I knew Pat Haden, a little, more than three decades ago. I covered the Los Angeles Rams for four seasons for the San Bernardino Sun, and Haden was in his second season when I got on the beat, in 1977. Haden was great to work with. Bright and accessible and honest. And, of course, a […]

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Not an original thought, I’m sure, but original to me. The best way to explain English soccer to somebody back in the U.S., who almost certainly doesn’t really care about the Premier League … is to compare it to college football. The same sort of tribal, DNA-encoded madness.

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This is the worst yet. Most of the first four years here in the UAE, we were able to see some college football. We had access to ESPN and ESPN America, which showed a bit of the college game.  Pretty much all the games that ran on ESPN in the U.S., and it was a […]

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I spent far too much of the night watching the NFL playoffs. Like, I have a day job, and the games began at 10 p.m. here in Abu Dhabi and ended at about 5 a.m. But I came to a couple of conclusions — or arrived at old conclusions anew — on two prominent NFL […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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For the first two decades of my journalism career, January 1 was the zenith of college football. The Biggest Day. The Longest Day. And we planned coverage of New Year’s Day football in great detail, and needed enormous sections to display everything that happened. Four or five or six bowl games, including all of the […]

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It’s been a long time since I felt remotely connected to the Los Angeles Rams. Certainly not since 1994, their last season in Southern California before the deliciously evil Georgia Frontiere hustled them off to St. Louis for buckets of cash. The St. Louis Rams never did a thing for me. Some other team. From […]

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Notre Dame was the team I most disliked, in my youth. They won too often, their fans were smug, their sense of entitlement was off the charts. The Knute Rockne stuff, and the “win one for the Gipper” fiction, and their being good every year … all of it bugged me, especially as a SoCal […]

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Final score from the L.A. Coliseum. Oregon winning, USC losing. In football. Not basketball. A Pac-12 result that ought to leave Lane Kiffin and the Trojans reconsidering, oh, everything about how they approach the game of football. And playing against Oregon. First off? I don’t like football of this sort. The pinball/video game version, where […]

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Every now and then I get on my marching band freak. I love marching bands. I may have mentioned that. Generally, I love the USC marching band. The Spirit of Troy, as the kids in sunglasses and plumed helmets prefer to be known. I would never say they are America’s best marching band. They are […]

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