Oh, good. It’s Olympics time again. Actually, no, it’s not good. I feel like I should care, but I don’t. Four years ago at this time, I wrote a column about how I don’t like the Olympics, and the passage of time has not changed that opinion much. This time, actually, I have found even more reasons than usual to avoid watching the games, although those are more related to the host country of Russia than they are to the athletic competitions.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

If you are a fan of the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday night was a tremendous night for you. If you root for the Denver Broncos, it was not so good. For everyone else, it was a mixed bag, I guess. If you are a fan of competitive football, it was a big pile of garbage. There were good moments, and certainly a number of good plays (made mostly by Seattle), but as a whole, despite the largest television audience of all time, I found this to be a snoozer and an embarrassing performance by what was supposed to be the NFL’s best offense. The Seahawks trounced the Broncos, 43-8.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

In order to give myself time to watch the Super Bowl and let it sink in, and also because I am likely to be trapped in my house due to snow on Monday, my column will appear on Tuesday morning rather than Monday morning.  See you then.

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

I don’t know about you, but I really dislike the two-week gap between the NFL conference championship games and the Super Bowl. I assume there is some kind of point to it, like perhaps the league thinks that it helps build anticipation for the big event, but is it really necessary? I am pretty sure the anticipation would be there regardless. One of the main things I don’t like is that the first of those two weeks always seems to be a slow news week in sports. This week, the story I saw everywhere, aside from the continuing Richard Sherman saga, involved the cheerleaders for the Oakland Raiders and the lawsuit they have brought against the team for unfair labor practices. The whole thing seems so absurd.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

What’s worse than a bad loser? A bad winner. One of my least favorite things in sports is the guy who mouths off as soon as he wins something. If you watched the playoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday evening, you saw Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman getting in the face of Niners wide receiver Michael Crabtree after he made the game-saving deflection late in the fourth quarter. He then gave sideline reporter Erin Andrews an earful during a post-game interview. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

Maybe I should change Tuesday to be my schedule day.  Due to vacation, BSGS will be delayed a day.  See you Tuesday.

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

Baseball takes itself very seriously. Far mores than any of the other major sports, the culture, traditions, statistics, and history of baseball are treated as hallowed ground by not only the people directly involved with Major League Baseball, but also by the fans. If anyone messes with any of these things, whether via cheating or something else untoward, we react with virulence, while we barely bat an eye at far worse things in the other sports. This week, Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard announced that he had given his Hall of Fame vote to the website Deadspin, which allowed visitors to the site to vote on the people that would make up the submitted ballot. The reaction was very negative, as you might expect.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

So often, it seems, big games fall short of the hype they receive. The age of social media and instantaneous reaction has led to a loss of perspective, I think. It seems like we have a new “Game of the Century” every week. Even with the century being relatively young, this level of hyperbole makes it hard to take any of this stuff seriously. The NFL is often the leader in this, driving a hype machine that is unmatched in sports. Occasionally, though, the product actually lives up to the expectations, and this weekend was a great example of that. The opening weekend of the NFL playoffs produced thrillingly close games in three out of the four contests. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

Football coaches exist at many, many levels of the sport. Kids start playing at a very young age, and there is nearly always someone standing on the sideline, working to make those kids better. At the top of the profession is the NFL. Just as being a player in the NFL is the ultimate goal of most guys who play football, coaching in the league is the dearest dream of anyone who ever held a clipboard. The thing is that even once you get there, the experience can be fleeting. The regular season ended on Sunday, and between Sunday night and Monday, five men were fired from their jobs as NFL head coaches. One of these men, Rob Chudzinski, had been coach of his team for only one season.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

Due to a combination of Disney on Ice and the Eagles game (don’t ask), BSGS will be delayed a day.  We’ll be back on Tuesday morning.

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

On Sunday afternoon, Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning broke the record for most touchdown passes in a season, reaching a total of 51 with one game still to go in the regular season. The former record of 50 was set by Tom Brady of the New England Patriots back in 2007. This incredible feat naturally led me to think about these two signal-callers and to compare their illustrious careers. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
2 Comments »

I was having a rough day on Sunday. The Saturday evening snow had turned to ice overnight, and my driveway, which is challengingly sloped even in good weather, was basically a skating rink turned into a ramp. I decided to skip my planned 11-mile run, as not only were the trails unusable, but running on the roads of my township was bound to be extremely hazardous. An hour and a half of breaking up ice and shoveling it was completed in time to watch the Eagles lay a huge egg against a bad Minnesota Vikings team that was missing its best player. I needed a pick-me-up and I received it in spades, thanks to the Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo, who blew a 23-point halftime lead and lost to the Green Bay Packers.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
3 Comments »

People are bad. Not all people, of course, but a lot of them. Maybe “bad” is not quite the word I am seeking…perhaps “stupid” is closer to the mark. This is the case particularly when you get a whole lot of them together and something either really good or really bad happens. Michigan State beat Ohio State to win the Big Ten title on Saturday in a thrilling game. Afterward, a large group of students set fire to a whole bunch of stuff and flipped over a car in East Lansing. I just don’t get it.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
1 Comment »

College football drives me crazy. Don’t get me wrong, there were some tremendous games this holiday weekend, including some huge upsets and some wins that meant a lot to me personally (thanks Penn State!). Football at the college level, as a game, is tremendous. The structure of the postseason is a total mess, of course, and has been for years. The unfortunate part this week is that college football managed to find a way to rob me of the enjoyment of something that I would have loved in past years, which is chaos.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
2 Comments »

A couple of times a year, I end up posting a column without a lead story. There is never a lack of sports stories, both good and bad…that’s for certain. Occasionally, though, nothing grabs me enough to push me to write my lead story about it. This is one of those weeks. A bunch of interesting things happened in sports this week, and some of them, like the Jameis Winston story, are sure to continue to make news in the future. If I felt that my point of view would add a worthwhile angle to the story, I would put together a bunch of paragraphs about it here, but I am not feeling it. Anyway, here are the bad and good stories for the week. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

Matt McGloin started for the Oakland Raiders on Sunday. The Raiders won the game 28-23 over the Houston Texans. Why, you might be wondering, is this my lead story? If you knew the tale of Matt McGloin, you might appreciate how unlikely this was. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

In last week’s column, I had an item about Jonathan Martin, the offensive lineman who had walked out on the Miami Dolphins claiming he had been bullied. The player who seemed central to the negativity was another offensive lineman, Richie Incognito. A voicemail left for Martin by Incognito, chock-full of threats, racism, and scatological humor, was made public. This story has been everywhere this week, dominating sports news and sports-talk radio.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

OK, so who can explain to me what is going on with the Philadelphia 76ers? No one? I didn’t think so. The NBA regular season started this week, and if you polled a thousand knowledgable sports folks and counted up how many of those people would have predicted a 3-0 start for this team, I guarantee the total would have been zero. That’s exactly how they have started, though, and I am just completely astonished.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

The St. Louis Cardinals took a two games to one lead over the Boston Red Sox in the World Series on Saturday night. That, in and of itself, is not surprising…these are two good teams and someone had to win game three, right? What made this one unusual was the way the game ended. The winning run scored in the bottom of the ninth on an obstruction call. That’s right, a call by an umpire allowed the final run of a game in the sport’s final series of the season to score despite the fact that the runner was clearly tagged out before he reached home plate. The key to this, of course, and the reason that this is Good Sports, is because it was absolutely the correct call.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »

Football has been played at Grambling State University for a very long time. Eighty-five years, to be exact. They are not a team you see on television very often, but they have a rich and successful history. This week, though, would have to be considered a low point in the school’s football history, as the team mutinied, for lack of a better term, and refused to play its game against Jackson State. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
No Comments »