I am an idiot. My favorite writer on the NFL is Gregg Easterbrook, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback. He'd been writing that column over the last two years in Slate and it didn't come back this season. I thought, Well, too bad, he's doing something else (Easterbrook is a very level-headed issues and politics journalist who in the past has been a frequent contributor to the New Republic, which is where I picked up on him during TNR's Andrew Sullivan-Michael Kelly period, back when TNR was really good), maybe writing another book (I read a terrific one by him, the name of which I have unfortunately forgotten, on the environment; his conclusion was that the market and improved technology have been the major causes of today's much-cleaner-than-25-years-ago environment and should be allowed to keep doing their work, and that overregulation is not only economically unsound but in the long run environmentally harmful, since it causes resources to be wasted that could be more productively employed elsewhere. He's a be-concerned-but-don't-panic guy on environmental issues, which I consider moderate and reasonable.) Anyway, the reason I like his football writing so much is that he doesn't pretend to be a sportswriter; his point of view is that of a generally well-informed, amused but rather detached TV spectator who uses the reasoning skills he developed writing about politics and issues to give readers a perspective that you never see anywhere else. I just found him. He's on ESPN and he's still writing on football; he's just getting paid more for it, I hope a lot more. Check him out.