Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
"What do you do when you can't cling to your old research on concussions because it's not credible, but you also can't admit it was faulty because that would expose you to massive damages in the lawsuits filed by former players?"
Will emerging research on (American) football-related brain injuries kill off the sport as we know it? Unlikely. It's proving tough to win football-related brain injury legal cases. Lawsuits don't look like the route to change
Ex-Denver Broncos star warns this year's top NLF draft picks that their lives are about to change. Nothing to do with football. It's money and fame that complicate things. "If you give your ear to fools, they'll chew it off"
Back story on Robert Griffin III, Heisman Trophy winner, soon to grace (one hopes) the NFL. Born in Okinawa, Japan. Both parents were in the military. Signs he was an athlete from a very young age. Running at 12 months
Interesting story of how and why Peyton Manning chose Denver. A triumph for John Elway, who played a canny game and was probably in a position better than anyone else to know how Manning would have been thinking
Elway and the Broncos started the chase for Peyton Manning toward the back of the pack. But they've landed their man. When they carve that statue of Elway in Denver, will he be carrying a football or a briefcase?
Where will Peyton Manning go now he's parted company with the Colts? How will he decide? And if you were a team GM, would you go in for him? What are the risks, and potential rewards? And what if he called you?
Poor Billy Cundiff. (Unless you're a Patriots fan.) He missed an easy, but very important, kick. So much is widely known. Less well known is that he was a guinea pig for research into how to stop players choking under pressure
Story of a scandal. "The NFL charges that over the past three seasons, between 22 and 27 Saints participated in a bounty program that paid defenders for specific achievements on the field, including injuring opponents"
On the scandal over NFL players intentionally injuring opponents. "Is our love of football – the spectacle, the violence, the thrills and sheer ferocity of it all – so insatiable that nothing will ever shock or disgust us again?"
On Indianapolis and the meaning of Peyton Manning. Before Manning, as Kurt Vonnegut said, there was "the 500-mile speedway race, and then 364 days of miniature golf, and then the 500-mile speedway race again"
Tim Tebow's first starts as Broncos QB prompted derision. But then came a series of stunning victories. Silver talks to the his coaches, teammates, and opponents and asks them: How did he do that, and will it ever happen again?
Image by Rajiv Patel (Rajiv's View) on Flickr
Adam Gopnik, on the Jets signing Tebow
"This is one of those moves so puzzling, so bizarre, so counter-productive and incomprehensible, that, to borrow a line from Bill James, it seems like the kind of thing that should be phoned in anonymously from an unknown caller, rather than announced in a press release"
