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Hi Paul - You're correct from the start, you want to 301 those dead pages to their closest related page. Maybe the sports team or sport category. From what you've written, I'm sure you can figure this one out - nice job!

No, we stayed with .aspx. I was also told that we received a call from "Google" coming into our main telephone number, and it was an automated call that asked about changes to the site, and if we would like to speak to a live person.  By the time the call was transferred, we lost the call.  (twice.) That could have been someone from Adwords, as I was also reaching out to them about some other things.  The weird part about the call was that the receptionist swears that she heard "We're calling to confirm changes to your site." before she tried to transfer the call to my office. I have never heard of Google calling regarding WMT, or site changes.

Hi Paul, Sometimes, you will get an automated response before action takes place. However, if a month has gone by, I would go the Google And Your Business Forum and report the entire issue, including your report to the troubleshooter. See if a TC will take interest in your plight and escalate for you.

Completely agree with Ryan - assuming it's not the first sentence or an extremely short article you're absolutely fine. Duplicate lines are very common - most notably as a quote (think how many times you see this in news publications).

Yes, you replied to my post last week when my most important pages dropped a few spots to a new site.  That's bound to happen, and a new site has hit #1. I'm talking about other landing pages that have dropped a whole page or two.  These landing pages have ranked in the top five on page one for well over a year.  I guess I was leaning towards a freshness issue because the sites that now rank on page one do have a freshness theme, aside from a few others that just kill everyone else with fantastic PA, DA, and inbound links.

Now that I can see the real reason that our competitor is number one for one of our key search terms, it's because they bought hundreds of links from spam blogs.  This just occurred in the past 30 days.  Here's the big question: Do you report them or see if Google will catch up?  I don't use black hat link building, but I would rather not draw attention to this issue if there is a chance for any "blowback" coming our way. I would use my secondary Gmail account to do the reporting, but I worry that Google would do something more than just look at that site for that term, and that rank.  Any thoughts?

Hey Paul- If you are already receiving an A grade for the page, I don't see why you would need to drop those 13 characters before it. Remember that those words can entice users to click on your site in the SERPs if it looks more attractive than your competitors. For example, look at the SEOmoz Title: "SEO Software. Simplified." Im sure simplified is not one of their major target keywords, but helps both users and search engines.