The hiring season for head coaches in the N.F.L., the world’s richest sports organization, is nearing its end the way it almost does. Four N.F.L. teams replaced their head coaches, and only one of the new hires was not white. After reaching a high-water mark of eight minority coaches two years ago, the league has […] More
BALTIMORE — Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson was the N.F.L.’s most dominating player this season, which is why he is the prohibitive favorite to win the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. But as the postseason approached, Jackson’s attention quickly turned to trying to deliver similarly stellar results in the playoffs, especially since he had played […] More
The San Francisco 49ers defeated the Minnesota Vikings, 27-10, on Saturday to advance to the N.F.C. championship game for the first time since the 2013 season. Playoff football made an emphatic return to the Bay Area as the 49ers won their first postseason game in six years by pounding the Vikings in a divisional round […] More
The road to the playoffs in the N.F.L. is short but tough, and the path to its second round has proved difficult for even the game’s best (sorry, Tom Brady). It takes lots of skill and plenty of luck to survive a field of 32 teams to be among what are now the final eight […] More
By this stage, Zlatan Ibrahimovic presumably has the image stored somewhere on his phone. You will have seen it, almost certainly: the one with Ibrahimovic, in profile, dressed in an angel’s robes and arm wrestling — a look of beatific concentration on his face — with a sinew-straining devil. He used it first, if memory […] More
After an N.F.L. wild-card round in which both No. 6 seeds advanced and three teams won on the road, the bar is set awfully high for this weekend’s action. Enter Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City and Green Bay, which just spent a bye week resting and plotting a course to the conference championship games. Here […] More
Pete Carroll has heard the haters telling him what he can do with all his New Age banter, all that talk about self-discovery and the Seattle Seahawks’ culture of love. He knows there’s a coach on the other side of the country with six Super Bowl rings — the guy who replaced him in New […] More
The Tennessee Titans were running the ball toward the sideline — again — which left New England’s defense flowing quickly to its left. It looked like a panel cribbed from a Stan Lee comic: the Titans running back beating all 11 Patriots to the edge, pushing forward with a full head of steam. With his […] More
