Don’t look now but your Saturday TV schedule from now through January will be plastered with college football — which is money in the bank for the country’s broadcast networks, sports cable networks and for the giant football factory universities.
But if you’re not this type of weekend warrior, you better learn how to fake it. Your standing at the office water cooler depends on it.
Both Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine, of course, go all out to win your support — but there is no need to buy both titles. Buy SI. It is superior to its rival — despite ESPN producing better writing and better photography in these head-to-head College Football Preview issues.
Take the titles’ dueling features on USC quarterback Sam Darnold — a favorite for the Heisman Trophy and to become the starting QB for the New York Jets in 2018.
ESPN’s story by Molly Knight is embarrassingly better than SI’s Darnold feature penned by Lee Jenkins. Knight outhustled Jenkins to get better info on Darnold as a kid (getting pulled away from shore as a 5-year-old on a boogie board), as a teen (breaking his hand against a locker after a loss while playing on his school basketball team) and at USC (his, aw, shucks, attitude during a photo shoot).
But ESPN, over 28 pages, doesn’t cover as much ground across the college football landscape or provide as much info as SI does over its 63-page college football section. SI, perhaps, just outgunned its rival. Those are the breaks, we guess.
The Time Inc. title breaks down the college football season week by week, highlighting the best games to watch.
Neither mag goes out on a limb and dares to pick a school not named Alabama to win the national championship — although ESPN’s Brad Edwards files a dissenting opinion in the form of Ohio State defeating the Crimson Tide in the final.
Then again, we’d like to see how the hundreds of pigskin prophets would pick a match-up of Alabama and New York’s best “college” team — the Jets.
Throwing a flag on youth sports
Talk about a brush-back pitch out of nowhere.
Time tells us we should take kiddie games seriously. In fact, its cover story reports on a $15 billion youth sports industry with all the crazy pressure and iniquities that come with it.
The industry is booming even as participation in relatively cheap Little League teams has fallen 20 percent from its peak 17 years ago.
“For better or worse, youth sports is being privatized,” said one investor. The parents interviewed here somehow act like these decisions are out of their hands, and they must succumb to their kids’ desire.
“This sports lifestyle is crazy,” one said. “But they’re your kids. You do anything for them.” Anything? Maybe that, right there, is the root of the problem.
Elsewhere, reporter Katy Steinmetz contemplates Trump’s review of 27 national monuments, which could eliminate or shrink the protected federal lands. Steinmetz points out that what locals have slurred as a “land grab” is further protecting parcels that the feds already own — a fact that anti-monument activists like Ammon Bundy have conveniently forgotten.
The chances that the landlord-in-chief will give a hoot? Probably not that high.
The New Yorker’s first television issue is anchored by Emily Nussbaum’s light-touch profile of Jenji Kohan, creator of “Weeds,” “Orange is the New Black,” and the new Netflix show “GLOW.”
Nussbaum has boosted Kohan for years, and the piece makes a case for her influence in bringing diverse people on screen and to the writer’s room, even though her output has been spotty at best.
