2025-12-15 04:52:48
Yesterday, Army played Navy in college football for the 127th time. For a long time this annual contest pitted two of the top teams in the country against each other, but you almost certainly don’t remember that unless you are in your 80s. The people watching from the student sections at the U.S. Military Academy and the United States Naval Academy certainly were not alive at a time when Army and Navy were competing for national titles.
The teams are midlevel Division I programs nowadays; the military academies’ height and weight rules put them at a disadvantage against teams that can, in comparison, field a defensive line of monsters. But both teams have been somewhere between decent and actively good for a while now, and Navy was ranked No. 22 coming into Saturday’s game. Both teams run a gimmicky offense, a modernized triple-option in which most plays are runs. On Saturday, Army rushed 34 times and threw just 10; Navy ran it 52 times compared to 14 passes. A Blake Horvath TD pass to Eli Heidenreich in the fourth gave Navy the 17-16 win, in a game that was indeed kind of exciting despite all those runs.
2025-12-15 02:27:46
It is not the biggest problem facing the NBA, and it is not really the Oklahoma City Thunder's fault, but it is unfortunate that the best team in the sport is such lousy television. It's more accurate to say that the basketball that the Thunder play is absolutely masterful, equally astonishing and infuriating in interesting ways, but that the games in which they play it tend not to be very compelling. The NBA Cup quarterfinal game against the Phoenix Suns that got OKC to Saturday's semifinal game was a good example of this, and a totally miserable sit. It was never close, the Thunder won every quarter by between 11 and 15 points and shot 59 percent from the field and 55 percent from three, and the only tension lay in whether the Thunder would win by 50 and how far apex irritant Dillon Brooks' plus-minus figure for the game could be pushed into overt psychedelia. The Thunder won by 49; Brooks finished at -47. The highlights feature all the seamless and metronomic Thunder offense you'd expect, but the game itself was like one of those endurance videos where someone loops the saxophone part from "Careless Whisper" for 10 hours.
The Thunder came into Saturday's NBA Cup semifinal against the San Antonio Spurs with a 24-1 record that both tied them for the best start in league history and might actually understate how dominant they've been over the season's first two months. They had won 16 straight since that sole loss, which came against the Blazers on November 6. It wasn't just that the Thunder romped in those wins, many of which came against lousy teams and virtually none of which were competitive either in the box score or in the moment, but that they didn't really reveal anything about how better or luckier teams might beat them. The Thunder are just exasperating—impossibly physical and obnoxious on defense in a way that wrecks teams' capacity to counterpunch, and patient and ruthless on offense in a way that swiftly puts games out of reach.
2025-12-15 01:13:43
Michigan men’s basketball came into Saturday night’s game riding an impressive streak. The Wolverines had beaten six straight opponents by 25 points or more, and most of the teams they walloped were pretty decent! Four are currently in the Kenpom top 45 even after getting shellacked by the Wolverines. In the Players Era tournament in Vegas, they beat Kenpom No. 45 San Diego State by 40, No. 29 Auburn by 30, and No. 3 Gonzaga by 40. They also walloped No. 33 Villanova in a 28-point win. They are obliterating teams while playing the ninth-toughest schedule in the country.
The Wolverines continued the early portion of Big Ten conference play* at Maryland last night. While the Terrapins are middling this year, they do force a decent amount of turnovers. Maybe not enough to win, but perhaps enough to confuse Michigan on defense and keep this one close. And credit where it's due: Maryland did break Michigan’s streak of 25-point wins. They shot 14-of-27 on threes, which is the first time they’d been over 50 percent all year; David Coit hit 8 of his 12 threes in a 31-point effort. Maryland’s eFG (a stat that weights threes and twos) was a season-high. Michigan was down by five at half. It was the toughest game the Wolverines had played in at least a month, and one of Maryland's better games of the year. It didn’t matter. Maryland had one of their worst defensive games of the season and couldn’t force turnovers; Michigan shot an eye-popping 70 percent eFG. The Wolverines played their worst defensive game of the year, and so Maryland did break Michigan’s streak of 25-point wins. But the Wolverines still won going away, 101-83.
2025-12-13 05:04:04
Sherrone Moore, who only two days ago was the head football coach at the University of Michigan, was arraigned in an Ann Arbor courtroom Friday on a charge of third-degree home invasion, a felony, as well as misdemeanor counts of stalking and entering without permission.
Moore was arrested Wednesday night and jailed in Washtenaw County, Mich., after an incident at the residence of a coaching assistant with whom he’d had what Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kati Rezmierski termed “an intimate relationship for a number of years.” (The name of Moore’s assistant was not used in court today, and will not appear in this article.)
2025-12-13 04:44:56
On Wednesday, Real Madrid hosted Manchester City in a portentous Champions League showdown that, for the home team, promised or threatened to mark a definitive before and after. Win, and Madrid could credibly claim the result as a turning point, when a devastatingly talented roster, helmed by one of the game's most exciting young managers, put aside its shaky beginnings and started to become the superteam it was meant to be. Lose, especially if the loss was a bad one, and you could assume that the club would take it as the final sign that things simply weren't working, and that the time had come for drastic change, starting with the firing of the aforementioned exciting young manager Xabi Alonso.
But reality didn't prove quite so neat. The Blancos played neither great nor horribly, and though they did lose, 2-1, the defeat was neither encouragingly narrow nor embarrassingly lopsided. In the end, in spite of the match's weighty stakes, Real is right were it was before, which is nowhere.
2025-12-13 03:16:00
The promise of Grand Slam Track was alluring. Track athletes have long struggled to make money; the quadrennial cycle of the Olympics brings attention to the sport in erratic bursts that are difficult to sustain between Summer Games. After the Paris Olympics, several track start-ups sought to allay the unsteadiness, most notably Michael Johnson's Grand Slam Track: The four-time Olympic gold medalist boasted that GST had secured over $30 million in funding before Paris. One year and just three events later, GST has declared bankruptcy.
Johnson's main investor was Winner's Alliance, the Bill Ackman vehicle also associated with Novak Djokovic's nascent, contradiction-riddled tennis players union. The Athletic reported this past August that the Winner's Alliance had not in fact invested the promised $30 million, but rather had handed over $13 million, with an option to give an additional $19 million if things went well. Things did not go well. The first meet was held in April in Kingston, Jamaica, and was attended by officials from Eldridge, Chelsea Football Club owner Todd Boehly's asset management company. The two parties had agreed to a non-binding term sheet, but the Kingston meet turned out so underwhelming that Eldridge declined to invest in the league at all.
