A sports blog by and for Midwest Sports Fans
From lessons for parents taking kids to sporting events to defining what "Midwest" means, Away From The Action is Josh Tinley's unique and always engaging take on the off-the-field aspects of sports.
We’re only two days away from NBA All-Star Weekend, one of my favorite weekends on the sports calendar. And one of the highlights of any All-Star Weekend is the Slam Dunk Contest. To get you ready for this year’s contest, here’s a look at the ten best dunks in the event’s history.
In honor of Hoosier Hysteria and the only high school basketball tournament to inspire one of the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Sports Movies, Josh Tinley has compiled a list of his eight favorite Indiana high school nicknames.
The “Crosstown Classic” began this year and will repeat next year in the Hoosier State. But why not have an event that showcases all ten of the state’s Division I programs? And why stop at “showcase”? Let’s have a tournament and determine a champion. And why stop in Indiana? This could work across the country.
While we all wait for Super Bowl 46, here are 46 trivial facts about the history of the Super Bowl, including the most interesting Super Bowl fact of all-time at the end.
National anthem performers are like referees. If they do their job correctly, we’ll completely forget about their performance in a matter of hours. But if they mess up, we’ll discuss and replay their error for years. With that in mind I’ve compiled 5 great Super Bowl performances of “The Star Spangled Banner” that we should remember.
The Super Bowl is one of America’s most prominent and valuable brands, and it owes its name to a children’s toy manufactured by Wham-O, the company responsible for popularizing the Hula Hoop and Frisbee.
Several months ago Josh Tinley asked, “What Is ‘Midwest,’ Anyway?” In the interest of continuing that analysis of the name of this website, he now wonders aloud, “What is a sport, anyway?” After talking through a few examples of controversial “is it a sport?” debates, you are asked for your opinion in our poll.
Over the past quarter century, four dozen athletes, teams, and other champions have announced their intention to celebrate their victory at a Disney park. Half have been Super Bowl champions. Josh Tinley provides a comprehensive history of this annual tradition, as well as the complete list of every athlete who has ever uttered these iconic words.
Trinity’s 252 straight victories, recently snapped by a loss to Yale, is the longest winning streak in intercollegiate sports history. Josh Tinley celebrates Trinity and seven other insane, underrated feats of sport streakness.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here are 9 of the many things we learned this holiday weekend, including why Vernon Davis will now be America’s most beloved tight end.
In the hours following the Broncos-Steelers game, armchair numerologists and symbologists mobbed the Internet, presenting evidence of God’s presence in Tebow’s performance and identifying other 316s. Are these numbers proof of divine intervention, part of an eerie coincidence, or products of confirmation bias? Josh Tinley says the latter.
Had the officials noticed Louisiana-Lafayette’s extra player last night, the penalty would have been a technical foul. In nearly all forms of basketball today, playing with six players is illegal. But there was a time when 6-player basketball was common.
If you weren’t already convinced that college sports is in dire need of reform, consider these three recent news stories. Each raises its own questions about the rights of student-athletes.Taken together, they expose the absurdity and unfairness of the NCAA’s policies.
Some bowls have been around forever and will probably never go away. Many more die young then fade into obscurity. Many of the games that rest in the college bowl graveyard were played only once or twice; few survived for longer than a decade. Here are the stories of nine of those short-lived bowl games of yesteryear.
All of my teams lost this weekend, so I’m really in no mood to think about sports, let alone write about them. But perhaps this little exercise in which I review what we learned this weekend in sports will be therapeutic and help me prepare for the months of heartache that surely lie ahead.
