Just like last week, the biggest story of the week happened on Monday. Each time I needed to either write a separate story, in order to try to be timely, or wait until I wrote and posted my normal column. On both occasions, my usual schedule has not allowed for the early post, so I have had to settle for a story well after the event. Like with the attack on the Boston Marathon, though, the story was big enough to still stand up a week later. This week, it was the revelation by NBA player Jason Collins that he is gay. He is the first active player in one of the major team sports to come out of the closet, so this is clearly a big deal. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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For many athletes, sports are more important than anything else. Those at the top of their sports must have an even greater focus on that area of their lives than the rest, I would imagine, considering the level of accomplishment. College athletes have certainly reached a level of athletic achievement of which most people can not boast, and it must be quite difficult to eliminate distractions and physical ailments that could interfere with those pursuits. You would not expect one of these people to voluntarily choose something that would end his college career, but that’s exactly what Cameron Lyle did. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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This column will post on Monday morning, nearly a full week after the horror that occurred at the Boston Marathon. I really wanted to write something soon after it happened, but, as is so often the case, life interfered and I never “put pen to paper,” as they say. With the added perspective of 6 additional days, I am not sure I can make a lot more sense of what happened that afternoon. As the resident sports columnist for When Falls the Coliseum, though, I feel like I need to at least give it a shot. The human tragedy of lives lost and lives altered forever at an event that should have been a joyous celebration is one that most of us will not quickly forget. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There is a whole lot of idiocy in sports. I write about a lot of it here on a weekly basis, although there is far more of it than I could possibly cover in this small space. Aside from the material it gives me, though, I do genuinely wish that most of it would go away. Things like what happened Thursday night in San Diego during the Padres game against the Los Angeles Dodgers just make me angry. The thing in question was a bench-clearing brawl between the two teams that included a major injury to Dodgers pitcher Zack Greinke, incurred when he was attacked by Padres slugger Carlos Quentin. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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OK, guys, you are at a baseball game and you’ve downed a few beers during the early going. Between innings, you run out through the tunnel looking for the nearest bathroom. You are not the only one with this idea, of course, and you find yourself in line. A few minutes later, you reach the urinal. You do your business, wash your hands, and get back to your seat as quickly as possible, right? The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, a minor league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, hopes not. Instead, they would like you to spend a few extra minutes playing the video games they plan to install above the urinals at Coca-Cola Park in Allentown. Wait, what?

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Every once in a while, I review all of my stories at the end of the week and find that while a bunch of interesting stuff happened in sports that week, nothing stood out to me as a lead story for Bad Sports, Good Sports. This is one of those weeks. Either nothing happened in sports this past week that moved me to attack with my customary cynicism or to wax poetic about someone’s great accomplishment, or I am just tired after a long day and a long week and my synapses are not firing well enough to make something leap into my imagination in order to lead my fingers to type out some clever commentary, or at least something that approximates my usual drivel. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In the big business that is professional sports, corporate sponsorship is a major factor in the whole show. From stadium signage to television and radio commercials, many varieties of companies and organizations pay significant money to make sure you know their name. Most of the time, fans do not have major opinions on the nature of those sponsors, preferring to try to ignore them instead. I am a pro at completely tuning out commercials, most of the time not even realizing that they are on. Occasionally, though, a sponsor appears that causes an uproar, and the sport involved becomes secondary. One such situation became news this week when Texas Motor Speedway announced that the National Rifle Association would be the title sponsor for the NASCAR Sprint Cup race that will happen at the track in April. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Professional athletes make a lot of money. Especially the ones whose names you know. Sure, some of them make a lot more than others, but even the supposed have-nots likely make a good bit more than you do. Some of them make more than you’ll make in your whole life, and if you lived multiple lives, you still might not get there. Usually, although not always, the best players make the most money. Sure, you can find a young superstar who has not yet cashed in on his first big contract who seems woefully underpaid, and you can also easily spot guys who had a big year, hit it big, and then never approached that level of accomplishment again, but I think it is fair to say that most of the guys making the biggest money are among the elite in their respective sports. Maybe I’m silly, but I feel like a guy who signs a deal that makes him the highest paid player in the history of his league should not only be the best player in that league, but one of the all-time greats. This week, Baltimore Ravens and quarterback Joe Flacco agreed to such a deal. Joe Flacco. Huh? [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Nerlens Noel is a freshman basketball player at the University of Kentucky. Pro scouts and draft gurus all had Noel penciled in as a very high draft pick in the next NBA draft, with some considering him a candidate for the number one overall pick. On Tuesday night, Noel tore his ACL in a gruesome-looking incident during his team’s game against Florida. A debate began immediately about the NBA’s draft eligibility rules, which require a player to be at least 19 years old and at least one year out of high school before he is eligible. It’s certainly possible that this rule may have cost Noel a whole lot of money. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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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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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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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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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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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I have always been a proponent of the use of instant replay in sports officiating. Since the technology exists, it would be a total waste to not take advantage of it in order to get more calls correct. Football is using it extensively, and baseball has been expanding its use over the last couple of years, with more sure to come. Game officials have a very difficult job, despite what you might hear from many fans. It is far easier to make a call when watching on television than to make it from field level at full speed. The thing I just don’t get is how the replay officials manage to get it wrong so often, as they have the advantage of technology that the officials on the field do not have. The two games that meant the most to me this weekend, Penn State against Nebraska and the Philadelphia Eagles against the Dallas Cowboys, each included a call that was massively botched by replay officials. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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What a miserable week, in the midst of a miserable year, it has been to be a Penn Stater. I am going to start by stating that no one I am writing about here has or will suffer in a way that compares to the actual victims of Jerry Sandusky’s evil. That is clear. That said, there are legions of Penn Staters out there who are having a very hard time dealing with every aspect of this situation, and I am one of them. As much as I despise what went on there, I find myself being very defensive as I read more and more of the drivel that has been written about the release of the Freeh Report and what it contained. I nearly left this story off of my list for the week for a couple of major reasons. First, it hurts to write about it, and I am hardly in the mood to put myself through that after the events of the week. Second, it is simply not a sports issue. It does not really belong in a sports column, just as it does not belong under the jurisdiction of the NCAA. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Has Hell frozen over? Are pigs flying? After years of officials stating that a playoff would never happen in major college football, a playoff is going to happen in major college football. The commissioners of the Division 1-A (I still refuse to call it FBS) football conferences gathered recently and approved a plan to recommend a move to a four-team playoff to the university presidents. This week, those presidents said yes to the plan. The BCS as we knew it is no more, or will be no more as of the 2014 season. Is this a good thing? Absolutely. It’s not really good enough, in my opinion, but it’s a start. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I hate people. I may have said this before, but it still rings true. Not all people, of course. Just some. The people who tell you that you should not hate anyone and that all people are worthy of respect must not have ever known or read about anyone like Elizabeth Lloyd. A couple of years ago, Lloyd was at a Little League baseball game, sitting near the bullpen where a pitcher was warming up. An errant throw by eleven-year-old Matthew Magliaccio, the catcher, struck Lloyd in the face. She suffered injuries as a result. That’s certainly a shame, but what has followed is what has Ms. Lloyd on my list of revolting people. She is suing this kid. That’s right, she filed a lawsuit against Magliaccio, now thirteen, asking for $153,000 in damages to pay for her supposed medical costs, and is also asking for additional money for her pain and suffering. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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