For years larger-than-life coaches like Meyer could operate without oversight or interference, but society has evolved and sports have caught upFor years, the two most powerful coaches in college football have been Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer. Combined, their teams have won nine of the last 15 national championships. They are giants in a sport where coaches are already exalted to mythical proportions, the highest-paid public employees in their states, their word greater and more important than even the presidents of their schools.So the fact that Ohio State put Meyer on administrative leave this week, pending an investigation into what Meyer knew about an assistant coach’s history of domestic abuse, shocked many. Meyer, it always seemed, was...
The one-time football sensation was derided when he signed a minor-league contract with the Mets to chase a new dream, but Tebow’s improbable if modest success deserves our appreciationFor all the gifs and memes and fragments of an Internet broken by his prodigious swings, Tim Tebow turned out to be a decent baseball player. Probably not a great prospect at 30 years old, but good enough to show that his second sports career wasn’t a joke. His best shot at a cup of coffee in the major leagues most likely ended with Monday’s diagnosis of a broken wrist. At the time he had been playing for the New York Mets Class-AA team, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, two levels below the...
Haskell, once the nation’s most prominent Native American college team, used to beat the likes of Michigan State. But now the program is no moreState Route 10 in Kansas ambles from the western suburbs of Kansas City into Lawrence, a college town of 90,000 with the 28,000-student University of Kansas and the 1,000-student Haskell Indian Nations University, founded in 1884 for Native Americans. Route 10 tightens from a four-lane highway and becomes 23rd Street in Lawrence, and off the street loom two 5,500-seat concrete grandstands and a noble stone archway. This is Haskell Memorial Stadium, which was dedicated on 30 October, 1926, 90 years ago this month. Haskell’s male students provided much of the labor to keep the cost to...