Tittle, former MVP, has died
Y.A. Tittle, a Hall of Fame quarterback and the NFL’s most valuable player in 1963, has died. He was 90. His family confirmed to Louisiana State, where Tittle starred in college, that he died Sunday night at Stanford Hospital .
Known as “The Bald Eagle” as much for his sturdy leadership as his prematurely receding hairline, Tittle played 17 seasons of pro football.
He began with the AllAmerica Football Conference's Baltimore Colts in 1948 and finished with the NFL’s New York Giants. He played 10 years in between with the San Francisco 49ers but had his greatest success in New York, leading the Giants to three division titles in four years in a remarkable late-career surge.
Tittle never won a championship but came to personify the competitive spirit of football thanks to an iconic photo taken by Dozier Mobley during Tittle’s final season in 1964.
The frame caught the then-37-year-old quarterback, who looked older than his years, after throwing an interception returned for a touchdown by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Chuck Hinton. Tittle is seen kneeling in exhaustion and pain from an injured rib, blood dripping down his face from a head gash.
Tittle was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. He passed for 36 touchdowns while winning the MVP award in ’63, an NFL record until Dan Marino passed for 48 in 1984.
Tennessee suspended starting defensive end Darrell Taylor indefinitely, the latest adversity for a team that has dropped its first two Southeastern Conference games and is coming off its most lopsided home loss since 1905. Volunteers coach Butch Jones, without offering specifics, said that “multiple factors” had led to Taylor’s suspension. Taylor already had been expected to sit out the first half of Saturday’s game against South Carolina because he’d received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for fighting in the second half of Tennessee’s 41-0 loss to Georgia on Sept. 30. Now Taylor won’t play at all against the Gamecocks.
ESPN suspended anchor Jemele Hill for two weeks for making political statements on social media. Hill, an African American, received backlash last month after referring to President Trump as a “white supremacist” in a series of tweets that referenced the president’s comments about a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Trump later suggested that NFL players be fired for not standing during the national anthem. In tweets Sunday, Hill targeted Jerry Jones after the Dallas Cowboys owner stated that players who disrespect the flag would not play for his team. Hill suggested on Twitter that fans who disagree with Jones should boycott the team’s advertisers and not buy the team’s merchandise.
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Iceland qualified for the World Cup for the first time after defeating Kosovo 2-0 at Reykjavik. Holding the momentum from its inspiring run to the 2016 European Championship quarterfinals, Iceland topped Europe Group I and advanced automatically to the finals in Russia next year. Iceland is the smallest nation in terms of population — 330,000 — to make the World Cup.
Paul Molitor will return as manager of the Minnesota Twins after leading a historic turnaround. The Twins announced that Molitor is getting a new three-year deal that keeps him under contract through 2020. They went 85-77 this season, becoming the first team to make the playoffs after losing at least 100 games the previous year. They lost to the New York Yankees in a wildcard game last week.