He’s kind of like the light in a dark room. He’s the same for us as he is for other people. | | | | | Jurgen Klinsmann. (Nathan Forget/Flickr) | | | | |  | “He’s kind of like the light in a dark room. He’s the same for us as he is for other people.”
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| | rantnrave:// Hello, friends. A little introduction of sorts, if I may. My name is Mike Vorkunov and I’ll be taking over SportsREDEF after MATTY’s indefatigable work over the last two years. How do I know he was so good? Because I was a subscriber. So I appreciate and enjoy the ethos this newsletter has created. My view as a curator is the same as I’ve held as a journalist: Sports are a way to learn about the world and refracts its troubles and joys onto a field or a pitch or a court. And it can be damn fun, too… Monday was all about coach-cutting. TEXAS is letting CHARLIE STRONG blow in the wind as reports insist he will be fired soon and the university stays mum about it. But the U.S. SOCCER FEDERATION needed change now. They fired JURGEN KLINSMANN -- a positive decision for the U.S., not just because they replaced an ineffective coach but because inactivity would have shown that U.S. soccer would have accepted stagnation. Which Klinsmann himself wouldn’t abide… Still, the USSF is going back to the future for its next coach… Meanwhile, over in ENGLAND, there is a new great debate: how much should soccer players be drinking?… But before soccer stole the news cycle, the biggest conversation in sports was about extra points, of all things. Football, more than any other sport, is conservative by its very nature. Coaches are risk-averse and watching kickers miss gimme kicks must have driven them mad because it invites the possibility they might actually need to take chances to win games. In coaching, as in life, the best adapt and the staid get left behind… Who could benefit most from the NBA's new CBA? The players who aren’t getting to the NBA at all. | | | - Mike Vorkunov, curator |
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 | Bleacher Report |
| How the Wolverines' living legend embraces the pedestal of superstardom. | | |
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 | Mercury News |
| Rob Mendez sounds like any other football coach on any other field across America - passionate, authoritative, knowledgeable - but he is like no other coach you know. | | |
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 | ESPN.com |
| Karl-Anthony Towns isn't just Rookie of the Year or the next great NBA center. He's the man destined to redefine what it means to dominate. | | |
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 | WSJ |
| James Harden and his teammates are on track to shatter the NBA record for 3-pointers-and that was exactly their plan. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Officials have found scores of violations from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games in Beijing and London. Now, Olympic stories and record books are being re-written. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The president of the World Anti-Doping Agency said he was eager to restore Russia to good standing, but athletes remain elusive to the authorities. | | |
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 | Vice Sports |
| While referees in other sports have used video review for years, soccer had been slow to embrace replay technology. FIFA will begin testing Video Assistant Referees in 2017, and it could change the game in surprising ways. | | |
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 | UPROXX |
| David Stern's dress code remains problematic, but players have found a way to make the most of it. | | |
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 | SB*Nation |
| Forget for a moment the wins and losses, the parochial triumphalism and the distant schadenfreude. What do we, the basketball watching universe, want from this Warriors team? | | |
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 | FiveThirtyEight |
| The sixth game of the World Chess Championship was over before the sun set. This was new. The intricately fought contests had thus far lasted until night fell, and sometimes well beyond. The darkness heightened the strategic drama, leaving an eerie purple glow shining out from behind the thick glass of the players’ room. | | |
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 | Outside Online |
| On Friday, November 11, with a solid swell that surpassed 30 feet, the World Surf League called its first big-wave contest of the Pacific Northwest swell season at Pe'ahi, aka Jaws, in Maui. This was the second time the competition was run, but this year was different: it included the first-ever female surfers to compete in a WSL big wave event. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The labor dispute between US Soccer and the women’s national team got a rare prime-time audience on Sunday, whether equal pay is realistic remains unclear. | | |
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 | The Undefeated |
| After climbing to the top of college football, the University of Texas coach lost his grip. | | |
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 | Sports Illustrated |
| Jurgen Klinsmann promised to lead U.S. Soccer into a new era, but after over five years, his position became untenable for a number of reasons. | | |
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 | Deadspin |
| Premier League ratings are falling in England and the United States! The live sports rights bubble is bursting! The first of these is definitely true, and the second I believe to be true, but nonetheless Chinese streaming video company PPTV shelled out $700 million for Premier League TV rights, according to the Associated Press. | | |
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 | The Players' Tribune |
| When I came to this city, I didn’t know if I had a future. Now I have a home. David Ortiz opens up on the end of his career. | | |
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| ESPN.com |
| The lives of Ohio State coach Urban Meyer and Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh have led them to this rivalry in the mold of Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler. | | |
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| Vice Sports |
| Mark Roberts has strutted his stuff at the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Champions League, Wimbledon, and countless other sporting events. But he's no athlete. Roberts is a prolific streaker who's bare arse has been viewed across the globe. | | |
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 | The Huffington Post |
| Thursday Night Football got an unexpected new home this season: Twitter. Earlier this spring, the social media platform famed for 140-character comments announced it would be teaming up with the NFL to broadcast ten games, throwing its hat into the live sports streaming arena. | | |
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| WSJ |
| Amazon.com has been in talks for live game rights with the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and more. | | |
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 | via YouTube |
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| © Copyright 2016, The REDEF Group |
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