What an amazing thing it must be to be a world class athlete. I grew up imagining myself out on a football field or a baseball field in front of thousands and thousands of people, making big plays and hearing the cheers. The fact that I had no special skill in either sport did not really enter into my thought process, of course. It seemed to me that every kid had the same dreams, and I imagine that many of them did. This is why I find it so unfathomable that so many of the guys who not only have the skill to get them to the pros but are actually good enough to be superstars are so willing to screw up and risk it all. Florida State quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston is one of these guys.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is a disaster. He has presided over a terrible franchise since 1981, and is currently the longest-tenured owner in the NBA. His team has been miserably bad for most of those years. Now that they are finally good, he has found another way to embarrass his team and his city. Known to be a racist for many years by a number of people, Sterling left no doubt about it this week when a tape surfaced of him making racial comments to his girlfriend.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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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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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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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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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
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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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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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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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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 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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