2018 world cup

Some people are fans of the Arizona Cardinals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Arizona Cardinals. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Arizona Cardinals. Your 2017 record: 8-8. Congratulations, Arizona. Your painfully brief stretch of tangential NFL relevance is now OVER. Bruce Arians opted for a retirement full of bad hats and nitroglycerin tablets. Carson Palmer hung up both his prosthetic knees. David Johnson suffered the first of MANY season-ending injuries. It’s all over now, but what a run! You were an NFC finalist one time! HANG A BANNER. Years from now, you’ll tell your grandkids about the Arians/Palmer glory days, and those grandkids won’t give a shit because they’ll be Cowboys fans. Your coach: Steve Wilks. Excuse while I nut my pants in excitement at the prospect of yet another Panthers assistant getting a head job. Do you people WATCH the Panthers? That … [Read more...] about Why Your Team Sucks 2018: Arizona Cardinals

Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, No. 14 Oklahoma.   Everything was business as usual in Norman last season, Lincoln Riley’s first as head coach of the Sooners. Much ink was spilled about the 34-year-old wunderkind taking over one of the most successful college programs in the nation, both presently and in the history of the sport. But he did everything he was supposed to and never made any real gaffes, guiding the Sooners to a 12-2 record, another Big 12 championship, and a date with Georgia in the playoff. Like anyone replacing a beloved and successful coach, it will take a couple years before Riley can be adequately judged for his ability to recruit and manage talented recruiters on his coaching staff. Until … [Read more...] about Oklahoma Is Relentlessly Fun And Fantastic

It’s Madden glitch season! God bless it. The exact same game, every single year, yet somehow always with horrifying and wonderful new misfires. Please watch this and luxuriate in the weirdness: Okay so, Tennessee punts, and the Seattle punt returner picks up the still-live football at the 1-yard-line. The Seahawks returner is pancaked by a Titans lineman into the end zone. He never loses the ball, as the replay makes clear. It’s a touchdown? Tennessee gets the points, but it’s the Seahawks who starts celebrating and the Seattle return man who is credited with a one-yard TD return??? This is the most joy this game will ever bring me, and that includes if I play it. Please send those glitches. … [Read more...] about I Sincerely Cannot Understand What Happens In This Madden Glitch

They say you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. They also say there is always one exception that proves any given rule. I don’t really know what to do with these two chestnuts but they seem relevant to the fact that Andrés Iniesta has moved to Japan and apparently transformed into Lionel Messi. Iniesta, the former Barcelona legend who left the only club he’d ever known this summer to join Japanese team Vissel Kobe, is famous for being a genius in the attacking end. But as breathtaking as his dribbles and passes and movement have consistently been over the years, he has somewhat curiously failed to rack up the number of goals you might predict from an advanced midfielder in the most successful attacking team in history. In his 14 years as a regular starter for Barça, Iniesta averaged just 2.4 goals per season in league play. During that span, he ended more La Liga seasons knocking in zero goals (3) than those in which he scored more than four (2). The two most … [Read more...] about Andrés Iniesta Has Moved To Japan And Become A Golazo-Scoring Fiend

The highlight of the preseason so far has been new Browns receiver Jarvis Landry laying into his fellow receivers for being weak little babies who don’t practice enough. Landry’s intensity does not seem to have quieted down since then, judging by this fight he started with cornerback Terrance Mitchell during practice yesterday: Mitchell doesn’t appear to have done anything deserving of a point-blank fastball to the face, but maybe this is all just part of Landry’s larger plan to change the culture around the team. How’s that going, by the way? Hey, when a guy who was forged in the winning culture of the Miami Dolphins shows up and starts yelling and fighting people, you gotta open yourself up to receive his lessons. … [Read more...] about Jarvis Landry Whips Ball Into Teammate’s Face, Starts Fight

Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Green Bay Paaaaaaaaaaaackurse  Your 2017 record: 7-9. Aaron Rodgers had his clavicle snapped like a wishbone and your replacement quarterback was the immortal Brett Hundley, who was so effective that the Packers immediately traded for the Browns’ latest draft bust when the season ended. Hey Mike McCarthy, Colin Kaepernick was still out on the street when Rodgers went down. Couldn’t you have possibly salvaged the season if you had at least kicked the tires on him? “Okay, I got three years invested in Brett Hundley, two years invested in Joe Callahan, the quarterback room is exactly where it needs to be.” Chisel that quote on this man’s fucking grave. After losing Rodgers, the Packers dropped eight of 11 and got shut out … [Read more...] about Why Your Team Sucks 2018: Green Bay Packers

GQ has an interview with Jaguars star cornerback and master shit-talker Jalen Ramsey out today, and it will surely be the most entertaining thing you read all day. A good portion of the interview involves Ramsey scrolling through the names of NFL quarterbacks on his phone and telling the interviewer which ones suck and which ones don’t. Ramsey had the most heat ready for Bills rookie quarterback Josh Allen: I think [Buffalo Bills draft pick Josh] Allen is trash. I don’t care what nobody say. He’s trash. And it’s gonna show too. That’s a stupid draft pick to me. We play them this year, and I’m excited as hell. I hope he’s their starting quarterback. He played at Wyoming. Every time they played a big school—like, they played Iowa State, which is not a big school in my opinion because I went to Florida State, and he threw five interceptions, and they lost by a couple touchdowns or something like that.✞ He never beat a big school. If … [Read more...] about Jalen Ramsey Can Tell You Exactly Why Josh Allen Is “Trash”

That fan to the right of the top photo? That’s basically me every time a baseball fight breaks out. “Oh! A fight!” Benches cleared in Tuesday’s 2-1 Giants win over the Dodgers in Los Angeles, as Yasiel Puig and Nick Hundley got into it at the plate. It was a typical baseball beef, a shover and not a puncher, but not due to a lack of enthusiasm on Puig’s part. Keep an eye on him in the video, wading through a sea of blockers from both teams in a determined attempt to get to Hundley. So what happened here? Puig was upset over fouling off a hittable pitch—he snatched his bat and you can hear him shout “fuck” in the video. Hundley took exception to that. “He told me to stop complaining and get back in the box,” Puig said. “When I got in his face, he told me to get out of his face, so that’s when I got upset with him. “I didn’t like that he was telling me what to do, and then he said some words to me in … [Read more...] about Yasiel Puig Is Fighting The Giants Again

“He’s the best leadoff hitter I’ve ever seen,” Braves teammate Ender Inciarte said of Ronald Acuña Jr. “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.” Gushing praise, from a teammate, sure, but counterweigh that bias with the fact that Acuña is still just 20 years old. And at least over the last week, it has been absolutely true. On Monday, Acuña became just the fourth player in baseball history with leadoff homers in both games of a double-header. He was absolutely thinking about that when he stepped to the plate on Tuesday. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hit another home run like that,” he said. “At first I laughed a lot, but then I got nervous again.” So, on the very first pitch: “I never have [seen anything like it] in my lifetime,” manager Brian Snitker said. “Freddie [Freeman] and I are sitting there looking at each other like ‘My God. Are we really seeing … [Read more...] about It Is Unconscionable How Hot Ronald Acuña Is Right Now

Rick Pitino’s emotional distress lawsuit against Adidas—truly a bold “vehicle for proving that he had nothing to do with Adidas’ outrageous, wrongful, and illegal conspiracy” to put good basketball players onto his basketball team—was dismissed Tuesday by the U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of Kentucky. Judge David Hale reportedly agreed with Adidas that, per the details of Pitino’s endorsement deal, the case must be settled in arbitration, and in Oregon, the home of Adidas’ North American headquarters. Pitino essentially alleged in the suit that Adidas deliberately damaged his reputation, by engaging in behavior—paying money to good players so that they’d play basketball for Pitino at Louisville—that would subject Pitino to “inevitable” ridicule and vilification. Hale’s dismissal of the suit doesn’t say that any of that is as whacky as it sounds, merely that the substance of … [Read more...] about Judge Dismisses Rick Pitino’s Emotional Distress Lawsuit Against Adidas