Red Right 88

Shurmur riding high after first win

Fresh off his first win as an NFL head coach, Pat Shurmur is moving up the coach rankings at ESPN.

Shurmur has an 80 percent approval rating following the Browns 27-19 win over Indianapolis, fifth highest in the NFL and tops in the AFC North. Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis (39 percent) and Baltimore’s John Harbaugh (45 percent) are in the bottom 10.

Not bad for a coach who only met most of his players a little less than two months ago.

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To commemorate New York’s Mariano Rivera recording his 602nd career save, it’s worth looking back at one big game he couldn’t close out: Game 4 of the 1997 American League Division Series.

Never gets old.

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Finally, we’re all aware that Fox News is anything but “fair and balanced,” so we guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that attitude extends to Fox Sports.

According to Jim Romenesko at The Poynter Institute, during the Week 1 broadcast of the game between the Bears and the Falcons, Fox Sports showed the following newspaper “headlines”:

Cutler Leaves With Injury
Cutler Lacks Courage
Cutler’s No Leader

Daryl Johnston was working the game as an announcer and told viewers that “these are the actual headlines from the local papers in Chicago.”

Turns out, that was a blatant lie. The headlines sounded fishy so the Chicago Tribune checked around and found out that Fox Sports fabricated the headlines to sell an angle they decided the game needed.

Not sure why Fox just couldn’t televise the game and let the stories come naturally, but there you go.

(h/t to UniWatch)

(Photo by the Associated Press)