The past year in sports was full of choices that worked out swimmingly, such as Anthony Joshua taking a fight on relatively short notice. The fight, of course, was against Jake Paul, it earned Joshua a massive payday, and he finished it with a knockout of someone a lot of people wanted to see get knocked out.
Other choices didn’t work out quite so well, and a few were unfortunate enough to make this roundup of 2025’s thoroughly regrettable sports decisions. It’s a non-comprehensive list (and by all means, make some additions in the comments), but it should be enough to have us all looking to ring in a less misguided new year.
The Mavericks trade Luka Doncic for … not much
Never mind that, in the wake of the Luka Doncic trade, the Dallas Mavericks wound up with Cooper Flagg. They don’t get credit for seeing a piece of outrageous good fortune fall into their collective lap.
On the other hand, the Mavericks deserved all the criticism they received — a Texas—size mass that didn’t subside for months — and not just because they dealt a massively popular, 25-year-old superstar who already had led them to the NBA Finals. The return for Doncic and a couple of ancillary pieces to make the trade work included an aging and injury-prone Anthony Davis, Max Christie, a first-round draft pick and … actually, that was it.
The worst part? Well, that’s a tough question, given that the trade came as an out-of-nowhere jolt of shocking news, left the franchise bereft of a long-term centerpiece (again, the subsequent, utterly fluky landing of Flagg doesn’t count) and allowed the Los Angeles Lakers to retain some assets that the Mavericks should have demanded as part of the package. Maybe the most galling aspect was that Nico Harrison, the Mavericks’ general manager, didn’t shop Doncic around the league, a process that almost certainly would have yielded more substantial offers. Instead, Lakers GM Rob Pelinka appeared to use his long-standing friendship with Harrison to pull off a clandestine swindle. Plus, did it have to be the Lakers? You know, the franchise that has lorded over the Western Conference for huge chunks of the past 45 years and whose fans have come to expect the regular arrival of elite players as their birthright?
None of that sat at all well with Mavericks fans, and ultimately their fury and the team’s lack of success after the trade cost Harrison his job. He’s no longer around, but the frustration of the Doncic trade figures to linger in Dallas for years to come.
Orion Kerkering throws home
It might be unfair to say he panicked, but Orion Kerkering was hardly the picture of composure when a ball was hit back to the Philadelphia Phillies’ 24-year-old pitcher in the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 4 of the National League Division Series. Kerkering had trouble fielding the ball, but after he did eventually pick it up, he appeared to have time to turn and throw to first base. Given that there were two outs, a successful throw to the first baseman would have ended the inning, kept the score tied and kept the Phillies alive in their series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Certainly, that was what Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto wanted. As Kerkering picked up the ball, Realmuto was pointing toward first base. Alas, the pitcher opted to throw home — the bases were loaded, so an inning-ending out also could have been made at the plate — but he had only a split second to beat the runner, and Kerkering’s rushed effort sailed wide of Realmuto. The runner was safe at home, the Dodgers spilled out of their dugout with joy, and the Phillies were forced to contemplate a brutal end to their season. Kerkering defended his decision, saying he thought he could get the ball to home plate faster than if he turned and threw to first, but he acknowledged, “It was just a horses— throw.”
The Clippers bring back Chris Paul
When the Los Angeles Clippers signed Chris Paul in July to a one-year contract, it seemed like a solid move, potentially even a heartwarming one — after all, Paul is a franchise icon, and he was poised to help his team return to the playoffs in what could be his final NBA season. Instead, the relationship between Paul — never one to refrain from offering strong opinions on team-related matters — and the Clippers’ coaching staff reportedly curdled almost immediately. Then, barely a quarter of the way through this season, the 40-year-old point guard was banished altogether.
Paul remains under contract, though, meaning that after getting the heave-ho, he is still essentially getting paid handsomely by the Clippers not to work. Wait, why does that sound familiar? Oh, right — their season began under a cloud of suspicion that they may have circumvented NBA salary cap rules by arranging for Kawhi Leonard to receive a lucrative, no-show job from a team sponsor. At least Leonard is performing his job for the Clippers by putting up good numbers, but he already has missed a chunk of the season with his latest injury and, more ominously, has proved unable to help the Clippers avoid an early-season free fall that has them near the bottom of the Western Conference.
A guy gets caught stealing a hat from a kid
Here’s the thing: If you’re going to swipe a cap clearly meant for a kid, don’t do it where loads of cameras are present. Wait, sorry, here’s the thing: Don’t do it at all. Alas, Polish businessman Piotr Szczerek found it as easy in the moment as stealing candy from a baby, only to discover that his misdeed went viral.
Caught red-handed at the U.S. Open (tennis version), Szczerek subsequently issued an apology, but not before online sleuths found his business and subjected it to damagingly poor reviews. Even in his apology, Szczerek claimed it was “never my intent to steal away a prized memento from the young fan,” leading to another round of criticism.
Picking upsets in your NCAA bracket
Everyone knows that if you actually want to win your NCAA tournament pool, you can’t go chalk. While you may not be able to predict which upsets will occur, you know they’re coming, so your best bet is to pick a few and hope you get some hits.
Unless, that is, you were filling out a bracket for the 2025 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which turned out to be a chalk show. The top 16 seeds won their first-round games, the only No. 12 seeds to get to the second round promptly lost, the only double-digit seed in the Sweet 16 was a John Calipari-coached SEC squad (No. 10 Arkansas, which promptly lost), and the Final Four was composed solely of No. 1 seeds. At least, at that point, Duke haters got to see the Blue Devils get upset by Houston, but even that unexpected result deprived hoops fans of seeing Flagg in the national title game.
Tom Brady clones his dog
In thanking a biosciences company for giving him and his family “a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog,” Tom Brady raised a question of what kind of “second chance” he thought he was getting. Obviously, the first go-round went so well that he decided to have the dog duplicated, so it wasn’t a question of making amends. At the same time, the personality that so endeared the original pooch to the Bradys wouldn’t necessarily be replicated in the clone.
What Brady could count on, if he cared to get some feedback, was disapproval from animal rights activists and others who happen to be well aware that tons of terrific pups are just waiting at shelters for a loving human to come along. That act of compassion could be accomplished for a fraction of the price of cloning — and without the possibility that several attempts might be discarded before an acceptable look-alike was produced.
Chauncey Billups plays in shady poker games
Chauncey Billups, the Portland Trail Blazers coach who was placed on unpaid leave one game into the season after being arrested on money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy charges, pleaded not guilty. Perhaps he did nothing wrong and is guilty only of poor judgment — but, hoo boy, did he display some poor judgment in getting involved in an allegedly Mafia-backed scheme to use his celebrity to attract other poker players to illegal games so they could be defrauded with techniques such as rigged card-shuffling machines. In addition, Billups was accused by federal authorities of passing along information about the Trail Blazers’ plans to tank a March game by benching players, which allegedly resulted in big-money bets being placed on the contest.
If Billups plays his cards right (ahem) with the not-guilty plea and avoids what could be decades in prison, he still might be banned for life by the NBA, particularly if there is compelling evidence that he did indeed share Portland’s tanking plans. At a minimum, he probably can kiss his coaching career goodbye, and his recent Hall of Fame induction could be in jeopardy.
A marathoner tries to help her maid
After Ruth Chepngetich eventually provided an explanation for how she came to have a banned substance in her system, the Athletics Integrity Unit described her tale as “hardly credible.” Even if you take her explanation at face value, though, it doesn’t exactly do her any favors.
Chepngetich, who smashed the women’s marathon world record in October 2024 only to test positive for hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) several months later, was said to have told investigators that she fell ill with similar symptoms to those experienced shortly before by her housemaid. According to the AIU, an agency established by track and field’s international governing body to ensure athletes adhere to anti-doping protocols, the 31-year-old Kenyan asked what medication her maid had taken and then promptly ingested it herself. Chepngetich even provided a photo of the medication, which clearly stated “Hydrochlorothiazide” on its packaging, and she was said to have claimed she didn’t know it was on the prohibited list.
The AIU noted that Chepngetich had multiple opportunities to give her account of events before she provided the explanation and that it still didn’t account for the trace amounts of HCTZ found in a test she took before the episode in question. She accepted a three-year suspension, although her record has been allowed to stand, at least for the time being.
Bill Belichick agrees to go on camera
Infamously taciturn during his two-decade run as the New England Patriots’ coach, Bill Belichick invariably gave the impression that he would much rather be left alone to work on game plans in a darkened film room. After taking the North Carolina job, though, he was much more willing to go on camera. By doing so, the 73-year-old Belichick also happened to shine more of a spotlight on his girlfriend, 24-year-old Jordon Hudson. That may have been the plan all along (for at least one of them), but it didn’t always go the way they would have liked.
Most notably, Hudson’s commandeering of a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview of Belichick in April raised widespread questions about how much of a managerial role she seemed to have taken. When the season started, she became a very visible presence on the Tar Heels’ sidelines, and cameras also caught Belichick conferring with her there shortly before games kicked off. In October, video emerged from an aborted docuseries on Belichick by NFL Films that showed Hudson displaying a high degree of involvement and, at times, casting aspersions on the work of production team members.
As for the on-field product Belichick produced, he probably wishes that wasn’t filmed, either. In his first season at UNC, he oversaw a 4-8 season that began with an embarrassing blowout loss and included four other defeats by at least 16 points.
Mississippi fans hope for Lane Kiffin to stay
Sure, Lane Kiffin’s bolting for LSU just after guiding the Rebels to their best regular season since 1962 made for a messy ending in Oxford, but what did Mississippi fans expect? Kiffin departed almost all of his coaching gigs with a trail of ill will in his wake, and the LSU job has been a generally more coveted position for decades.
Nonetheless, a lot of Mississippi fans apparently expected Kiffin to stay, and many of them didn’t appreciate getting jilted. Maybe now that he’s with the Tigers, some of those fans will learn that a leopard can’t change his spots.
FIFA creates a peace prize for Trump
Maybe, just maybe, if President Donald Trump hadn’t been openly pining for a Nobel Peace Prize, and if FIFA head Gianni Infantino hadn’t been acting so openly obsequious toward Trump, the fact that FIFA’s newly created peace prize just happened to go to Trump wouldn’t seem like such a blatant case of currying favor. Of course, soccer’s international governing body could reasonably have some major concerns about the smooth staging of its 2026 World Cup — much of which will be in the United States, which hasn’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat for foreign visitors this year — that FIFA wants very much to allay.
We’ll see how it goes next year with the world’s most-watched tournament, just as we’ll see who gets picked by FIFA as the next recipient of what it promises will be an annual honor. Presumably, the pool of candidates will be composed solely of world figures Infantino reckons will actually want to accept an award of such dubious origin.
FIFA asks Wayne Gretzky to pronounce names of countries
At the same World Cup draw this month where Infantino handed Trump his hardware, Wayne Gretzky was asked to help read names of countries as they were slotted into pods for group play. While it wasn’t ideal that he pronounced Curaçao as “Cuh-rocco” and North Macedonia as “Mack-a-donia,” in fairness, those probably aren’t places he hears dropped into conversation very often.
But Jordan? Or as Gretzky put it, “Jor-DAN”? Again, that’s a country not likely to be bandied about frequently in Gretzky’s presence, but you would think he has heard more than enough comparisons to Michael Jordan to just go with that as the default pronunciation.
NASCAR thinking it could win a court battle against Michael Jordan
Speaking of Jordan, his latest showdown was in a federal courtroom, not on an NBA court, but the outcome would have been familiar to any number of Jordan’s opponents in hoops: NASCAR was put on the proverbial poster. Jordan and his 23XI racing team, along with co-plaintiff Front Row Motorsports, came away with a settlement of their antitrust lawsuit that pretty much gave them what they wanted. In turn, that amounted to a huge win for all the other Cup Series teams, who also will benefit from the reported settlement terms of permanent charters, greater revenue sharing and more say in how the overall business operates.
The Charlotte-based judge who presided over the nine-day trial, which began approximately 14 months after Jordan and his partners filed suit, said he wished the settlement could have been reached “a few months ago.” Some NASCAR officials probably felt the same way, given some of the damaging details that emerged during discovery. They reportedly included text messages from NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps to a colleague that called team owner Richard Childress a “stupid redneck” who should be “taken out back and flogged.”
It remains to be seen whether Phelps is able to keep his job, but there is little doubt that the organization he works for got dunked on by His Airness.
The choice of Keegan Bradley for Ryder Cup captain
Normally, active PGA Tour players are not chosen for the Ryder Cup captaincy. Keegan Bradley was not only very much still on the tour but, in fact, played so well this year that he might have been a captain’s pick — had he not been the captain himself. Technically, Bradley could have selected himself, but he chose to focus solely on his duties as captain.
The result of the Ryder Cup — a 15-13 win for Europe on American soil — made it fair to wonder whether it would have been better to pick a captain who could have used the whole PGA Tour season to focus on the event instead of finding time between tournaments to give it thought. Bradley was criticized for his pairings — particularly the duo of Harris English and Collin Morikawa, whose possible partnership ranked dead last out of 132 optimal pairings in a widely cited statistical model — as well as his course setup and other tactics.
It seems safe to assume that, come 2027, the Ryder Cup captaincy will revert to an accomplished player who has aged out of the PGA Tour. Hmmm … Tiger Woods, anyone?
Mark Sanchez picks a fight over parking
Allegedly, anyway. At Mark Sanchez’s trial, which was moved to March, he might be able to present a convincing case that he was the victim in an October incident that left him in a hospital with stab wounds. The bizarre episode resulted in a felony charge being brought against the former quarterback, who can now also be called a former Fox Sports analyst after the network parted ways with him.
In Indianapolis for an upcoming Colts game, Sanchez was said by prosecutors to have been in a state of public intoxication when he approached a 69-year-old man and allegedly took issue with where the latter had parked his truck. The man was described as an employee of a cooking oil recycling company who had brought his truck to a hotel loading dock to perform his job duties before ending up in a physical confrontation, during which the man allegedly produced a knife to defend himself from further attack.
Authorities cited surveillance video from a hotel in bringing charges, which indicates Sanchez’s legal team will have some work to do. If he can’t adequately explain his side of things, Sanchez could get prison time.
