Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
SportsTalk: Albert Pujols signs with the Angels and Prince Fielder joins the Tigers. Which team is better now?
Ryan Callahan scored for the fifth time in four days and defenseman Ryan McDonagh snapped a second-period tie to lift the New York Rangers to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
Kobe Bryant hit a baseline jump shot with 4.2 seconds left and the Los Angeles Lakers wrapped up a six-game road trip by holding on to beat the Raptors 94-92 on Sunday, their eighth victory in nine meetings with Toronto
Arc's five up, five down: After No. 11 Michigan State's 58-48 upset of No. 3 Ohio State, you'd be a fool to discount the Spartans' national title chances now.
Miami coach Al Golden says the worst is behind him, but his headaches figure to continue now that former booster Nevin Shapiro, now in jail, says his involvement with the Hurricanes program will result in stiff penalties.
Golf's dream pairing - Woods and Mickelson - is on the course in the final round at Pebble Beach. Jason Sobel has hole-by-hole reports.
The United States completed a 5-0 rout of Switzerland in the Davis Cup on Sunday, with 19-year-old Ryan Harrison and John Isner winning closing singles matches.
Zambia has won the African Cup of Nations, beating pre-tournament favorite Ivory Coast 8-7 on penalties in a dramatic final at Stade de l'Amitie.
Tessa Worley of France fought off gusting winds to win a second consecutive World Cup giant slalom Sunday in the Andorran Pyrenees. Overall leader Lindsey Vonn was more than a second behind and finished eighth.
Robins: It’s the Year of the Dragon on the Lunar calendar, and this Chinese influence could extend to it also being the year of the Pekingese on the green carpet at the 136th Westminster Dog Show on Tuesday.
Reuters fileOf course, the most recent batch of players that have been thrown into the swamp have denied using anything illegal, which is what you would expect whether they are guilty or not. Just as with Bonds, whose links to chemically enhanced statistics are supported by more evidence than a hearsay report, there are no positive test results for any of them.
If we were talking about football and one of the names was Emmitt Smith, it still wouldn’t be a big deal. Before the first President Bush signed a law making steroids illegal in 1990, the NFL was infested with them, but nobody really cared. It’s still not a big deal with a football player tests positive — just part of the game in the minds of many.
Baseball is different because iconic players and the records they set are involved. It’s hypocritical to hold the national pastime to a different standard, but it’s also understandable. No kid wants to hear that there is no Santa Claus. No adult wants to hear that his or her heroes were cheating.
The difference is that with Santa Claus, the truth is met with sadness. With baseball, it’s met with outrage. It shouldn’t be. Major League Baseball, its commissioner, Bud Selig, and its players association all welcomed the infusion of offense and the barrage of long balls. It wasn’t until Congress got involved and public opinion got nasty that the game decided that maybe testing wasn’t a bad idea after all.
Congress was as hypocritical as anyone else — more so, actually. This is the outfit that authorizes nearly $20 billion a year to fight drugs and thinks nothing of locking away half a million marijuana users — not dealers — every year, yet has not authorized anything resembling a concerted effort to track down and jail steroid dealers and users.
Go to any serious gym and the steroid users are everywhere. High school kids are for the most part free to take whatever they want. You can get steroids by mail or drive over the border to Mexico and fill your trunk with them. And in the rare instances where someone actually gets caught red-handed, as happened with BALCO founder Victor Conte, the sentence is a few months in jail.
I refuse to blame the players for doing what everyone accepted and even applauded. These are the most highly competitive people in the world, people who will do anything to win. Steroids may have been illegal, but the game didn’t test for them; it didn’t want to know. The shock isn’t that large numbers of players took them, but that there were any that didn’t dip into the medicine cabinet to get another foot on the fastball, another ten feet on the long ball.
Selig wanted to find out the extent of the problem when he appointed George Mitchell to investigate the use of performance-enhancers. Now he’s finding out, and it’s ripping gaping holes in the game he was sworn to protect and didn’t.
Clemens today. Who will it be tomorrow?
SportsTalk: Albert Pujols signs with the Angels and Prince Fielder joins the Tigers. Which team is better now?
DeMarco: Plug in a well-heeled ownership group and negotiate one of those mega-bucks TV deals that are going around, and the Dodgers could become the west coast version of the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox.
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
Ryan Callahan scored for the fifth time in four days and defenseman Ryan McDonagh snapped a second-period tie to lift the New York Rangers to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
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