I was in my friend Mark’s dorm room, sitting on his bed, watching the game. We were freshmen, a bit more impressionable and a bit more willing to get excited about the athletic pursuits of our alma mater. Kristi Toliver hit the three-pointer, Kristi Toliver hit the free throws, and Maryland was the national champion in women’s basketball.
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Did you see Tiger Woods on Sunday? There he was: red shirt-wearing, intimidating, win-closing Tiger Woods strutting the course at Bay Hill and flicking off all comers like they should have known better.

Sometimes, it’s not a case of the rich getting richer as much as the rich remembering they’re the rich. Last year, as Butler and Virginia Commonwealth crashed the Final Four and—oh, the audacity!—stole a whole semifinal for themselves, we shrugged. This is what’s become of the NCAA tournament in the one-and-done era, the thinking went. The Butlers and VCUs have more experience, and experience is the great equalizer. 

Tiger Woods didn’t win a tournament in 2011, though. Continue Reading →

We foist a lot of expectations on the NCAA tournament. We want upsets. We want the best teams to go far. We want exciting finishes. We want perfect brackets. When those fail, we want total havoc. But we want order and certainty that the teams will be as memorable as the shining moments, that a single-elimination tournament is a reasonable way to crown a champion.

Tom Izzo’s Michigan State teams are 17-3 in the second game of NCAA tournament weekends. I love that statistic because it explains why Izzo is the ultimate NCAA tournament coach. Continue Reading →

Sunday’s episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead dealt with the question of intentions in a cold world. The group of survivors we’ve been following—and therefore, however falsely, the group we’ve come to think of as the good guys—has taken a prisoner from another group that had tried to kill several of our good guys. The entire episode—this show moves slowly, to put it lightly—deals with the ramifications of killing this prisoner on the moral integrity of the group.

He wouldn’t be the first live human the group’s killed for protection, and he probably wouldn’t be the last. It’s a desolate world. Society exists only in memory. Violence is the only way out. But this is different. This is colder. You can choose, one group member insists, to remain civil even as civilization falls to ruins. The NFL has its own dilemma of moral integrity. Continue Reading →

NASCAR’s an acquired taste; city boys like me aren’t supposed to pick it up. We’ve never whipped around backwoods roads on moonshine deliveries or earned our stripes on dirt tracks in midget cars. The closest Sprint Cup Series race to New York City, where I grew up, was more than two hours away in Long Pond, Pa., home to Pocono Raceway.

Then jet fuel spills on the course and a car and a truck go up in flames. Continue Reading →

Tyler Kepner, the baseball columnist for The New York Times, had a column on Sunday that attempted to explain why baseball fans love spring training. “Yes, there’s the warm weather, the comfort of routine, the general lack of night games,” he wrote. “But really, the reason is that spring training is the only time when everybody gets to be optimistic. In a game built on failure, there is value in that.” Continue Reading →

There’s an inherent flaw in the Jeremy Lin-Tim Tebow comparison: Jeremy Lin isn’t polarizing. Read through a few thousand tweets, and you’ll find people calling him overrated or using a variety of racial slurs. But you won’t see anyone making a logic-driven argument against his success.

Jeremy Lin doesn’t have his own Merril Hoge. He’s won over the traditionalists with his intelligent play and nose for the basket. He’s won over the stat-heads with his…stats. He’s won over the emotional fans with his fairy-tale story. It’s not that you have to like Jeremy Lin. It’s that you have to admit that he’s onto something, even if no one quite knows what that something will become.

Here, we use five stories to break down the Jeremy Lin saga, from his trouble finding a team out of high school to his success at Harvard to his failings in Oakland to his takeover of Madison Square Garden to his status as Asian-American icon.

The New York Giants won Super Bowl XLVI by a score of 21-17 against the New England Patriots.

Oh, and other things happened this weekend. Super Bowl coverage can be suffocating, to the point where it was actually difficult for me to navigate major sports websites to find non-Super Bowl stories for this feature. They exist. And even amid the screeching sound of Madonna’s 53-year-old vocal cords, these stories sang.

This weekly feature normally is about finding five of the best stories about the biggest event of the weekend. You can find those on your own. These things also happened, and these writers wrote about them with grace. Enjoy.

It takes four months to tear down an empire. We know that now. Joe Paterno is dead, and maybe that’s important to you. Maybe it means nothing at all.

How will you remember Joe Paterno? That’s a personal decision, which means there is no right answer. I know what I’ll think about when I think about Joe Paterno—I know the first thing that will come to my mind—but that’s my business. Not yours.

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Supposedly, playoff football is about running backs and defensive tackles. Soft offenses, they say, can’t cut it in January. And while that maxim might not explain how the New Orleans Saints and Green Bay Packers won the last two Super Bowls, it certainly fit with last weekend’s results, when those teams limped off against the hard-hitting San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants.

I don’t buy it. Continue Reading →

There is no major college football in New York City, where I grew up. College sports aren’t even on the map unless St. John’s is good. (Felipe Lopez, anyone?) So I picked my own team as a kid, opting for the one with the elephant mascot, cool name and fans that cared about college football as much as I cared about the Yankees.

I’m still not sure I grasp the devotion Alabama natives feel toward the Crimson Tide. But I watch every game and greet strangers with “Roll Tide” and laugh at the Big Ten. The last part is most important, because the Southeastern Conference kind of owns this place. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. So Alabama and LSU will play for a national title tonight. Continue Reading →

The NHL tied its Winter Classic manufactured tradition to New Year’s Day. College football bowls have long be synonymous with the holiday as well. Those two sports own January 1st—unless January 1st falls on a Sunday. You don’t mess with Sundays. Especially not on Week 17.

We care more about the NFL than we do other things. Not just sports. Things. Churches, at least those on the East Coast, usually give parishioners plenty of time to file out of the pews and make it home for a different sort of religious experience. And no one competes with the NFL, even if tradition says New Year’s Day is your day. The NFL took your lunch money and made you get to the back of the line, college football and the NHL. Continue Reading →