News Information and Media Site: Sports: What to Read and Watch

December 19, 2020

What to Read This Weekend

Sarah Fuller gained more notice by kicking for Vanderbilt’s winless football team than by leading Vanderbilt’s women’s soccer team to the Southeastern Conference tournament title.L.G. Patterson/Associated Press

Many women broke through glass ceilings to gain roles in men’s sports this year, Marisa Ingemi writes. One of them is Sarah Fuller, a goalkeeper on the Vanderbilt women’s soccer team.

Her biggest headlines did not come in November when she led her team to an upset of top-seeded Arkansas in the Southeastern Conference tournament final. Instead, they came six days later, after she appeared in a Vanderbilt football game, and then again, when she became the first woman to score in a Power 5 football game. She became a national sensation.

“It’s like nothing I ever experienced,” she said of her sudden fame. “I was pretty satisfied with an SEC championship, and I was helping out the football team.”

For some female athletes, though, the fact that Fuller’s soccer achievement was overshadowed by the football one underscored the idea that competing among and against men may not be, for the women involved, an achievement worthy of more attention than doing so with women.

Read the full article here.

What to Watch This Weekend

Tiger Woods, right, and his son, Charlie, will play in a televised father-son event this weekend.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

All times are Eastern.

Golf

Tiger Woods, 44, and his son, Charlie, will make their debut Saturday in the PNC Championship, a 36-hole best-ball format featuring 20 teams of prominent past champions and their family members. Tournament officials have added forward tee boxes to accommodate Charlie, who at 11 is the youngest competitor in the tournament’s history, Karen Crouse writes in The Times. (Final round, Sunday, 3-6 p.m., NBC.)

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Football

This weekend is packed with college football conference championships as the season limps along to the College Football Playoff. Saturday begins with both the Big Ten championship game (No. 14 Northwestern facing No. 4 Ohio State at 12 p.m. on FOX) and the Big 12 title game (No. 10 Oklahoma vs. No. 6 Iowa State at 12 p.m. on ABC). The A.C.C. title game features No. 2 Notre Dame vs. No. 3 Clemson (4 p.m., ABC), and the SEC title will be decided in a game between top-ranked Alabama and No. 7 Florida (8 p.m., CBS).

This weekend also features a potential Super Bowl preview between the Saints and the Chiefs. As Benjamin Hoffman writes in The Times: “At their best, both teams have explosive offenses and opportunistic defenses. If the Chiefs have a fatal flaw, it is their boredom, but a road game against a top competitor should keep their attention.” (Sunday, 4:25 p.m., CBS.)