Read, Skim, Scan - This Week's Sports Illustrated - November 28, 2011

... our worship but we rebel against."

ESPN is everywhere.  It's so ubiquitous that we often fall into the trap of thinking its the only sports coverage around.  Being the one stop sports shop - t.v., web, radio and print - is the business plan.  The brand is so accessible and delivers such acceptable content that its easy to forgo everything else.  Especially when we're all too damn busy to wade through the morass to find good stuff elsewhere.  That's where we come in, to show you there's life beyond The Monolith.

In between bouts of sleeping and working, we still manage to read the old faithful of sports journalism - Sports Illustrated.  And while it may seem like we're wasting our time with a dying medium, SI can still produces excellent content.  But since nobody has to time to read the whole thing, we'll endeavor to give you three recommendations each week (with links) - one to read in full, one to skim in brief, and one to scan for the highlights - to let you get the best without having to actually buy a magazine.  We read so you don't have to.

Read:  "Tim Tebow's Wild Ride."  Yes, more Tebow.  Hate him or not, he's still interesting and so is this article.  It gives an account of each of Tebow's starts through contemporaneous quotes from various sources - coaches, media and teammates.  What becomes apparent is that his teammates absolutely love him while everyone else, particularly Coach John Fox and VP John Elway who very much dislike him, remain very much unconvinced.

Skim:  "Bordering on Hatred."  Why should you waste your time on a story about a middling college football rivalry like the one between Missouri and Kansas?  Two reasons:  (1) to find out how it started - a nice Old West massacre played a part; and (2) to understand that sometimes maybe hurt feelings are as much to blame for forfeited rivalries as the evils of conference realignment.

Scan:  "In My Tribe" gets the pimp seat in the magazine this week (the last article before the old Rick Reilly spot - he's now busy doing awful, awful poetry on Monday Night Football) and it's super long.  It's all about defining sports moments in various writer's lives.  Didn't really work for us but it was a weak issue and maybe you'll be more susceptible to stories about how sports can be transcendent.