Peter King screws up

How about a "Who's Now?" issue?

 

Seriously, who really cares after No. 100? I think the players themselves will get a kick out of the list, but my gawd, the rest of us, no way.

 

One mistake in a list of 500 is a typo, an oversight.

Three is some sloppy-ass shit. Nobody in that whole magazine actually read the 500 and noticed that three were the same?

 

Disposable lists by writers slumming from their TV gigs and not edited well ... To think how different SI was as a revered destination a generation ago. Love Reilly's witty "This is one Bus ride you won't want to get off" nonsensical blurb on Bettis' book as well.

 

"You should have heard my first idea," I told Lombardi, who's now with the Broncos. "I wanted to rank every player in the league, 1 through 1,696. I was even looking into the long snappers. But people wisely talked me out of it."

uh, yeah.

 

Agreed.

The team previews used to be pretty meager, Dr. Z's ruminations on why a team was gonna be good or bad. But the cover features were interesting, whether it was 1988's Dr. Z comparison of quarterbacks from 15 years before to the current ones, 1993's linebackers stuff that included the classic Concrete Charlie story, etc.

Then they struck a balance when they used to be Peter King and Dr. Z, with a dose of Silver thrown in and an opposing scout's view there for Xs and Os. Now the team previews range widely in quality, and some read like they're written by interns who haven't taken advanced writing yet. The cover features used to focus on a position or an innovation in the game (the 1997 preview, as I recall, had an excellent article on why the zone blitz works).
This year's cover shows Peyton manning looking like he's constipated, and Peter King's ranking of the top 500 players. I didn't bother with any of it; I mean, who the hell cares? Why can't they just spotlight a different position every year; it would take more than a decade to cycle back around and have a repeat.

Anyway, I keep my subscription because of Tom verducci and the possibility I might see some Dr. Z in the magazine. Gary smith, Michael Farber, Phil Taylor are all excellent as well, but none write regularly enough for my taste. No, it's better to print a story about Nick Saban by someone who has a connection to Alabama. Better to run Silver's latest tripe about partying with athletes.

I guess what I'm saying is . . . . 15 years of subscribing is a long time. But I wonder more and more why I bother. If there's a great story, my brethren at SportsJournalists.com will tell me about it.

 

Smith's in this week, story about Miami coach Randy Shannon's incredible family background. Farber writes nearly every week during the hockey season, which means I don't read many of them but his byline is there a lot. The Saban story, while written by someone "with a connection to Alabama," wasn't exactly penned by the school president or something: it was a pulitzer-prize winner.

But the previews have definitely changed over the years. My dad's got every issue since 1971 and whenever I'm home I'll grab a few random copies and start reading (my favorite discovery was finding a big feature on Gerry Cooney in like 83 or 84, followed six months later or so by a big feature on...Gerry Cooney. He really was the Great White Hope). It's rather startling to see the way the magazine's evolved, in good ways and bad. Still my favorite though.

 

Agreed. That is sloppy. I've made mistakes before, but not three like that. One I might be able to understand, two tops. But three, at a mag the caliber of SI, is gross.

 

Well-written piece. But not something I prefer to see in SI, which is supposed to have plenty of excellent writers in its own right.

 

Perhaps if King wasn't so engulfed in which town has the best coffee shop, his copy would get the attention that's required.

 

I didn't look that up. I'm saying on the same page as the King correction are corrections for those other screw-ups.

 

I've never been more dissappointed in a SI after I went through the football preview. Didn't they do that Player Value Indicator (PVI) or other acronym shit like that every year anyways? So now that's the cover story - and then there's all those errors. The guy being ranked twice 200 spots a part is proof that King didn't put a full effort into it. It seems like he has too much on his plate or maybe he is just getting lazy. I've always like MMQB but I think that this fall's columns are slipping compared to year's past. The PWI mention earlier is great, though. I remember getting super pissed when Japanese guys I've never heard of would rank higher than Shawn Michaels.