The goal of this column was to ask questions about the world of sports journalism. Over the past weeks we’ve looked at journalistic conflicts of interest, sports personalities ranging from Darren Rovell to PFTCommenter, and suspensions of both professional athletes and professional pundits. There ...
On Saturday the last games of week 14 of the college football season were played, capping off the slate affectionately referred to as Rivalry Week. Needless to say, I watched a lot of college football this past Saturday. There is a certain pageantry to the college game that separates it from its professional ...
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." This is a quote from Batman in "The Dark Knight" (2008), but as we see with each passing day, “life” really does imitate “art.” To many, athletes are heroes. Day in and day out professional ...
The thing about bad things is that they are, almost always, bad. But what if something was so bad that it was, in some barely explicable way, good? What if, by being so incredibly stupid, you could unlock new levels of enlightenment? Well, my faithful, beautiful readers, let me tell you a thing or ...
This week I learned what the word “ombudsman” means. An ombudsman is an official who investigates maladministration, and perhaps unsurprisingly, ESPN has one. They’ve actually had several ombudsmen, and the current one, Robert Lipsyte, published a piece last Tuesday. Lipsyte’s latest article ...
I hope everybody savored the latest edition of Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning. The two have now played against each other 16 times in their careers, and the coverage associated with the games is bigger than ever. The week leading up to a head-to-head matchup between the two always seems to come with ...
Last week, everyone’s favorite hashtag, #cancelRovell, popped back up on Twitter. For those who aren’t familiar with Darren Rovell, he is an ESPN sports business reporter as well as a business correspondent for ABC News. He is famous for his overaggressive focus on New Media buzzwords. The first ...
When an athlete does something wrong these days, you hear about it. There is an initial rumor of wrongdoing, a confirmation of the wrongdoing, a team or league mandated suspension, an (often unsuccessful) appeal, a long wait and finally a return. Each stage of the process seems to come with its very ...
It’s been over a month since Josh Gordon acknowledged he would be suspended for the 2014 NFL season due to a violation of the league’s substance abuse policy. Gordon tested positive for marijuana. It’s been over two weeks since that one year suspension was reduced to 12 games. However, the story ...
I don’t usually find myself defending Bill Simmons.Simmons is the Editor-in-Chief of ESPN's sports and pop culture affiliate, Grantland.com. He grew up in Massachusetts, went to college in Massachusetts and worked a couple of Boston newspaper jobs before starting the site BostonSportsGuy.com, ...
