Month: October 2017

–“The Browns haven’t given up. You have to credit them for that.” Announcer Trent Green with 4:58 left in game and Browns down two touchdowns. “I agree with not calling a timeout here. They’re down two touchdowns … just get out of here.” Announcer Trent Green with 1:12 left in game and Browns down two…

The Cleveland Browns in Week 7 lost a legend, continued their quarterback clown show and committed 12 penalties including, somehow, FIVE defensive offside penalties, and feat so remarkable that announcer Spero Dedes called it incredible. Twice. The Browns needed a missed field, a stop at the 1 and a bizarre slice 54-yard field goal just…

“We are eager for your outrage!” — Editors of GQ No, GQ, you aren’t. I know you write that you are eager for my outrage but, as Ferris Bueller once said, you don’t want this much heat. I don’t want this much heat. I didn’t begin reading your list of 50 greatest living athletes with…

There is a bar in Los Angeles, right off Hollywood Boulevard, called the Saint Felix. Best I can tell, there have been numerous Saint Felixes through the years, but none of them are patron saints. That’s a shame. Gregory the Great is the patron saint of teachers. St. Martha is the patron saint of dieticians….

A few years ago, when I was a kid reporter in the Rock Hill (S.C.) Bureau of the Charlotte Observer, the biggest story on my innumerable beats was the college recruitment of Jeff Burris. He was a superstar running back at Northwestern High School and was among the most recruited football players in America. Everybody…

I missed most of Sunday’s game between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Jets because I was on a plane between Arizona and Los Angeles. You probably know that it’s a very short flight between Arizona and Los Angeles — less than an hour of airtime — but because I flew out of LAX…

On Thursday, during the Cleveland-New York playoff game, the excellent Matt Vasgersian and John Smoltz made a pretty big deal of a marvelous sounding statistic. They pointed out that teams that win Game 1 of a five-game series win 72% of the series.

I wrote something in the hours after the Browns’ loss to Cincinnati — something about the awfulness of the game, and the sensible decision of my PosCast partner Michael Schur to rescind his temporary Browns fanhood, and the sheer hopelessness of rooting for a team that seems to stuck in time, adding players but never…

In all those trying years when the Kansas City Royals were but a blinking, barely visible blip on the Major League Baseball radar, old baseball fans around town would sometimes talk about the old days. “You wouldn’t believe it,” the conversations would begin, “but Kansas City used to be a baseball town.” Nobody did believe it…