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 opened 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.
2025-12-13 00:25:05
There are only so many ways to surprise in the construction of a murder mystery, which is why the set-up of Wake Up Dead Man is understood from the start and goes so far as to cite its sources: Here is a locked-room murder, a la John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, and, as we all know, there are only four ways to commit a theoretically possible locked-room murder. If you don't know, the movie will teach it to you. By nature of the genre, the ending of the movie is understood as well: As a romance ends with a happily ever after and a comedy—at least Shakespearean style—ends with a marriage, every whodunnit will end with who did it. Even the ways you can be surprised are understood: It was the person who hired the detective! All of the suspects were in on it! It was the murdered person herself!
For all the exhaustion of franchising, a murder mystery is the ultimate, perhaps least cynical, form. The burden of the traditional murder mystery series is to do something new each time, complicating the twists and turns of the mystery enough so that the surprise of who did it in the end is, well, a surprise, and not so obtuse as to be unguessable. The latter point is, depending on the viewer, not a necessity; I am personally happy simply noticing the writer's sleight of hand for including relevant details, and rarely think actively enough to select a suspect or concoct a possible solution. It is also better for a mystery to err on the side of complication because after all, the hero detective in a murder mystery is necessarily smarter than everyone else in the room, including the audience. Make that detective charming and believable enough, and you can't resent them, or the narrative, for winning every single time.
2025-12-12 23:48:05
It seems that it is no longer a good time to be one of Bill Belichick's special guys. Following the old-timer's disastrous first season at North Carolina, changes are underway. According to multiple reports, Belichick is firing offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens and special teams coordinator Mike "Nuke The Gays" Priefer.
Kitchens and Priefer were among the cadre of washouts and football sons for whom UNC became a work program under Belichick. Kitchens was the Tar Heels' offensive coordinator during Mack Brown's final season in charge, but survived Brown's firing and was allowed to keep his position under Belichick, no doubt due to their long-standing relationship. Priefer, on the other hand, was entering his third year of unemployment when Belichick came along and offered him a lifeline.
