We were watching an NFL game a week or so ago, when a running back was violently pushed out of bounds, stumbling several steps and into the motley clot of people who have permission to be on the edge of the action. When the play was over, a large person in street clothes had been […]

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In 30 prep football seasons, through 2007, I reported on … I’m going to make an educated guess and say … 300 games. In the 11 seasons that followed, I reported on … zero prep football games. Not because I lost interest in the high school games, but because I was out of the business […]

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Have I done this before? After 10-plus years I must have. But know what? I’m not going to check because the 10 teams I love to hate changes a bit, from year to year. This list would probably be unlike any other I might have done. For instance, most of my life I have wished […]

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I was as badly wrong about Jared Goff as … well, just about anyone or anything over a long stretch of time. Back in 2016, his rookie season, I was suggesting the Los Angeles Rams quarterback was in big trouble even before the season began, and then declared him a top-of-the-draft disaster. Or nearly did. […]

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The Rams offense this summer did something that has never happened in National Football League history: Ten of their 11 starters on offense did not play a single minute of preseason football, according to The Orange County Register. Players have been complaining for years about the four-game exhibition season, and so have some coaches. And […]

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It rained in London yesterday. Not just a little. A lot. Steady, pelting rain nearly the whole of the afternoon. And especially during the Crystal Palace-at-Watford match, staged in a London suburb. The players were soaked. The officials were soaked. The fans, those of them who stayed in seats not covered by the partial roof […]

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Chelsea opened Premier League play last weekend, and I could not have been the only viewer puzzled by the presence of a grizzled old … bum? … sitting among the Blues’ coaches. It looked like the guy had not shaved in a while, and he had the sort of buzz haircut he might have done […]

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What are we? The proverbial “red-headed stepchildren”? We just went 26 days without an elite soccer game being played anywhere in the world. It was on July 15 that France defeated Croatia 4-2 to win the 2018 World Cup. And then planet soccer went cold turkey. None of the big European leagues in action. No […]

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How many times has global soccer gone through this over the past 30 years? Three times? Four? England, standing prepared to stage, on short notice, what appears to be a possibly amateurish — or scandal-tainted — World Cup. Most recently, it was Russia 2018. This time it is Qatar 2022, the World Cup that has […]

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Two things we have learned over the first half of the 2018 Major League Soccer season: –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most exciting player in the league. –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most underpaid player in the league. Generic soccer fans probably knew about the first bit of information, and if they did not his three-goal match […]

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