Our weekly roundup of the most interesting sports columns online.
Magic Khakis returns!
Jason Gay writes about why Rex Ryan was one of the few still standing after the dust of the 2013 NFL regular season settled. The Jets finished 8-8, better than last season, and they did it without marquee names and with a sometimes exhilarating, often maddening rookie QB in Geno Smith.
Ryan kept his job mostly because his team’s lukewarm performance wasn’t nearly as bad as the crash-and-burn pre-season predictions, Gay argues. “The Jets actually gave Ryan a Gatorade bath Sunday, which was a little cringe-worthy, the coronation of mediocrity,” he writes of the team celebrating the announcement that ol’ Magic Khakis would be back. “Smith compared the locker-room reaction to winning the Super Bowl, which means only one thing: Smith needs to experience a proper Super Bowl celebration.”
His players appear to feel genuine loyalty and affection for Ryan, and now he’s installed a new, toned-down personality that might elevate the team above his antics in the headlines. Black Monday could have been a lot darker for the Jets, Gay concludes.
He helped Penn State
Dan Wetzel argues that Penn State coach Bill O’Brien’s ascendancy to the NFL with the Houston Texans should be celebrated at the still-healing school. “He was a powerful, no-nonsense presence,” Wetzel writes of O’Brien’s brief two-year tenure. “O’Brien asked his players to pledge loyalty to each other, to the school they chose, to their very real understanding that the Penn State football culture was richer and deeper than anything Jerry Sandusky had done.”
In spite of O’Brien’s recruiting successes, Penn State is still grappling with depleted depth, along with a lingering foul smell and a campus full of temporary leadership. But O’Brien’s ability to ignore the carnage in the rear-view mirror while he was at the helm leaves the school and the program in the best position it could be in. “O’Brien showed this isn’t a wasteland, that there is so much positive to still work with, so much potential to be tapped,” Wetzel concludes.
Why Rousey said no to Playboy
Bruce Arthur has a hugely entertaining roundup of the wittiest, stupidest, most deadpan and bizarre sports quotes of the year. Standouts include Ryan Whitney explaining the Oilers’ third-place position in Sports Illustrated‘s pre-season power rankings (“Well, marijuana is legal in some states now”), MMA fighter Ronda Rousey on why she won’t appear in Playboy (“No one should be able to see my cash and prizes for $5, OK?”) and Nicklas Backstrom on what’s to be learned from the Capitals losing their fifth game seven in six years (“Lesson? Maybe learn how to play in the playoffs, I would say”).
“Tim is a very nice person”
Richard Deitsch summarizes the most interesting quotes from the conference call that followed ESPN’s incredibly-surprising-out-on-a-limb-and-not-at-all-preordained-to-the-point-of-comical-redundancy hiring of their beloved Tim Tebow as an analyst.
My favourite didn’t come from Tebow at all but from Stephanie Druley, VP of production for college networks, who said, “Tim is a very nice person, as we all know… but he’s also a football junkie. He lives eats and breathes the game. That is what you look for in an analyst.” If anyone ever hired me for a job and then praised me as “a very nice person” as part of the explanation for why I was the right candidate, I would eat my own hair in embarrassment.
As for Tebow himself, he said his goal as an analyst is to “continue to be someone that is positive but also be someone that is objective,” and also to regain employment in the NFL. The tone of the whole session is the sports media equivalent of those corny university brochures showing people sitting on the industrial carpet of a dorm hallway, gesturing with psychotic enthusiasm about the chicken fajitas they just scarfed down in the cafeteria. Which is to say, this might be a fun circus to watch.