It is a pigskin paradise on the newsstand
Will it be the Giants, or the Jets, or the Steelers, or the Cowboys, or (insert your team here)? The long wait is over, with the NFL kickoff set for Thursday, when the Rav🎶ens visit ❀the Broncos. Here’s how to make sense of it all.
Sports Illustrated is screwing with our mind, right? There’s no way SI writer Austin Murphy is trying to convince readers that Dallꦆas Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant will see “his talent and maturity” come into “better balance” this season even after the fourth-year player stands the writer up for an interview for nearly four hours. Ultimately, Bryant has to be harangued by team officials in order to “roust him out of his house,” Murphy reports. That slight and many more over the course of an odd interview, however, don’t seem to stop Murphy from declaring Bryant is “poised to realize his full potential.” Is there a chance Murphy is taking oh so subtle digs at Bryant and the Cowboy’s organization? Sure. Even so, that leaves us with the possibility that Murphy is a sycophant sportswriter, a passive-aggressive twerp who’s too afraid to tick off his contacts, or both. Elsewhere, SI’s Peter King curiously picks the New England Patriots — wꦉho lost signal-caller Tom Brady’s go-to-receiver to the Denver Broncos and another to a murder rap — to have the best record in the NFL and make a Super Bowl appearance. Now that’s crazy talk.
The graphics are confusing, ESPN, but they look good. The magazine is wall-to-wall pie charts and bar graphs breaking down the NFL to the finest points. It is a game of inches and, as ESPN points out, fantasy football is a game of passion. So any little advantage helps, like knowing which running🅠 quarterback takes the fewest hits every time he takes off. ESPN beats other football guides by breaking the monotony of numbers with at least one feature story. All else is fodder for fantasy footballers.
Pro Football Weekly’s preview highlights the clash of the Manning boys Week 2, when the Giants are slated to face off against the Broncos. “Will the third time be the charm for Eli, who has been beaten by his … big brother in their two previous encounters?” the mag asks. Peyton crushed Eli hardest most recently in 2010, but he’s getting up there and this time the little brother’s chances are better, the mag predicts. Elsewhere, a grim picture is painted for the Jets, as rookie quarterback Geno Smith competes with Mark Sanchez. This comes “at the worst possible time” for Rex Ryan, who could be a “lame duck” under new GM John Idzik.
Lindy’s is still the no-nonsense — but no-frills — unofficial official guide to the NFL. It has all the stats from last year to the draft to preseason rankings to Super Bowl predictions. Perhaps its boldest prediction is Jets make the playoffs. Lindy’s knows it’s bold; they say it in the far out predictions section. Its safest prediction is D꧃enver goes all the way. The most heartbreaking prediction is Giants come in last. The magazine is still brainwashed by Dallas and forecasts a first-place finish. Lindy’s is🌌 all numbers, no heart.
In an 11-page feature on NYU’s controversial, growth-obsessed president, the New Yorker says John Sexton has become a lightning rod as universities increasingly run themselves “like businesses, with increasing inequalities among those who work for them.” Tha💫t’s about as far as the critique goes, however, in what amounts to a puff piece on Sexton. We get Sexton’s side of the story on recent dust-ups over vacation homes for star faculty and administrators, collaborations on new campuses with repressive regimes in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai; and NYU’s ouster of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng from its campus this summer. On the latter, for example, we are told by a friend of Sexton that it was “totally preposterous and inconceivable” that Chen was forced out amid pressure from China. Really? The article fails to mention that Sexton never met with Chen during his yearlong stay. Speaking of preposterous, elsewhere, Malcolm Gladwell likens the use of steroids in sports to correcting iodine deficiencies in malnourished populations.
Weighing in on the Miley Cyrus twerking controversy in this week’s Time, cultural critic Camille Paglia declares that “the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus’ performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin.” Fair enough, but Paglia goes a little overboard as she contrasts Cyrus with Madonna, who, she maintains, made videos in the 1980s that “were arguably among the best artworks of the decade.” On the other end of the spectrum, columnist Joe Klein dresses down Hillary Clinton, saying she and her husband’s “long history of fancy conferences and steroidal speaking fees and flights on private jets… has rendered them too precious to represent the people. There is something unearthly about getting paid $700,000 for a speech in Nigeria.” Unearthly? We can think of a few other adjectives, too. To boot, the cover story nicely parses the scandal behind the proposed merger between American Airlines and US Airways.