Wednesday was the biggest day of the year in the world of college football recruiting: National Signing Day. Over the last several years, this day, and recruiting in general, has become such a circus that I am rarely surprised by anything that happens. Press conferences, hat ceremonies, and millions of people hitting refresh on their browsers are normal occurrences on this day, as people wait to find out if some teenager has decided to play at their school. I have to admit, though, that the saga of Alex Collins was not one I could have predicted. Collins, from Florida, was committed to play at Miami until Monday, when he changed his mind and announced his intention to sign with Arkansas. His mother had other ideas, however, and she not only refused to sign his letter of intent at the signing ceremony, she actually ran out the door with the papers. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Like many a sports-crazed lad, I grew up thinking about what it would be like to take my kids to a ball game. We’d be sitting in a colorful arena, watching our team, in the midst of a pleasantly churning crowd, cracking nuts, smiling at the ease and joy of it all. But it’s not like that anymore. Big-time sports at all levels are hopelessly corrupt, egocentric, decadent. You have to be willfully ignorant to look past it all and soak in the simple joys of a game. But we are lollipop heads,so we keep fueling it with our interest. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:

Emperor’s Decree No. XLVII: He does not know it yet; he might not want the position, but he has no choice, because we are, after all, the Emperor of the World. The Emperor is appointing Alan Spoll, author of WFTC’s  “Good Sports, Bad Sports,” to be the Imperial Grand Master of Sport. (The Emperor likes that European “sport” thing, instead of “sports.” It’s real classy.) Grand Master Spoll, alone, through his diligent assessment of the weekly goings-on in sports, will help the Emperor (who is rapidly becoming more and more disgusted with professional sports, but who loves sports, in general) decide if they should be allowed to continue. After the Ray Lewis bit in Alan’s column — with which His Imperial Perfectness completely agrees — the Emperor has decided that, if over the course of the next six months, the “good sports” don’t outweigh the “bad sports” in Alan’s column by at least 75%, professional sports will be banned from Earthly civilization. Professional sports have become an incubator of crime (let me count the ways), dishonesty (yeah, you, Lance), vanity (insert picture of…hell, a thousand guys here), greed (duh!) and even sadism (the Emperor does not forgive Michael Vick). Overwhelmingly, some of our lowest humans have become cast as heroes and even the ones who never went so far as to stab anyone in the eye or to set innocent animals on fire are simply models of flagrant self-aggrandizement who teach our impressionable children that confidence requires arrogant showboating and that achievement is attached to end-zone dances and to conceited statements through which the achievers pathetically beg the general public to shower them with praise. It makes the Emperor royally retch.

The Punishment: The Emperor gives Grand Master Spoll six months in which to change the Imperial Mind. After that, sports go back to the sandlots and tree-lined parks, where (let’s face it) they really belong.

Now, go forth and obey.

The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning

Tags: sports, The Emperor decrees by Chris Matarazzo
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I am not going to recap the Super Bowl for you. Everyone watched it, right? OK. Good. I am a sports fan, so I obviously watched as well. I am an Eagles fan, so I had no real skin in the game. I actively rooted for the 49ers, though, and there are two words that explain why: Ray Lewis. In case you had somehow missed it, the celebrated middle linebacker from the Ravens was playing his final NFL game. Lewis represents everything that is wrong in professional sports, in my opinion, and the incessant focus on him made the days leading up to this game somewhat unbearable. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. “For some reason, we never received our pregame ‘care package’ from Lance Armstrong.”

9. “We’re confused. Since when is it not best out of seven?”

8. “Too much pre-game gumbo.”

7. “After halftime, instead of the game, all we could talk about was whether or not Beyoncé was lip-synching.”

6. “We used to get all our carbs from Twinkies.”

5. “Nobody warned us that the Ravens would keep pushing and shoving us like that.”

4. “It’s hard to concentrate when you’re worried about the debt ceiling.”

3. “In the second half, we were all still grossed out by that hot chick making out with that pudgy nerd.”

2. “Our quarterback just got dumped by his imaginary girlfriend.”

1. “We kept getting our plays from the wrong Harbaugh brother.” 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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This Super Bowl features the first match-up between head coach brothers (John Harbaugh for the Baltimore Ravens and Jim for the San Francisco 49ers), causing the game to be dubbed the “Harbowl” and the “Superbraugh” and “John and Jim totally overshadow the guys actually playing.” (That one hasn’t caught on so much.) The brothers are undeniably at the top of their profession: they have outstanding career records (John is 54-26 regular season and 8-4 in the playoffs; Jim is 24-8 and 3-1); have been vindicated when huge mid-season gambles paid off (John fired his offensive coordinator, Jim replaced his quarterback); and have the best jawlines in the NFL since Pittsburgh’s Bill “The Chin” Cowher retired. They also run teams that haven’t won a title too recently to keep expectations manageable, meaning much of their recent success has been gravy (this will soon change).

While I’m sure neither man is particularly happy – coaches make KGB agents seem cheerful – they must feel a genuine excitement each day, knowing that times are good and possibly about to get better.

This is not the case for most coaches in the NFL, notably former Philadelphia Eagle bossman Andy Reid. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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The Oakland Raiders lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl XXXVII in January of 2003, 48-21. I don’t know about you, but I certainly could not have predicted that ten years later, that game would be the main topic of conversation in the sports world. Earlier this week, former Raiders wide receiver Tim Brown, who retired after the 2004 season, claimed that then-Raiders head coach Bill Callahan had “sabotaged” the team in order to let his friend Jon Gruden win the game. Gruden had coached the Raiders through the previous season before leaving for Tampa, and Callahan, who had been Oakland’s Offensive Coordinator, took over as head coach. This is definitely one of the oddest accusations I have seen in a long time. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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… and this weekend was one of those times, as the annual Football Association Cup tournament entered Round 4 … and what a round it was, featuring so much of what soccer fans like most about ‘FA Cup’ competition, its often-unlikey matches and its sometimes-surprising results.
[Read more →]

Tags: sports by Jeff McDonald
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Early in the week, I assumed my lead story for this column would be Lance Armstrong. Little did I know that the Manti Te’o saga was about to hit. In case you somehow missed it, Te’o is the Notre Dame linebacker who became an inspirational story earlier this season after his grandmother and his girlfriend died hours apart. He played in his team’s game that week anyway, recording twelve tackles and a fumble recovery in an upset of 10th-ranked Michigan State on the road. His strong season and compelling story led to a second-place finish in the Heisman Trophy voting, which was the highest finish for an exclusively defensive player since 1980. On Wednesday, Deadspin revealed that not only did his girlfriend not die back in September, she didn’t even exist. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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If you follow this column, you know I am a runner. A little more than a year ago, I wrote about my first race, which was a half-marathon in Philadelphia. Later I wrote about my second race, with a focus on the business of these events. This weekend, I ran my first full marathon, which was the Walt Disney World Marathon in Florida. This was an experience like nothing else I have been through, and I would like to share it with you. I apologize for the delay in the publishing of this column, but I was in no condition to write on Sunday evening. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I apologize for the changed schedule, but my column for the week will not post until Tuesday morning.  The column itself will explain why.  Thanks for reading!

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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An amazing thing happened earlier this week. For the first time since last July, someone in a position of significance stood up for Penn State. Shockingly, it was Pennsylvania’s governor, Tom Corbett, a member of the school’s Board of Trustees who had formerly appeared to be in support of the sanctions. On Wednesday, Corbett, on behalf of the commonwealth, filed a lawsuit against the NCAA, seeking to overturn the devastating sanctions that were levied against the school’s football program in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Although it has not yet been made official, Andy Reid’s tenure as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles ended on Sunday. For the fans of the team, a group of which I am most certainly a part, this is a beautiful thing. I am extremely ready to see someone else leading this franchise. The national pundits don’t seem to understand it, but that is because they have not lived and breathed Eagles football for the past fourteen years. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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From time to time, something happens that makes us remember how little our favorite sports really mean in the grand scheme of things. Last week, as I am sure you all know, a disturbed young man walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and took the lives of twenty children and six adults after killing his mother at home. It’s hard to imagine anything more horrifying than what took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the outpouring of grief has been discernible everywhere I have gone since that time. One of the victims, Benjamin Wheeler, was the son of an old high school friend of mine, and although I know that anything that I have been feeling is barely a fraction of what she, her husband, and their families must be feeling, it has been hard to watch or read any story about the incident. At times like this, though, we sometimes get to see the beautiful humanity inside some of our sports heroes. A couple of them, Victor Cruz and Derek Jeter, really seemed determined to make some kind of difference in the face of tragedy. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I’ve always suspected hell is an endless party where every person in attendance is convinced they’re the life of the party and no one can ever leave. Because a party can handle a maximum of ONE (1) person who is the life of the party. Indeed, some parties cannot handle any life-of-the-party people, for there is nothing less fun than a person insisting you have fun and you have it right now. Because fun isn’t something you force: you can try to organize an unforgettable evening, but no matter how carefully you plan sometimes people need to go home early because the babysitter has a cold and they’re giving Randy a ride so he needs to leave too and at that point it just seems like a good point to call it a night, no matter how much you scream at everyone to do shots.

I mention this because it seems TV executives cannot get enough life-of-the-party peeps: with the possible exceptions of Masterpiece Theater and the Weather Channel, television is overflowing with wildly charismatic personalities if by “wildly” you mean “very” and by “charismatic” you mean “loud.”

And I say: enough.

[Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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Much is made of a college athlete’s commitment to his or her school. Millions of people follow recruiting, particularly when it comes to college football, and in the era of Twitter, every little comment is analyzed under a pretty powerful microscope. The fans of a school have all kinds of expectations about which players should commit to their school, when they should do it, and what kind of players they will be once they enroll. When a player transfers, you would think that he had betrayed his school and all of its fans. Little is said, though, when a coach leaves to go elsewhere. This week, Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville left a restaurant during a recruiting dinner, never returned, and was announced as the new head coach of the University of Cincinnati football team the next morning. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Readers: You are not to ask me how I managed to intercept (ha, get it?) the following correspondence between Eagles’ ringleader Andy Reid and Commissioner/Hitler Reincarnate Roger Goodell. I will only say that it took a good bit of libel-licious spy stuff. Or perhaps more plainly, to quote the finest actor of our time, “You’re on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know.” Enjoy.

From: Andy Reid
Date: Friday 7 December 2012 3:34pm
To: thecommish@nfl.com
Subject: Rule Changes

Dear Big Red,

[Read more →]

Tags: damned lies, sports by Ian Micir
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What is it that causes people to get behind the wheel after they have been drinking? I know that decision-making skills deteriorate as you drink more and more, so I guess it is not a shock that a drunk person would make the atrocious decision to drive in that condition, but it still amazes me how often it seems to happen. In the world of sports, it seems to be even more common than elsewhere, although that is likely because it gets publicized, whereas you rarely hear about the schmuck-down-the-street’s DUI unless you are friends with the neighborhood gossip. The same thing goes for gun offenses, as they seem to run rampant among professional athletes. A week after football player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and himself with a gun, Dallas Cowboys linebacker Jerry Brown was killed when the car he was riding in flipped over while speeding. His teammate, Josh Brent, was driving and was quite drunk at the time. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I recently attended a fundraising event for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). This event was sponsored by the Kevin Turner Foundation. Turner, a former Philadelphia Eagle, has ALS, and through his foundation he supports research about the disease. The Foundation also seeks to raise awareness about how brain trauma is related to contact sports. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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What is the responsibility of a coach in professional sports? Is it to try to win every game? Is it to make sure the fans in the seats are entertained? Should he be focused on the television audience, perhaps? Maybe I am unusual in this, but I feel that the job of the coach is to win a championship. It appears that David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, feels otherwise. On Friday, Stern fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for coach Gregg Popovich’s decision to not play four of his star players in a game against Miami on Thursday. This was a terrible decision by the commissioner. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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