By Tamara Hew-Butler and Phillip D. Levy/The Conversation

Along with the revival of professional sports comes the yearning for a return to amateur sports – high school, college and club. Governing officials are now offering guidance as to when and how to resume play.
However, lost in the current conversation is how schools and club sports with limited resources can safely reopen. As an exercise scientist who studies athlete health and an emergency medicine physician who leads Michigan’s COVID-19 mobile testing unit, we wish to empower athletes, coaches and parents by sharing information related to the risks of returning to play without COVID-19 testing. This includes blood tests to see if athletes have already had COVID-19 plus nasal swabs to test for the active SARS-CoV-2 virus.

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Posted on June 24, 2020

By Jim Coffman

Talladega should be shut down as in it should be flattened. It is absolutely irredeemable. The comprehensive destruction of the Alabama racecourse could be a centerpiece of a modern-day march of justice and obliteration through every square foot of NASCAR country.

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Posted on June 22, 2020

By David Rutter

Welcome to the Strange Mystery of Mitch Trubisky’s Missing Motivation.
I just dropped in to see what condition his condition was in.
Sing it, Tevye, and narrate your strange story . . . “Mo-tee-vay-SHUN.”
Trubisky Is going to be really good for the Bears in this pending fourth year of his diaspora. All his friends and allies say this is true because he is now really inspired to play quarterback for the Chicago Bears and really cares about his mental stability for that job.
Before? Not so much apparently. There is little comfort in colleagues’ assurance he is working on mental stability. Or that now, he really wants to be a good quarterback.

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Posted on June 22, 2020

By Thomas Chambers

The operating BS of the majority is that if one horse wins all three of the races this year, it will be a Triple Crown.
No. And. NO!
Although Tiz the Law was quite impressive in winning Saturday’s running of the 152nd Belmont Stakes (Grade I, 1-1/8 miles, $1,000,000), it was really a non-competitive, dime-a-dozen 9-furlong zip race that should forever carry an asterisk. All the talking heads, except Bloodhorse’s Steve Haskin on FoxSports1, either lent full endorsement to this race being a true Belmont and Triple Crown race, or basically avoided the issue.

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Posted on June 21, 2020

By Thomas Chambers

When is the Belmont Stakes not a real Belmont? 2020.
This 152nd running (Grade I, nine furlongs, 1-1/8 miles, $1,000,000) will be the first leg of this year’s convoluted Triple Crown. They scaled it back to nine furlongs. Always a long race, settled in at 1-1/2 miles for nearly a century, the last time it was run at this distance was 1893-1894. This distance will mean they’ll start in the chute, making it only a one-turn race, which is a huge difference for many horses. Running around two turns is not automatically easy for a horse.

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Posted on June 19, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Walls are falling. Plus: Rob Manfred Is A Cop; Wet Hot American Long Gone Summer; Bubble Life; Better At It Than Baseball; and Belmont Betting.

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Posted on June 19, 2020

By David Rutter

This idea was not my invention. I am merely an eyewitness to its application.
I was In “The Room Where It Happened,” as Hamilton’s gang might have sung it.
My eyeballs were open to the optical illusion at those moments, and I was being self-educated as a daily newspaper editor allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of labor negotiations.
My function? No power at all. Barely a hood ornament.
Now that the Major League Baseball season faces the real possibility of being stillborn, we will want to know why they could not keep the lights turned on, and who it was who pulled the plug.
That’s the easy-peasy part.

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Posted on June 16, 2020

By Jim Coffman

I want to make sure I have this completely straight: Major League Baseball owners, realizing the 2020 season would be shortened, asked players for help. And the players union agreed to pro-rated salaries, i.e., they only get paid the fraction of their salaries that match up to the fraction of the season that is played.
In other words, if a player has a salary of $2 million dollars and teams only play 50 percent of their season this year (81 games), the player is paid $1 million dollars. It is a move that would save owners more than a hundred million dollars and one would have thought it would surely ensure that professional baseball is played this year.
Then the owners apparently decided, “Wow, if these suckers would go for that, surely they’ll agree to give us hundreds of millions more with further salary reductions! Heck, they’ll probably even play for nothing.”

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Posted on June 15, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

A moment when everything seems possible. Plus: MLB Draft’s Dizzying Heights Of Hype; We Blame The (Lying) Owners; The Neverending Sammy Sosa Saga; and NBA & NHL Flux.

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Posted on June 12, 2020

By Jim Coffman

How about a tournament in which an NBA team can win a draft-order lottery by winning? Or one where they can avoid being replaced in the NBA by the Gatorade League team based closest to them (for the Bulls that would be their Hoffman Estates-based affiliate)? Best idea yet! A combination of the two.
The Bulls were bad enough when their regular season was permanently suspended back in March that they are among the eight teams on the outs in the NBA. We learned last week that they don’t qualify for the recently announced, “expanded so much it resembles an every-player-gets-a-trophy old-time youth sports event,” 22-team NBA playoff set to kick off next month.

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Posted on June 10, 2020