Hey all – no column this week due to travel and timing.
One thing to highlight: Penn State’s women’s volleyball team won its 6th national championship in the last eight years this week. Amazing. Congratulations to them.
See you next week.
Unlike a friend of mine, I am not one of those people that has ten televisions and the ability to watch all of the NFL games at once. That’s not to say I don’t wish that I were, but it is not my reality. On Sundays, if the Eagles are not playing at 1:00, I look at FOX and CBS to see which games they are carrying and I pick one to check out. Most often, I end up watching FOX, as they are usually carrying NFC games, and I am partial to that conference. This past Sunday, I was totally confused when I put on FOX and saw a game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals, two AFC teams. I had never seen that before, so it made me curious. It turns out that the reason was a predictable one: Johnny Manziel.
Students and fans of the University of Alabama-Birmingham were dealt a tremendous blow this week when the school decided to shut down its football program. No one is more directly affected than the players and coaches, who will see the work they have done to build this program flushed away with barely a thank you. Although there was not a lot of history in this program, as it only started in 1991, the team just finished its most successful season in a decade and things were looking up. [Read more →]
One of the favorite pastimes of sports fans is complaining about officiating. I like nothing better than yelling at the television in anguish as a referee makes brutal call after brutal call. Well, let me qualify that. I like well-officiated games the best, and I really hate when one of my teams gets screwed by a terrible call, so I shouldn’t really say that I like all the yelling. However, watching sports would not be the same for me if I didn’t get worked up and indignant a time or two while doing so. If I am watching a game in which I have no real rooting interest, especially, it really does add to my enjoyment, although it may not do the same for the people around me at the time. On Saturday night, Alabama played Auburn in a game that is known as the Iron Bowl. There were several bad calls and confusing situations in this one, but the worst one involved a “simultaneous catch” in the second half.
As much as I love college football, 2014 has not been a banner year for the sport. Sure, the actual game is still good, although my beloved Nittany Lions are struggling through a year that was always likely to be the worst part of the sanctions. Everything surrounding the game, though, is going to hell. The NCAA is coming apart at the seams, much to my delight, with lawsuits out the wazoo promising dramatic change for all of college athletics in the future. Beyond that, the way recruiting is handled, especially within certain conferences, continues to shed a very bad light on what is supposed to be an amateur sport played for the love of the game. The latest example of this comes to us courtesy of Mississippi State University and its head coach, Dan Mullen. This week, he pulled the scholarship offer from a kid who was about to graduate in two weeks and enroll early at MSU. [Read more →]
How did the world become so filled with idiots? Why is rudeness and an oversized sense of entitlement so pervasive today? These are things that occupy my mind on a regular basis, as I encounter them every day. I am sure there are sociologists with solid theories about it, so if you know or are one, feel free to share. I have been thinking about this subject in the last few days because of a silly little incident that occurred at the game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the New Orleans Saints on Sunday. Cincinnati tight end Jermaine Gresham scored a touchdown and tossed the ball up to a couple of women in Bengals shirts who had run down to the railing as the play happened. A man, Tony Williams, sitting right there in a Saints shirt, jumped up and grabbed the ball away from one of the women and kept it.
I think most sports fans will agree that playoff time is the best part of any sport’s season. The tension and excitement are both amped up when it’s “win or go home” time. NASCAR has taken note of this in recent years, changing its late season format to what it calls the “Chase for the Sprint Cup,” a ten race segment to end the season during which points are reset and only the top drivers from the first 26 races have a chance at the championship. That has been a pretty succesful change, but the modifications made before the 2014 season have made a mess of things, in my opinion. [Read more →]
A lot of Bad Sports stories amuse me. Some disgust me, while others make me shake my head in amazement, but it is the funny ones that really motivate me to write. Occasionally, though, there is a story that truly makes me sad. Not sad in the way that I’d be when someone on one of my teams does something stupid and gets suspended for it, but sad in a real way. One of those happened this week. Rita Jeptoo, the winner of the last two Chicago Marathons as well as this year’s Boston Marathon, failed a doping test back in September. The news just came out this week, just as she was about to collect the World Marathon Majors title on Sunday.
Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of smoke coming out of Chapel Hill that seemed to point to some major wrongdoing within the University of North Carolina and its sports program involving fake classes and the like. The NCAA supposedly investigated and decided to accept the school’s own sanctions against itself, which were pretty minor, and took no further action. This week, a new report came out indicating that the problems were far more widespread than had been previously indicated. [Read more →]
Perhaps it’s just me, but I preferred the version of the world where people who did something bad did not immediately profit from it. In that world, Kim Kardashian would still be famous, but only in a negative way, and she would not have made untold sums of money and become a household name by appearing in a sex tape while displaying no other notable skill other than self-promotion. Paris Hilton would have been seen as a family embarrassment rather than a worldwide celebrity. We have had a good number of athletes become famous for bad things too, and the pace at which the bad turns to profit seems to have accelerated quite rapidly. The current case in point is Joseph Randle, running back for the Dallas Cowboys and shoplifter. [Read more →]
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is worse, the players or the leagues. While the NFL and the NCAA find themselves in one bad situation after another, the players at both levels make it clear that many of them have little regard for rules or even for other human beings. At the college level, I think the good kids outnumber the bad kids by a lot, but there are still a number of them that clearly think the world revolves around them and the rules don’t apply. This week, Georgia’s star running back, Todd Gurley, was suspended indefinitely after it was alleged that he signed a whole lot of autographs while getting paid to do so, a clear violation of NCAA rules.
It’s really amazing how much of the talk around the NFL this season has centered on non-football issues. It is more than I can ever remember, and that is saying something, as there is always a fair amount of that stuff going on. The early part of this past week included a lot of discussion of religious touchdown celebrations. Husain Abdullah of the Kansas City Chiefs was penalized after sliding to the ground and praying in Muslim fashion after he returned an interception for a touchdown in the third quarter of his team’s win over New England on Monday Night Football.
There are multiple sides to most stories, right? That’s what people say, anyway. Here at BSGS, despite the fact that most of our stories fall pretty firmly on one side or the other, I guess an argument could be made that many stories could be placed on the opposite side of the ledger if you just looked at them from a different perspective. I am a person of strong opinions, so I would likely tell you that you were wrong if you told me that you disagreed with the side on which I placed one of these incidents of wrongdoing or heroism, but it’s my column so I am allowed to do that. Some things, though, really can reasonably be seen from both perspectives, and this week’s lead story is one of them. In fact, I started this out as a Good Sports story. That did not last. The subject is Minnesota Twins pitcher Phil Hughes, who missed out on a significant bonus this week due to bad luck and then a bad choice.
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It’s been a few months, so I guess it’s time for another column about how big an idiot Jameis Winston is. The Florida State quarterback and reigning Heisman Trophy winner continues to prove that he just doesn’t get it. This time, he was suspended for Saturday night’s game against Clemson after making a public ass of himself on campus last week.
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We are now two weeks into the NFL season, and much of the coverage continues to be about non-football issues, much to the league’s chagrin. Off-the-field issues are dominating the airwaves, and understandably so. Hot on the heels of the whole Ray Rice/domestic violence mess, Adrian Peterson, one of the league’s biggest stars, has been charged with child abuse.
On Monday, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell released his latest report issued as the academics integrity monitor for Penn State, a position to which he was appointed by the NCAA when it handed down historic sanctions a couple of years ago as the Jerry Sandusky scandal unfolded. As expected, the report was glowing and included recommendations to remove the remainder of the bowl ban and to return the rest of the scholarships that had been docked. I, along with the rest of Nittany Nation, was thrilled to see this happen. My Twitter feed exploded with unabashed excitement about the promise of the future of the team. As happy as I am to see most of the sanctions brought to an end, I remain unsatisfied, as there are still some aspects of this wholly unjustified punishment that remain in place. Beyond that, the narrative that goes along with this action, from the NCAA, the school’s administration, and the media, is a false one and it grates on me to an incredible extent.
My lead Bad Sports story this week was nearly a minor Good Sports story last week. I had already written the blurb and was preparing to post my column when new information came to light that changed the whole situation. Josh Shaw, a senior defensive back on the USC football team, is in major trouble after a crazy set of events that took him from being lauded as a hero to having his college career in jeopardy after he was shown to be a big-time liar. [Read more →]
Most of the big sports now have some degree of instant replay being used in an effort to get more calls correct. In order to avoid endless games, the big sports have implemented a challenge system, where coaches can officially question calls and ask for a review. I see this as great progress in sports, as I hate to see games turn on incorrect rulings. Some of the rules about how the challenges can be used, though, make me wonder if the goal is really to get things right or if it’s just to appease the fans a little bit. A good example of this happened in the game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Toronto Blue Jays on Saturday.
It’s just a vacation time of year, I guess. If it helps tide you over, feel free to make up some Bad Sports stories and put them in the comments.
NASCAR drivers are a hot-headed bunch. They drive around in these little compartments at very high speeds for hours on end, their cars banging into other cars and getting cut off and messed with constantly. I am amazed at how often I see these guys, after they have been wrecked, run out on the track toward the car that they feel wronged them, gesturing and yelling and sometimes throwing things. I have always felt that this was a rather dangerous thing to be doing. On Saturday night at a dirt track in upstate New York, my fear that someone would get killed doing this became reality. [Read more →]
