A sampling of headlines on the Houston Chronicle‘s site early this morning:

• Complete coverage of Texans’ disappointing loss to Panthers

• Texans lose the battle of the rookie quarterbacks as Yates struggles

• Texans blasted for disrespecting America

• Turnovers, red-zone busts continue to haunt Texans

• Slow starts catch up to Texans in loss to Panthers

• Watch the trick play that embarrassed the Texans

When an NFL team—particularly a good NFL team—loses, someone has to be at fault. That goes for the defending Super Bowl champions takes its first loss of the season or a fringe playoff contender hurting their chances. It might be the coach or the QB, the defense or the special teams, but someone needs to get blamed for a loss. Every week.
Continue Reading →

I have a thin skin when it comes to NBA critics. My favorite sports league is problematic in its inner workings, sure, but the game itself is beautiful and played at the highest level. I chafe when I hear people claim that it’s all been downhill since Bird or Magic or Jordan retired, that the current crop of NBA players don’t go all out or are just in it for the money. Those arguments just don’t hold up—they’re mostly built on fallacies conjured by people who don’t actually watch the NBA. Or worse, but perhaps more commonly,  they’re built on fallacies by people who marvel at the NBA playoffs every year then say the regular season has nothing for them.

But I don’t really have a counterpoint for this argument: Continue Reading →

At 3:15 a.m. on Saturday morning, Twitter damn-near exploded. Suddenly seven of the nine trending topics in the U.S. were about the NBA. There was “Kobe Bryant” and “#teamheat” and “Mike Brown” and “David Stern”—even “Phil Jackson” made the list. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see “Nikola Pekovic” pop up at that rate.

Continue Reading →

We don’t know anything about the NFL. That’s not some royal “we.” It’s not just fans or pundits—it’s all of us.

OK, we all knew the Green Bay Packers would be pretty good. But you got one prediction wrong, at least. Probably several. Before the season, two of my colleagues were discussing which team would be worse: the San Francisco 49ers or the Cincinnati Bengals. If the season ended today, after 10 weeks, both of those teams would be in the playoffs.

Continue Reading →

I’d like to say I would fight him. If I were put in Mike McQueary’s shoes, I want to believe I would have intervened when I saw Penn State icon Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abusing a boy in the showers. At least yelled at him. “What are you doing?” At least stopped what I could stop. Continue Reading →

Say this for Tony La Russa: He makes baseball interesting. Other words commonly associated with the Cardinals manager: brilliant, stupid, egotistical, generous, frustrating, crotchety. But if we’re going to yell hyperboles and start bar fights about baseball, there’s no better man to start the arguments.

That was a great World Series. Seven games, one all-time classic (Game 6), four unknown heroes (Allen Craig, Mike Napoli, Derek Holland and MVP David Freese), one historic feat (Albert Pujols’ three-homer Game 3) and an ultimate underdog winning it all. You’ve probably heard about the guy who put $250 on the Cardinals to win it all when they were a  999-to-1 long shot. It was that kind of season for Major League Baseball.

And it produced writing. Lots of writing. Not all of it was good, of course. But plenty was. Here, in a special Five (plus two)-on-One, we spin through one great read from every game. Enjoy.

Dan Wheldon, winner of two Indianapolis 500, champion of one IndyCar season and father of two very young boys, will be remembered mostly for the horrific crash that led to his death Sunday.

Those who knew him will remember the sunny, smiling Englishman and the steely, talented competitor, I’m sure. Most of us didn’t know Dan Wheldon, though. Most of us will keep in our minds that image of his car going airborne as flames shot up on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

One day later, we look for answers and try to figure out what we lost. Yahoo’s Jay Hart talked with Wheldon days before the crash. John Romano visits Wheldon’s home in St. Petersburg, Fl., to find ample evidence of support. Greg Couch asks if the death was avoidable, a bitter question none of us should expect clear answers to. English readers wonder about their own open-wheel league while mourning the loss of a countryman.

“It’s actually been a very difficult weekend for us so far,” wrote Wheldon in his USAToday.com blog before the event. He was referring to car issues.

“Al Davis can’t be all bad; it just seems that way,” wrote New York Times columnist Dave Anderson in the 1970s. And why did it seem that way? For one, Davis had a habit of not letting anyone really get to know him. Ask for an exclusive interview, and you probably got a grinning, “No, but thanks for asking,” from his publicist.

Richard Hoffer, perhaps Sports Illustrated‘s most under-appreciated scribe, penned a mighty piece in 1989 about Davis and the rebuilding Raiders. In it, he describes Davis’ insecurities with the media:

Continue Reading →

We can all imagine Tim McCarver saying something like, “The key to winning, especially in the postseason, is to hold on to the lead.”

Let’s skip the clichés, though, and move right ahead to the facts: In Sunday’s three divisional series games, relievers logged 22 1/3 innings. That’s an average of roughly 3 2/3 innings out of the bullpen per team per game. No pitcher, not even Rays ace James Shields (who finished what he started 11 times during the regular season), has pitched a complete game in the playoffs this season.

Today, we take a look at relief pitchers and the playoffs, starting with one of George Plimpton’s finest sportswriting. Plimpton took in the view of the classic 1975 World Series, pitting the Reds and Red Sox, from the bullpen, where the relievers smoked in the Porta Potty and prepared to pitch the biggest innings of the season. Continue Reading →

One or two of the above columns is sure to look foolish by November. That’s just the way sports go: We live in the moment, and we judge based on some mix of whatever merit a team has earned in the present and whatever respect a team has accumulated in the past.

“It’s a tough time for skeptics,” The Buffalo News‘ Jerry Sullivan writes, and while he’s speaking directly of the upstart Bills he covers, he could very well be writing about dozens of teams in numerous sports throughout the country. (Did you know Old Dominion was ranked No. 1 in field hockey, ahead of giants such as North Carolina and Maryland?) Continue Reading →

In the fall of 2005, the Madden NFL franchise unleashed QB Vision Control. It was a dreadful day for those novices like me who didn’t own a PlayStation or Xbox but still wanted to play with friends occasionally. We couldn’t figure out how exactly the video game decided Peyton Manning had the peripheral vision of an alligator while David Carr wore an eye patch.

It was hailed as the moment where Madden figured out how to differentiate quarterbacks, a true landmark for the franchise. This wasn’t adding the truck stick or linebacker spy. QB Vision Control affected every passing play (provided you didn’t turn the function off), often 60-plus plays per game.

Continue Reading →

This year’s opening piece is not last year’s piece, and could not be after this offseason. Down the rabbit hole we go.

That’s how Spencer Hall opens his college football season preview. It’s more or less a disclaimer, which is the only way we can talk about this college football season after that college football offseason. The game’s foundation has been rattled, but we watch anyway.

Continue Reading →