playbook

ONCE A BELOVED WORLD CHAMPION, LANCE ARMSTRONG IS NOW A PARIAH IN HIS HOMETOWN. WILL HE EVER BE A HERO AGAIN? WAS HE ONE TO BEGIN WITH?

Leonard Cooper of Little Rock, Arkansas, had a lot of catching up to do.

In an interview Wednesday with ESPN's Jackie MacMullan, Kobe Bryant made a few comments about his large-shouldered teammate, Dwight Howard.

It found that kids who cycled or walked to school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation, performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after they got to school.

THE MERCY RULE

Whatever Super Bowl Sunday brings us, Krewe du Vieux's float of Roger Goodell has already given us the most enduring, and maybe most appropriate, image for Super Bowl XLV.

Group of Men Have Played Game of Tag for 23 Years; Hiding in Bushes, Cars

While reporting his cover feature for Sports Illustrated on Manti Te'o, Pete Thamel found what he called some "small red flags"

In football, it's usually true that everything you see has happened before and will happen again.

Hinged goal posts are safer for delirious fans intent on tearing them down and easier for stadium staff to repair and remove for concerts and other events.

Appreciating just how far Robert Griffin III has taken Washington this season means understanding just how unexpectedly bad the once-proud team had gotten.

The EPL remains the most exciting and unpredictable league in world football.

Dallas Cowboys fans can burn jerseys and curse their owner all they like. They have the team they asked for.

"Get rid of instant replay," says Colorado coach Tad Boyle, who's frustrated by officials' decision to use an inconclusive replay of a potential game-winning 3-pointer to reverse an on-court call at the end of Thursday's game against Arizona. Human error is part of the game, he says.

When I look at any picture of a Bears game I saw between 1960 and 1965, I feel like a crackhead looking at a picture of me doing my very first line of coke. For more than 50 years, I’ve been addicted to watching NFL football games at what feels like the cellular level, snorting the game long past the point where I derive any deep emotional satisfaction from the activity.

Jason Kidd plays basketball with a generosity and grace that seems to elude him off the court.

Robert Griffin III to Tony Romo, as captured by a microphone for Showtime’s “Inside the NFL,” via Michael David Smith, ProFootballTalk.com: You either have a quarterback or you don’t. When you do, like the Redskins, people laugh at a prank at a news conference.

It is not news that college athletics is a business of billions. What has become ever more obvious this year is the hypocrisy within the organization. The N.C.A.A. has a problem that is both optical and practical, and it’s becoming impossible to ignore.

Dr. Jonas Gustav Wilhelm Zander, the Swedish physician and orthopedist and all-around genius who invented the exercise machine in its familiar form, popularized the connections between physical exertions and overall well-being.

vard Rugland does not have the pedigree one might expect for someone who has become an Internet sensation for kicking an American football. He knows next to nothing about the sport. Just ask him to name the quarterback of the New England Patriots or the Denver Broncos.

The New York Jets' coaching staff didn't know Greg McElroy had been experiencing concussion symptoms this week. His teammates did.

After years of being resistant to change, the NFL is suddenly using the newest and best ideas all over. A new class of young, multitalented quarterbacks who can throw and run – not just one or the other – is dragging the NFL to its future.

The NFL has instituted new medical regimens to protect concussed players, and made refs crack down on the most dangerous hits. But it hasn’t considered an obvious step that would deter dirty play: a penalty box.

For more than six years, the underground bicycling club has prowled L.A.'s pavement at night. Some see a group high on the rude chain; others see a vehicle for activism.

There is pageantry within the N.F.L.—excess, shamelessness, rawness, and a struggle for control by League overseers in the face of many tendencies toward anarchy—that has made the League more successful than any other American professional sport. At the same time, it is more imperilled. This has been a season of sold-out stadiums and high cable ratings. But it may also be remembered as the beginning of the end—the season in which the League’s balance sheet of accumulating liabilities became fully apparent.

If you haven’t seen a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in a while, you might forget just how accomplished the company’s dancers are. You know they can do anything, but the visible evidence can leave you reeling. From what I saw in one of the programs in Ailey’s five-week season at City Center, the company is dancing better than ever.

The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last-second whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing cry: “Avalanche! Elyse!” The very thing the 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought — fresh, soft snow — instantly became the enemy. Somewhere above, a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt, slicing a slab nearly 200 feet across and 3 feet deep. Gravity did the rest.

Breaking down college football's coaching changes and all the bowl games except the one that matters

Fire Joe Morgan has a cult reputation that can seem intimidating to those not already in the cult.The much-beloved baseball blog took aim at subpar sports journalism, heckling bad math and and lazy received wisdom with a call-and-response format that many others still imitate.

We know obesity is an epidemic, but gym memberships are expensive. So maybe what we need are new gyms.

The lessons to be learned from soccer are real—and can help save lives. Whereas health research focuses on what is readily quantifiable, soccer fans and announcers appreciate the complexities that make Lionel Messi the player he is, and a host of other intangibles during a match—from field conditions to injuries to opponents to coaching and managing.

New York City's limit of a maximum 16-ounce size of sugar-sweetened drinks for sale in eating establishments is a positive public health move and should be replicated in Canada, argues an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Jerry Stackhouse has never been anyone's favorite player but his own, but he's still here...

Jeremy Lin entered Monday night’s game against the New York Knicks — the first time he was playing in Madison Square Garden, site of Linsanity, circa February 2012, as a member of the Houston Rockets — on an all-time low. “Terrible,” Lin told the New York Post, when asked to assess the state of his game.

In a documentary, Red Bull celebrates three consecutive F1 championships and address complaints that the team went beyond the limits of the FIA rulebook. That's not true, says chief engineer Adrian Newey.

Jeremy Lin returned to New York as a Rocket on Monday. He conquered the Knicks, but it'll never be the same again.

Bryshon Nellum's improbable comeback from gunshot wounds, and how he changed perceptions along the way.

Brain changes in children who have sustained a mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion, persist for months following injury — even after the symptoms of the injury are gone, according to a study published in the December 12 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings highlight the potential benefit of using advanced imaging techniques to monitor recovery in children following concussions.

How and why Roger Goodall got the New Orleans Saints' bounty investigation all wrong, and how Paul Tagliabue's ruling shows the problem isn't bounties, but Goodall.

With apologies to Beethoven, in January 1999 -- known by many as the The Winter of Love -- the best song ever created sang its way into the hearts of America’s youth. The song I refer to is, of course, “You Get What You Give” by The New Radicals. And, much to Jason White’s chagrin, on Saturday, days after his 20th birthday, Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy.