Leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, I was originally not planning to write an article on the big game. The Super Bowl already gets its fair share of attention, and I was expecting this game to be about the same as the last time the Steelers were in the Super Bowl. Heading into Sunday, Pittsburgh was definitely the better team; though not by the seven or so points that they were given in the spread. I never would have guessed after the first three quarters of play that we would be in for one of the most exciting fourth quarters in recent memory. Oh, and what a fourth quarter it was. But let’s keep things in perspective. It was just the fourth quarter that was exciting, while the rest of the game was very blasé. Yet the media can’t help but try and make the entire game look like it was worth the buildup.

As soon as the Cardinals took the lead in the fourth quarter, newspapers across the country were readying themselves to print one of two possible headlines. The headline would either read: “Cardinals Pull Off Upset in Greatest Super Bowl Ever!”  or “Steeler Nation Rejoices After Best Super Bowl Ever!” Don’t believe me? On Monday, Mike and Mike, PTI, and Around The Horn all debated if this was the best Super Bowl of all time. And those were just the shows on ESPN. Even Roger Goodell, not 20 minutes after Kurt Warner became the Kurt every Rams fan remembers him as and fumbled away the Cards last chance, proclaimed this Super Bowl better than last year’s. Really? You mean to tell me that last year’s Super Bowl, the same Super Bowl that saw the #5 seed Giants, who were 13-point underdogs and having barely made it into the playoffs, the same Giants that were one good Brett Favre throw from never making the Super Bowl in the first place, those Giants beating the Patriots, those same Patriots who were 18-0, knocking on the obnoxiously loud and frightening door-knocker of history, those same Pats who were a minute and change from taking away all purpose to Mercury Morris’ existence, in the same Super Bowl that saw David Tyree earn himself his own personalized catch animation in Madden 2009, you mean to tell me that this year’s Super Bowl was better than that one? This year’s Super Bowl, with the #2 seed Steelers beating the Arizona Cardinals who, until four weeks ago, were on the butt-end of every NFL joke’s punch line? C’mon Roger, that’s bush league for you to even put those two games in the same sentence.

But in fairness, Goodell wasn’t the only one making use of superlatives irresponsibly. Of the many offenders, Rick Reilly was certainly one of them. In his two-minute wrap up of the Steelers’ victory, Reilly has the rocks to utter the following statement: “…The right thing happened to history. The NFL now has its Yankees. Pittsburgh has won six Super Bowls, more than anyone in history!” I honestly think he put as much thought into that previous comment as the NBC execs did when they decided to sell-out the cast of Heroes with their rendition of “Feeling Alright”. The Steelers are the Yankees of the NFL? That’s quite a bold statement. Especially considering, out of 106 World Series trophies handed out, the Yankees own 26 of them and the next closest are the Cardinals with ten. That’s more than twice as many as the team who takes home the silver. By the comparison that Reilly makes, you’d think that the Steelers were pulling a Phelps (minus the bong) by blowing the competition out of the water with the number of Super Bowl rings they have. You know who has the next most Lombardi’s after the Steelers? Two teams, the 49ers and the Cowboys, both have five. Not quite the same hurting the Yankees have been putting on to the rest of the teams in the l900’s.

This type of journalistic free balling brings me to the main point of this article. Like I said, I’m not writing a Super Bowl article. No, this is an article about Rick Reilly and how far he’s come (or gone) in the last six months since signing with ESPN. For the record, I used to love Rick Reilly. His Life of Reilly column at the back of Sports Illustrated was always the first thing I turned to every Thursday when my copy got delivered in the mail. It was also the reason why I chose SI over ESPN the Mag year in and year out. But he doesn’t need to get his accolades from me. After a bit of Wikipedia research, I found out Reilly has won 11 Sportswriter of the Year awards and six of his columns were featured in the Best American Sports Writing series. But it’s because of all these accolades that make his current stuff so disappointing. Let’s have a look at what’s been happening more recently in The Life of Reilly.

Reilly’s last article was about an unlucky man who lost his job due to the recession then became a lucky Phillies fan when he ended up celebrating their World Series victory in the locker room. It’s a story that contains the type of inside information that you could only get if you were an established sportswriter and people didn’t blow off your interview requests. But nowhere in the article did Reilly elaborate on how an ordinary man could sneak himself into the Phillies locker room, other than with vague quotes from his friends saying things like, “He’s good at that stuff.” 

The article before that, Reilly wrote about tough it’d be for Larry Fitzgerald to keep his objectivity while reporting on this year’s Super Bowl, and how important it’d be for him to do so because he was such a long-tenured writer for the newspaper. Something important that Reilly decided to gloss over was the fact that the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the newspaper to Papa Fitz writes for, is a newspaper no ones really heard of. All week people from Minnesota have been on the airwaves, saying how this was the first time they had ever heard of Fitzgerald’s newspaper. It probably would have been better for the newspaper’s subscription numbers if Fitzgerald just wrote, MY SON IS BETTER THAN YOUR SON!” over and over, instead of trying to remain objective.

But that’s not all. Reilly’s chronicle of “Beer Pong, the Next Great American Pastime” was a story that could have just as easily been written by any frat guy across the country, and he wouldn’t have to travel to Vegas for the World Series of BP. Real beer pong (or even real-er, Beirut) doesn’t happen in Vegas with 50K on the line, it happens in every college dorm on tables that are actually closet doors, where the only time money enters the equation is when you’re trying to decide who’s buying the cases and who’s buying the cups. Oh, and if you’ve ever seen the picture that’s at the top of this article, someone needs to teach that guy the elbow rule (and the “you-aren’t-allowed-to-straddle-the-table-while-taking-a-shot” rule while you’re at it). 

His Jan 7 article about why Utah should be the national champion only gave us one reason. One. And by the time his article came out, everyone and their Mormon uncle already knew that Utah was the nation’s only undefeated team left. It’s the type of argument you’d hear out of any radio phone-in junkie stuck in 5 minutes of traffic, or by a girl down the hall who just started watching college football because she “kind of likes that Tea-boo guy”. But it’s not the type of argument you would expect to hear out of a man who has as much hardware as Reilly does sitting on his shelves at home.

Those previously mentioned articles certainly aren’t the worst things I’ve ever read. They had a purpose, got a point across, and were at least slightly humorous. At least they weren’t preaching anything stupid or negative to the people reading them. Which is exactly why these last two articles really steam my beans. Reilly has a history of using emotional personal stories to drive his articles. In November, he wrote about Barry Scott, the ex-soldier, ex-policeman, and ex-living human being who died after losing a boxing match for charity. Reilly writes that throughout his whole life, Barry Scott never backed down from a challenge, which is how he found himself in Iraq, then as a cop, then in a boxing match against a guy who had 20 pounds on him. In the end, Scott never knew when enough was enough, and he died following that match, leaving behind his police unit, his wife, and his baby son. Through this article, Reilly is honoring a man who devoted his life to good, but at the same time he’s honoring a lifestyle where you go balls-deep into everything without considering the consequences. Scott didn’t consider the consequences of entering that ring, and despite it being for a good cause, there is no way that fight is worth the price that his family has to now pay in his absence.

Sportswriters everywhere love to draw attention to the toughness that has become synonymous with football. A true football player is supposed to fight through anything, literally anything, to make sure he makes it out there on game day. But often times we forget that it’s just a game, and outside of the game these players are people who still live lives outside of the game. Reilly certain muddies that line when he wrote his article in October about Trevor Wirke, the high school senior who cut off his pinky finger so he wouldn’t miss the his senior season. Cut it off, for about a dozen lousy football games. Was it dedication, or a brash misguided decision by someone who may not yet be old enough to buy a scratch ticket? The only thing worse than that decision was the fact that his parents let him go through with it. And then that Rick Reilly decides to glorify the deed with an article dedicated to it. Reilly undeniably shows reverence to this kid, and pays homage to the fact that he is now down one appendage. Is that what we should try and live up to? Cutting of this little piggy just to stand beneath the bright lights… of high school football?

Maybe I’m just picky. Maybe I expect too much out of a guy who I semi-idolized a few years ago. Pam from The Office said it pretty well when she was talking about her parents and how when she was younger she always thought that her parents were love-struck soul mates, until she got older and realized their love wasn’t really love. That’s how I feel about Rick Reilly right now. For the longest time, he was the gold standard for sports writing in my mind. He was the best of the best, and there was no way he could be writing a crappy, poorly structured column with a less than wholesome message. Eventually you realize that even Rick Reilly isn’t the perfect journalist, and that he doesn’t get carte blanche for making mistakes. I like to think that Rick Reilly has just resting on his laurels since the switch the ESPN. He’s bring home a lot more money for doing what he’s always done for SI, and he’s even getting himself the occasional face time, either on Sportscenter, or ESPN.com, or both. To be honest though, it’s not so much that I think he’s resting on his laurels, as much as I hope he is. At least then you can hold out hope that the good stuff will make its return, sometime in the future when he’s done rolling around in the lettuce ESPN delivered at his door. But if not, and this is really all Reilly’s got in the tank, then it may just be the end of an era. It’s possible though, that he just stubbed his finger a while back and has trouble typing now. If that were the case, the best advice is to lop that sucker off so he can get back to quality writing. Isn’t that right, Rick?