Sports At Politics

After a runaway victory by the AFC team in pouring rain at the NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando, Florida earlier today (the AFC defeated the NFC by a score of 26 to 7), Jason Witten, the color commentator for the English-language telecast of the Pro Bowl that aired on ABC and ESPN and was produced by ESPN, broke the #1 rule of trophy presentations, which is to not break the trophy, by breaking the trophy: Jason Witten broke the damn Pro Bowl trophy: https://t.co/Rxvi41usqy pic.twitter.com/RKL3SXqi17 — Deadspin (@Deadspin) January 27, 2019 That's an embarrassing way to cap off one of the least interesting Pro Bowl games in a long time.

After being fired by the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in 2017 after being implicated in a sex scandal involving sending at least 12 phone calls on a university phone to escort services, Hugh Freeze took the head football coaching job at...wait for it...Liberty University, an evangelical university that was founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell, Sr., whose current president is his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and has a strict "honor code" that, for lack of a better description, regulates the morality of its students. At the press conference in which Freeze was announced as Liberty's head football coach, things got even weirder: #Liberty AD Ian McCaw on Hugh Freeze: "He’s a man of great faith, great family man." — Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) December 7, 2018 I'm sure you've met a few others who can handle your junk @CoachHughFreeze pic.twitter.com/NxEU8bxUYz — gmannVOLS (@gmannVOLS) December 7, 2018 I'm not going to cri...

Jim Harbaugh, the head football coach at the University of Michigan, stated during the Big Ten Conference (B1G) media day before the start of this year's college football season (which begins August 25, although the first games featuring B1G teams is August 30) that he would like the College Football Playoff (CFP) that determines the unofficial national champion in NCAA Division I FBS college football expanded to eight teams, with an expansion to sixteen teams being a long-term goal, as well as eliminating conference championship games: Jim Harbaugh on @CFBPlayoff expansion: "Let's go to 8 and eventually 16." Says to eliminate the conference championship game to get there and keep number of games reasonable. pic.twitter.com/KVsezXrura — Hawkeye Headquarters (@HawkeyeHQ) July 23, 2018 In short, Harbaugh's proposal to reform the College Football Playoff is half-great and half-terrible. I strongly support the idea of expanding the College Football Playoff to ...

With the 2018 FIFA World Cup men's soccer tournament beginning Thursday, I'll take this opportunity to predict the outcome of every match of this year's World Cup tournament. For the group stage, each match in each pool is listed in chronological order (although the last two matches of each group are played simultaneously), and my prediction for each mach is listed using the following format: (Team A) (Team A predicted score)-(Team B predicted score) (Team B), and the individual match predictions are followed by predicted pool standings. For the predicted pool standings, standings for each team use the following format: (Wins)-(Draws)-(Losses) (Points); for teams that I predict to advance out of group stage, their elimination stage seeding is listed as (group ranking)(group letter), and any tiebreaking criteria used is noted as well. For the elimination stage, predictions for individual matches follow an identical format to those for the group stage, with three exceptio...

The backlash that the National Football League (NFL) has received (examples here and here ) for adopting a "stand-or-stay" rule in regards to performances of the U.S. national anthem before NFL games might be just the beginning of the NFL's problems in the upcoming NFL season. Several NFL players, whose names have not been revealed, have reportedly told Shaun King of the New York Daily News that they are considering sitting out the season unless NFL team(s) sign Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, two NFL players who are not currently under a contract with any team due to the NFL team owners effectively blacklisting them from the league for protesting against racism in America. Furthermore, King has claimed that the goal of the unnamed players is to get as much as one-quarter of the league's players to sit out with them. BREAKING: Several star @NFL players have told me they are considering sitting out the season until the de facto ban of Eric Reid and Colin Kaepern...

This tweet from President Donald Trump may have just sunk the joint bid by the United States, Canada, and Mexico for the right to host the 2026 edition of the world's most prestigious men's soccer tournament, the FIFA World Cup: The U.S. has put together a STRONG bid w/ Canada & Mexico for the 2026 World Cup. It would be a shame if countries that we always support were to lobby against the U.S. bid. Why should we be supporting these countries when they don’t support us (including at the United Nations)? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2018 In other words, Trump, at least implicitly, threatened to revoke U.S. foreign aid from countries that intend to vote for Morocco's bid to host the 2026 World Cup over the joint USA/Canada/Mexico bid. Morocco, a country in northwestern Africa, was thought to be a heavy favorite to be selected to host the 2026 World Cup even before Trump's threatening tweet, and is probably even more of a favorite to be selected ...

Danny White, the athletic director for the University of Central Florida (UCF), claimed a national championship in NCAA Division I FBS gridiron football after the undefeated UCF Knights defeated the Auburn University Tigers by a score of 34 to 27 in a thrilling Peach Bowl contest. I'm going to consider UCF to be unofficial national co-champions with the winner of the College Football Playoff (CFP) final , which is scheduled for January 8 and will feature the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the University of Georgia Bulldogs, as the winner of the Bama vs. Georgia CFP final will invariably have one loss on their record for the season (both Bama and Georgia lost regular season games to Auburn). Remember, the NCAA does not officially award a national championship in Division I FBS football . Instead, the College Football Playoff (CFP) was created in an attempt to avoid controversies over who would be generally recognized as national champion, which plagued the former Bowl C...