David Steele

On June 26, 2013, the nation awoke to the sight of a star player on one of the NFL's model franchises being escorted out of his house by police, a T-shirt pulled over his cuffed wrists. New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez was charged later…

If San Jose State University is known for anything outside the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s for its world-class track, record-shattering speedsters and a pair of gloved fists raised on behalf of human rights. The school honors Olympic medalists and…

On the day last October that Jamaica qualified for the Women’s World Cup for the first time ever, Cheyna Matthews, one of its key players, was watching from her south Jersey home and FaceTiming with her mother in the suburbs of Atlanta, while her…

Four years after the Orioles hosted a regular-season game in front of an empty stadium while Baltimore was embroiled in massive civic unrest, the Orioles have somehow managed to undergo more fundamental changes than the city. That has not boded well…

Twenty-four hours earlier, the Chiefs needed distance between themselves and the debacle that Tyreek Hill's tenure there had become. They insisted early Friday, hours after the NFL Draft's first round had ended, that they weren't aware of how badly…

On NFL Draft night, every team is 0-0. But always and everywhere, karma is undefeated. What the Chiefs and, by extension, the league got as their marquee event of the offseason began is exactly what they deserve. What came out of the recording…

It’s a draft tradition, in the NFL and every other sport. All the focus leading up to it is on the first round, maybe the first two; all the focus immediately after is about who won, who lost, who passed and who flunked. It’s not until long afterward…

For nearly three years now, the public has grappled with Colin Kaepernick using the American flag and the national anthem as a vehicle to protest the condition of African Americans in current society. The actions of Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and…

It’s impossible to miss the irony of one date in baseball history being shared by one of its most significant hirings and one of its most significant firings. April 8, 1975, marked the day Frank Robinson managed his first major-league game for the…

WASHINGTON — Baseball fans are bitterly divided over pitch clocks, the shift, universal adoption of the designated hitter. But who doesn’t love bullpen carts? Maybe not everybody. But enough fans love them for more than 400 people to apply to drive…

Maybe by the time the 2019 regular season begins, someone will have an answer to why Todd Gurley was a non-factor in Super Bowl 53. The wait goes on, though, because by the morning after, the only answers anyone had given made little agreement and…

AKRON, Ohio — Nineteen years is a lifetime. An entire lifetime has passed since the last time Atlanta hosted the Super Bowl. Two families have lived without their sons, nephews, brothers, uncles — their lives ended by violence — for all that time.…

We know this much about the day Jackie Robinson was born — Jan. 31, 1919: There were no black players in major league baseball. There wasn’t even a formal, organized Negro League on that date; that didn’t happen for another year. On Robinson’s 28th…

NFL playoff predictions are made easier when the Super Bowl pick made before the 2018 season enters the postseason as the favorite to hoist the Lombardi Trophy in February. That's the case for Sporting News and the Saints. We liked New Orleans then,…

Howard Cosell called "Monday Night Football" games for ABC for 14 years, from its 1970 inception until 1983. He teamed with Frank Gifford and "Dandy" Don Meredith — just that trio, without another partner — for, surprisingly, only five of those…

Any other season, any other week, the Patriots visiting the Steelers — with both in first place and with playoff seeding on the line — would be the one game to rule above all others. Not this week, though. The game of Week 15 takes place three days…

You’d like more from a December slate of NFL games, but in Week 14, just three games pit teams with winning records against each other. Two are prime-time games, thankfully, and one of them is as good a matchup as anyone could wish for, on Sunday…

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Plenty of people in and around the University of Maryland and its football program — in positions of political and financial power in the state and among the fan base — were already sold on Mike Locksley as the coach to steer the…

Congratulations to the NFL for one it got right. The Sunday night flex policy was immensely necessary and pure genius. More proof comes this Sunday, in Week 13, with the Chargers' trip to Pittsburgh replacing the 49ers-Seahawks game originally…

This space was originally reserved to counter the cynics and naysayers who claimed that after the Monday night Rams-Chiefs unprecedented shootout, the video-game, scoreboard-short-circuiting era of the NFL was upon us, 54-51 games were about to…