The NFL Players Association has filed a collusion complaint against the league, charging teams with improperly conspiring to restrict players’ salaries during the sport’s season without a salary cap in 2010. The union announced the filing Wednesday, one day after an arbitrator dismissed a case in which the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys were contesting salary cap reductions imposed on them by the league — with the union’s assent — for the way the teams structured players’ contracts during the uncapped year. The union’s complaint alleges that the league had a secret salary cap of $123 million per team during the uncapped year, according to the NFLPA’s announcement. The case was filed, according to the union, in the federal court in Minnesota that oversaw the ... Continue reading →
Udonis Haslem of the Miami Heat delivers a flagrant foul to Tyler Hansbrough in Game 5 of the playoff series against the Indiana Pacers. (Andrew Innerarity / Reuters) It’s going to take a while for the NBA to sort out just what kind of penalties the flagrant foul-fest that was Game 5 of the Miami Heat-Indiana Pacers series might warrant, but the hardest hit in the increasingly physical series was landed by a 55-year-old Hall of Famer who hasn’t played since 1992. Larry Bird, the Pacers’ president, called out his team in the clearest terms possible Tuesday night after the Heat took a 3-2 series lead with a 115-83 victory. The loss was the worst in Pacers’ playoff history. “I can’t believe my team went ... Continue reading →
Over a 61-year coaching career at Penn State University, Joe Paterno, who died in January at the age of 85, earned a pension of $13.4 million, His widow, Sue Paterno, will receive a $10.1 million payment by the end of the month, with the remainder to be paid over the next two years, a Paterno family spokesman told the Associated Press. The Paterno family said that the pension was calculated using the State Employees’ Retirement System formula. Paterno, who coached until he was fired last November in the wake of the burgeoning Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, never took his pension. Sandusky faces 52 counts of alleged abuse of 10 boys over a 15-year period, allegations he has denied. Jury selection in his trial is ... Continue reading →