The American League playoff race remains by far the more interesting of the two leagues, although it picked up a little clearer focus this week, thanks mainly to the results of the big five-game weekend series between the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals.
The AL East race is the focus of daily sports on Monday, with consecutive prime-time games on MLB Network and ESPN2 featuring the three teams with a realistic chance at winning the division title.
We’re not far from the day when daily sports on Sunday means a tripleheader of NFL football, but for now, the prime focus is still a day-night doubleheader in baseball, with TBS and ESPN on the call. So it is again today.
The NFC South promises to be one of the most balanced in the NFL. Whether you think any of Atlanta, New Orleans, Carolina or Tampa Bay is a viable Super Bowl team, all of these teams are reasonably well-respected, and the betting odds on this division suggest perhaps the most closely matched four teams in the NFL.
The arrival of new head coach Greg Schiano for the 2012 season put some life back into a Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchise that lived through a disgraceful laydown job by its players to conclude 2011. Now it’s a question of whether that renewed life can translate into wins, and ultimately a playoff berth, in a competitive NFC South.
The 2012 NFL season was a time of great expectations for the Carolina Panthers. It was expected that quarterback Cam Newton would continue to improve and that the Panthers would make the playoffs. Neither came anywhere close to happening. But while expectations are down, they’re not out, on Tobacco Road.
The New Orleans Saints long year of purgatory is finally over. After they were torn asunder in the 2012 NFL season over BountyGate and all the attendant suspensions, the Saints can start fresh for this year. They do so with a crying need to stop the number of big plays opponents are making.
The story of the Atlanta Falcons in the 2012 season is Exhibit A as to why constantly evaluating quarterbacks by their W-L record, at the expense of the team concept, is just stupidity. The Falcons are not a team that should have gotten to within a couple plays of the Super Bowl. But through the excellence of quarterback Matt Ryan, they nearly made it.
If it’s Saturday in the summer that means Fox Sports is somewhere with baseball coverage, and that somewhere usually represents the highlight in the daily sports menu. Today, that somewhere is Fenway Park for the middle game of the Yankees-Red Sox series. It’s a good pitching matchup, with New York’s Hiroki Kuroda against Boston’s John Lackey, as the Yanks have no room for error and the Red Sox are trying to keep hold of the AL East.
There’s only four races in the regular season of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, before the deck gets reshuffled for the playoffs and only twelve drivers are eligible for the sport’s 2013 championship. As the circuit readies itself for Sunday afternoon’s Pure Michigan 400 (1 PM ET, ESPN), seven drivers continue to hold steady as the leaders.
It was just a week ago that it seemed safe for our MLB coverage to rule the Cincinnati Reds out of the three-team dogfight in the NL Central. The Reds might have been in great position to make the wild-card game, but they were drifting off the radar for the division title. No more. Cincinnati has had a hot run, while Pittsburgh has struggled and St. Louis not really asserted themselves. Consequently, the Reds enter Friday’s games just 2 ½ behind first-place Pittsburgh, and only a half-game back of St. Louis.
Charlie Manuel was fired today as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. It’s an unfortunate move, but also hardly surprising, given how much the Phils have disappointed for two consecutive years. I don’t see it as Manuel’s fault—the organization shoved all its chips on the table with big contracts to veterans and those vets just couldn’t stay healthy consistently—but it’s hard to deny that it’s time for the Phils to take a new direction.
