Month: October 2024

The New Orleans Saints were one of the worst bets in the NFL last season, finishing 6-10-1 against the spread. That makes Dennis Allen 13-20-1 ATS in his two years since taking over the head coaching role.

If Allen can’t turn things around in 2024, the “good times” may not be the only things rolling in New Orleans. And based on the Saints’ stiff start to the upcoming schedule, “heads” could be on the move by November.

Thanks to life in the NFC South, NOLA was a betting favorite in 13 of its 17 games in 2023. This year, look-ahead lines have the Saints laying points just seven times with a season win total of 7.5 (Over -120). Division futures and playoff props aren’t optimistic about New Orleans either.

Is it mor…

Right, where were we? Police and stewards had formed a cordon to separate angry fans from angry players, Jordan Pickford was ushered away from one confrontation, Alex Iwobi gave his shirt to a supporter and had it thrown back at him and Frank Lampard held his hands up in apology after a second anaemic defeat at Bournemouth inside five days. We pick up with Everton in trouble again.

Six weeks is a long time to brood over events on the south coast, where Everton’s collapse in form was met with an ugly demonstration of a collapse in support for Lampard’s team. One of the major plusses of the Everton manager’s 11-month reign has been the reconnection between crowd and players after the divisive days of Rafael Benítez and the disillusionme…

Yes, they suck. But we were all Bears fans today. Since 2004, the winner of the Bears-Colts regular season game successfully predicted whether a Republican or Democrat would win presidential office. Like every AFC-NFC matchup, the Bears and Colts play every four years. It just so happens that the AFC South faces the NFC North in election years. The Bears’ wins in 2008 and 2012 coincided with an Obama win and reelection. And when the Colts beat Chicago in 2004 and 2016, Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively, clinched the presidential nomination. If today’s sports stat is any indication, we’ll be inaugurating Trump again in 2021. Knowing that this stat was cherry-picked by someone with maybe a little too much time on their hands, I tried to see what other AFC-…

Back then – 30 July 1966 – it was pretty well possible to park your car within a minute’s walk of Wembley’s twin towers, and when our Ford Zephyr came to a juddering halt, me clutching the envelope containing our tickets in one hand and my self-constructed union jack flagpole in the other, my dad gave me a talk I had never expected. It was not about the rarity of this moment, the first English appearance in a World Cup final since the tournament began. It was about the opposition team: West Germany. I said I knew they were good. East Germany, by contrast, were rubbish.

He told me he did not like the team we were about to play and reeled off the names of cousins of whom I had never previously heard who had died in two previous world w…

Uefa promised to open a “special refund scheme for fans” who attended last season’s Champions League final, as it responded to the damning findings of the report it commissioned into the events in Paris last May.

The report found that Uefa bears “primary responsibility” for the catastrophic organisational and safety failures that turned the final into a horrific, traumatic experience for thousands of Liverpool and Real Madrid supporters.

‘Terrified’: what Liverpool and Real Madrid fans told Uefa panel Read more

European football’s governing body did not provide details of the refund scheme but it raises the prospect that it could reimburse the cost of match tickets. General admission tickets at the St…

A LOT TO PACK IN

Listening to John McGinn reflect on Aston Villa’s win over Young Boys after the final whistle on Tuesday night, it was clear how much playing in Bigger Cup meant to him. As a young player making his name with St Mirren and Hibs, occasionally playing on the plastic pitches at Hamilton, Falkirk and Kilmarnock, the midfielder hoped that one day he might move on to more prestigious, metaphorically greener astro. And while making his Bigger Cup debut in a stadium with a name ripe for schoolboy sniggering against a struggling side is hardly the stuff of young footballers’ dreams, you can only beat the team in front of you while burning the skin from your knees and elbows on the pitch underneath you and V…

It’s now an NHL playoffs tradition right up there with the handshake line. Right after a team is eliminated, usually starting with the second round, and beyond, the losing team’s coach or beat reporters or both will start to announce what injuries various players had been carrying throughout the spring. The winning team can’t of course, because hockey is convinced that A. no one knows a guy is hurt and B. if they did their future opponents would hack the affected bone/muscle/tendon like it was a sequel to Scream. Broken feet, separated shoulders, fractured wrists, these are just some of the maladies we’re used to hearing guys trying to gut through. But at some point, we should probably ask, why? Last night, Paul Maurice revealed that Aaron Ekblad has been playing on a broken fo…

If Michigan is going to have any chance of turning around its season, Saturday's Big Ten game against visiting Iowa at Ann Arbor, Mich. would be the logical place to start. The Wolverines (7-12, 2-6 Big Ten) have faced adversity all season. Michigan was without head coach Juwan Howard for the first 10 games as he recovered from an offseason heart procedure. More recently, the Wolverines have only had part-time service from their most dynamic player, sophomore point guard Dug McDaniel. On Jan. 10, McDaniel was suspended by Howard for a string of six road games to work on academic issues. The Wolverines have already lost both road games without McDaniel, falling at Maryland on Jan. 11 and at Purdue on Tuesday. The Wolverines' 99-67 loss at Purdue was the worst defeat by scorin…