio
In February 2020, Mark Dantonio — by far the most successful football coach in Michigan State’s history — retired. The stress of managing 120 student-athletes every year wore on him, Dantonio said. He wanted to make his life less complicated, so he was stepping away from football and East Lansing....
LeBron James is Team USA’s shadow GM and possibly its next director
LeBron James is back to doing what he does best, flexing those roster construction muscles as the league’s greatest shadow GM. According to Shams Charania and Joe Vardon’s report in The Athletic, an effort to recruit Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Jayson Tatum and Draymond Green, is being...
![Michigan State's Mel Tucker has been suspended [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/662f342034a41f1815def2e3503f5c03.jpg)
Michigan State's Mel Tucker has been suspended [Updated]
[Updated at 4:17 pm ET] The Title IX investigation into sexual harassment claims against head football coach Mel Tucker has been ongoing since December of 2022, but it only took a few hours of media scrutiny for MSU to decide to discipline him. Funny how that works....
Donald Trump, Ron Desantis in Ames for the ‘Cases Pending Kickoff Classic’
Former president, and current defendant, Donald Trump is attending the Iowa-Iowa State game today, where he’ll watch two schools — with current and former players under investigation, or accepting plea deals for gambling — face off. Oh, and Meatball Ron Desantis will be in attendance as well, as the...
Oh right, Gregg Berhalter returns to USMNT this weekend
Mostly, the international break is just a water break for fans. Qualification for various tournaments doesn’t really matter until the end, or to a handful of countries on the bubble, if it matters at all. That’s doubly true for the USMNT, who don’t have anything to play for and anyone to play right ...
If the shootings at UVA couldn’t change gun laws, nothing will
America has its favorites — football, guns, and racism. Charlottesville, Virginia, has all three....
Mark Cuban is the hero America needs (on Xwitter)
Sometimes, in life, you don’t get the hero you want, but you get the hero you need. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks — an organization that has been embroiled in ongoing sexual misconduct allegations for the last several years — is best known for either his role on the wildly popular Shark ...
Mel Tucker gets paid too much to be this cavalier with his players
The college football season is back, and with it, negligent and dangerous coaching decisions. In East Lansing on Friday, senior receiver Alante Brown was knocked out while blocking on the first kickoff of the game. He was carted off, but somehow managed to return to action, taking a kick 16 yards be...
Team USA must play like this for the rest of the FIBA World Cup
Americans don’t care when Team USA wins non-gold medal games. But they do give a damn if they lose them....
Julie Ertz, the USWNT’s most irreplaceable player, retires
I’m a sucker for a midfielder. Especially one like Julie Ertz. It’s not that I played there or anything. It’s just something about a player who sees all the angles on both sides of the ball before being anywhere near it that gets me, I think. Xabi Alonso is my favorite Liverpool player of all time. ...
Rondae Hollis-Jefferson has taken quite a star turn during the FIBA World Championships
It was a long shot for Jordan to qualify for the second round at the 2023 FIBA World Championships. They are 0-3 through three games and were throttled by USA, 110-62. However, through the defeats a player bloomed. The leading scorer in the FIBA World Cup is, unsurprisingly, Luka Dončić at 30 points...
Christian Pulisic is having fun
If you’ve found yourself lost on soccer Twitter the past week, and it is a haven for the truly wayward as we’ve all had our brains addled by too many pre-dawn wakeups and day beers, you’ve probably seen a lot of “Pulisic is so back!” tweets and hashtags. Whether Pulisic is actually “back” is another...
A tribute to Terry Funk, an unsung wrestling god
Legendary wrestler Terry Funk died yesterday. He was 79. I am certainly nowhere near a talented enough writer to eulogize him properly. Nor have I been a fan long enough or deeply enough for long enough to try and encompass his whole career. The thing is, no one is, so it’s not a personal failing. F...
USWNT captain Lindsey Horan said the quiet part out loud
It started to percolate during the latest Summer Olympics, delayed a year to 2021 because of the pandemic. The United States women’s national team — the former two-time-defending World Cup champions — not only looked vulnerable, but they also appeared average. Not average for the Stars and Stripes —...
Count Tua Tagovailoa among the Sound of Freedom’s ‘forgotten viewers’
The movie rage hitting the theaters this summer extends beyond Barbie, and Oppenheimer. There’s a hidden treasure, one could even call it forgotten, and the independent, umm, film has brought in nearly $175 million. The Sound of Freedom — an action thriller about a child trafficking ring starring Ji...
Vlatko Andonovski was bad at a very tough job
If one didn’t want to kick dirt on Vlatko Andonovski as he recedes from the USWNT manager job, and kicking dirt is kind of what we do around here, it would be wise to point out the size of the task he was faced with. He took over a team that had won two World Cups on the spin, so there was really no...