In a press conference yesterday afternoon, Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman was asked if being called a "thug" bothered him. "The only reason it bothers me," he said, "is because it seems like it's the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays."

This account of an affair between two men who played together on the Washington Redskins in the late '60s/early '70s is heartbreaking. It comes from the NFL Network's episode of A Football Life profiling player Jerry Smith, who remained publicly closeted for his entire life (Smith died of AIDS in 1986).

For a city where you can legally smoke pot, Denver sure has a creepy airport.

Good Idea Alert: Why not have a football bowl game that begins at midnight on New Year's day, just after the ball drops? That way you can turn the game on at your New Year's party.

The University of Alabama's student newspaper, The Crimson White, has apologized for running this cartoon. But why??

As part of his hazing ritual for joining Manchester United, a young David Beckham had to jerk off to a picture of another dude in front of his jeering teammates.

Adam Weinstein, the newest addition to the Gawker family, has written a vivid and moving account of his days as an instructor at Florida State University, where the football program has fully captured the academic mission, for our brolleagues at Deadspin. Football is the one with the longish ball, I think.

Recent controversies involving individuals putting on blackface for Halloween apparently failed to deter the football coaches at a San Diego high school from darkening their skin and dressing up as members of the Jamaican bobsled team made famous by the 1993 comedy sport flick Cool Runnings.

Charles Krauthammer is a conservative columnist with a permanent sourpuss etched into his self-impressed face. He is not a sports columnist, okay? Yet he has managed, quite impressively, to come up with the single most inane solution yet for the "Washington Redskins" name controversy.

Last week, the young son of NFL star Adrian Peterson died after being beaten by the boyfriend of the child's mother. Today, a columnist from New York's most pungent gutter tabloid has figured out a way to insult Adrian Peterson.

A typical Craigslist ad offering free football tickets for this Saturday's Tennessee-Florida Football game comes with a slightly atypical catch: Interested parties must be willing to take the original ticket holder's stepdaughter out on a date.

A fifth Vanderbilt football player has been indicted for allegedly advising one of his co-defendants on how to cover up raping an unconscious student.

The Heights High School senior class president was suspended from school and banned from graduation ceremonies after he posted a tweet that insinuated his school's athletics were nonexistent.

Our nation's great institutions of higher learning exist for a very clear and noble purpose: to enrich themselves, and, by extension, their football coaches. Data shows that they are pursuing this mission with selfless zeal.

Pity the suburban commuter school that goes belly-up trying to spend its way to college-football greatness, then looks to cover its bet with shady stadium-naming rights. Pity the Florida Atlantic University Owls.

Yesterday, the incoherent jumble of insinuations, flat-out lies and chiiiiiiiiiiiiiillllleeeees that is MediaTakeOut posted a MTO SUPER DUPER WORLD EXCLUSIVE featuring pictures of NFL free agent Kerry Rhodes "ON VACATION ... With One Of His 'MALE FRIENDS!!'" In its homophobic way that villainizes but stops short of exhibiting direct malice, MTO branded the shots of Rhodes and a much wispier dude seemingly canoodling in a tropical setting as "suspect."

ESPN recently polled its readers about gay people in professional sports and found out that, well, people are still kind of homophobic (surprise!). One poll found that 56 percent of its readers think a player coming out while still a pro athelete would be a "selfish act" that would divide the locker room.

Now this is a football highlight reel.

Florida Atlantic University's football stadium will be named after GEO Group, which runs private prisons. Appropriate.

This evening's Super Bowl, which pits the Baltimore Ravens against the San Francisco 49ers, raises an obvious question: if a real Corvus corax fought a real 19th-century California gold panner, who would win? We talked to experts and did some research to find out.