Sports

It’s hard to overstate what the Dallas Mavericks pulled off Thursday afternoon. In exchange for disgruntled point guard Dennis Smith Jr., Wesley Matthews and DeAndre Jordan and two future first-round draft picks, the Mavs acquired center Kristaps Porzingis, Courtney Lee and Tim Hardaway Jr. from the New York Knicks. Porzingis,…

There are certainly worse places to spend late January than Orlando, but it’s hard to imagine any of the Cowboys coaches and players currently in Florida are all that happy to be there. Like everyone else in the NFL, Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott, Leighton Vander Esch and Jason Garrett would…

At times this year, your faithful Observer sports correspondent was deeply wrong about the Cowboys. Like most of the media, local and otherwise, I declared Dallas’ heroes dead and buried after their Nov. 5 loss to the Titans dropped them to 3-5. Before the season started, I even chided the Cowboys…

Saturday is one of the nights that’s happened far too little for Cowboys fans over the last decade. Their team takes the national stage in prime time in Los Angeles, one upset away from playing in its first NFC Championship Game since January 1996. Defense travels, and the Cowboys have…

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Here we are, 65 days from being totally sure that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was going to dump head coach Jason Garrett after the season, and things have done a 180. Up is down, left is right, cats are chasing dogs and Garrett has…

Saturday night’s the thing for the Cowboys. Put together a solid performance — nothing out of line with what they’ve done over the last couple of months — and they’ll get a shot at making 2018 a truly special season. Succumb to history, their worst impulses or the turnover monster,…

The Cotton Bowl will be cool again in a little less than a year — literally and figuratively. Fair Park’s grand old stadium will host the NHL’s 2020 Winter Classic next New Year’s Day, becoming the 12th venue to host the league’s mid-season showcase. The Stars will be the host…

For the vast majority of the 20th century, North Texas had exactly one bowl game. On New Year’s Day or somewhere thereabouts, college football fans would brave weather of varying quality and head to otherwise deserted Fair Park to watch their team play in the Cotton Bowl. In 2003, things…

Globe Life Field, the home of the 2020 Texas Rangers, took another step closer to becoming reality Wednesday, as the club debuted a new rendering of the still-being-built stadium and gave an update on the construction at a holiday party for stadium workers. Rangers Executive Vice President of Business Operations…

Short of spending $600 million in free agency, nothing Texas Rangers general manager Jon Daniels could have done this winter would have turned his team into a contender. The Rangers are simply too many pieces away from competing for the franchise’s first World Series title. What the GM needed to…

The bad news for the University of North Texas football team and their fans is that they have to spend the weekend in Albuquerque. The good news is that, should the Mean Green knock off 10-2 Utah State in the New Mexico Bowl on Saturday afternoon, they’ll do something no…

For about a half-hour Sunday afternoon, it looked like the Cowboys were going to be playing three huge games to close out the 2018 regular season. Less than 15 minutes of game time later, however, those contests in Indianapolis, Arlington and New Jersey had been rendered effectively meaningless, setting up…

Major League Baseball is seriously considering banning infield shifts that put more than two players on either side of second base as early as the 2019 season, according to a lengthy new report from The Athletic’s Jayson Stark. While banning the shift would be the most significant change to MLB…

Do their job Sunday afternoon in Arlington and the Cowboys can make the rest of their 2018 regular season pretty simple. They won’t have to worry, as they did last year, about results in Detroit, Seattle or Carolina, nor will they face the pressure of having to win out merely…

Thursday night’s setup should be familiar for Cowboys fans. Their heroes are in the midst of a mixed bag season. They’re talented, but imperfect, getting ready to face one of the NFL’s gatekeepers. A loss wouldn’t destroy their season, and a win won’t make it, but the result of the…

In 2018, Dallas sports were all about the individual. The city’s usual suspects, the Cowboys, Rangers, Mavericks and Stars, were universally mediocre or worse, leaving sports fans to look for joy in the superlative performances of DFW’s bumper crop of 20-something stars, many who captured spots high on this list…

Jason Garrett’s coaching career is a cockroach. Ugly, basically untouched by evolution and capable of surviving anything short of global annihilation. Two weeks after being left for dead following a desultory performance in a Monday night loss to the Tennessee Titans at home, the Cowboys knocked off the Falcons in…

Through the first 11 games of his NBA career, Mavericks forward Luka Doncic has been a revelation. He’s averaging more than 20 points and six assists per game while making weekly appearances on SportsCenter for his spectacular ball-handling and passing. Doncic appears to be worth everything the Mavericks gave up…

Monday night’s debacle against the Titans wasn’t the last game of the Cowboys’ 2018 season worth paying attention to, as it turns out. Wednesday afternoon, former Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant signed a one-year deal with the New Orleans Saints. On Thursday night, Nov. 29, Bryant and the Saints come…