2015 Sports In Review
2015 is about to wrap up in case your empty wallet post-Xmas didn’t confirm it. With 2016 on the horizon we need to take a look back at the year that was in sports.
It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns of course. There were a lot of knuckleheads. A lot of idiots doing things athletes shouldn’t be doing.
But make no mistake, 2015 saw plenty of heroes on the field.
The year started off with Ohio State shocking the football world by winning the first college football playoff ever. Urban Meyer used 42 different quarterbacks during the season and once again made folks believe he’s a football genius.
Hard to argue with a guy who now has national titles at two different schools.
February rolled around, and we got to see football players that actually get paid to play on the big stage. New England managed to win their fourth Super Bowl ever when it looked like they were dead and gone. But thanks to Pete Carroll out thinking himself, Russell Wilson threw an interception that handed the victory and the Lombardi Trophy to the Patriots once again.
This truly was one of the greatest Super Bowls ever. It’s just a shame that a coaching blunder cost Seattle the game.
While I hate to even bring it up again, DeflateGate was the biggest off-the-field story of the year. The story of Tom Brady possibly cheating by deflating footballs dominated the airwaves for weeks upon weeks.
Brady always wins though, and this sad little episode was no different.
The Patriots quarterback came up victorious in court, making Roger Goodell look like a clown once again. The end result of DeflateGate was a lot of wasted time and a lot of pissed off fans having to endure the non stop talk about a topic that made no difference in an actual football game.
During the summer of 2015, we got an alleged great homecoming of a king. Unfortunately for Cavalier fans this so-called king was assassinated by a babyface baller name of Steph Curry.
No matter how badly ESPN wanted LeBron to walk away with the NBA title, Golden State was having none of it. They disposed of Cleveland in six games and have started the 2015 – 2016 season as hot as any team ever. Not to mention the fact that Steph Curry is now as big or bigger a star than the lesser king James.
The world of golf found a young upstart in Jordan Spieth who is now the number one player in the world. Maybe now people can get over the fact that Tiger Woods simply sucks and is never going to return to form. There are plenty of golfers to root for without having to hang onto a has-been who simply doesn’t have it anymore.
I could go into how the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup over the summer, but I’m afraid no one in the USA really noticed. Actually, this team was pretty damn engaging, and 25 million TV viewers thought the same thing.
I hear the Kansas City Royals won the World Series. I find it fascinating that people can sit through 162 games per year in this modern age of two-minute attention spans. Enjoy your World Series games now because it’s probably going to be replaced by some sort of Instagram Corn Hole in the near future.
2015 saw a few unexpected events. We witnessed the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years when American Pharoah chewed up the three biggest races of the year, just when everyone had given up on another horse doing the seemingly impossible.
The most shocking sporting event of 2015 had to be the upset of Ronda Rousey. MMA fans around the world had come to believe she was indestructible. All that changed in the blink of an eye when Holly Holm turned her lights out and took her UFC Bantamweight Belt.
The fight was not close. It was a beat down from start to finish.
Not since Iron Mike Tyson had there been a fighter believed to be so flawless. But as we saw with Tyson and Sonny Liston before him, not to mention Anderson Silva, no fighter is safe from a knockout. There is always someone out there who is badder than the baddest man or woman on the planet.
In 2016, we’ll get to see an epic rematch between Holm and Rousey. That’s when we find out just what Ronda Rousey is made of. She rose from adversity once to become the most popular MMA fighter at the time. It’ll be interesting to see if she has the character to rise back to the top after enjoying the fame, fortune, and luxury that came as a result of her hard work.
Rousey wasn’t the only UFC champion to get dethroned in 2015. Chris Weidman dropped his belt to Luke Rockhold while Conor McGregor knocked Jose Aldo out in a mere 13 seconds to end the longtime champion’s reign.
Boxing did its usual thing in 2015, namely disappoint. The biggest fight of the century turned into a snoozer when Manny Pacquiao was unable to take the fight to Floyd Mayweather, giving us just one more mundane defensive fight. Just a typical Mayweather bout.
“Superfight” my ass. This pay per view was the biggest waste of money since Mike Tyson knocked out a terrified Michael Spinks in 91 seconds.
You may have noticed an entirely new “sport” rise to the forefront in 2015. Daily Fantasy sports have been around for a little while now, but the public got acquainted in a major way when DraftKings and FanDuel went on a media blitz of outrageous proportion. Now everyone knows what DFS is, including Big Brother, who looks to take a bite out of this new billion dollar “sport” heading into the new year.
I don’t know what else to say about 2015 except I had a helluva good time covering my favorite sports. It’s quite a privilege to work in a field that gave me so much pleasure as a kid.