Keith Strudler

There’s nothing particularly private about being a big-time college football coach. Beyond your moves on the football field and the recruiting trail and press conferences, pretty much every part of your life is for public consumption and critique. I can remember a long time ago visiting a southern SEC college town, and someone pointed out on a tour the house where the football coach lives, like it was Graceland or something. So if you’re looking to be an anonymous millionaire, it’s probably better to consider a different line of work.

There’s a lot of ways for football coaches to get fired. Maybe the easiest one is to lose a lot of games. You can also lose the support of your players or get into a fight with your school administration or team owners. The one thing that typically doesn’t get you fired is winning. And winning by a lot.

There are certain crowd environments where you take something of a calculated risk, like sitting in the lower deck at a baseball game or close to the track at NASCAR. In those cases, being close to the game could potentially put you in harm’s way. You wouldn’t expect that to be the case at tennis — the sport of kings, where contact on the court is forbidden, where you have to apologize to your opponent if the ball accidentally hits the top of the net and goes over.

If you watch a lot of college football, and I do, you’re quite familiar with instant replay, where officials check on what they might consider a questionable call.

The U.S. Open has become something of a fans gone wild, at least by the tame standards of tennis spectatorship, which still has some expectation of decorum.

Should athletes who go pro be able to come back to play in college? Keith Strudler says no.

Nothing grows that fast without pains, and at the moment, the WNBA is definitely feeling some.

You could make the argument that LeBron James is something of a sports Rorschach test. What you see when you look at him reveals something about who you are. Right now, those visions range from sinner to savior and everything in-between. And that’s before he’s even taken to the court for his new NBA home in Philadelphia.

Commentary & Opinion: The legacy of this cup will go far beyond the winner, especially here in the U.S.

Of all the teams that had a rough run at the World Cup, no one had it worse than Iran. I suppose you could say Italy, because the four-time champion has now missed the past three Cups.