On Friday afternoon, Bay Area native Jack Del Rio cautiously mentioned that he has NBA Finals tickets for Game 5 of Warriors-Cavaliers.
NFL defenses are repeatedly prioritizing speed over size. This season, look for offenses to counter by beefing up.Over the past few NFL seasons, getting smaller on defense has been all the rage. Safeties have become de facto linebackers. Linebackers have become edge rushers.
Tammy Abraham and Joe Hart are among the players who were sent on loan outside the Premier League this season but could return to star in 2017-18 Tammy Abraham and Joe Hart are among the players who were sent on loan outside the Premier League this season but could return to star in 201
To the Raiders, Derek Carr is the most valuable player in the NFL. Will they pay him as such?At the NFL combine, Oakland Raiders head coach Jack Del Rio was asked if he’d learned anything from the 2016 season. His reply: “Don’t lose your quarterback.
1. Not exactly going out on a limb here, but I think Jared Goff will be the Rams’ Week 1 starter.
Two US women football stars have rushed to defend an eight-year-old girl whose team was disqualified after she was accused of looking like a boy. Short-haired Milagros "Mili" Hernandez has been praised on social media by Olympians Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach.
One of the key features of Chelsea’s title winning season was the consistency of their starting lineups. After the 3-0 thrashing by Arsenal in September, Conte switched to a 3-4-3 formation and Chelsea embarked on a 13-match winning streak in the league that ultimately propelled them to the title.
He silences the first alarm at 5 a.m., and a minute later he does the same for the 5:01. There’s always the 5:02.
1. I think Ty Montgomery taking permanent residence atop the Packers’ running back depth chart makes a lot of sense. He averaged 5.
Football as we know it is done, because the lawyers are here. When the lawyers arrive, things as you know them are over. After making an initial beachhead with concussion lawsuits in the NFL, The Lawyers (capital letters necessary) are pushing inland and making great, great gains.
I n early 2007, Brandissimo was a fledgling youth marketing agency with a corporate frat house vibe.
I decided not to hold a press conference because I didn't want to have to say things that were cliché. I've done enough of that since I've been playing football. I actually didn't really plan on saying anything about my retirement at all. I just kind of wanted to disappear.
Sagging ratings, national controversy, horrifying head injuries, shameless greed: The conversation about the NFL has officially changed. Is it too late to fix it?By Bill Simmons and Malcolm GladwellSimmons: “Is he crying?”“He’s just having trouble breathing. He’s disoriented.
One of my earliest assignments as an associate producer at NFL Films, the cinematic and mythmaking arm of professional football, was to splice together montages of the best plays, catches, bloopers, and hits from the week’s games, and synchronize them to the stirring orchestral themes for which th
I was strapped to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, still in full uniform. Shoulder pads, helmet — everything except for my face mask. The trainers had taken that off while I was still lying on the field in front of 81,000 people at Lambeau.
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Scenes from a beautiful and dramatic and sometimes incompetent debacle, the best really bad game I have ever seen: Cardinals 6, Seahawks 6. Other side of the field.
The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his "other phone," to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way into town.
The XFL jumped off the top turnbuckle in 2001 and landed with a blow equal parts short-lived and long lasting.
Two years ago, when Derek Carr and Khalil Mack were Raiders rookies, and Oakland stumbled to an 0-10 start and lost by 52 to the Rams and got swept by a combined 57 by Denver, Carr would say the same thing so many Sundays to Mack after another debacle. “Look at me,” Carr would say.
Editor’s Note: Peter King and the staff of The MMQB took over this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated magazine.
NFL broadcasts and coaching news conferences are full of football proverbs. Very often, these are simply explanations for a why a situation demanded avoiding risk, or at least delaying it. And very often, the numbers -- while not perfect -- tell us otherwise.
Flurries outside my window in New York late Sunday night. It’s beginning to look a lot like the pennant race, with quite a few teams we didn’t see coming. Such as:
Here at FiveThirtyEight, we tend to think statistics can add to our understanding of sports.
Every week watching the NFL, we try to draw conclusions on what we’ve just seen.
When a group of disgruntled Fiorentina fans were thoroughly fed up by the monied world of Serie A, they decided to establish their own, self-financed football club and pay homage to the Coen brothers’ greatest characterBy Chloe Beresford for The Gentleman Ultra, part of the Guardian Sport Netwo
Fantasy football and I have been dancing for three decades now and I can tell you, there are things we cannot explain. There is an ebb and flow to fantasy that is hard to explain if you are not in it, but it is very real, it is very beautiful and, man, can it be very frustrating.
If Football—that is, the American National Football League football—used the same naming scheme as “Dungeons & Dragons,” we’d call it “Beer Commercials & Cheerleaders.” Like dungeons and dragons, beer commercials and cheerleaders are two things that not everyone likes.
Adapted from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (Harper). After the last game of every season, we came into work for an exit physical.
It's not easy to beat Tom Brady in the playoffs, but the blueprints on how to pull it off aren't hard to find. Just about every team who has managed to take down the Patriots over the past decade has done so with pass pressure.
Let’s just get it out of the way: Even I think the term “football babies” is a little creepy, but it’s going to be the way we get into this Friday’s picks column.
To the public, one of the mysteries of the NFL is the game plan, the weekly and oft-times encyclopedic secret document each team uses to strategize against that week’s foe.
There are five 3-0 teams in the NFL. Do you know what they have in common? It's not All-Pro quarterback play.
You learned it quite early on. If someone tugged at your sleeve, or touched your back, or whiffed a kick close enough to your shin, you immediately slowed down and tripped yourself. Then you glanced at the referee and said, “Porra, falta, caralho!” (roughly, “Fuck – foul, dammit!”).
Sending my best on this Memorial Day to those who have sacrificed so much for our country. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s a Shirt-Pocket Notes column today, borrowed from the late and inimitable Myron Cope.
Dwight D. Eisenhower thought that football was the best sport for young men to play because it was the closest sport to war. Football’s similarity to battle also explains why it has made for such excellent fodder for movies through the decades.
There’s a pall over the Bay Area this morning.
The smart people in 2011 said the bounty Atlanta GM Thomas Dimitroff paid the Browns to move up 21 spots in the draft to pick Julio Jones was excessive. Two ones, a two and two fours is quite a premium to move from 27 to six.
But until now, Ankersen says, the progress of data analysis has been limited—rather than a revolution, we have something closer to a gradual evolution.
From predicting Leicester’s grind towards the title to foreseeing Norwich’s decline, analytical models are changing the way people watch football The first time I came across the phrase “expected goals” was in November 2015.
Those were the words of NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock as Texas A&M phenom Myles Garrett crossed the finish line of the 40-yard dash in a staggering 4.64 seconds on Sunday, putting a bow on the show that most scouts expected he’d put on here at Lucas Oil Stadium.
I remember my first meeting with the chairman when I arrived at Leicester City this summer. He sat down with me and said, “Claudio, this is a very important year for the club. It is very important for us to stay in the Premier League. We have to stay safe.” My reply was, “Okay, sure.
From Duluth west to Moorhead, from Warroad up near the Manitoba border south to Albert Lea, on the road to Iowa, the good people of Minnesota are in pain this morning. That is nothing compared to the pain of Blair Walsh.
As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent.
On a Monday afternoon nearly two years ago, a woman in her mid-forties settled into a long Metro ride, Dupont Circle to Landover, bound eventually for FedEx Field.
The first project I officially worked on inside football didn’t involve statistics, but it did involve analysis. My task was to take all the video for teams we knew were unusually good at set pieces, analyse what they were doing, and build a guide of best practices.
Saturday, 6:30 a.m., two NFL general managers and good friends on the phone, trying to finish a trade. The subject of sleep comes up.
There are 1.27 million lawyers in the United States, one for about every 300 Americans — about 400,000 more of them than there are doctors. Their work is rarely glamorous, and especially for those just starting out in the profession, it can be grinding and repetitive.
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's August 31 NFL Preview Issue. Subscribe today! ONE DAY IN April, the NFL asked Chris Borland to take a random drug test.
No new news about the status of a certain 49er quarterback—Sunday was very quiet in the Colin Kaepernick derby—but we do have some information about the first pick in the 2016 draft. Specifically: The Titans might have some action on the No. 1 slot.
As we near the end of a strange Week 4 in the NFL (margins of victory this weekend: 31, 24, 28, 24, 3, 7, 6, 21, 19, 13, 5, 21), let’s take stock of the race that’s looking very fun, and very different than usual: the NFL MVP race.
On Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks walked all over the Denver Broncos, 43-8, to win Super Bowl XLVIII. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson passed for 206 yards, ran for 26 more, threw two touchdowns, and made National Football League history.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.
With Peter King on vacation until July 25, this week’s Monday Morning QB guest columnist is Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio. Peter and Mike work together on NBC’s Football Night in America on Sunday nights during the season, and Mike also hosts PFT Live weekdays on NBC Sports Radio.
PHOENIX — Paul DePodesta, the Cleveland Browns’ trump card on the rest of the NFL. Nice fellow. Harvard guy, and, to his credit, doesn’t intimidate you with his Ivy League brain. Fifteen months into the new job after two decades with five Major League Baseball teams. Nowhere to go but up.
HIS BOSSES WERE furious. Roger Goodell knew it. So on April 1, 2008, the NFL commissioner convened an emergency session of the league's spring meeting at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. Attendance was limited to each team's owner and head coach.
We love the game. We love the players, too, even when they scare us.
One non-Incognito point to ponder this morning, prompted by non-stat-geek Mike Florio and based on 2013 NFL history: If Indianapolis is 20 points better than San Francisco, and San Francisco 24 points better than St. Louis, and Indianapolis plays St.
You probably know the 2014 NFL season kicks off in Seattle tonight, with Russell Wilson, Russell Wilson’s unairbrushable loins and the defending champs laying six points to Aaron Rodgers and the Packers. I’m excited to have Brady, Gronk, Belichick and every other Patriot back in my life.
Since the 2000 season, which started the Buffalo Bills’ current 17-season playoff drought, eight coaches and six general managers have failed to make the franchise great again. Sean McDermott will be the ninth coach to try. Brandon Beane will be the seventh GM/personnel czar to try.
On Saturday night, the NFL scheduled a major television event for the marquee game of the first playoff weekend. A rivalry game, with intense feelings between players and cities, featuring one of the great franchises in American sports, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The season is not quite over, but it’s already time to start celebrating the best players of this 2014 NFL campaign.
Back in the summer of 2013, before he became perhaps the biggest bust in the history of the National Football League, before the social-media firestorms and the mysterious rehab, before his hard-partying ways put him on TMZ more than on ESPN, Johnny Manziel already worried his parents.
Zac Easter texted his girlfriend shortly before 10 A.M. He typed as he drove, weaving Old Red, his cherry red 2008 Mazda3, down the wide suburban boulevards of West Des Moines. He'd already been awake for hours, since well before sunrise. At 5:40 A.M.
O Coughlin, my Coughlin. The Giants have thrown away some games in truly infuriating fashion during the Eli Manning–Tom Coughlin era, but Sunday night’s dramatic 27-26 loss to the Cowboys felt particularly painful.
In the first quarter of a scoreless 2016 AFC Championship game against the New England Patriots, Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos faced third-and-6 from their own 44-yard line. Wide receiver Demaryius Thomas ran a 15-yard out, breaking toward the Broncos’ sideline.
Unless something bizarre happens next Thursday, Texas A&M’s Myles Garrett will become the 16th defensive player in the past 50 years to go first overall. Statistically speaking, though, there’s about a 50–50 shot that he won’t live up to the hype.
Everywhere you go at the National Football League’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan, a Park Avenue enclave that feels both futuristic and retro at the same time, you encounter ‘‘the Shield.
IRVING, Texas — What no one on the outside world can see on NFL draft weekend is the gut-punch emotion owners and coaches and GMs feel when they miss out on a player they want. Really want.
Offensive linemen are football’s forgotten men. They sometimes work on an island, trying to stop rabid pass rushers one-on-one, while other times they’re cogs in complex schemes that demand perfect spacing and precision timing.
The former No. 1 high school dual-threat quarterback recruit in the nation is sitting with his mom on the front porch of a little yellow house on Bluebird Street in LaPlace, La.
Lydon Murtha, who played for the Dolphins from 2009 to ’12, is adamant that Richie Incognito never bullied Jonathan Martin. (Cliff Welch/Icon SMI) By Lydon Murtha I don’t have a dog in this fight. I want that to be very clear.