Norman Chad

I made a typographical error in my column last week: I meant to say that we need

A while ago – the exact year escapes me – I determined that someway somewhere in some manner or some fashion most of us in America had somehow lost our minds.

Yes, I am obsessed with TB12. Why wouldn’t I be? Who am I going to obsess over during this pandemic, Jay Cutler?

I got on the horn – that’s a late 19th-century expression for making a phone call – and contacted every single sports league and federation to see when they would return.

I lost my regular poker game at Hollywood Park Casino in Los Angeles when the world shut down. Degenerates gotta degenerate, though, so most of us now find ourselves on the World Wide Web to get our gamble on.

Nobody wants a pandemic, certainly not one that kills hundreds of thousands

Have you ever tried to reschedule an Olympic Games? Sure, many of us have postponed weddings – and there are at least two I should’ve canceled altogether – but those are much smaller affairs to manage. The Olympics? That’s got to be the biggest event in the world, even larger than a “Duck Dynasty” Easter egg hunt.

Money never sleeps, correct? Well, the sun never sets on the sports-betting empire either.

ESPN without sports is like NASA without space. But ESPN is smarter than NASA – it can still thrive even if its world explodes into the atmosphere. Here is a look at the new ESPN 24-hour coronavirus programming schedule.

Sure, many NFL teams would love to have Tom Brady for the next season or two, but I guarantee you almost any organization – big business, Wall Street, law firms, Hollywood, ad agencies, even Spirit Airlines – would hire him in a Foxboro heartbeat.

Couch Slouch: The NFL and Major League Baseball – two of our floundering nation’s most successful, longstanding entertainment entities – each recently decided it wants to add two more teams to an always-expanding postseason. Why would they mess with success? Because they can and they will – and because there’s TV gold in them thar playoff hills.

Simply put – and I realize I am last in on this, but I only write once a week and I also sleep in weekday mornings, mainly to avoid bad news – Major League Baseball should vacate the Houston Astros’ 2017 World Series title. I understand there is some Astros fatigue right now, but this sign-stealing saga has generated more reader mail than any issue in recent memory. In fact, if I paid out $1.25 to every Astros-related Ask The Slouch submission, I’d be writing this column at a loss.

Couch Slouch: As is our annual tradition at the NBA all-star break, Couch Slouch looks ahead to the remainder of the season – laced with remarkable perspicacity* – at no additional cost to you, the reader. Yes, I will provide the acumen of subscription-based The Athletic and the access of pricey NBA League Pass…ALL FOR FREE. Let’s do it!

Super Bowl 54, in contrast to the Senate impeachment inquiry, felt like a fair trial: unmistakable video evidence, plenty of witnesses, a definitive and satisfying conclusion.

History repeats itself, unless it doesn’t. (And they say a University of Maryland education is worthless.) So here’s some history worth repeating:

Couch Slouch: So the Houston Astros, using cameras and video monitors and a labyrinthine baseball-bat-and-trash-can notification system, were stealing signs from opposing teams. From all indications, this is cheating and this is not kosher.

Couch Slouch: To be fair, replay as an officiating tool remains only the fifth-worst global problem, behind climate change, world hunger, the decline of American exceptionalism and the inability to find anything you like when clothes shopping. It is an endless procession of did-he-or-didn’t-he moments to examine:

Let’s take a closer look at the bugaboos and blemishes infesting our nascent millennium.

A popular sentiment these days – and one that most of Sports Nation wants to embrace – is that the New England Patriots finally will be kaput in the postseason and cannot possibly win Super Bowl 54. What America are these people living in?

Couch Slouch: Just before the turn of the century, two monsters of a new millennium were unleashed on the unsuspecting sporting communities of New York and Washington. Twenty years later, two franchises – the NBA Knicks and the NFL R*dsk*ns – have fallen from proud to pathetic, laying in waste in a rubble-filled puddle of dysfunction and defeat. Today we bring you an overdue comparison of the presumptive worst owners in professional sports, the Knicks’ James Dolan and the R*dsk*ns’ Daniel Snyder:

Before going any further, let’s briefly summarize

Couch Slouch: In a clandestine meeting at a Doubletree by Hilton conference room in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in late March 1987, Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell secretly hatched a plan for worldwide, around-the-clock NFL expansion, according to multiple sources at or near the gathering who are unauthorized to speak publicly about the undertaking because they might not even know what they’re talking about. And, from all indications, this covert NFL manifesto is now in its final stages.

Couch Slouch: In the NBA, super teams have morphed into super pairings. Taking the lead from the world of entertainment – those folks knew that Simon & Garfunkel

Couch Slouch: Let’s talk load management!