2026-01-19 08:38:32
C.J. Stroud played like a man possessed in Sunday's divisional round game against the New England Patriots. The problem was that for a lot of the first half, the Houston Texans quarterback was a vessel for the spirit of playoff Jake Delhomme.
It was a hideous afternoon for Stroud in the Texans' 28-16 loss. His first quarter was whatever: Houston's first two drives of the game resulted in a three-and-out and a field goal, respectively, and his first interception was a bad throw, but New England cornerback Carlton Davis III made a great play on the ball and kept his knee in bounds. Besides, that turnover felt less costly when Patriots QB Drake Maye lost a fumble two plays into the subsequent drive. After a touchdown catch by Char—sorry, Christian Kirk, Houston even held a 10-7 lead early in the second quarter. Then it turned into a horror show for poor C.J.
2026-01-19 03:58:58
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia brought charges against 26 people they say were involved in a scheme to fix bets on college basketball and Chinese Basketball Association games. The point-shaving scheme, according to a 70-page indictment unsealed that morning, involved at least three dozen players on 17 different teams.
Twenty of the defendants played college basketball during at least one of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 NCAA seasons. Some were already the subjects of NCAA investigations into betting violations this fall and were no longer competing. A few defendants, however, were active college basketball players until Thursday. Carlos Hart, Camian Shell and Oumar Koureissi, who are charged with fixing games at previous schools before transferring to new ones, have played in games as recently as this week. Simeon Cottle, a Kennesaw State player who's now suspended indefinitely, put up 21 points in a win the night before he was indicted. He is his conference’s leading scorer and was named CUSA preseason player of the year.
The indictment refers to the scheme’s ringleaders as “the fixers,” a group of people who started by recruiting and bribing players to fix CBA games during the 2022-23 season. After some success doing that, the fixers decided to try men's college basketball, enlisting NCAA players who agreed to make sure their team didn’t cover point spreads. Among the fixers, according to the indictment, were Marves Fairley and Shane Hennen. Fairley and Hennen were also indicted by a New York grand jury in October for alleged involvement in a similar scheme in the NBA—the one involving Terry Rozier. Where the bets in the Rozier case were player props—bets a single player could conceivably fix alone—the wagers mentioned in the Philadelphia indictment were spread bets and half bets concerning team scoring, which makes fixing a bit tougher. In colorful and depressing detail, the indictment shows just how exhausting it is to rig a team sport.
2026-01-19 02:31:21
First impressions can be deceiving, but the opening seconds of Saturday’s 49ers-Seahawks NFC divisional round game really did presage the lopsided evening to follow. Maybe the game was over before it began: The Niners won the toss and deferred, perhaps to get a better look at an injured Sam Darnold. First mistake. Before Darnold could be looked at, Seattle return man Rashid Shaheed took the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown. Half the country hadn’t yet switched over from the Bills-Broncos overtime on CBS, and the Seahawks were up 7-0. The coin toss was the only thing the Niners won all day.
So dominated was San Francisco’s offense that Shaheed’s touchdown, which took all of 13 seconds, would end up being the game-winning score in the 41-6 result. The Niners looked slow, weak, and sloppy against a defense that has killed opponents' passing games with heavy nickel and dime usage, stuffed the run with a loaded front seven, and generally befuddled quarterbacks all season with an array of disguised coverages. In the Seahawks' locker room postgame and at the podium, the phrase “complementary football” came up a lot. This team would be a fitting victor of a postseason whose lesson has been something like “quarterbacks don’t matter.” Darnold’s last playoff performance didn’t inspire much confidence, and a late-breaking report from ESPN's Adam Schefter about Darnold tweaking his oblique in practice earlier in the week inspired just as little, but in the end, Darnold felt almost incidental to the whole thing. The defense gave him short fields to work with, and the running attack finished the job in the second half. The job responsibilities of the Seahawks QB, whoever it may be, are simple: Don’t turn the ball over, target Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and everything will be OK. You don’t really have to do anything else.
No team scored more non-offensive touchdowns than Seattle in the regular season. On one occasion, special teams scored all their points: Jason Myers made all six of his field goals in the queasy 18-16 walk-off win against the Colts, in Philip Rivers’s first game back from retirement. Two catches by Shaheed on that game-winning drive got the Seahawks into field goal range.
2026-01-19 01:08:38
News broke Wednesday that John Harbaugh would be hired as the next head coach of the New York Giants, but then the deal continued to be, as they say, hammered out. There must have been a lot of hammers banging away at that thing, because the team's official announcement was delayed for days. NFL insiders insisted that the deal hadn't fallen through, only that Harbaugh was negotiating specific language before signing the contract. On Saturday, we finally figured out what he wanted: to make Giants general manager Joe Schoen less relevant.
Yesterday the Giants officially announced a five-year contract for Harbaugh, and with it a reworked hierarchy within the organization. Typically the franchise has had the head coach report to the GM, who then reports to the owners. In his previous job with the Baltimore Ravens, Harbaugh reported directly to owner Steve Bisciotti. Once this week's deal was done, The Athletic confirmed that the new head coach will answer to owners John Mara and Steve Tisch:
Harbaugh had productive relationships with executives Ozzie Newsome and Eric DeCosta during his time with the Ravens, and he said that’s the plan with Schoen. When asked who would have the final say in the NFL Draft if the two disagree, the 63-year-old coach said they will “do whatever it takes to get on the same page.”
“It will be the same as it was in Baltimore and really everywhere around the league,” Harbaugh said. “We’re going to work until we agree.”
2026-01-18 23:18:10
Minutes after the Denver Broncos clinched a spot in the AFC Championship Game with a 33-30 overtime victory over the Buffalo Bills, CBS sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson noticed that something was off with the winning quarterback. "One thing to keep an eye on. It looked like Bo Nix got hurt at the end of the game," she reported. "Possibly his knee. Something to watch."
It wasn't Nix's knee, but he had suffered an injury, one that would abruptly end his season even though he didn't miss a play in Saturday's game. Broncos head coach Sean Payton said afterward that his starting QB had broken a bone in his right ankle and would have surgery on Tuesday, ruling him out for the remainder of the playoffs. Payton said the injury to Nix's ankle occurred on "the second-to-last play" of overtime, "before he threw the pass to [Marvin] Mims." That play, a designed run for Nix, resulted in a two-yard loss, but he didn't seem worse for wear as he got up. On the next play, he threw a deep pass intended for Mims that drew defensive pass interference on Bills cornerback Tre'Davious White, giving Denver a 30-yard boost and ultimately setting up Wil Lutz's game-winning field goal.
2026-01-17 04:24:25
Imagine a very orderly person who lives in an apartment with a very large dog. The two can coexist happily, with each providing necessary support to the other, but there is also going to be a tension inherent to that relationship grounded in the fact that one of the parties to it is forever lining things up and optimizing and re-optimizing counter space and the other is a very large dog, and as such will knock things over simply due to being a very large dog. This is not an argument against continuing to line things up just so, of course. It just means that the very orderly person will over time become a very familiar face to the people at The Container Store, to the point where they might remark to each other during their breaks about having seen him, again, purchasing more of those stackable, breakable containers that he's always getting.
This is probably not the best way to understand the interplay between New York Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns and team owner Steve Cohen. The relationship is much more prosaic, really, and fairly common to the world of finance, where Cohen became rich enough to buy the Mets; it boils down to that between an impulsive and very rich boss and a high-performing employee whom the impulsive boss trusts but will still sometimes overrule when bored or aggravated or just moved to do so. There is no reason why these two parties can't coexist, and the two both help and need each other in meaningful ways. But there is still going to be a mess every now and then.
It is not quite accurate to say that the MLB offseason had been process-forward until Kyle Tucker signed a four-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday evening. Different teams have different processes, as well they should, and the few teams that had ponied up for high-end talent were not just doing so because they had pivoted to Very Large Dog mode. When the Mets, who were along with the Toronto Blue Jays reportedly co-runners up for Tucker's services, signed the former Jays shortstop Bo Bichette to an astonishingly player-friendly three-year, $126 million deal on Friday, it was probably somewhat closer to Very Large Dog behavior; the Mets will lose their first-round pick next year as a result of signing a player to what amounts to what amounts to a one-year, $42 million contract to (reportedly) play third base, a position he has never played in the majors. But if this is not something that the patient and process-oriented Stearns would ordinarily do, it is also not happening in a vacuum. It is happening, instead, in the stupid part of baseball's free-agency period.
