NEWSLETTER
What a beautiful Sunday it is today. It’s 79 and sunny in the Chicagoland area, the PGA Championship is on, and the White Sox are on (and haven’t made me want to puke in a few days). Oh, and I’m officially 14 days away from seeing Taylor Swift at Soldier Field! Swift was in Foxborough this weekend as her Era’s Tour made a three-day stop at Gillette Stadium. To commemorate the weekend, the Patriots social team polled the players in the building for OTAs on their favorite Taylor Swift jams.
- I can’t lie; the range of the picks by the Patriots players in this video took me by surprise. I was expecting the radio hits to be the popular answers. However, some true Swifites among this bunch were evident by their picks. We even had an All Too Well — 10 Minute Version mention!
- So, let’s talk about some actual football, eh? Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay shared his top five NFL players of all time on Friday after Jim Brown’s passing. Irsay went with Brown at No. 1. Okay, I can’t entirely agree, but to each their own. There was some recency bias there, given the tweet’s timing. Still, it wasn’t the strangest part of Irsay’s rankings.
- Irsay went with Colts killer Tom Brady at No. 2. Brady made a career of beating the Colts in the AFC playoffs when he was with the New England Patriots. Real recognize real, I guess. I can’t argue with that one at all. So, Irsay had to go with Peyton Manning at No. 3, right? Wrong!
- Not only did Irsay go with John Elway at No. 3, but he also omitted Manning from the list entirely. John Elway, the same quarterback who threatened to leave pro football for the baseball field so that Irsay’s dad Bob and the Colts wouldn’t draft him in 1983. Manning won four MVPs and led the Indianapolis Colts to their only Super Bowl under the ownership of the Irsay family.
- After getting criticism for that tweet, Irsay said: “No doubt Peyton, Barry Sanders, and Jerry Rice in Top 10. It’s just that Elway didn’t have great offensive players around him til the end, when he won 2 in a row, and his feet were remarkable, from baseball talents,” Irsay later tweeted.
- I came across a tweet last night while scrolling the Twitters that had me feeling equal parts nostalgic and frustrated.
- The training camp game mode on Madden NFL 2003 was PEAK Madden. I can’t even put a number on the hours spent playing that game mode alone. Couple the endless fun of that mode and the fact that in the early 00s era of Madden, franchise mode was king, and throw in the unmatched soundtrack of the 2003 game. You have, hands down, the best Madden NFL iteration, period.
- For about the better part of the last decade, Madden has been pretty crappy. Gone are the days of an immersive franchise mode. EA Sports has replaced that with the money-grab MUT (Madden Ultimate Team). But for the cost of the game and the capability of the next-gen consoles, EA should be able to accommodate both, and it stinks that they don’t.
- Brian Davis’ company is suing Bank of America over a failed bid to purchase the Washington Commanders.
