Daily Loaf

Rick Reilly is lucky I’m not his editor. Fo’ real. Because if he had turned in this piece of garbage across my desk, he’d be wearing it, along with my lunchtime plate of linguini.

Exhibit A:

If you look at Collins’ face this week, you’ll see a big cut on his nose. He was deer hunting, saw a six-pointer loping by, didn’t have time to get a good rifle rest on his shoulder, fired anyway and the recoil nailed him. But he got the deer.

Figures. He never did like to pass the buck.

If you didn’t already believe in the innate goodness of human nature, consider this: Kerry Collins, the subject of the article, had to have read these last lines and somehow resisted the urge to mount Reilly’s head in his trophy room.

Take the time to carefully read, analyze and suffer through his prose, and you’ll realize that the last sentence is the entire piece’s raison d’etre. Because were it not for that horrible pun disguised as a cutesy, life-revealing anecdote, Reilly would never have written his profile of Tennessee Titans quarterback Kerry Collins as a stand-up guy who doesn’t make excuses when he sucks. God bless Kerry Collins, he’s like a modern day George Washington (albeit one incarnated as an NFL journeyman).

It gets worse, though (or better, depending on your masochistic tendencies):

No matter how he screws up his life—and the young Collins found more ways than MapQuest—he always faces the music. Hell, he sticks his face in the tuba.

And with one mighty swoop of his metaphor, our inveterate, aging sports writer proves he knows what the Internet is. Which is then followed by a trite idiom made even worse and literal with a musical instrument reference. At this point, after taking the brown paper bag away from my mouth, I would order more food (the messier, the better) just to throw it at Reilly.

Exhibit B:

After he performed like a Xanaxed ferret in the 2001 Super Bowl, lobbing four picks to the Ravens in the Giants’ blowout loss, he stood at the podium postgame and said, “I sucked today. I was prepared. I was ready. I just played terrible.”

I’m almost ready to concede that Reilly might be a genius, because I haven’t a clue as to what a “Xanaxed ferret” performs like. Until I remind myself that I’m reading what’s supposed to be an illuminating profile of an NFL football player and its author has just used the phrase “Xanaxed ferret.”

It’s a shame, really, because this is the graf where Reilly supports his thesis, where Collins mans up in front of the whole world and refuses to say that, despite throwing four interceptions and guiding his team to a 34-7 loss, he played a pretty fucking awesome game.

Exhibit C:

Vince Young melted down in the second week of the season. There was talk of guns, confusion and suicide. Even his mother said her boy was “hurting inside and out.”

And yet sitting at the next locker was a man who once made Britney Spears look Amish. Still, Young has never asked Collins to help him.

I think Reilly’s being a little harsh here. Let’s give Young the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t know he was locker buddies with a guy who would rather risk permanent facial scarring than let Bambi lope free one more minute on God’s green earth. I won’t comment on “once made Britney Spears look Amish” except to say that at this point in the editing process, I would have leapt over the desk and put Reilly in a headlock until he agreed to a rewrite.

Because the buck stops here.

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