Andrew Heisel
Throwback Thursday: Willie Burton's 53-Point NBA Game And The Likeliness of Unlikely Greatness
Willie Burton's 53-point game for the Philadelphia 76ers on December 13, 1994 is all the more remarkable given what he went through to accomplish it.
Are Football Players Really Modern-Day Gladiators?
Comparisons between American football and Roman gladiator games are common. Do historians think they're apt?
Biorhythms: The 1970s Fad That Won a Super Bowl, Killed Clark Gable, and Made America Gaga for Computers
Long before copper bracelets and nanobubbles, the sports world—and America, too—went all-in on the pseudoscience of biorhythms.
Who Pissed Off All the Mascots? An Investigation
Teams have found out that angry mascots appeal more to fans than friendly mascots.
"Everybody Messed with the Ball": A Former NFL Star Speaks Out on Deflategate
Jeff Blake was a star quarterback in the NFL and he says that ball deflation is both commonplace and a distraction from the NFL's real problems.
The Last Two Minutes of NBA Games: A History of Racism, Money, and Boredom
There has always been a debate over the last two minutes of NBA games—too exciting or too dull, too slow or too fast. It hasn't always been a great conversation.
The Plot to Kill the Slam Dunk
For decades, one of basketball's most beloved techniques has been under assault by ardent old-schoolers who want the dunk dead and buried.
NFL Kickers Talk about Playing with Their Balls
We got a bunch of NFL kickers to talk about all the ways they used to doctor game balls because investigative journalism is what we do here.
The NFL Wants You to Blame Its Players for the Brain Trauma Crisis
The "Heads Up" program is supposed to make football safer, but all it's doing is shifting blame onto players for the NFL's brain trauma crisis.
That Time an NFL Team Used Truth Serum on an Injured Player
The same drug used in lethal injections and CIA mind-control plots was used by an NFL team to determine if a player was faking an obvious injury.
NFL Players Didn't Know the Dangers of Playing Football and Neither Did Anyone Else
The argument remains that NFL players knew the dangers of playing football, but decades of reports show that no one—players included—knew the full scope of the danger.