This year, Infiniti is proud to team up with coaches to help raise up to $500,000 for Coaches vs. Cancer. They’re offering six chances to win a trip to the 2012 Final Four and all you have to do is fill out a CBSSports.com Round by Round bracket. Every correct pick you make helps out a great cause.

Please visit the Infiniti Round by Round Coaches vs. Cancer contest to sign up. For more information, check out the video below.

- Tiger Woods battled some rough conditions to shoot an even-par 72 in Dubai. (Golf.com)

- The labor agreement delay may cancel any free agency movement in the NFL and force free agents to stay with their current teams. (SI.com)

- Packers give general manager Ted Thompson a well-deserved contract extension. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

- Is Matt Holliday willing to take a paycut to help the Cardinals re-sign Albert Pujols? (St. Louis Post Dispatch)

- LeBron James gets into it with a fan after said fan mentioned LeBron’s momma. (ESPN)

- Hey, the Cavs finally won a game! (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

- The Penguins and Islanders racked up 351 penalty minutes in one game last night. Yikes. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Let’s be honest: Sports bloggers know everything. Just ask us. As part of our 2010 Year-End Sports Review, our list of things we already knew this year includes Brad Childress’ biggest fail, Wade Phillips’ demise in Dallas and John Calipari’s troubles. We also knew Kevin Durant was the next great superstar (who didn’t see that coming?), Roger Clemens is the ultimate windbag and that “Matty Ice” knows fourth-quarter comebacks. We should have gone to medical school…

Contributors: Anthony Stalter, John Paulsen, Paul Costanzo, Drew Ellis and Mike Farley

LeBron is a frontrunner.

We all were a little surprised that LeBron left Cleveland, but the writing was on the wall. Growing up, LeBron didn’t root for the local teams. He followed the Yankees, Bulls and Cowboys, which in the 1990s constituted the Holy Triumvirate of Frontrunning. He wore his Yankee cap to an Indians game and was seen hobnobbing on the Cowboy sidelines during a Browns game. He says he’s loyal, but he’s only loyal to winners…unless they only win in the regular season, of course.

Brad Childress’ biggest flaw cost him his job in the end.

There were many reasons why the Vikings decided to fire head coach Brad Childress roughly a year after they signed him to a contract extension. One of the reasons was because he lost with a talented roster. Another was because he never quite figured out how to best utilize Adrian Peterson, which is a sin given how talented AP is. But the main reason “Chilly” was ousted in Minnesota was because he didn’t know how to manage NFL-caliber personalities. He didn’t know how to handle Brett Favre, which led to blowups on the sidelines and multiple face-to-face confrontations. He also didn’t have a clue how to deal with Randy Moss’ crass attitude, so he released him just four weeks after the team acquired him in a trade from New England. Childress was hired in part to help clean up the mess in Minnesota after the whole “Love Boat” scandal. But the problem with a disciplinarian that hasn’t first earned respect is that his demands fall on deaf ears. In the end, Childress’ inability to command respect from his players cost him his job. You know, on top of the fact that he was losing with a talented roster, he didn’t know how to best utilize Adrian Peterson, he…

Love him or hate him, George Steinbrenner will forever be one of baseball’s icons.

You may have hated his brash attitude, the way he ran his team or the way he conducted his business. You may even feel that he ruined baseball. But regardless of how you may have felt about him, there’s little denying that George Steinbrenner will forever be one of Major League Baseball’s icons. Steinbrenner passed away in July of this year. He will forever be a man known for helping revolutionize the business side of baseball by being the first owner to sell TV cable rights to the MSG Network. When things eventually went south with MSG, he created the YES Network, which is currently the Yankees’ very own TV station that generates millions in revenue. During his tenure, he took the Yankees from a $10 million franchise to a $1.2 billion juggernaut. In 2005, the Yankees became the first professional sports franchise to be worth an estimated one billion dollars. While many baseball fans came to despise the way he ran his team (mainly because he purchased high priced free agents with reckless abandon due to the fact that he could and others couldn’t), don’t miss the message he often made year in and year out: The Yankees are here to win. He didn’t line his pockets with extra revenue (albeit he generated a lot of extra revenue for his club) – he dumped his money back into the on-field product. Losing wasn’t acceptable and if the Bombers came up short one year, you could bet that Steinbrenner would go after the best talent in the offseason, regardless of what others thought of the approach. How many Pirates and Royals fans wish they had an owner with the same appetite for victory?

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What do we think will happen in 2011? Ha! We’re glad you asked. As part of our 2010 Year End Sports Review, we see good things ahead for Duke, the Celtics and the Saints. We see cursed days ahead for the Phillies and Giants, and one Florida Gator-sized reunion in Denver. We also like Carmelo to play for the…hey, why are we telling you all this? Read for yourself below, lazy. (And have an open mind – we had some fun with this section.)

Contributors: Anthony Stalter, John Paulsen, Paul Costanzo, Drew Ellis and Mike Farley

You think he’s gone? He’s not gone. He’s never gone!

Brett Favre has duped us before with his retirement talk, so why should we buy what he’s selling now? Lord Favre says 2010 will be his final season, but after spending a couple of months on his ranch next summer, he’ll get the itch to return. And some team will welcome him back. And the media will torture us with their 24-hour Favre watch. And the dreaded cycle of death will continue. So which lucky team will have No. 4 in uniform next season? While we wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Favre returning to the Vikings for one more year now that Brad Childress is gone, that’s not a very fun projection. Thus, what about Da Raaaaaaaiders? Huh? Can you see it now? Lord Favre and Al Davis at the podium holding up their pointer fingers and saying, “Just win baby.” No? Ah, you’re no fun.

Carmelo will be a Knickerbocker next year.

Book ‘em, Danno. The writing is on the wall. He hasn’t signed the three-year extension that the Nuggets offered last summer and has reportedly decided that the only team he’ll agree to be traded to is the New York Knicks. This means that if the Nuggets are hoping to get something substantial for him, they’ll have to move him before the February trade deadline. Since there appears to be only one team in the running, the deal isn’t going to be very good. We wouldn’t want to be Nugget fans right now — the rebuilding process is about to begin.
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After years of taking written abuse from former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti (who is being charged with felony domestic assault), White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf took the opportunity recently to share how he really feels about Mariotti.

Listen to this (hat tip to SPORTSbyBROOKS.com):

Great word choice by Reinsdorf. (By the way, the definition of “pissant” is: a person or thing of no value or consequence; a despicable person or thing.)

It’s clichéd to say, but I’ll say it anyway: What goes around comes around. Mariotti made a living off of making personal attacks on the people he covered and now he’s being shredded in the media because of this domestic assault charge.

As Johnny Cash once famously sang, “Sooner or later God’ll cut you down.”

Former MLB star Roberto Alomar is in trouble with the law after he was served a domestic violence injunction for threatening his wife with a knife.

The Tampa Tribune has the details:

On Monday, he allegedly got into an argument with his wife, Maria Del Pilar Alomar. He approached her and with his bodyweight pushed her several feet back, according to court documents.

At their home in June, Alomar yelled at her and pushed her with his chest. While being pushed back she fell to the floor, according to court records. Alomar called his family and his father called 911. Deputies were dispatched to the home, but a report wasn’t filed.

In April, Alomar threatened her with a knife, according to court records. She feared for her life and called her father on the phone. She told him what was occurring and wanted to let him know in case she was hurt or killed, according to court records.

When Alomar heard the phone conversation, he dropped the knife.

You stay classy, Roberto Alomar.

UNATHLETIC compiled some of the best home run-robbing catches on every level of baseball. Here are some of the best ones.

The announcers in that last video some coffee or something. Kid makes an unbelievable catch and they’re monotone!

Per Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

Lance Armstrong missed out on a Tour de France stage win today after being outsprinted at the end of the three-week race’s toughest day, which included four Pyrenean mountain climbs.

The seven-time champion finished sixth of eight riders in the dash to the finish in Pau, after helping drive the pace of the breakaway group for about five hours. Pierrick Fedrigo won the stage, the 16th of 20, while Alberto Contador kept an eight- second lead in the overall standings.

“It was full gas all day,” Armstrong, who hasn’t taken a stage this year, told reporters. “I’m not the best guy in the race but I still have the spirit of a fighter.”

Defending champ Alberto Contador continues to lead the race by eight seconds.

Thanks to Bing for sponsoring this post.

An unlucky Stage 8 led to a resigned quote from Lance Armstrong:

Close the book on the Lance Armstrong era at the Tour de France. He has.

The record seven-time champion wrote off his chances of victory in his 13th and last Tour, signaling the beginning of the end of one of the most celebrated and controversial careers in cycling history.

The 38-year-old Texan’s hopes for yet another title were dashed Sunday after he got caught in three crashes — one of which brought him down — and struggled to keep up during two tough climbs in Stage 8, the race’s first foray into the Alps. He and his team said his hip got banged up, keeping him from pedaling hard.

“My Tour is finished,” said Armstrong, who fell to 39th overall.

Thanks to Bing for sponsoring this post.

Ben Roethlisberger was accused not once, but twice of sexually assaulting two separate females, while Tiger Woods admitted to cheating on his wife with multiple women, including at least one porn star.

But neither of them hold a candle to Michael Vick in the category of most disliked athlete. The same goes for Al Davis apparently, seeing as how he was found to be the second most disliked sports personality among voters in a recent Forbes survey.

From FOX Sports:

For the second year in a row, Michael Vick topped a fan poll taken by Forbes as the most disliked national sports figure, myFOXphilly.com reported Sunday.

The Forbes survey sampled sports fans and filtered out lesser-known figures like disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis and sports agent Scott Boras, who weren’t known by a lot of fans but really disliked by those who knew them.

In the end, Vick was still held in a lower opinion than Ben Roethlisberger, Tiger Woods and Oakland Raiders’ owner Al Davis, with 69 percent of those polled disliking Vick.

Davis was a surprising second with 66 percent, given the amount of bad PR that Woods (53 percent) and Roethlisberger (57 percent) had in the past year.

Wait, Al Davis was second? So let me get this straight: you can commit adultery or be accused of sexual assault and still be more liked than if you ruined an NFL franchise. That’s kind of disturbing. I know I’m drawing a rather incomplete conclusion based on this unscientific poll, but I wouldn’t think that Al Davis would be ahead of Tiger and Big Ben on the most disliked scale.

I guess it goes to show you how much Americans love their football.