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The Clever Reason He Wants Matt Nagy To Use The Hurry-Up Offense

By Thomas Chambers

It’s amazing how different the television-watching experience is for various sports.
I will theorize that Bears coach Matt Nagy should actually take into account the nature of television coverage in the course of a game. What a pioneer he would be! Yeah, right.
In major team sports, NHL hockey is the best. I believe the game is stopped only about twice per period and the intermissions are great. You can’t stop the game when the Patrick Kane line has one leg over the boards for a shift change.
I’ve always enjoyed watching professional bowling. These guys miss pins too, and they show whole games at a time. The current juggernaut is the Australian Jason Belmonte, a right-hander who doesn’t use the finger holes. The five-time bowler of the year is clutch. Different from the days of Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton Jr., Earl Anthony and Johnny Petraglia when the gallery behind them was as quiet as a funeral, now they have a few dozen fans on the side of the left lane who constantly scream and never shut up. If Tiger Woods were a bowler, he’d stick his head in the ball return and wait for the next one up the chute to put him out of his misery. If the bowlers don’t mind those fans, neither do I, but the pandemic has thankfully removed them.

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Posted on October 15, 2020

A To B To C With The Reinsdorfs

By Jim Coffman

When Jerry Reinsdorf fired Doug Collins as the Bulls’ head coach July 1989, the first thing he didn’t do was make the ludicrous assertion that the decision was mutual. It obviously wasn’t, just like it was obvious that Rickey Renteria didn’t decide not to manage the potential World Series co-favorite White Sox in 2021.

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Posted on October 14, 2020

The St. Louis Flat-Earthers

By David Rutter

It’s a joke. Don’t you get it? Humor. Droll satire by a prankster?
Let me make this as clear as I can. St. Louis pitcher and new Fox TV baseball analyst Adam Wainwright complained on air last Tuesday that he had spent 2020 trying to fight shortstop and teammate Paul DeJong’s ignorance.
But it was a joke. Must have been.
Wainwright is a known provocateur and humorist with a straight face. We laugh. Ha!
According to Wainwright, DeJong and “Half the Cardinals are flat-Earthers” and also “There was no moonlanding” conspiracists. Flat-Earthers think the planet is a flat disc with massive walls of invisible ice, or cream cheese, around the edges. And the ringleader, he strongly implied, was DeJong whose playing performance metrics are not dissimilar to Cubs budding icon-in-training Javier Báez.

Multiple St. Louis sports bloggers were dubious of any DeJong involvement in what they generously though inaccurately called “pseudoscience.”
DeJong’s agent and business partner suggested it did not seem likely because DeJong is an Illinois State University graduate in biochemistry with a 3.74 GPA, and planned to attend medical school if baseball didn’t work out.

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Posted on October 12, 2020

Cinderella On Steroids

By Roger Wallenstein

If your ball diamond thirst remained unquenched after both the White Sox and Cubs bowed out of post-season play, the Yankees-Rays’ division series last week served as a primer for today’s state of the game along with giving fans a fascinating baseball fix.
Similar to many stories, this one also begins with the money.

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Posted on October 12, 2020

Joliet’s Route 66 Raceway Left Off NHRA’s 2021 Drag Racing Schedule

By NHRA

NHRA officials announced Wednesday a 22-race 2021 NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series schedule. Details on Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock, and Pro Stock Motorcycle qualifying days as well as special exhibitions and specialty series that compete at national events will be announced in coming weeks.
NHRA enters 2021 with a new sponsor on its premier professional series – Camping World, the nation’s largest retailer of recreational vehicles (RVs), RV accessories, and RV-related services – and an extended partnership with FOX Sports including amped-up coverage. All 22 events in this extreme sport series will be aired exclusively on FOX Sports with select events on the FOX broadcast network.

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Posted on October 9, 2020

Don’t Blame Trubisky. Blame Bears’ Schulz.

By David Rutter

Every city has its own well-tended gestalt garden of sports self-recrimination.
Chicago and its fans focus resentment on Bears quarterbacks for being, well, Bears quarterbacks, which is to say they are comparably not very good.
This is a comic strip we’ve seen somewhere before. Bears fans seem forever to be restaging the annual Swiped Ball Trick from Peanuts: Lucy, Charlie, “and that infernal football.”
We blame them, mock them, harp on their failures and take solace that, however inept we are at our own lives, we are not as fumbling as they are. I know this to be true because I have done it, too.

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Posted on October 8, 2020

Black Colleges Join eSports Bandwagon

By Delece Smith-Barrow/The Hechinger Report

The fall semester for most college students won’t look like any semester in the past, and that’s not such a bad thing for Keenan Johnson. He attends one of North Carolina’s historically black colleges and universities, Johnson C. Smith University, which is offering classes remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson isn’t thrilled to be logging into his courses from home, but he is excited for one of the university’s newest student groups – the JCSU Esports Club.
“We’re basically making history at HBCUs,” said Johnson, a 20-year-old junior.

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Posted on October 6, 2020

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