wildcard Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Deadspin’s 2021 NFL Wild Card picks you can bank on: Day 1
Are you ready for some self-imposed quarantine football? You have two straight days of NFL triple headers. Stop pretending you’ll leave the couch....

Behold! Your NFL playoff matchups are nigh
We get a real treat on Wild-Card Weekend this year. With the expanded playoff structure that was introduced prior to the 2020 season, an additional Wild-Card team is in play. In the past, the top two seeds from each conference received a bye – now, only the one seed moves on, giving us six teams fro...

Cardinals fumble playoff berth, NFC East ends season just like it started, and Titans almost cough up AFC South like a cigar smoker
The end of the NFL season is finally here. By Hell or high water, the NFL made it through this season, some will rejoice in that fact, but many will say that this season should have never been played....

Kyle Freeland Is A New Kind Of Rockies Pitcher
By the time last night’s interminable NL wild card game was over, your memories of the contributions made by Rockies starting pitcher Kyle Freeland, a second-year player throwing on three days rest, may have understandably faded. A quick refresher: 6.2 innings, four hits, one walk, six strikeouts, a...

Brave Rock Men Thwart Pesky Bear Children In NL Wild Card Slog
Some might remember Tuesday’s NL Wild Card game as classic, cagey postseason baseball. Others may describe it as a painfully slow and annoyingly long slog that lost all of its charm the very moment the ninth inning ended without one team ahead of the other. The luckiest among us will remember it as ...

Javier Baez And Nolan Arenado Share Warm Hug During Live Baseball Play
The Cubs and Rockies refuse to settle this goddamn National League Wild Card game, which is now in the 13th inning. The Cubs had a good chance to end it in the bottom of the 11th, after Javy Baez advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt and the Rock men elected to intentionally walk Daniel Murphy with...

This Is The Closest We've Gotten To Finding The Beer-Throwing Blue Jays Fan
The police have not yet identified the shithead Blue Jays fan that tossed a beer at Hyun Soo Kim last night, who the team said was able to slink off into the night before security could apprehend them. This, despite the rigorous work done by certified expert internet investigators such as myself. Wh...

The Wild Card Game Is Incredibly Cruel, Usually To The Pirates
Before the 2012 season, Major League Baseball changed the playoff format that had been in place for almost 20 seasons. Instead of four teams from each league advancing to the postseason, five now do with the two best non-division winners facing off in a one-game playoff to advance to the League Divi...

Mic'd-Up Matt Stafford Was Very Confused By That Reversed PI Call
Matt Stafford was mic'd up during last Sunday's playoff game against the Cowboys, and his reaction to the reversed pass interference call that helped bone the Lions out of a win aired on last night's episode of Inside the NFL. As you might imagine, Stafford was just as confused and exasperated by th...

Chart: Royals-A's Was Awesome; Giants-Pirates Was Shit
Everyone knows the AL wild-card game between Oakland and Kansas City was much more exciting than San Francisco's blowout win over Pittsburgh in the NL game. Fangraphs' Jeff Sullivan has provided all of us with a stark visual representation of that fact by charting the win-expectancy fluctuations fro...

Royals Fans Got Loud Enough To Help Their Team Win
If you are a Royals fan who attended last night's crazy-ass wild card game in Kansas City, you should go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. Because according to A's outfielder Sam Fuld, you played a direct role in the Royals winning that game....

Jon Lester Vs. James Shields Is An Argument For The Second Wild Card
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the presence of MLB's second wild card teams, but tonight's matchup is not one of them. That's because we will get to watch two great pitchers—James Shields of the Kansas City Royals and Jon Lester of the Oakland A's—start the precise game that they were acquir...

NFL Betting Lines, Visualized: Wild Card Round
Below is your betting info for the Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs. In addition to the regular data, the charts now display the "season average" spread and over/under for each team, as well as their away/home split for these figures. We'll be back on schedule next week, with an early/late editio...

The 49ers-Packers Wild Card Game Is Going To Be So Damn Cold
It looks like this Sunday's Wild Card game between the Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers is going to be one of the coldest games in NFL history. How cold is it going to be? Really damn cold....

The Rangers Win, And We're Getting Game 163
Coming into today, the last of the MLB season, three AL teams—the Rangers, Rays, and Indians—were vying for the two remaining playoff spots. Thanks to a late rally by the Rangers, that fight isn't yet finished, and the Rangers and Rays are set to play game 163....

Wil Myers And James Shields Are The Wild Card Race's Best Show
It's fitting that Wil Myers and James Shields, the two principals involved in the Royals-Rays preseason trade that launched a thousand articles and blog posts about which team had just committed an unforgivable blunder/stolen a great player, are refusing to give us an easy answer to that debate. Wit...

The Redskins May Have Been Pumping Artificial Crowd Noise Into The Stadium During Yesterday's Game
This morning, DC sports blogger Dan Steinberg retweeted a number of tweets from Redskins fans who claimed to have heard fake crowd noise coming from the FedExField PA system at yesterday's NFC Wild Card game....

Dr. James Andrews For Head Coach: Seahawks-Redskins, In Five GIFs
Seattle 24, Washington 14: It's fair to debate Mike Shanahan's decision to keep a hobbled Robert Griffin III in the game today: For much of the first half, it looked like a gamble in the process of paying off, and Griffin has been so stellar for so much of this year that it's hard to imagine Kirk C...

Mike Shanahan Lied When He Said That A Doctor Cleared Robert Griffin III To Play After He Sprained His Knee In Week 14
During Washington's 31-28 victory over the the Ravens five weeks ago, Haloti Ngata brought down Robert Griffin III during the fourth quarter, leaving Griffin limping. Griffin sat out one play, then returned for four more, going 2/3 and advancing Washington to the Baltimore 16 before intentionally gr...

The Joe Webb Experiment Did Not Work: Vikings-Packers, In Two GIFs
Green Bay 24, Minnesota 10: You know how the most important part of the Hippocratic Oath is primum non nocere, or "do no harm"? Probably you do, because they kept showing that promo for that show about the schizophrenic doctor called Do No Harm? Joe Webb subbed in for an injured Christian Ponder to...