Month: October 2024

Patrick Mahomes is set to make his fourth Big Game appearance when his Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 58.

Mahomes’ Super Bowl odds will be among the most popular wagering options as kickoff closes in and casual bettors flood the market with a desire to bet on the Super Bowl’s biggest stars.

I size up the Patrick Mahomes odds and give my best NFL picks for his performance in Sin City on Sunday, February 11. For more NFL odds analysis and Super Bowl predictions, be sure to check out our 49ers vs. Chiefs picks.

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It was a rough run for NFL underdogs in Week 5, as point-spread pups finished 4-10 ATS overall following a hot 56% start to 2024. 

As we roll into Week 6 and beyond, the power of points diminishes. I pinpointed this swing in market value for pups in last week’s column, with underdogs covering at a 55% clip in September over the past 10 seasons before dropping to 50.6% from Week 5 onward.

Two of those favorites that covered the spread in Week 5 started the week as underdogs, with Miami (+1.5 to -2) and Houston (+1 to -1.5) jumping the fence and coming through as short chalk.

We’ve got another one of these games teetering on a pick’em in Week 6, with the Tennessee Titans opening as 1-point home favorites hosting the Indianapoli…

Trevor Kennison, a former snowboarder who was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2014 backcountry accident, is an aspiring Paralympic monoskier based in Colorado. At the National Sports Center for the Disabled’s Competition Center at Winter Park Ski Resort, Trevor and a diverse group of other elite adaptive alpine skiers are already training intensively for the 2022 Paralympic Games, three years away. We talked to Trevor about transitioning to monoskiing from snowboarding, training for the Paralympics, and how the sport helped him adjust to life after his accident. Senior Producer: Kiran Chitanvis, Danielle Steinberg | Creative Producer: Anders Kapur | Videographer: Amber Genuske | Editor: Michael Pasquariello …

TOP-FOUR TALES

They’re all just brazenly trolling Liverpool now. For most of the second half of the season, the clubs near the top of the Premier League table have seemingly gone out of their way to keep the top-four door ajar, only for the Reds to pass up several opportunities to make up the points with a series of silent-movie pratfalls, slapstick gaffes and sidesplittingly predictable last-minute capitulations. They’ve pretty much run the entire clowning playbook, save routines that require props forbidden by the laws of the game, such as custard pies, buckets of glitter and square-wheeled cars – and yet there’s still a sense that there’s one big-top fiasco to come.

Klopp: Liverpool suffering because of M…

The outcome of the World Cup group stages showed the teams that advanced without complication were those best prepared mentally and not distracted by political issues, according to the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger.

Referring to shock exits by Germany, Belgium and Denmark, Wenger, speaking during a technical analysis of the group stages by Fifa, said it was notable the teams that focused on football and started well – such as Brazil, France and England – had easier passages to the last 16.

“The teams who were not disappointing in their first game performance – because when you got to the World Cup you know you have not to lose the first game – are the teams with experience, they have results … th…

John Stones is confident England are capable of a seamless switch to a back three if Gareth Southgate presses ahead with plans to change formation in Saturday’s quarter-final against Switzerland.

Marc Guéhi’s one-game ban has forced England into at least one defensive change and it is understood they have used training sessions this week to trial a return to the system that carried them to the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup.

‘Focused’ Toney ready to play his part as England prepare for SwissRead more

Southgate, who is expected to replace Guéhi with Ezri Konsa, has tried to be more expansive at recent tournaments and has used a 4-2-3-1 system in his team’s first four games at Euro 2024. He has not start…

There’s a prevailing line of thought right now in the public discourse: baseball, as a sport, is in grave trouble if Major League Baseball doesn’t figure out how to have a 2020 season. Jayson Stark, last year’s highly deserving Hall of Fame honoree as the J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner, has been retweeting, daily, his warning at The Athletic of “ don’t drive off that cliff!” Over at ESPN, Buster Olney wrote a piece last week headlined, “It’s not just the 2020 season at stake, but the future of MLB.” Before that, there was Tony Blengino at Forbes, with the dire warning, “A Lost 2020 Season Could Be An Existential Threat To Major League Baseball.” Not to say that there isn’t reason to worry, but as MLB and the MLBPA continue to get nowhere in their negotiation…

Oh hello there! Merry Christmas! Oh, did I just wish you a Merry Christmas IN MARCH? Indeed I did. I just adore the holidays so much that I celebrate them all year round. It’s true! That way, I can fill every day with joyful tidings! Right, kids? [my kids throw full cans of soda at me] Such darling little scamps. Okay, so perhaps I’m being a touch casual with the truth here. I must confess that I’m a bit late to the holiday this winter, and that is because, as befitting an American Christmas, everything got in my fucking way. I couldn’t drive anywhere this Christmas because there was too much traffic. I couldn’t buy any presents because every store was packed. I couldn’t cook anything because all the markets were barren. I couldn’t even find a Williams-Sonoma catalog to ma…