Secret Base

Media Club: The magic behind Pi’erre Bourne’s production

A reporter once played QB for the Lions. He shouldn’t have been so terrible

12 football players is too many, but 15? Now we’re talking

How many Ravens is too many Ravens? Against Cleveland, Baltimore had 15 defenders on the field at once, and nearly got away with it.

The tongue-eating louse is a prime example of nature’s affinity for body horror

Open wide for a surprise!

Patrick Mahomes and the very bad sack

Let’s appreciate Rickey Henderson some more

Here’s to baseball’s Grand King of Locomotion

Joakim Noah’s encounter with Kevin Garnett shows you should never meet your heroes

Growing up idolizing Kevin Garnett won’t save you from beef if you happen to be facing him in an NBA game.

Dorktown: The 1986 Philadelphia Eagles were sacked into oblivion

Media Club: ‘Valhalla’ has forced me to reinterpret some of my favorite literature

It turns out that even a video game version of history can help you see ancient art through a fresh perspective.

Can a soccer player be ‘unsporting’ while scoring a goal?

Silas Wamungituka managed to get himself a yellow card for scoring a goal, which is very impressive work

It is very hard to travel across a whole country in a straight line

But it’s fun to watch this man try!

Mud, wind and a ‘soggy ball’: the story of the USA’s first basketball gold medal

In the 1936 Olympics, basketball was played outdoors on a dirt court. A storm during the final showed why that was such a bad idea.

Timo Werner’s misses are beginning to look downright supernatural

How is any of this even remotely possible?

This nullified touchdown perfectly captures the NFL’s beautiful chaos

The Miami Dolphins didn’t get a touchdown when they didn’t kick, because their legal formation was illegal. Football is great.

Real Madrid and Sevilla demonstrate that catastrophic errors are contagious

Here are two of the funniest possible soccer screwups possible, somehow committed within half a second of one other

Dorktown: NFL teams that score 16 points win more often than teams that score 21. Why?

It’s not just that. Teams who score 13 have a better winning percentage than teams who score 14. 20 > 21. 23 > 24. 27 > 28. What is going on here?

When the going gets tough, these ants explode

These ants literally blow themselves up to defend their colony

Dorktown: Nori Aoki played an entire season without seeing the bases loaded

Media Club: Why 2000s MTV was the golden age of TV

Take me back.

In this photo, Mike Morse is hitting a grand slam without a baseball bat

In the first inning of a 2012 Cardinals-Nationals game, things got ... sort of weird

Learning from the worst pass ever thrown

Matt Cassel once managed to throw a pick and get flagged for intentional grounding on the same play. There’s an important life lesson here.

This botched Chargers play makes absolutely zero sense

Dropping your offensive line into pass protection during a sneak attempt turns out to be a bad idea

Covid-19 broke the Denver Broncos

How does an NFL team function without any of its quarterbacks? It doesn’t

Romain Grosjean’s engineered miracle

How on earth did anyone walk away from this?!

Let’s talk about the Utah monolith

Now that the Utah monolith has disappeared, why did we all find it so interesting in the first place?

This is the most consequential injury in sports history

The death of King Henry II in a jousting tournament sparked a series of wars that lasted 32 years and killed three million people

Revisiting the strange and wonderful career of baseball lumberjack Adam Dunn

Adam Dunn was the at once New Baseball’s prophet and its antithesis. He ruled.