Brandon Marshall and Harry Caray’s 7th Inning Stretch in Water Tower Place will host a Thanksgiving dinner for Maryville Academy children Nov. 24. Maryville Academy, which is celebrating its 130th anniversary, serves troubled youth struggling with a variety of issues, including mental health.

The Bears wide receiver, who is an investor in 7th Inning Stretch, has brought some much needed attention to mental health issues due to his own struggles with borderline personality disorder. He hosted the first annual Limelight fundraiser Oct. 10 at Morgan Manufacturing, which raised over $400,000 for the mental-health focused Thesholds and Brandon Marshall Foundation.

Marshall will be joined during the Thanksgiving dinner by Bears teammates. They'll help him serve food, play interactive games with the children in 7th Inning Stretch's Chicago Sports Museum and distribute holiday gifts for the children to take home.

About those gifts: Harry Caray’s is accepting donations. Bring new, unwrapped...

Bears defensive end Lamarr Houston's season-ending knee injury during his sack dance reminds me of how a lot of football players are just big kids. Big dumb kids.

Heck, Bears coach Marc Trestman is giving his students -- a.k.a. the players -- written evaluations during the team's week off, so if he can give homework, I can hand out midseason grades for fantasy football. Here are my take-home progress reports:

DeMarco Murray, RB, Cowboys: A+ 

He's at the top of the draft class with eight straight 100-yard rushing games, which our records show never has been done before. Everyone is just so proud.

Goals: We appreciate the desire for extra credit, but we worry DeMarco is overworking himself with 232 touches at the mid-point. He'll want to save his best for the fantasy playoffs from

Kelvin Benjamin was a man on a mission.

The wide receiver out of Florida State knew exactly where he wanted to play in the NFL and knew exactly how to get there.

Perform poorly at the scouting combine.

Or so he says.

The rookie receiver told ESPN he purposely turned in a sub-par performance in the 40-yard dash “because I wanted to play for the Carolina Panthers.’’

Well, who doesn't?

Benjamin executed his plan perfectly, running a 4.61-second 40 -- which is two-tenths of a second slower than what he says is his best time -- back in February, somehow knowing that it would drop him just far enough to be snatched by his dream team with the 28th pick overall.

Oh, yeah, and lose millions of dollars in the process. I'm sure that was part of his master plan as well.

The Panthers did need help at the receiver spot and Benjamin has provided just that. He has 38 receptions for 571 yards and five touchdowns, and was named the NFL offensive rookie of the month for September.

So everything worked...

A man who left his seat at halftime during the Denver Broncos' home game last Thursday and never came back was found safe Tuesday night more than 100 miles away.

Paul Kitterman told police he had "his fill of football" so he walked and hitchhiked to Pueblo, Colo., where he was found by police outside a Kmart store five nights later.

Fox 31 Denver reports that sources said the 53-year-old Kitterman, a construction worker and avid hunter and outdoorsman, was coherent and had just wanted to get away and find someplace warm.

The Facebook page "Help Find Paul Kitterman" reported Tuesday night that he was with his family, who requested privacy at this time.

Denver Police Sgt. Steve Warneke said no criminal charges are expected in the case, but he did not have any further information.

“All we were trying to do was make sure he was unharmed, and he was,” Warneke said. “So at that point, we're finished.”

But there's still plenty of mystery surrounding the disappearance of a man with no known...

Ticket prices for LeBron James’s first game back with the Cleveland Cavaliers are selling for an average of $758, the most for a National Basketball Association regular-season game in at least five years.

Tickets for Thursday’s game at Quicken Loans Arena against the New York Knicks are going for 14 times the $53 last season’s home opener averaged on the resale market, according to ticket-price aggregator SeatGeek. It’s higher than all but four National Basketball Association games since 2010, and each of those games took place in the finals.

James, a native of Akron, Ohio, played his first seven NBA seasons in Cleveland before joining the Miami Heat in 2010. The team reached the NBA Finals in all four of his seasons there, winning two titles, before James returned to Cleveland this offseason.

His homecoming will generate as much as $215 million annually in new and redistributed money for the team and Cleveland, boosting tourism, taxes and service industry spending, according to data...

Eddie Olczyk will be busy covering his other favorite sport this weekend for NBC.

The Blackhawks and NBC’s lead NHL analyst will be part of the network’s crew working the Breeder’s Cup Friday and Saturday at Santa Anita in California. It is a dream assignment for Olczyk, a passionate horse player.

“I’m really excited,” Olczyk said. “I’d be doing it (analyzing the races) at my house or at Hawthorne. This is the Super Bowl of horse racing. To be there for NBC really is going to be special.”

Olczyk said his start in broadcasting actually occurred in horse racing, not hockey. While playing for the New York Rangers in 1994, Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey invited him to analyze the races during a NHL work stoppage. He had been hooked on the sport ever since a friend’s father took him to Arlington Park at the age of 13.

“They knew I was a big horse player,” Olczyk said. “They said, ‘Why not come down and do some race analysis?’ I was going to be there anyway.”

When play resumed and the...