var Page 19 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
A Philosopher's Definitive (And Slightly Maddening) Case Against Replay Review
The motivation for using video review in sports is obvious: to get more calls right. This seems like an easy enough mission to fulfill, but anyone who has spent even a little time watching sports on TV can attest to the fact that the application of video review is not so simple. In most sports where...
Leicester City Are For Real Again
When Leicester City won the Premier League title in 2016, it felt like an accident. Sure, they had N’Golo Kanté, Riyad Mahrez, and Jamie Vardy, but outside of those three, Leicester weren’t a team full of great players. Rather, they had a good system that worked to perfection long enough to complete...
New Yorkers! Tonight’s Varsity Letters reading series, presented by Gelf Magazine, boasts a trio of sports business reporters. Albert Chen of Sports Illustrated, Matthew Futterman of The New York Times, and Ben Reiter of Sports Illustrated will all be reading. You should go! More information is avai...
Brazilian Coach Gleefully Shit-Talks Giannis Antetokounmpo After Anderson Varejão Destroys Greece
A Brazilian team of Guys—led by Anderson Varejão and Leandro Barbosa—took down the reigning MVP in the group stage of the FIBA World Cup in China on Tuesday, and winning head coach Aleksandar Petrovic will never let the Greek Freak hear the end of it. ...
Cristiano Ronaldo Makes Fun Of VAR For Being A Killjoy After Scoring
Cristiano Ronaldo thought he’d scored his first goal of the new Serie A season last week, only for VAR to erase it due to one of those maddeningly marginal offside calls. In today’s match against Napoli, the Juventus forward once again found the back of the net, only this time the goal stood. In ack...
VAR Took A Dump All Over This Vancouver Whitecaps Penalty Kick
VAR keeps hitting never-before-seen low points in ways that were hard to imagine when it was first implemented. The Vancouver Whitecaps experienced a new version of outrage during their match against the Montreal Impact on Wednesday night, when replays ruled out one of their goals, due to both the ...
Manager Ascends To New Level Of Consciousness, Makes Completely Logical Connection Between The Handball Rule And Brexit
The modern discourse is a never-ending cascade of Expanding Brain memes. Everyone plays their part, and when Deadspin is doing its job well, we provide takes that belong to one of the latter panels, ones hopefully more sophisticated than this but less out-there than this. Proving that our angle on t...
The New Handball Rule Is The Cold, VAR Is Cancer
For the second time in as many weeks of the new Premier League season, the biggest story from the weekend was another ruinously stupid imposition of VAR. The only thing more tiring than having to write the umpteenth anti-VAR post is having to witness video replay poison this wonderful sport from wee...
VAR Once Again Steals A Game-Winning Goal From Manchester City
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Manchester City were on the verge of pulling out a late victory against Tottenham at home, and then VAR stepped in to take it away....
UEFA Thankfully Won't Uphold The Dumb VAR Rule That Marred The Women's World Cup
One of the worst-received aspects of the Women’s World Cup this summer was the VAR-induced penalty kick debacle. The choice to subject goalkeepers’ feet locations to exacting scrutiny with video review, and to let penalty takers try their kicks again should VAR detect that a keeper drifted a centime...
VAR Is Turning Everyone Into Cops
The opening weekend of the Premier League season was in some ways bittersweet—the sweetness provided by the return of the best league in the world, the bitterness from the sad end of England’s noble resistance to the scourge of VAR. To anyone expecting to witness the inherently corrosive effects of ...
Yordan Alvarez And The Astros Made A Strong Case For Relegating The Orioles
In only the second-worst beatdown the Orioles have suffered at the hands of a Texas-based team in Camden Yards, the Astros ran roughshod all over Baltimore in a 23-2 win on Saturday. The hapless O’s were only allowed two innings of scoreless respite as the remaining seven included at least one run t...
Canelo Álvarez Seems To Have Lost Gennady Golovkin's Phone Number
Middleweight champion Canelo Álvarez released a statement Wednesday announcing that, for the first time since 2015, he will not be fighting his traditional bout on Mexican Independence Day weekend in September. Álvarez—who’s generally a safe bet to box on that weekend as well as Cinco de Mayo weeken...
Harvard Fires Fencing Coach Over Shady Home Sale To Recruit's Wealthy Father
Harvard University has fired longtime fencing coach Peter Brand, who was involved in an admissions scandal having to do with the extremely suspect circumstances of the sale of his home to the family of a high school junior who was later admitted to Harvard as a fencing recruit....
Soccer Idiots Agree: The USWNT Is Cool, VAR Is Not
It’s Independence Day, the day on which every American feels especially proud to be American, which also now means every taking it upon yourself, as an American, to make sure that every other American is behaving in a suitably proud way re: how American they are. In real life, this holiday mostly re...
Lionel Messi Goes Off On "Bullshit" Refereeing After Argentina Lose To Brazil
VAR has been a disaster at the Copa América this summer, and last night’s Brazil-Argentina semifinal was no different. And as evidenced by his scathing postgame comments slamming VAR and the refereeing in general after his team fell to Brazil, Lionel Messi is fed the fuck up with it....
Jason Vargas Implies That We Do Not Know The Full Story Behind The Mets' Latest Metsing
Mets pitcher Jason Vargas had one of his best starts of the season last night, holding the Phillies to just three hits and two earned runs through 6.1 innings while striking out 10. The Mets still lost the game, of course, but Vargas’s strong start apparently left him feeling a bit sassy. In the loc...
Argentine Soccer Team Orchestrates On-Field Sit-In To Protest Red Cards
In the second leg of their promotion playoff final against Alvarado, players from third-tier Argentine soccer club San Jorge de Tucumán decided to protest what they considered two unfair first-half red cards by sitting down in the middle of the field and refusing to move or play. This lasted about t...
The Women's World Cup Has A Refereeing Problem
Despite what our lovely commentariat might believe, we here at Deadspin do not have a quota of anti-VAR posts to hit. If it feels that way during the Women’s World Cup, it’s only because FIFA, through the kind of casually negligent behavior that typifies its treatment of the women’s game, has put it...
Almost Every Penalty Kick Save Ever Is Illegal Now And It's A Mess
The idea, which is not an unreasonable one on its face, is to “get it right.” The less inspiring extension of that is “to avoid something horribly embarrassing.” There are examples that spring to mind when it comes to justifying VAR’s existence—the people in charge are probably thinking of moments ...