Blog

True to NFL life

Whenever I wonder just how true my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” is about the NFL, I encounter a story that reestablishes my equilibrium.

Such a story is contained in John Branch’s “In Manziel, a Draft Machine’s Human Cost.” It’s a by-now-familiar tale – the rise and fall of a big-time college football star. Johnny Manziel, aka “Johnny Football” – who won the Heisman Trophy as the best college player when he was a freshman quarterback at Texas A&M – was the main event in the 2014 NFL Draft, the 2016 version of which gets underway Thursday, April 28. ...

Read more

 

Read More

Whither Kaepernick in the game of musical quarterbacks?

So I’m sitting  in a sports bar in Tallahassee that has, according to my nephew James, 59,000 TVs, most of them tuned to college basketball, this being March madness. But a few are checking out the NFL Combine and the new prospects like Ohio State defensive star Joey Bosa, all glorious 6 foot, 6 inch, 276 pounds of him.

But there was no time to measure his defensive pulchritude as the networks quickly moved on to the game of musical quarterbacks. With Peyton Manning retired from the Denver Broncos, Brock Osweiler would’ve seemed to have had a lock on the job, but no, he bolted – a favorite verb of sportswriters – to the Texans. The Broncos then traded for Mark Sanchez, formerly of the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles, but no one thinks he’s a permanent first-string solution (except probably Mark Sanchez). ...

Read more

 

Read More