Every once in a while, a sports fan is faced with a strange dilemma. It sometimes becomes evident that it would be much more beneficial for a team to lose than to win. This is because of the nature of the draft, particularly in football and basketball. Sure, baseball and hockey have drafts too, and the draft orders for those sports are determined in such a way that the worst teams get the earlier picks, just like in football and basketball, but because baseball and hockey have robust minor league systems, players in those sports generally take a lot longer to get to the major league level and picks are far more speculative in nature. If you root for a bad team, you often realize that late-season wins may actually be hurting the cause of making the team better. In the spirit of that philosophy, this week’s big Bad Sports story to me was the Philadelphia 76ers’ win over the Detroit Pistons on Saturday night. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Five years and one week ago, I wrote my first column for When Falls the Coliseum. I was going to make note of this in last week’s post, but it seemed more appropriate to call it out this week, as I knew it was likely that I would be writing about the same thing I wrote about back on March 16, 2009, and that is March Madness. The NCAA Basketball Tournament started this week, and the opening weekend provided lots of Good Sports moments. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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It is a shame, but we are used to professional athletes behaving badly. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to write this column if there weren’t a world full of these people doing stupid, bad things on a very regular basis. Occasionally, it’s not the players but the coaches that are committing these acts of idiocy. Every once in a while, though, it goes higher up the ladder than that. On Sunday night, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay was arrested for driving while intoxicated in a suburb of Indianapolis where he lives. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I keep reading that this is a “trophy for everybody” world now. The lack of trophies on my desk make me think that this is just hyperbole, although it could just be that I have not competed in anything that would earn me one of these trophies just for being there. On second thought, I have several medals I received for finishing somewhere in the thousands in a bunch of races, so I guess I agree with the original premise. Still, when you get into organized sports beyond the type that anyone can just join because he or she feels like it, there is usually a distinct winner at the end, and that is as it should be. Occasionally, there are examples to the contrary, and this is where the supposed fun begins. Fun for columnists, not for players, of course. The state of Ohio held its high school hockey championships last week, and when the ice dust cleared, no one won. Or everyone won. It’s hard to tell. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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When people cheat in the professional ranks, it is a shame. When there is cheating in college sports, it seems a little bit worse, since the players there are younger and are, ostensibly, still kids for the most part. Cheating at the high school level, though, takes it all much farther down a path where there can be no explanation beyond just bad people. In nearly all of those situations, of course, adults are either the ones doing the cheating or they are at least aware and complicit in some way. This week’s example comes from Curie Metropolitan High School in Chicago, whose basketball team was ranked second in USA Today’s national rankings until it was revealed that seven of the team’s players were actually academically ineligible to play.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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O my child, in your bright tiny uniform, I use this spell to transfer my aggression, my radiant energy through the ether to you. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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One of the things I see regularly that really gets under my skin is this bizarre sense of entitlement that so many people seem to have developed, particularly young people. I don’t know where it comes from or why it’s so pervasive, but everywhere I turn I encounter yet another example of it. In a sports-related story, we had a good illustration of it last week at West Chester University. At halftime of a basketball game between the school and Shippensburg University, a student was given the chance to win $10,000 by hitting a series of shots. According to the rules of the contest, he failed to win, despite the fact that it appeared he had indeed won. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to actually lose…a national pizza chain picked up on the uproar that followed and came up with the money for the kid. Everyone was happy…except me, of course.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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What’s wrong with people? I really need to know. Perhaps I should run a contest…people could send in their answers and the best answer would qualify the sender for some sort of fabulous prize, like maybe a lifetime subscription to Bad Sports, Good Sports (you really can subscribe). It’s a tough question, though, and I reserve the right to decide that none of the answers are suitable. As an example of how hard this question is, consider what has been happening to Rashaan Evans, a high school football player from Alabama, over the last couple of weeks.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. “That’s the gayest opening ceremony I’ve ever seen!”

9. “I guess they’ll be taking Shaun White’s picture off all those gum packages now.”

8. “Man, the drinking water’s the same color, whether it’s going in or out of my body.”

7. “That woman curler gives great broom!”

6. “I said I’m a ‘biathlete’, not a ‘bi athlete’!”

5. “I haven’t seen this much slush since that explosion at the Icee factory.”

4. “Do you have a door knob on your side?!!”

3. “I just borrowed that guy’s ChapStick, then realized it was Bob Costas.”

2. “Why would President Putin ask me to oil up his bare chest?”

1. “Is that a microphone?”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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I walk the line of liking (and, I guess believing) in youth sports while feeling that big-time sports structures in our culture are broken. What can we do? Well, stop watching. I never watch college football or basketball, on principle, for instance. Feeble gesture, indeed, and I don’t chastise friends (too much) for their viewing preferences, especially in light of my addiction to the violent, shameless NFL. But when I read a recent piece by Philadelphia Inquirer high schools spots writer Phil Anastasia about out-of-state high school football games, I was dismayed. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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
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10. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Doubles Luge

9. Snowplowing

8. Synchronized Curling

7. Bottomless Ski Jump

6. Icicle Toss

5. Chechen Rebelling

4. Nordic Hot Tub

3. Ice Hockey Free-For-All

2. Uphill Speed Skiing

1. Gay Bashing
 
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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
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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
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Let’s face it: fans of both American and European football can be disgusting. I’m not sure what to do about soccer — it seems the riots continue and there will always be select beatings of unfortunate visiting fans. But I think I have an answer for American football…and it came to me after I watched a video of an Eagles fan (they lost) spitting in the face of a Saints fan (they won) at the end of a recent playoff game.

We can all agree that this is bad form. Perhaps we can all agree it is disgusting, no? But, perhaps — as I often point out to my writing students on the verge of their “problem solution” papers — we can eliminate the problem by simply recognizing and removing its cause. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Chris Matarazzo
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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
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