Peter King screws up

King deserves the majority of the blame, here . . . hey, if he didn't screw it up, there's no problem, to begin with . . . but the thing was obviously rammed through, with no one with an ounce of professional pride bothering to eyeball the piece while dedicating a thimbleful of mature thought to its integrity . . . too bad.

 

Come on, Mizzou.
This is a pretty big whiff.
And it's not just on PK. Thought SI had editors. How do they miss that?

 

"When Fortune puts Marriott at both #203 and #459, you can compare the two."

Great point. And it's definitely a fact-checker issue more than it is PK. I'm guessing he didn't file the 500 in a single take, and somebody has to go through it and make sure nobody is two of the top 500 players in the league. Fabian Washington gets in there twice? Of all the guys to double up.

And Chris Simms No. 500? You get 16 guys per team -- that's nearly a third of the league, so congrats to those elite players who graduated in the top 30 percent of their class -- and can't close out the list with somebody better than the No. 4 quarterback for a last-place team?

It's not a bad concept, and it's carried throughout the preview. You can't do a top 50 list without oversight, so I'm sure there's somebody who's top-100 worthy (at least once) who's not on the list. I honestly don't care enough to go through and see who he's missing.

 

The accountability is shared, but Sports Illustrated used to be known for its tireless fact checking. So it is surprising.

 

How can you say it more simply than that??

Missing a comma = nitpicky.
Typos = nitpicky but objectionable.
Attempting to compile a list of 500 without checking to be sure you didn't repeat = careless and sloppy.

 

I wonder if the fact-checking decline has something to do with the fact that the magazine is really rammed out there quickly now. It's amazing how I'll see something from two or three days before in the magazine, but that has to screw up the vetting process.

 

When I clicked on this thread, I was stunned when the mistake wasn't...

1. Brett Favre
2. Brett Favre
3. Brett Favre

 

The most entertaining part of this thread is the harping from you folks all hot and bothered when SI makes a mistake. I don't work for SI and have met King only once or twice, but it was an ambitious project that was interesting even with the miscues.

For all those of you out there who go a month without a single correctable error in your sports section, please drop me a line and tell me all about it.

For Pete's sake (pun intended), get a freakin' life.

 

clutch, so if Peyton Manning was No. 1 and No. 204, would it just be a little "miscue"?

 

If King thought this list up on his own, he's insane, given his workload. But that's why he gets the big money. I've worked on these kind of lists, and they must get multiple, thorough read-throughs from different people, throughout the edit process. A typo was bad but I prayed that I didn't miss something infinitely more embarassing.

I thought it nitpicky, but I saw a "tk" in a chart in the football fantasy preview a few weeks ago. That's a no-no.

In a related note, I see they've upped Gary Smith's workload -- to the detriment of his reputation. That Minaya piece was inescapably forgettable.