Sports

Bias Against Bicyclists and Pedestrians When Cars Hit Them

Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens in 2019 Dartmouth head football coach Buddy Teevens was seriously injured when a truck struck his bicycle Thursday night on State Road A1A in Crescent Beach near St. Augustine. The news story in the St. Augustine Record demonstrates something I've been noticing in the media lately -- the bias that bicycles and pedestrians are probably to blame when vehicles hit them: Teevens, 66, was crossing at 6100 State Road A1A at around 8:40 p.m. when he was hit by a ... (read more)

SportsFilter's NFL Pick 'Em Contest

SportsFilter is giving away an official NFL Game Football in this year's NFL Pick 'Em contest: http://t.co/AYF2iv1lCU pic.twitter.com/Mnx5GLXckI— Rogers Cadenhead (@rcade) September 8, 2015 ... (read more)

Tackled Ohio State Student Was Wearing Booze Panties

There's a video going viral of a student running onto the field at the Ohio State/Cincinnati college football game Saturday night and receiving a ferocious open-field tackle by Ohio State strength and conditioning coach Anthony Schlegel to the roaring approval of the home crowd. Press reports indicate that the student is Anthony James Wunder, a 21-year-old senior in mechanical engineering who is an Evans Scholar, a full tuition and housing scholarship for golf caddies based on grades, character ... (read more)

Programming a Confidence Pool for the World Cup

I did some coding yesterday to run a 2014 World Cup confidence pool on SportsFilter. The way a confidence pool works is you assign points to teams based on how confident you are they will win. In this contest, you get point values from 32 down to 1 and assign them to the 32 World Cup teams. The more points you assign a team, the more you are awarded when that team wins or ties a match. Anyone can sign up for a SportsFilter account and play. A prize will be awarded to the winner: the Adidas ... (read more)

The Car for the Man Who Hates His Wife

Here's an interesting message for 100 million Super Bowl viewers: If you hate your hectoring shrew of a wife ... ... you'll love a Dodge Ram Charger! ... (read more)

The Danger of Employing Redskins as Movie Actors

Although it's getting a lot of flak from publishers and authors, Google Books is one of the most amazing contributions to world knowledge launched on the web in years. The ability to search the full text of thousands of books published prior to 1923 -- and hence in the public domain -- is amazing. I've been poking around it for a while, and I found something today while studying how Americans used the term "redskins" before Washington's NFL team chose that repulsive racist mascot in 1933. In ... (read more)

In 1987, the No. 1 Show Aired on Friday

A web search turned up a great read on the 1987 national championship game between Miami and Penn State, which remains the most-watched college football game in history. The piece mentions a bit of television history that I'd forgotten: Before this, the Fiesta had been second-tier, unable to stand up to the cabal of Rose, Cotton, Sugar and Orange, but now the Fiesta Bowl was in the right place at the right time, and so was NBC, which took the radical step of shifting the game to a Friday night ... (read more)

ESPN Spikes Rob Neyer's Post about Mark Whicker

The web site for ESPN spiked a blog post today by acclaimed baseball writer Rob Neyer in which he appeared to call for Orange County Register sports columnist Mark Whicker to be fired for his widely criticized column making light of Jaycee Dugard's 17 years of captivity at the hands of a sexual predator. The blog post was submitted at 08:57:40 PST and had been deleted from ESPN's web site by the afternoon, but it was cached by several search engines and could be recreated, aside from some text ... (read more)

Sportswriter Mark Whicker Makes Light of Dugard Kidnapping

On Tuesday, Orange County Register sportswriter Mark Whicker used Jaycee Dugard's 17 years of captivity at the hands of a sexual predator as a premise for a light-hearted sports column. The result may be the most astonishingly tasteless thing I've ever read in a newspaper. Here's how Whicker starts: It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page. Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year. She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ... (read more)

Telemanjaro: The World's Largest HDTV

I attended Sunday's match between Chelsea FC and Club America at the new Cowboys Stadium, the $1.15 billion facility that opened a few weeks ago in Arlington. I expected the stadium to be huge, but Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has managed to construct a facility that is enormous even by the overcompensating standards of big-boot, tiny-johnson Texas excess. Cowboys Stadium has the largest roof in the world that isn't supported by columns. Two arches twice as wide as the Gateway Arch in St. ... (read more)