We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine remains the NFL. Although I’ve painfully extricated myself from fantasy; am annoyed for various reasons by the kneeling debate; think the sport is destructive to the minds and bodies of human beings; loathe the league’s “farm system,” big-time college football; and cannot generate a whit of interest among my kids, there I am on a Thursday night, all alone, watching the Ravens and Texans game. [Read more →]
During my many tournament travels, I often see, in a variety of sports, some poor team or kid getting trounced. They’re in the wrong skill group or age level or something, but it’s a lopsided whupping. Sometimes, especially in more competitive events, that team or kid will have a trainer. [Read more →]
10. Appaloser
9. Not-Very-Thorough-Bred
8. My Little Pony
7. Night Mare
6. Tripod
5. Seattle Stew
4. It’s A Grand Old Nag
3. Feckless Equus
2. Shouting Myself Horse
1. Sean Spicer
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
I watched the NCAA wrestling championships the other night and saw the stunning dominance of Penn State. The Nittany Lions won five (of 10, for you non-wrestling folks) individual national titles. Two of those guys beat two-time defending champs. Another was a redshirt freshman who took off the redshirt midway through the year. The other two are buzzsaws. The team won the national team title for the sixth time in seven years. [Read more →]
Someday I’ll break the NFL addiction, but it won’t be 2017. I’m nestled in watching playoff football lately, which means I’m also watching a repeated cycle of commercials. Toyota has one in which a hard-working young lad and his parents go through a path filled with bumps and bruises that ends up with a smiling college football coach offering him a full scholarship. That’s some good theater: Everyone’s all teary-eyed that the lad made it! [Read more →]
10. Sewer Diving
9. Urban Shooting
8. Javelin Catching
7. Defensive Archery
6. Scum Sailing
5. Hockeying a Loogie
4. Zika Dodging
3. Topless Beach Volleyball
2. Pokémon Go Roundup
1. Synchronized Sludge
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
So the U.S. men are shaping up a nice run in the Copa América tournament, but many feel that the men’s overall success in the world scene is still not there. [Read more →]
10. Tripod
9. No Way José
8. Mucilage
7. Parts On Order
6. Save-Your-Money
5. It’s A Grand Old Nag
4. Kevorkian’s Delight
3. Stumblebum
2. Wrong Way Corrigan
1. Bernie Sanders
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
Is it finally over? Is it done yet? Man, do I hate the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. [Read more →]
Another wrestling season comes to a close. What will I do with all my free time? More importantly, what might those little wrestlers do? Here’s a note I sent to the parents in my wrestling club, Palmyra Junior Wrestling. [Read more →]
I challenge you to a football game. Here are my rules: You have to pick eleven players from your block. I can pick anyone (including, if I like, a player on your block). Let’s go! [Read more →]
The Drexel Football Team is an improv group. And I like it that way. [Read more →]
Before I get into this, I want to re-assert that you could only describe me as being avidly involved with youth sports. This is my eighth year as head coach of Palmyra Jr. Wrestling, and I have been coaching Pal-Riv soccer for 12 years. Each year, I spend hundreds of hours planning practices, attending meetings, conducting practices/training, coaching matches and games, and communicating with parents. [Read more →]
Okay youth coaches, it’s game time. You have a choice to make: Are you a coach or are you a fan?
There comes a point in every marriage where one partner tells the other: “I want to take a break from you and our child and the life we’ve built together to be a prostitute in Las Vegas—see you soon.” Granted, my wife and I haven’t reached this point yet (give us time, people). Nor have any of our friends. Nor has… well, anyone else I’ve ever met or heard of, besides the husband of former Olympian/call girl Suzy Favor Hamilton. For decades, he offered his spouse a love equal parts heartbreaking devotion and spectacularly questionable judgment. [Read more →]
Just as I expected, a judge from New York, Richard Berman, tossed out the NFL’s suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady that was handed out in the wake of the so-called “Deflate-gate” scandal. Details are not fully available yet, but the entire suspension was removed and Brady will be eligible to play in next week’s season opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I have been totally perplexed at the NFL’s insistence on fighting this thing all the way to this point, as they clearly had no real case and were very likely to end up with a really bad look. I guess the league felt that a compromise would somehow look even worse (it wouldn’t have), and since Brady flatly refused any deal that involved an admission of guilt, the NFL felt like it needed to follow through with the judge. Bad choice. Now the league has been thoroughly embarrassed, and all for something that was so ridiculous and trivial in the first place. Millions of dollars (for the Wells Report plus legal fees) later, all that was accomplished was a foolish look and the loss of some serious clout.
More to come.
I’m a few days late on this, but the story really never gets old. After all, how often does an NFL starting quarterback get his jaw broken by a punch delivered by a player on his own team? That’s exactly what happened to Geno Smith of the New York Jets last week. [Read more →]
Many athletes have gotten themselves in trouble by using social media without thinking things through before posting. I have highlighted many of them here in this space. Today, we found out that this kind of gaffe is not limited to just players. Vanderbilt University tweeted out a doozy this morning.
Two years ago, four Vanderbilt football players were indicted on rape charges after an incident that happened in a dormitory that summer. Two of the players were found guilty back in February of this year, while the charges against the other two players are still pending. Despite all that ugliness, the team’s official Twitter account put out a new ad campaign today. The tweet looked like this:
Wow. Someone got paid to come up with that. The program then sent it out to the world. Even if it wasn’t so clearly a huge mistake, it also doesn’t even make sense. My guess is someone will be out looking for a job tomorrow.
Oof.
These athletes just make it all so easy sometimes. Digging for stories is fun, but it’s simpler to just let one of these overpaid, spoiled children write the story for you. Sheldon Richardson, star defensive end for the New York Jets, has done just that this week.
A few weeks ago, Richardson was suspended for the first four games of the upcoming NFL season for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. Marijuana was reportedly the substance in question. The 24-year-old said all the right things in the wake of his suspension, although it was clearly just lip-service, as it turns out. Less than two weeks later, he was arrested in St. Louis for an incident that just got worse the more you read about it. Police clocked him driving his Bentley at a ridiculous 143 miles per hour. When they began to pursue him, he left the highway, went through a red light, and reportedly tried to pull into someone’s driveway to hide. If that weren’t bad enough, check out this trifecta of brilliance: he had a loaded semi-automatic handgun in the car, there was a strong smell of marijuana detected by the arresting officers, and there was a 12-year-old kid in the car with him. Wow!
This guy is one of the best young players in football. His prodigious skill looks very likely to be missing from the playing field for a lot longer than the four games he was already going to miss, and justifiably so. If he were a scrub, he would have already been cut. I am interested to see what the Jets do with him.
From time to time, the bad sports and good sports are so intertwined that it is hard to figure out which one wins out. This may be one of those occasions, although I’d give the edge to the good side. This past week, EA Sports, a video game company, revealed the cover of the next edition of its popular soccer game, titled “FIFA 16.” For the first time ever, a female player appears in the picture. Alex Morgan, a star on the U.S. women’s national soccer team, is shown next to male star Lionel Messi. [Read more →]
