MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports It’s gone so far beyond absurd. It’s gone to the market and straight to the cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs aisle. The NFL made Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce date Taylor Swift (yeah, I’m sure they had to really twist his arm) in order to rig the Super Bowl so…
“You come at the king, you best not miss.” — Omar MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports The irony is rich, but not welcome, though all too familiar, in Baltimore. The modern-day pro sports Brooklyn, Baltimore, once again, will wait until next year. The officiating was what the metrics (and the television critics in their advance…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports I truly don’t know if there is or if there isn’t; but why do you suppose there is such suspicion of conspiracies and “scripts” each week during every week of every #NFLTheTVShow season? Maybe because there is always available data such as what follows? It seems NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports For Baltimore Ravens fans living in Cumberland, you were, in theory, between a rock and a hard place Sunday night as far as which team you wanted to see advance to play the Ravens in Sunday’s AFC championship game, the defending world champion Kansas City Chiefs or the Buffalo Bills,…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports The circus is coming to Bawlmer, hons! Just call M&T Bank Stadium the Big Top, because the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens are going to square off for the AFC championship; and by circus, I don’t mean Taylor Swift. I mean Jason Kelce, the brother of Swift’s boyfriend…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports We used to sit in Cole Field House most weekdays reading the different newspapers that were suddenly to our avail — the Washington Post, the great Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore News-American, the New York Times and our own campus newspaper, the Diamondback. We usually found ourselves in Cole at roughly…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports All talk and plaudits of organizational strength, stability and adaptability, visionary player development, ingenious schemes and rich talent, while seemingly true, will be put to the test beginning (or ending) Saturday afternoon when the Baltimore Ravens host the Houston Texans in an AFC semifinal game. Will it be 2019 all…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Pitchers and catchers report in 29 days. Spring training opens in 39 days. Opening Day is 72 agonizing days away, and for the third straight year, the Baltimore Orioles have the No. 1 prospect in baseball according to Baseball America, infielder Jackson Holliday, who is just 20 years old but…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports Forty years ago in March, I moved back to Cumberland and went to work for the Cumberland Times-News as a sportswriter. A lot of things have changed since then: My hair is no longer black, Greenway Avenue Stadium is no longer Fort Hill Stadium, its field is no longer grass, the football…
MIKE BURKE Allegany Communications Sports What a long strange trip it was; and in just a 12-hour period from early Wednesday evening to early Thursday morning when three great football coaches — two of whom can legitimately be considered the greatest of all time — Pete Carroll, Nick Saban and Bill Belichick were all gone.…
