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The broadcast started at eight-thirty, with final predictions from the booth. Gruden looked solemn. “I think the Kansas City Chiefs are in real trouble tonight,” he said. Jaworski looked at Gruden and Mike Tirico. “You guys can call me crazy, but I’m excited about Tyler Palko tonight,” he said. Tirico giggled, but Gruden just squinted.

Doyle approached him and said, “Do you know there’s a retired number in Williams football?” “Williams doesn’t retire numbers,” Quinn replied. “Apparently it does,” Doyle said. On the Monday after that game Quinn called Boyer and asked, “Williams has a retired football number?” “I don’t know about retired,” Boyer said, “but there’s this box down […]

It’s been two autumns now since JaMarcus Russell last played a down of organized football. This fall, when capable quarterbacks have been in high demand and short supply, he’s gotten no calls. The Raiders lost his successor, Jason Campbell, to a broken collarbone on Oct. 16, and last week they acquired 31-year-old Carson Palmer, who […]

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with […]

The secrets of Moneyball, eight years later. “The young men had heaps of fun, working crazy hours and, to blow off steam, knocking golf balls around the office, playing football among the cubicles and celebrating big wins with postgame refreshments at Boston watering holes. Then one day in 2002, a best-selling writer by the name […]

In 15 prison interviews with Yahoo! Sports and hundreds of telephone and email interactions, Shapiro laid out a multitude of reasons for blowing the whistle on his illicit booster activity. Chief is his feeling that after spending eight years forging what he thought were legitimate friendships with players, he was abandoned by many of the […]

So it was, then, with great and satisfying surprise that almost immediately upon arriving at the party, I found myself locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers, all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series Friday Night Lights. We spewed forth excitedly, like addicts—this was no […]

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why […]

I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is […]

When Jeanne Marie Laskas started reporting on the devastating impact of repeated hits to football players’ brains in 2009, the NFL was still in denial. By now the evidence is irrefutable, and every bloody Sunday (and Monday and Thursday) it becomes a little harder not to cringe with each collision. But if you’re a guy […]