
Breaking news: Extremely talented and extremely cool wide receiver Randy Moss has announced, via Ustream, which is amazing, that he wants to return to the NFL for the 2012 season. Moss, who wears a five-o’clock shadow better than anyone save this guy, also happens to be one of the best wide receivers to ever play football, and should get a couple bites despite having not played since 2010. Football players are often well into their decline at 35, Moss’s age, but there’s a good chance that his prodigious skills—speed, a hell of a vertical leap, being a football genius—haven’t eroded: When guys are this good, aging profiles, rules, and precedent go out the window.
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Of course, the biggest story of the week was the emergence of Jeremy Lin for the Knicks, as well as the emergence of the Knicks, as well as the emergence of coverage of the Knicks. It’s been a hell of a story, with digital ink spilled pretty much everywhere. The gist of it: Lin, an evangelical, undrafted Asian-American, and the first Harvard man to play in the NBA since 1954, has produced at a historical level and brought a respectable winning streak to a heretofore shameful and terrible Knicks franchise. He has been one of the best players in the NBA since his debut, and now the Knicks are no longer figuratively unwatchable. (They remain literally unwatchable—Time Warner customers don’t get MSG, the team’s cable channel home.)There’s been debate as to whether his success—unprecedented, though it has tapered off some—is a product of his team’s system, a small sample size, or if it is in fact real. The current Knicks iteration is all offense and push, and Lin’s Jordanesque point totals might not exist if he played, say, on a slow team like the Pistons. Then there’s the argument that anybody can have a few good—OK, outstanding—games, and that once teams and coaches catch up to him, he’ll fall back to earth. This is, after all, a player who the entire industry whiffed on.
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Weird Al may sing Super Bowl halftime.That is all.@samreiss_Previously – February 6