Top Stories
Stories in Unbalanced that you’ll love, handpicked by our team.
Wild Card Weekend Recap: What Happens Now?
I think I figured out why I love Wild Card Weekend so much. It's because it's the first playoff anything of the calendar year. The NFL season starts in the fall, and once upon a time, the champion was crowned either on or slightly before New Year's. The evolution of the NFL schedule has resulted in the playoffs starting just into the New Year, and currently, the final week of the season falls on the first weekend of the New Year, with Wild Card Weekend coming a week after that. So yes, chronologically, the NFL's Wild Card Weekend serves as the first playoff anything of the calendar year.
By Clyde E. Dawkinsabout 12 hours ago in Unbalanced
What Went Wrong: We Still Own You, Boston
A familiar saying comes to mind in this case: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." First off, let's talk about the fact that this was the best Wild Card Series round ever. Yes, we're only four seasons in to this format, but still. In the first three years, there were 12 series. Only two went the maximum three games: Mets/Padres in 2022, and Brewers/Mets in 2024. This year saw three deciding Game Threes, and the last one was between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.
By Clyde E. Dawkins3 months ago in Unbalanced
It All Comes Down to This...
The 2025 MLB season has been filled with outstanding catches and moments. Now, the following teams are fighting for Wild Card spots and as the regular season winds down, every game matters. For context, I'll be focusing only on the American League in this story. I'll check in the following week to see how the records of the teams I'm about to talk about have changed. Also, next week, I'll be going over the Wild Card hunt in the National League.
By Mark Wesley Pritchard 4 months ago in Unbalanced
NFL Week 11 Recap: About Damn Time
For the 52nd straight season, the 1972 Miami Dolphins can pop the champagne. The Buffalo Bills defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the central game of Week 11 of the 2024 NFL season, doing so by a score of 30-21. This was a game were the Chiefs were lost for the most part, which had been the case in a lot of games this season. However, unlike past weeks, the Chiefs could not stumble their way out of this, especially with Travis Kelce being a ghost in this game, and Patrick Mahomes adding two more interceptions to his total for this year.
By Clyde E. Dawkinsabout a year ago in Unbalanced
Lovin’ the PWHL
The inaugural season for professional women’s hockey is well underway and I, like many North American sports enthusiasts, have cottoned on to the excitement of the games and the fanfare. Most of the women playing are relatively well-known through previous media exposure during Olympic games, World Championships and Rivalry matches between Canada and the United States. Yesterday, March 8, being International Women’s Day, I decided that I would pay tribute to the women of the world in my own little sports-minded way, and watch a PWHL game between the teams from Toronto and Montreal. Casually observing the new teams since the start of the season, I had suspected that the Women’s league was somehow different from the NHL and other men’s hockey leagues around the world. Sometimes these differences don’t show up during the Olympic games or World Championships because of the media focus on winning gold medals and the like. However, during a regular season hockey game, be it a men’s game or a women’s game, one gets a chance to really notice what the respective games are all about. I would therefore like to weigh in on what have formerly been suspicions but now are being seen as true differences between men’s and women’s professional hockey.
By John Oliver Smith2 years ago in Unbalanced
A Spirit That Fears Nothing
There are many sound reasons to repudiate professional sport in general and NHL hockey in particular. After all, the game has been as utterly defiled by cynical, avaricious late-stage capitalism as every other aspect of contemporary existence. The ordinary fan is incessantly encouraged by marketers and advertisers to gamble, guzzle alcoholic beverages and devour kilograms of fast food, which is a bald oxymoron if you contemplate it for a moment. Salaries are stratospherically inflated, as are ticket prices, and what passes for discourse generated by the participants in, and commentators upon, the game is so full of cliches and verbal false limbs that Orwell’s ghost will never stop screaming.
By D. J. Reddall2 years ago in Unbalanced
The History of the Adams Division
I've followed the NHL in some form for 30 years, but I'm still learning about the league I enjoy watching. A long time ago, I did learn about the old divisions: Adams, Patrick, Norris, and Smythe. These divisions predated the geographical ones that we've known for the last 30 years, and the rivalries were immensely intense during that period. This will be the first of four stories focusing on those classic divisions, and I'll start geographically, even though the names had nothing to do with location. First off, the Adams Division.
By Clyde E. Dawkins12 months ago in Unbalanced
A Look Ahead to Week 18 of the 2023 NFL Season
Week 17 kicks off tonight, but I want to take a look ahead to Week 18, the final week of the regular season. We all love the final week, don't we? We've really loved it since they changed the final week's schedule back in 2010. The final week always completes the league's playoff puzzle, it's do or die for a lot of teams looking to get in and even clinch divisions. However, a lot of games lacked a lot of drama, and even saw teams not give their all when they know that they can't move up in the standings. So in 2010, the NFL decided to make all of the final week's games divisional, because regardless of where a team is in the standings, that team wants to give their all to defeat a division rival.
By Clyde E. Dawkins2 years ago in Unbalanced
63 Strikes, You're Out!
They did it, folks. They finally did it. The Los Angeles Chargers actually fired Brandon Staley as their head coach, with the firing coming after the Chargers suffered a very embarrassing loss on national television. The Chargers were on the road against the Las Vegas Raiders, and it was a game that saw the Raiders absolutely pour it on. 63 points. Nine touchdowns--seven of them by the offense. The 63 points fell just 10 short of the long-standing record set by the Chicago Bears, who scored 73 points in the 1940 NFL Championship Game over Washington. However, the Raiders' 63 points are the most in team history, and marked the second time this season that a team scored 60+ points--the Miami Dolphins scored 70 points in Week 3.
By Clyde E. Dawkins2 years ago in Unbalanced
NFL Week 9 Recap: Nine Months
January 2, 2023. We all remember that Monday evening. The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals faced each other in what was the final Monday night game of the season. Regarding the game and the storyline, it was two teams jockeying for position in the AFC, as they were both in position to possibly take the AFC's #1 seed. This was an important game for both teams, but before the 1st quarter ended, there was suddenly something much, much more important than the game of football.
By Clyde E. Dawkins12 months ago in Unbalanced
Fantasy Football is BACK!
Despite being English, I have found myself becoming more and more enamoured with the sport that the Americans call “football”. Watching American Football in the UK used to be a most difficult proposition, aside from the Superbowl the only way to watch any action was a highlights show at 1am on a Wednesday morning. During the nineties and early 2000’s I was school aged, but after that coverage started to improve. In recent years Sky Sports have added the Thursday and Monday night games, as well as three Sunday matches. Even then, the absolutely baffling decision to host games only on nights when most people have work confuse me no end. But as my interest has grown, I’ve put additional effort into trying to keep up with the games when I can. My wife has since joined me in this interest, but unlike me she is a reasonable person, who goes to bed at a sensible time rather than staying up into the night watching foreign sports and typing up nonsense for strangers to read (4th wall break! Hi, thanks for reading).
By Luke Foster2 years ago in Unbalanced
NFL Week 1 Recap: A New York Minute
The NFL is back, and this fan was ever so eager for the season to start. My reasons were simple. One, I had a good feeling about Fantasy Football this year, and two, I'm a Yankees fan who wants to forget about this disaster of a season. With every new NFL season comes new storylines and new questions, and one of the biggest new storylines of the debuting 2023 NFL season had to be Aaron Rodgers making his New York Jets debut on Monday Night Football.
By Clyde E. Dawkins12 months ago in Unbalanced
