Sports

It’s been a rough year for the NFL. Ratings were down, stadiums half-empty, players kneeling, Roger Goodell somehow keeping his job. But take heart, fans! The football gods have decided that you've suffered enough. NBC’s Super Bowl pregame show will go on without Katie Couric Bob Costas.

On Monday, Valerie Richardson at the Washington Times noted that no teams with players who continued to kneel during the National Anthem before National Football League games until the end of the regular season qualified for the playoffs. A sports psychologist sees a potentially important lesson in this result, while NBC, which has promised to showcase kneeling players during the Anthem before…

The Washington Post devoted a news story on Tuesday to President Trump’s attendance at the college football championship in Atlanta. But the story by Marwa Eltagouri and Sonam Vashi concentrated on tiny protests by leftists. The “smattering of boos” was defined as news.

On Tuesday, 2018's first White House press briefing showed that the media have picked up where 2017 left off by making fools of themselves with dumb and nonsensical questions. This time, topics included college football in red states, that infamous white box truck, and working during the holidays.

On Christmas Day, perhaps to minimize its exposure, the Associated Press published its top ten sports stories of the year. Readers will not be at all surprised that "NFL players kneeling during the national anthem" as a result of President Donald Trump's "feud with the NFL" was "the runaway winner ... in balloting by AP members and editors." Predictably, the AP didn't mention the lower attendance…

Tuesday morning on MSNBC, Chris Jansing and Ayman Mohyeldin brought on The Nation’s Sports Editor Dave Zirin to argue that President Trump’s attacks on kneeling NFL players was actually a campaign of “open, ugly racism”  deliberately aimed at discouraging black athletes from expressing their opinions. Last week in The Nation Zirin lambasted “Donald Trump, Fox News, and their neo-Nazi-infused…

CNN very publically refused to attend the White House Christmas Party (which had to be relief to everybody tired of Jim Acosta’s whining – “The waiter intentionally didn’t offer me mini-quiches!”) So it’s not surprising the network loves talking to others who, when it comes to Donald Trump, will take their ball and go home.

Behold the ever-shrinking ESPN -- The World Leader in "Liberal" Sports, now 150 employees lighter after its second round of layoffs this year. ESPN President John Skipper today issued a memo to employees announcing the elimination of more jobs, just seven months after the April trimming of 100 employees.

Howard Bryant, the portentously leftist, constantly aggrieved “Truth” columnist for ESPN The Magazine, went on a rant on the back page of the December 4 edition of the biweekly, blasting supposedly “offensive” team nicknames, especially pro baseball’s Cleveland Indians and pro football’s Washington Redskins, in “How Is This Still a Debate?” It hasn’t been much of one lately, though the liberal…

The 2017 competition for Ingrate of the Year is now closed; the disgraceful distinction belongs to LaVar Ball. Rather than thank President Donald Trump for his part in keeping his son and two other UCLA basketball players from rotting in a Chinese prison for several years, Ball, when asked by ESPN about Trump's role, shot back "Who?" — and complained that "Everybody wants to make it seem like he…

In a Sports Illustrated "Off the Board" podcast released on Thursday, ESPN's Scott Van Pelt took several cheap shots at the network's critics, in the process demonstrating how horribly out of touch he is with financial realities at his network. Van Pelt aimed particular venom at those who have decided that they didn't need to have cable TV any more when ESPN selected Caitlyn-formerly-Bruce Jenner…

It has been known at least since Saturday that the three UCLA basketball players detained in China on shoplifting charges and forced to stay in the country while the rest of the team went home were accused of stealing merchandise from three stores. Somehow, that news never got through to Vox.com's John Kirby, who shortly after noon on Thursday, claimed that the trio had only stolen "a pair of…

Jay Busbee has been a "writer for Yahoo Sports since 2008" who "has covered the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, the Masters, the Indianapolis 500, the Kentucky Derby, the Final Four, NBA, NCAA football, and the MLB playoffs." It's hard to believe that someone with this level of experience can actually believe that reported "attendance" at National Football League games represents the number of…

The unease among advertisers over falling National Football League TV ratings is starting to boil over. One of the league's major sponsors is considering pulling the plug on its NFL advertising next year, and, according to Business Insider's Mike Shields, other "brands are threatening to pull ads from NFL coverage if NBC keeps covering players' national-anthem protests." If those ad dollars go…