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Sports
January 19, 2007
Are You Ready For Some Football ... Columns?
This weekend, the Colts and the Patriots are playing for a spot in the Super Bowl, and the game has been discussed to such an extent that not only has Manning-Brady fatigue set in, but there's been enough time for ESPN.com's Sports Guy to whine about that fatigue. He might well be most upset with a mocking fill-in-the-blank column penned by fellow ESPNer Patrick Hruby, who calls out fellow journalists (including Simmons) for their predictable hyperbole when it comes to this particular matchup.
Sports
January 17, 2007
Going Grade School
With less than half a quarter to play, the Patriots were in a jam. Down by eight points and sitting at fourth and five, their normally unflappable quarterback Tom Brady threw his third pick of the day, this time to Chargers safety Marlon McCree. But a great hit by Patriots receiver-and-sometimes-defensive-back Troy Brown jarred the ball loose, and the Patriots recovered the fumble and got a new set of downs. They went on to win, and sportswriters around the country got to talk about elementary strategy.
Sports
January 9, 2007
Kyle Williams, Loyal (and Distraught) Reader of Blogs
There's something about the contestants in last week's Rose Bowl that brings out the nastiest of imaginary blogging. After USC's rout, TV commentators predicted those mythical men of the typing machines would start calling for the ouster of Michigan coach Lloyd Carr (an overblown fear, as Deadspin pointed out). Now another questionable premise has gelled into media factiness, this one about USC offensive tackle Kyle Williams. Supposedly, the devoted blog reader was so devastated by the online writers' devastating critiques of his performance in UCLA's upset of the Trojans (three false starts) that he temporarily quit the team.
Sports
January 9, 2007
OSU Gets Meyer-ed in Gator Raid
Florida soundly beat Ohio State in the BCS title game, and it was up to the nation's legions of editors to turn the blowout into interesting copy for their sports-hungry readers. Since Gelf couldn't find anyone who went for the easy "Fall of Troy (Smith)" headline, perhaps feeling sorry for the latest Heisman winner-turned-goat, Gelf did some light reading to see what they did come up with:
Sports
January 2, 2007
Old Balls, New Coke
The NBA's foray into synthetic basketballs is over. The old leather ball is back. "There will be some initial getting used to," Grant Hill told the Washington Post, "but in two months, it will be old news, just like New Coke is old news." Hill—perhaps showing that he has a future in sportswriting—is onto something. The New Coke analogy pervaded many types of articles about the switch:
Sports
December 12, 2006
Dropping the Ball
The NBA's new microfiber composite basketball is history; the old leather balls will return starting Jan. 1. If you weren't paying close attention, you might think that every player hated the new ball and would applaud the new decision—yet another by-product of what Mavericks owner Mark Cuban tells Gelf is a familiar occurrence in the sports media: More attention is paid to high-profile quotes than to original reporting. But not all hope is lost for the new balls. They'll be kept on hand with the teams for testing by the players, an NBA spokesman tells Gelf.
Sports
December 12, 2006
Boise Blues
Gelf wants a college football playoff. So does Sports Illustrated. In last week's issue, Phil Taylor wrote an article entitled "Playoff, Please," in which he laid out the case for a single-elimination tournament to supplant the bowl system. Taylor cited UCLA's upset of USC to argue that "strange, unexpected things can happen when teams meet face-to-face rather than in a computer's circuitry or a voter's imagination." Too bad, then, that Taylor and SI would leave undefeated Boise State out in the cold as much as the present system does.
Sports
December 8, 2006
Voting for Yourself
Nebraska football coach Bill Callahan holds a unique place in the pantheon of USA Today poll voters. While most of his peers were busy padding their own teams' resumes by voting them higher, only Callahan had the humility to actually vote his team one spot lower than where it ended up in the final rankings.
Sports
November 30, 2006
Sum Ergo Sum
In the postmodern era since Manny Ramirez was excused for his erratic behavior because he is in fact, Manny Ramirez, stating "that's just X being X" has become an even more popular (and less useful) cliché among athletes than "going out there and giving 110%." Still, there seems to be some confusion about when the phrase is appropriate—an Arizona high school golfer recently excused his poor putting by stating, "It was just golf being golf"—so let's see how the big boys use it.
Sports
November 29, 2006
What Stephen Jay Gould Missed About Big Mac
Baseball writers are debating whether to vote retired slugger Mark McGwire into the Hall of Fame in his debut year on the ballot, despite reports that McGwire used illegal steroids to enhance his performance and Big Mac's refusal to refute these reports. Paleontologist and lifelong baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould would have seen no cause for debate, because he applied little scientific skepticism to the game he loved.
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