Billy Reed

Smiling so hugely it looked as if his face might crack, Louisville football coach Scott Satterfield told a national TV audience that his team would celebrate its 38-28 victory over Mississippi State in the Music City Bowl by spending the night in Nashville instead of immediately returning home.

They came to Rupp Arena expecting a basketball game, but doggone if they didn’t get Stripes II, the sequel to comedian Bill Murray’s hit movie from 1981. The difference was that this one wasn’t about the stripes Army guys wear on their shirts.

I don't want to go all Grinchy so soon after Christmas, but can somebody please tell me why CBS put the Kentucky-Louisville basketball in a time slot where it butts heads with the LSU-Oklahoma College Football Playoff game on ESPN on Saturday?

In his 39 years of running the King of the Bluegrass holiday basketball tournament, Lloyd "Pinky" Gardner has seen his beloved game change so much that his tournament now is a throwback to the glorious era of high school basketball captured in the movie "Hoosiers."

You see Darrell Griffith today and you swear he still could do one of the creative slams that earned him the nickname "Dr. Dunkenstein" during his senior year at the University of Louisville in 1979-80.

What Saturday’s Governor’s Cup game gave Kentucky football fans, besides an other-worldly performance by quarterback Lynn Bowden Jr., was a trivia question that will win a lot of bar bets over the next 20 years or so.

If you’re a University of Louisville football fan still waiting to exhale, you can breathe again.

Had 7-foot freshman center James Wiseman kept his commitment to Kentucky instead of reneging in favor of Memphis, the chances are good the college basketball world wouldn’t be talking Wednesday about the Wildcats’ shocking 67-64 loss to Evansville in Rupp Arena.

Heading into the last third of the college football regular season, the climactic Governor’s Cup game between Louisville and Kentucky surely looks different than it did back in July.

The late Mongolian Groom, who suffered a fatal leg injury in the Breeders Cup Classic on Saturday at Santa Anita, may be remembered as the horse who saved thoroughbred racing.

Moving inexorably down the road to perdition, the NCAA’s Board of Governors has voted unanimously to begin the process of allowing, ahem, student-athletes to be paid for the usage of their name, likeness and image.

Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney’s national championship football program is built largely on how Swinney uses his form of Christianity to recruit, teach, inspire, and motivate.

Before the season, long before anyone knew what to expect from new football coach Scott Satterfield and his staff, almost every sensible University of Louisville football fan –- there are some, right? -– circled Oct. 19 on the calendar as a good time to have more productive plans, such as, oh, findi

A pyrrhic victory, the ancient Greeks tell us, is one achieved at such a high cost that it wasn't worth it to the winners.

Call me old school (you won't be the first), but I've never been a fan of instant replay, mainly because of what we're seeing now in most sports, especially college football.

Willie Taggart still is scrambling. More than two decades after he was the quarterback at Western Kentucky University, he’s still bobbing and weaving to keep from getting sacked.

I’m sure you are aware of the latest scandal involving a Triple Crown winner trained by Bob Baffert, and are concerned that even the FBI might not be able to figure it out.

I understand that nobody likes to have earned victories and championships taken from them. Yet I've also thought this kind of sanction was merely a matter of the NCAA thinking it has the power to revise history, which it does not.

Welcome back, college football. A lot of us around the University of Louisville missed you last season.

Whoever wins, or whatever the margin, may Notre Dame and Louisville both continue to be places where bigotry of any kind is rejected and where immigrants are embraced regardless of their race, religion, or nationality.

If I ever make it back to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., I have a plan. I’ll find the plaque with Marty’s name on it, point to it, and say as loudly as I can, “And this one belongs to the Reds.”

In 38 of our 50 states, the highest paid state employee is a college football or basketball coach.

Billy Reed says that while Pimlico Race Course leaves plenty to be desired, there are plenty of good things about the city of Baltimore.

Ace has been Holmes’ service dog for years, helping him deal with vertigo and other after-effects of three brain surgeries. But he didn't make this trip to the Open.

Hard as it may be to believe, Rory McIlroy has not won a major golf championship since the 2014 PGA Championship right here at Valhalla.

I’m sure in the franchise’s 150-year history, the Reds have fielded teams as maddening as the current one. But in my lifetime, I can’t remember a Reds team that was such a cruel tease to the true believers, who follow the team faithfully on radio and TV when they can’t come to Great American Ball Pa

Hello, my name is Billy and I’m a South Ender. I say that with pride. I have never forgotten from whence I came.

A lot of knowledgeable thoroughbred racing experts thought it was a foregone conclusion that the Breeders’ Cup board would move this year’s event from Santa Anita to another site, most likely Churchill Downs.

The South End always has been Louisville’s melting pot, an ethnic mix of blue-collar, working-class people who can’t afford the luxury of dreams. At the neighborhood taverns, the men stare into their cold beers with hard eyes, wondering how they’re going to afford this or that.

The University of Louisville baseball team didn’t come roaring into Omaha at the speed of a Michael McAvene fastball, which is north of 90 mph, but the Cardinals still arrive with the verve and swag exhibited by actor Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones,” the 1952 classic movie about motorcycle gangs.

The New York Racing Association always has done a first-class job of promoting the Belmont Stakes, the ancient 1.5-mile classic that is the third and final jewel, after the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, in thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

The Preakness, which began two years before the Kentucky Derby in 1873 but has not been run continuously, has fallen apart, which is fitting when you consider the dilapidated condition of Pimlico Race Course.

For the first time in 145 years, the Derby winner was found guilty of committing a crime during the mile-and-a-quarter race. The victorious Maximum Security was disqualified to 17th and replaced by second-place Country House.

Whatever happens this weekend in the NCAA Final Four has to almost be anti-climactic, given all the incredible upsets, last-second heroics, and true grit that we've seen so far in the 2019 men's tournament.

I am having a Big Orange headache. The Tennessee athletics director, former football coach Phillip Fulmer, apparently is trying hire away women's basketball coach Jeff Walz from the University of Louisville.

From its opening until this very moment, this college basketball season has belonged to Duke’s Zion Williamson. To quote the late Thurman Munson, he has been the straw that stirs the drink.

It seems a bunch of rich people, including two Hollywood actresses, discovered they had children who either couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work necessary to get into prestigious universities such as Stanford, Yale, and Southern Cal.

I am wondering what happened to the shoe. Surely the basketball managers at Duke didn’t throw it out. Maybe Zion Williamson still has it somewhere. He should, because it’s already the most famous shoe in college basketball history.

The other Robinson is the one American history most remembers, and that is as it should be, because Jackie was the pioneer who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.But Frank, a rookie with the Cincinnati Reds in 1956, was the better player.

I realize that Super Bowl LIII is ancient history, but I’m not ready to let go of the unacceptable events that sullied it until the National Football League accepts accountability by make significant rules and policy changes.

On Sunday, millions of Americans will gather around their television sets to watch another tribute to wretched excess, something we do better than anybody on the planet.

Heading into Thursday night’s home game against N.C. State, the University of Louisville men’s basketball team is averaging 15,816 fans per game in the KFC Yum! Center, a drop of 5,030 from Rick Pitino’s final season in 2016-2017.

My fellow Americans, I rise again today to beseech the National Football Foundation to do the right thing by Howard Schnellenberger, one of the most successful and respected coaches in football history.

We'll all be watching on Saturday afternoon to see how new Louisville basketball coach Chris Mack handles himself and his team in his first confrontation with John Calipari and his 10th Kentucky team.

Maybe I've been overcome by the spirit of the season, or maybe I'm still reeling from the worst University of Louisville football season ever, but today I feel better about the present and future of Cardinal athletics than I have in a long time.

Well, lookee here, Mama. Doggone if the University of Louisville, big inner-city school, has done gone and hired itself a good ol' boy as its football coach.

Some of the pundits keep saying the final 2-10 record was UofL’s worst season since 1992 or somewhere back there. But it’s worse than that. Much worse. This was the worst Cardinal football team ever.

An honorable man with a strong conscience, Jeff Brohm soon will face a decision that will test him to the core of his being.