ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The assignment was simple: Find the person who got the best tattoo to celebrate Michigan’s 2023 national championship. Unsurprisingly, there were many contenders. Michigan fans are a passionate bunch, and quite a few of them wanted an indelible reminder of the Wolverines’ perfect season tattooed on their skin. One tattoo, discovered…

Alabama dropped to No. 13 in the latest College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday night and Mississippi fell to No. 14, leaving the SEC with only three teams in the projected field of 12 heading into the final weekend of the regular season. Oregon, Ohio State, Texas and Penn State remained the top four in the…

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — First came the beating, another desultory setback in the rapidly degenerating professional life of Jared Goff, the face of a flailing franchise’s enduring futility. That was torture enough. What Goff truly dreaded, however, was The Meeting. Summoned to Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell’s office on a late-October Tuesday in 2022, Goff…

It always made sense. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ brass has been fascinated with Blake Snell since president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman spent one of the Tampa Bay Rays’ 10 first-round picks on him in the 2011 MLB Draft, and has sought to add him multiple times over the last few seasons as he toured…

When Kenny Atkinson sat down for lunch with Donovan Mitchell inside the Four Seasons Westlake Village just outside of Los Angeles in late June, his mission was clear: Inspire enough trust and belief in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ franchise player that Mitchell would be compelled to sign a new contract rather than let the threat of…

Last week, the New York Jets fired Joe Douglas, making him the first NFL general manager of the season to lose his job. Douglas will not likely be the last, as underachieving teams abound this season. Seventeen of the NFL’s 32 teams entered Week 13 with losing records. And nearly a dozen of those teams…

The New York Giants’ season is all but over. There are some major questions still to be answered about who will be in charge of fixing this franchise in the coming months, and perhaps the backstretch of the season will help provide some clarity there. However, one thing we know for certain: The Giants’ future…

Suspended Premier League referee David Coote is being investigated by the Football Association (FA) following allegations he discussed issuing a yellow card with a friend before a match. The allegations were first reported in UK newspaper The Sun on Tuesday night and relate to a booking received by Leeds United’s Ezgjan Alioski from Coote during…

As the season approaches its final two weeks, jostling for at-large bids continues for teams in the upper echelon of College Football Playoff competition. At this point, there are teams with CFP hopes both as a conference champion and as an at-large. There are others, such as Big 12 contenders BYU and Colorado, which need…

“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley. “The Basketball 100” is available…