Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

Takes me 10 minutes to translate the headlines to their features . . . which are typified by hard-to-read letters spaced out and thrown on the page in no particular order.

 

Another day, another "choose" question:

On an island for 6 months and you get to read just one, Reilly or Simers.

 

Reilly.

They're seldom this easy.

Next.

 

Suicide

 

It is truly amazing how much SI has changed since ESPN the Magazine debuted and that's not a compliment... At least SI is readable, a lot of great stories in The Magazine get buried in all of the colors and charts and all that BS... But there is a lot of stuff in SI that they never would have dreamed of doing 10 years or so ago...

 

10 years ago, it's Reilly without even thinking about it...

Today, it's Simers...

 

A guy is stranded on an island for six months, and you're going to force him to read Reilly or Simers? Isn't the man suffering enough?
Me, I'll take whatever washes up onshore -- whenever Tom Hanks and Wilson are done with it, of course.

 

They're moving towards each other . . . and of the numerous informal "swaps" which have occurred, the Mag appears to have gotten the best of them, in toto.

 

I still prefer SI, but I wonder if that's only because that's the one I've been reading for the last 25 years...

 

$2 million a year is insane...

 

So when does Rushin's no-compete end?

 

Always liked that a lot better. You'd get Leigh Montville one week, Rick Telander another, then a Karl Malone column lecturing Charles Barkley about being a role model.

Was anti-Reilly as columnist from the start, mostly because I really enjoyed the rotation of columnists.

Mizzou: good point on the downfall of SI. The closest I came to canceling was when they started "The Beat" back in 2000, with its "who athletes are having sex with/partying with this week" vibe. Then Bill Scheft wasted space for two years . . . ugh. They saw that ESPN was putting out a product whose design was skewed toward the short attention span set, and they strated skewing their writing that way.

And now ESPN is superior in writing, if not in presentation.