During last weekend's Campeonato Pernambucano fifth-round match between Sport and Nautico, Sport's Marcelinho Paraiba collided with Siloe and had a tooth fly out of his head as a result. So after Sport won the match 4-3, Marcelinho asked club officials to try and find the tooth. When they couldn't, he offered a R$1,000 ($572.

I had the chance to visit with a high school basketball team yesterday, and in their pre-practice meeting, they were referring to an article that I had also once written about a couple of years back. The article had to do with toughness, which ESPN's Jay Bilas has a pretty good reference point about.

Oh fuck me. The FA Cup is back.

Now, I'm not one of those EPL-centric, footballing-history-started-in-1992 type people. I just hate the FA Cup. I hate how misused the FA Cup is in terms of broadcasting (both online and televised).

Last March I wrote a post about how College Basketball's March Madness is presented in America.

Every coach wants to have players on their team that are assertive and willing to accept leadership responsibilities. No matter how demanding a coach or his staff can be in practice, ultimately, success will come down to their players being able to hold their teammates to high standards and demands during the game.

MLS is good enough, talent-wise, to be more popular with sports fans in the U.S. than the English Premier League and other world leagues.
Even though these other leagues may have superstar players and better overall play from top tier teams, sports fans should be able to have a deeper appreciation for MLS due to the history of outstanding relationships built by American sports teams.

It's looking less and less likely that we'll have an NBA season this year. The latest chapter of this sad saga has David Stern giving the NBA players a deadline to accept the owners' latest offer. However, the players have already all but officially turned down the offer.

The deadline, which is the close of business on Wednesday, will surely come and go without a deal in place.

Javaris Crittenton is a free man. For the time being, at least. Javaris Critten was freed on a $230,000 bond on Tuesday. The former NBA player has been charged in a murder of 22-year-old woman.

According to police, Crittenton was shooting at a man who had previously robbed him and accidentally hit Julian Jones.

Neil Blackmon continues his EPL Preview marathon. (Too bad he doesn't work for you guys ESPN)

Will The Deuce Abide...and remain at Fulham?

Part III of our Barclay's Premier League preview focuses on five teams that should all contend for the Europa League, which, depending on who you ask, is either great (because some ownership boards are honest enough to admit they aren't going to make the Champions League), or the European soccer equivalent of college basketball's NIT.

Study after study indicates that time spent using the internet is making humans less patient and more neurotic.
From the moment people are waking up till the moment they go to sleep, time spent with the internet changes how people react and behave. Its effects are impossible to ignore.
The speed of the information from the internet is making it harder for people to concentrate on other things in life that are slower to develop and take more personal time, like reading a book or watching a baseball game.

Union

CSN is going to show the Union's match against Everton but the showdown with Real Madrid gets the ESPN Deportes and ESPN3.

The Union's Kevin Kinkead breaks down the team's performance using MLS Chalkboards.

Mark your calendars: The Union are traveling to Harrisburg in August to face the City Islanders!

There's been a littany of problems in so many American sports lately. College football has an annual crisis of players, coaches and boosters scheming the system, Ohio State University being the latest. College basketball has its own share of problems as witnessed earlier in the year when the University of Connecticut got busted for recruiting violations only to bounce back and win the national championship a month later.

The top U.S. sports websites (most read/most popular) are; YAHOO.com, ESPN.com, FOXsports.com and SI.com. None of these sites give MLS its own category/webpage on their homepages.
MLS is found only among the 'Soccer' category.
Each of the other big '4' team sports have their own categories.

By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Apr 5, 2011) US Soccer Players -- Though it's always tricky trying to draw parallels across sports, last night's National Championship game in college basketball should serve as a reminder of what happens to any sport when the quality tanks. Prior to one of the lowest scoring, and frankly painful, games in national championship history, the conversation was about parity in college basketball.

Kemba Walker has been the best player in all of college basketball over the last three weeks. In that span, UConn has won all nine games they have played. Their latest victim was Arizona. With a 65-63 victory on Saturday night, UConn is headed to the Final Four. That makes us 2-for-2 in our Elite 8 predictions for March Madness 2011.

It is hard to imagine things more soul-sucking than a week that is dedicated to international fixtures. The domestic leagues are reaching a boiling point and all the excitement is killed by these FIFA dates for friendlies and Euro qualifiers.
For example, the English media are so devoid of interesting topics they are harping on the fact Gareth Bale may miss the upcoming Wales v.

Mike Greenberg of ESPN RadioOriginally posted July 31, 2010
Sport Talk's impact thus far on pro Soccer is everything and nothing at the same time for U.S. sports fans. It means everything because sports talk is the main vein of contact among sports fans. The impact is nothing because that's about how much relevance U.

Today starts College Basketball's March Madness. Sixty-eight teams due battle over the next few weeks in a tournament that makes the World Cup seem puny in terms of scale, (but not pageantry or importance or anything else, mind you). Today, there are 16 games going on. The same amount will be played tomorrow.

By Jon Levy A week prior to the tipoff of college basketball's NCAA Tournament, the only American sports playoff which inspires anything near World Cup-level madness, The World's Most Famous Arena hosts a yearly five day competition that doesn't garner half the prestige of "the big dance." No one fills out brackets, and Sally the [.

Escalade is dead. You know him from being the huge bigman on the AND1 Mixtape Tour. He died in Los Angeles while in town for the 2011 NBA All-Star Game. Escalade's real name is Troy Jackson and he's the younger brother of Mark Jackson, the former star point guard who now calls games for ABC next to Jeff Van Gundy.

In the relatively short span that I've being a fan of MLS, I have grown to consider the television coverage of MLS to be like the Snake Exhibit at your local zoo: isolated, thought of in a wide variety of fashions from cool to ambivalent to disgusting, and lacking the level of interaction that allows the observer to experience first-hand what is to be offered.