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By Ken Reed

Fighting is up in the early going of this shortened NHL season. That’s bad.

Staged fighting, in which a couple players — usually hired goons — drop their gloves after just a few seconds of game action to fight each other, is also up this season. That’s worse.

As Paul Busch writes […]

By Ken Reed

The NFL players’ union has given a 10-year $100 million grant to Harvard Medical School to study the health risks associated with playing football. The grant was fueled by growing player concerns regarding brain injuries incurred in the nation’s most popular sport. The goal of the study is to develop strategies to […]

By Ken Reed

The two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl are designed to be a celebration of the game of football in general and the NFL in particular. Things aren’t going so well for Roger Goodell and the boys in that regard this year.

First, there was the news that Junior Seau’s family […]

By Ken Reed

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a Dear Colleague Letter today clarifying schools’ obligations to provide extracurricular athletics opportunities for students with disabilities under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

The directive applies to K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities. The bottom line of the OCR action is that […]

By Ken Reed

As Taylor Branch said in an interview with the League of Fans a few months back, the plight of college athletes is “definitely a civil rights issue.” In that interview Branch talked mostly about how college football and basketball players are getting screwed by the NCAA and its member schools due […]

By Ken Reed

It’s been well over a week since the Washington Redskins lost to the Seattle Seahawks in a game most notable for the controversy surrounding Redskins’ quarterback Robert Griffin III regarding whether or not he should’ve continued playing after his right knee had been clearly damaged early in the game. The buzz continues […]

By Ken Reed

On the same day this week we learned that Junior Seau suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive blows to the head, we also learned that Bernie Kosar has been struggling for over a decade with persistent pain and other symptoms related to having suffered […]

By Ken Reed

Robert Griffin III was a brave, courageous athlete last Sunday. Mike Shanahan was just another win-at-all-costs (WAAC) coach, more concerned about his legacy (a desperate quest to end up in the Hall of Fame) than the future of a bright young star. Basically, Shanahan’s ego led him to go all WAACY when […]

By Ken Reed

I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful conversation with the great sportswriter Frank Deford the other day. One of our topics was “What’s the biggest issue in sports today?”. Deford believes drugs, performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), are sports biggest challenge.

“Performance-enhancing drugs are a threat to every sport,” said Deford.

He […]

By Ken Reed

Given all the busts for using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports the last few years, and the difficulty in catching all the cheaters, there’s a growing movement to chuck the whole process, to let athletes do anything they want in order to get a performance edge.

In a recent commentary, Tom […]