Emotions run high in sports. This is true whether you are just a fan or if you are an actual participant. As I imagine every one of you out there knows, when you are emotional, you often say things that you might not otherwise say. A regular person has a shot to get away with that, as there aren’t usually hordes of people hanging on his every word. A player or a coach has no such luck, however, as someone has a microphone or recording device at every turn when people want to know what you have to say. Nebraska head football coach Bo Pellini found that out the hard way this week when a 2 year old recording of him surfaced in which he cursed out fans of the Cornhuskers, among others.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Due to a family situation, Bad Sports, Good Sports will not appear this week.  We will return with more fun sports news at this time next week.

If you are looking for some quick links of interest, check out:

A total mess at Oklahoma State

High school football player rips opponent’s helmet off and beats him with it

Bench-clearing brawl due to showboating pitcher

Broncos linebacker Von Miller in trouble and in more trouble

NASCAR surprises me and takes steps to correct some wrongs

Jim Furyk fires 59 at BMW

Bad sports, good sports appears every Monday

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I like to think of sports as being pure, at least as far as the integrity of the results. Fakery, result-fixing, and shadiness are for things like professional wrestling. When I see something in a sport I love that smacks of cheating and a less than legitimate outcome, it makes me sad. I know it is foolish of me to believe that a whole lot of this stuff does not go on regularly, but I can’t help it. I need this stuff to be real. This week, I have reason to question NASCAR. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I know that I have recently written about Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, as well as about the NCAA, an organization that is coming apart at the seams. I hate to repeat subjects in short order, but it is impossible for me to avoid writing about them this week. There are so many facets to this story that I feel like I would not be doing my job if I didn’t put forth my opinion on what happened this week down in College Station, starting with the absurd penalty levied against Manziel by the NCAA for his autograph shenanigans, and ending with the complete douchebaggery of Manziel’s performance against Rice on Saturday in his team’s opener.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Fandom is a funny thing. People are willing to paint their faces, their bodies, adorn their homes with flags, signs, and a huge variety of other items with logos, and spend an awful lot of time discussing the teams that they follow. Some are exclusively interested in professional sports, while some have a stronger allegiance to the college variety. You’ll find the nuts in both places, of course, and I don’t know if either could claim a more rabid fanbase. The teams and the schools do plenty to stoke the fires of their followers, whether they be the stoic, occasional watchers or the foaming-at-the-mouth types. They do go too far sometimes, though, especially when the people doing the exhorting are new to their teams or schools. The target of my annoyance this week is Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I really hate the NCAA. I know I am not exactly putting myself out on an island with that statement, as hating the NCAA in 2013 has become kind of like hating the DMV…pretty much everyone feels that way. It’s an organization built to protect a concept of amateurism that is outdated by a solid twenty to thirty years. Beyond that, it is now run by a grandstanding ignoramus named Mark Emmert, an empty suit who never met a microphone he didn’t like. Beyond the whole Penn State fiasco, Emmert and the NCAA have continued to look bad on a weekly basis this year, from failing to punish schools that actually do break NCAA rules, to sanctioning individual players who do awful things like washing their cars using university water. This week, a former marine who is now a freshman at Middle Tennessee State University was declared ineligible to play this season due to yet another awful ruling.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Listening to interviews with athletes and team officials is often brutal. For the most part, no one will actually say anything anymore, as organizations are so afraid of either lawsuits or giving the other team “bulletin board material.” This has also carried over to commentators and sports talk show hosts, who try to offer what they might call criticism, but who usually soften it so much as to make it unclear what they are actually saying. Occasionally, though, someone manages to speak his or her mind, and you would think the world had come to an end to watch the reaction. This happened a couple of times this week, when two former professional athletes, baseball’s Jack Clark and football’s Bernie Kosar, forgot to hit the bland button before they spoke. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The big news in the sports world this week involved a racist comment made by Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper during a Kenny Chesney concert last month. The comments were caught on someone’s phone, and came to light this week when a local sports-gossip site, Crossing Broad, got a hold of the video and made it public. There are a lot of layers to this story, and they all qualify as Bad Sports. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Oh, Ryan Braun. We tried so hard to believe in you. We allowed ourselves to consider that maybe the mishandling of your positive test for PEDs last year led to a positive test when you were not actually guilty of taking anything illicit. I, for one, feel really dopey here. For those of you not in the know, Braun, the slugger and former league MVP who roams the outfield for the Milwaukee Brewers, was suspended for the rest of the season this week as part of a deal he struck with Major League Baseball for violations of the league’s policy on performance enhancing drugs. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I have been writing this column every week for nearly four and a half years, and I have become quite accustomed to scouring the sports world for stories, with much of my focus being on the bad ones. This focus on the negative may have made me jaded, I suppose, as some stories that should leave me outraged merely make me laugh. When I start to give my take on them, I will sometimes find that maybe some of these actions are more revolting than they are funny, and my text will often reflect that disgust. Still, I think most of these things don’t seem very real to me, because most of the people involved are unlike anyone that I actually encounter in my own life. An example of this would be Antonio Morrison, a soon-to-be-Sophomore linebacker for the University of Florida football team, who was arrested on Sunday for barking at a police dog.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Professional athletes are inherently risk-takers. They have to be, right? They put themselves out on a field and put their bodies at risks, especially football players. It makes perfect sense that some of them would have off-the-field interests that would explore that side of their personalities as well, although I have to bet their teams would wish that were not the case. Every July, we hear about some NFL player who goes to Spain to run with the bulls in Pamplona. This year, Russell Okung of the Seattle Seahawks was the guy, but he was not alone among his football brethren. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan was there as well. In my opinion, they are a couple of idiots. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Sports fans are passionate. Not all of them, of course, but a pretty good percentage of them take these games quite seriously. The word “fan,” after all, is short for “fanatic.” Being a fan often means taking silly or irrational stances on things that should really have little consequence in the life of that person. Life is hard, though, and it’s often much easier to throw our energy into sports than it is to face reality and everything that comes with it. One of the things that we take seriously is the loyalty of the players who play for the teams that we so love. Someone might want to explain that to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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As much as the world has changed over the last decade or so, it is amazing how consistently people will say stupid things about someone who is breaking down barriers. There are many people who have evolved, but expecting that everyone has is a fruitless endeavor. Danica Patrick is the first woman to make serious inroads into the world of NASCAR. She hasn’t lit up the leaderboard, but she has been respectable. Despite that, some people are very quick to discount her. Kyle Petty, a former driver and current commentator, took about as serious a shot at her as he could in an interview this week, saying she “is not a race car driver.”

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Hey there everyone. Greetings from Walt Disney World in sunny Orlando, where the humidity is oppressive but the happiness wins anyway. I am here with my family, and time has kept me from completing my column for this week. I had great designs on having everything written in advance, which would have allowed me to post even after a couple of very long weekend days, but it was not to be. I will return next week with a column that will contain two week’s worth of brilliance and insight, I promise.

If you are desperate for some Bad Sports, Google Aaron Hernandez, Serena Williams (re: Steubenvile), or Allen Simonsen. For some Good Sports, Abby Wambach, Will Venable, and Joe Torre’s daughter would be some good starting spots.

Have a great week.

Bad Sports, Good Sports appears every Monday

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I am torn. I am a big fan of college sports, with football being my clear number one and basketball coming in second, but I enjoy other sports at that level as well. The reason for my mixed feelings is how much like professional sports the big two have become. At the Division 1 level, especially in the big conferences, there is very little to back up the premise that these are amateur sports, aside from the fact that the players do not (generally) get paid. Any time I start to think that the whole setup stinks and needs to be changed, I realize that the sports I love could be dramatically altered if that happened, and that’s a hard reality to face. Still, it’s hard to follow these players and not see the problems that come from the big business of college sports. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In 1995, running back Ricky Watters signed with the Philadelphia Eagles after starting his career with the San Francisco 49ers. In his first game with the team, he was running a crossing pattern and made a feeble attempt at catching a pass because he was shying away from the contact that was coming at him. When asked about “short-arming” this pass after the game, Watters famously wondered aloud why he would have even considered doing otherwise, asking “For who? For what?” Although he went on to have a very good career with the Eagles, the notoriously tough Philadelphia fans never let him forget the selfish questions with which they were introduced to him. This week, another new Eagle, Cary Williams, went down a similar road when asked about some recent Organized Team Activities that he had skipped. Uh-oh.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In the world of academics, I would bet that university presidents are popular individuals. The successful ones are highly visible on campus, raise tons of money for their schools, and are often given at least some credit for the success of their institutions. From a college athletics standpoint, though, I am starting to really despise these guys. People like E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State just don’t seem to live in the real world, and yet they get paid large (sometimes huge) sums of money to be the faces of their universities. This week, Gee came under a great deal of scrutiny after a recording of one of Ohio State’s athletic council meetings surfaced during which he made offensive remarks about a number of different targets, including Catholics, the SEC, and a couple of Kentucky schools. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The Mets’ four-game sweep of the Yankees this week, with two victories at home in Queens and two overseas in the Bronx, may not be a story for the grander history books. But for this baseball fan and for New Yorkers on both sides of the greatest baseball divide, it was memorable. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Jeff Scheuer
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The world has many problems. So many, in fact, that any attempt to list them would be futile, and the idea of putting them in some kind of order is ludicrous. I believe, though, that racism is certainly somewhere near the top of the list. In my own sheltered little world, it is easy to pretend that it doesn’t exist, but that bubble bursts on a regular basis whenever I let the real world intrude on my idyllic existence. Racism is not as pervasive as it was 50 years ago, of course, but it is still a very real force in our society, and sports are in no way immune to its effects. Two weeks ago, golfers Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods battled for the Players Championship title and, at the same time, bickered back and forth about a breach of course etiquette that Garcia believed Woods had committed while they played together during the 3rd round. This week, Garcia, who was being asked yet again about the incident, stepped far over the line and made a clearly racially-tinged remark about Woods.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The young men who comprise the Midland College Chaparral baseball team truly are the ‘boys of summer’ this year. At a time when most students are pursuing ventures off-campus – recreation, work, whatever – the team has remained on campus and at work, getting ready for what lies ahead. It’s been two weeks since commencement exercises brought an end to the 2012/2013 academic year at our community college in Western Texas, and it will be another week before we kick-off the summer semester. It’s a quiet time around campus … unless you’re a baseball player. They returned to Midland just a few days ago with a regional championship trophy in hand – the first ever for MC Chaparral baseball. And now they’re in Grand Junction, Colorado for the JUCO World Series, the National Junior College Athletic Association‘s national championship tournament.

JUCO World Series-bound Midland College Chaparrals, 2013 NJCAA Region 5 Champions

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Tags: sports by Jeff McDonald
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