The 29-year-old can still be good, perhaps even great – but every day he goes unsigned is an embarrassment for the coaches and GMs desperate to play it safeIt’s hard to believe that Colin Kaepernick can no longer be a useful quarterback in the NFL. The league is filled with too many mediocre passers who possess little skill beyond an ability to parrot the jargon of a preferred system offense to deny a man who actually took a team to the brink of a Super Bowl victory. All you have to do is look at the lackluster play of the NFL’s low-end starters, ball-cap wearers and clipboard holders to know Kaepernick still has a lot to offer. He is 29,...
Lost in the bombast of the Raiders’ exit from Oakland is the not-so-subtle admission by the NFL that their opposition to gambling was always temporaryFor decades, the NFL wanted nothing to do with Las Vegas. As the city boomed in the Nevada desert and other professional team sports at least dabbled with the idea of a Las Vegas franchise, the world’s most lucrative league stayed away. Even talking about Las Vegas meant opening the door to gambling – and the NFL wasn’t going down that alley.But now that Nevada has $750m of public money to offer the Oakland Raiders for a gleaming new stadium, the NFL is embracing Sin City, even championing it. When the league’s owners approved the Raiders’...
Watching Tiger Woods now is a struggle but the 20th anniversary of his first Augusta triumph stirs memories of a first-day tee shot that signalled his greatnessThe morning at Augusta National had been spent following Lee Westwood, an early starter in the first round of the 1997 Masters. At 23, the Englishman was making his Masters debut. Just to remind him of where he was, his drive off the first tee flew into an enormous sand trap, setting up a double bogey.Four hours later, as a chastened Westwood was signing for a five‑over‑par 77, news was coming in from the front nine about a worse catastrophe that appeared to be about to engulf an even younger player. Making his much...
Enough of the hypocrisy: every other top-class basketball program is trying to copy Kentucky, which makes rooting against them so outdated and pointlessThe NCAA tournament field is down to the Sweet 16 weekend of games, featuring 15 collegiate programs and the Kentucky Wildcats, a D-League team that is still officially unaffiliated with the NBA.John Calipari’s team will take the court on Friday night featuring three freshmen starters in De’Aaron Fox, Malik Monk and Edrice Adebayo – all of whom are expected to go in the first round in June’s NBA draft, with Fox and Monk slated to be selected among the first few picks. This one-and-lottery-pick approach is the way it’s been at Kentucky since Calipari arrived in 2009. He...
The US should beat Honduras but if they fail then the pressure is likely to tell on a team left floundering at the end of the Jürgen Klinsmann eraLet’s start with the obvious — Honduras is a must win game. Concacaf qualifying may appear to present a ridiculously forgiving format, but there’s only so far that forgiveness stretches when you’ve lost your first two games and dropped points in the third. And no team has ever secured an automatic qualifying spot after losing its first three games, so unless the US team fancy playing in a wild card game after the Hex (and that’s a best case scenario…), they need to win on Friday. Continue reading...