THOUGHTS ON: Grantland Quarterly Vol. 2 (2011)
Regarding whether sports used to feel more significant than they do now
NOTE: I had a new piece, Seven Proposed Alternative Conceptual Visions of the Savannah Bananas, go up on the main site last week if you didn’t see it.
I had the pleasure in mid-July of stopping into two places that I too rarely get to visit, both of which are located across the street from one another in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota: Allianz Field, home of Minnesota United FC, and Midway Used and Rare Books.
When I first set foot on University Avenue in August of 2022, the idea of a Major League Soccer stadium and an eclectic bookstore standing in such proximity to one another was foreign to me. Keep in mind that the soccer stadium in which I found god sits across the street from a Nebraska Furniture Mart. That day featured a 3-3 barnburner between the Loons and the Portland Timbers in the mid-afternoon, after which I stopped into Midway books and found copies of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and a collection of Ursula LeGuin essays.
Every summer since then, I've intended to stop by both, but I either never had the chance or never took the chance. This summer, I was determined to see both again. Allianz was gorgeous, cold, spirit, and the Loons lost 1-0 so I didn’t get to hear “Wonderwall”. My trip to Midway was fruitful: I found Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stars" in the fiction section and Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" in the nonfiction section. Shortly before I was about to head out, I asked the employee behind the check-out counter the same question I tend to ask at every bookstore: Do you have a section on soccer or sports in general?
I don't talk about this often, but a few years ago, I sent myself on a mission to amass a library of every book ever written on American Soccer. This is an impossible task to complete, but it's given me a sort of North Star to follow whenever I'm at a bookstore, and I've found books that I otherwise would never have sought out as a result of it. My favorites are "Bloody Confused" by Chuck Culpepper, a narrative of an American college football writer falling in love with Portsmouth FC in 2008, "A Massive Season" by Steve Sirk, a collection of columns covering the Columbus Crew's 2008 Supporters Shield/MLS Cup double-championship season, and "When The Dream Became A Reality" by Bobby Warshaw, which is one of the most brutally-honest, unvarnished memoirs I've ever read by any athlete, highlighting the unique sort of competitive ennui that finds American soccer players (particularly on the men's side, but it's present with the women as well).
Anyway, I didn't find any soccer books, but I found Grantland Quarterly issues 2,3, and 4, pictured above.
I either had completely forgotten or had never known that Grantland (Bill Simmons' now-defunct ESPN vertical) had published physical collections like these, but I picked up all three of them without hesitation. I loved Grantland during its run from 2011-15. I still appreciate Simmons' vision for it, perhaps best exemplified by the idea that the writing on the site deserved to be printed into hardcover volumes like these.
Simmons had a huge impact on my personal development, both directly and indirectly. The original 30 for 30 run in 2009, particularly Steve James' "No Crossover", is what first got me interested in documentary filmmaking, a hobby that's persisted since adolescence. I'm sure that I've talked about this somewhere before, but his Book of Basketball helped me to re-discover why I loved reading as a college freshman at home on winter break after a lifetime of required readings and attempts to shoehorn interests in genres like Science Fiction and Fantasy left me disinterested in it.
As I grow older and witness the degradation of the internet, I find Simmons' insistence that sportswriting, emphasis on writing, matters, to ring true as well. This feeling has grown as I've worked my way through Grantland Quarterly Volume 2, which collects essays from the Fall of 2011, as it's made me remember just how enthralling sports were during that time.
As I read through, I'm hit by just how massive everything felt and in what quick succession it all happened. Allow me to lay out, as succinctly as I can, the major storylines of Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 in American sports at the time to demonstrate this.
NFL:
The Dream Team Eagles, the Ryan/Sanchez Jets, and the Phillips/Romo Cowboys all collapse. The Manning era in Indianapolis ends with an unceremonious neck injury. The Packers flirt with going unbeaten in the regular season. The Patriots are rejuvenated with two breakout tight ends with very different futures ahead of them named Gronkowski and Hernandez. The Lions and Texans finally make playoff runs. The New York Giants limp into the playoffs at 9-7, then upset three future/former MVPs to win the Super Bowl. Tim Tebow quarterbacks the Denver Broncos and everyone has something to say about it. The very foundation of the league is threatened by the impact of CTE and the commissioner seems outmatched.
College Football:
Conference realignment tears the Big XII and Big East apart. The Backyard Brawl, the Border War, and Lone Star Showdown all come to premature ends. Pay-for-play and academic dishonesty scandals rock Ohio State, Miami, USC, and North Carolina. LSU and Alabama meet in a much-ballyhooed Game of the Century, which ends up as a 9-6 defensive struggle in favor of the Tigers. Everyone else outside of the SEC West fails to meet the moment. Oklahoma State loses in Ames, Stanford loses to Oregon, Oregon loses to USC, Boise State loses to TCU, Oklahoma loses to Baylor, Arkansas loses to both LSU and Alabama, Wisconsin gives up twin Hail Marys. We are left with a national championship rematch of Alabama and LSU, which Alabama wins easily. The Heisman, seemingly in the hands of Stanford's Andrew Luck, ends up going to Baylor's phenomenal Robert Griffin III after that upset win against Oklahoma. More shocking and certainly more important than anything that happens on the field is the mid-season indictment of Jerry Sandusky and firing of Joe Paterno at Penn State (and indeed, a single sentence here feels inadequate to cover it).
MLB:
Names like Harper, Trout, Machado, and Altuve break into the collective spotlight. The post-Selig Brewers have a dream NL Central-winning season in Milwaukee and seem poised for their first World Series run in nearly 30 years. The Red Sox and Braves both collapse despite 8-game leads in the Wild Card standings in September, giving up their slots to Tampa Bay and St. Louis on one of the most dramatic sports nights I can remember. St. Louis rides their momentum through Philadelphia and Milwaukee to meet Texas in the World Series. The Rangers, an out away from winning Game 6 and the series, are defeated an incredibly clutch performance by David Freese.
NBA:
After an incredibly entertaining season defined by the heel-turning Heatles, rising Thunder, tragic Bulls, collapsing Lakers, and Cinderella Mavericks, the NBA is headed for a momentum-killing lockout. David Stern's authority in the eyes of the players is damaged and never really recovers. Discussions over the CBA turn acrimonious and personal. Communication via social media gives players a voice and a direct line to breaking news that they hadn't had in prior labor disputes. This, built atop the contentious 2010 LeBron James free agency saga and the 2011 Carmelo Anthony trade saga, sparks what becomes known as the Player Empowerment Era. The Nets are about to relocate to Brooklyn after a controversial eminent domain deal and the NBA searches for an owner to buy the New Orleans Hornets franchise. The season is played, though shortened to 66 games and is set to begin on Christmas Day of 2011, which coincides with the end of Grantland Quarterly #2.
Everything Else:
Sydney Crosby misses the 2011 NHL season with a concussion. John Calipari's Kentucky squad, led by Anthony Davis, looks set to run through the SEC in college men's basketball. Brittney Griner and Baylor intend to break the Connecticut stranglehold on college women's basketball. Novak Djokovic disrupts the Nadal/Federer hegemony atop men's tennis. The PGA struggles forward despite the personal struggles of Tiger Woods. Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather remain atop boxing despite seeming vulnerable in recent fights. The USWNT is simultaneously rejuvenated by their 2011 World Cup run and reeling from their loss in the final on penalties. The USMNT fires Bob Bradley after a disappointing summer.
If you had asked me, prior to reading this book, if I remembered any individual factoids within the prior five blocks of text, I would have honestly told you that I did, but I had forgotten (a) how much of this piled up atop itself and (b) how huge it all felt at the time. Everything that happened in sports that fall seemed to reflect some essential underlying truth, and the essays within this collection reflect that. A Michael Schur essay asks whether the Red Sox' collapse portends a return to the franchise's Snakebitten pre-2004 ways. A Bill Simmons essay explores how deep the schism between Stern and the NBPA really is, and whether it can be repaired. Multiple essays by Brian Phillips and Chris Ryan explore the connection between the Tim Tebow phenomenon and the state of Christianity in American culture at the time. Two excellent essays by Michael Weinreb and Charlie Pierce, both reflective of their unique strengths and perspectives as writers, distill the confusion, hurt, and indignation surrounding what happened at Penn State.
It all felt like it mattered, like it meant something deeper. In the context of sports, yes, but it transcended into American culture in whole... and it all happened in such quick succession. The Cardinals won that dramatic World Series, LSU and Alabama played in that rock-fight 'Game of the Century', Tim Tebow led the first of his comebacks, and the details of the Penn State case all came out within about a four week span.
I contrast this with the context in which I found the book in the summer of 2025. I cannot remember an NBA Finals that felt less culturally significant than this year's. I enjoyed it, I thought the basketball was high-quality, but I missed Game 7 to play in a benefit trivia game at a local community center and didn't really regret it. A collection of the world's best soccer clubs came to the United States to play in a Club World Cup tournament and I didn't watch a minute of it. The sole culturally transcendent American sporting phenomenon of the moment (The WNBA rivalry between the Indiana Fever with Caitlin Clark and the Chicago Sky with Angel Reese) is on hold as both have dealt with injuries this year and the Sky are generally inept. It is August, yes, an infamously boring sports month, far from the fertile Autumnal soil in which this book's essays were grown, but I can't help but feel a disconnect between sports and the zeitgeist.
So, why do I feel this way? Why does this moment feel so much less significant than the moment compiled in Grantland Quarterly #2? I have a few ideas:
1) I was sixteen during the Fall of 2011 and I am thirty in the summer of 2025
I have to start out with this. When I say that it all felt huge, I must acknowledge that it all felt huge *to me*, and I was in the midst of a period of life in which everything, infamously, feels huge. I was, at the time, coming home from junior year of high school, reading blogs like Bleacher Report and EDSBS (and, yes, Grantland), and watching the block of Around the Horn into Pardon the Interruption on ESPN. I oriented myself around this stuff, ergo, it felt important to me. Fall 2011 was also a particularly fraught, memorable part of my life, and my brain tends to keep time through whatever sporting event is happening.
For example, I missed that LSU/Alabama game, but it plays a significant part in my development as a person, as it happened during one of the more significant weekends of my young life at the time. I had been signed up for a three-day leadership retreat through the Boy Scouts that I didn't want to attend, was informed within the early hours of that Friday evening that I actually wasn't really supposed to attend, given that my leadership positions within the Boy Scouts at the time were only "Assistant Banquet Coordinator" and "Orienteering Merit Badge Instructor". I moped through the entire weekend, genuinely had no insights to share to begin with, had to share a dorm room with two guys who spent the entire weekend trading the limited drinking stories they'd racked up by sixteen years old, found the material asinine (this was where the fever dream "The Game of Life" anecdote I've told friends and do not have space on this post for came from), and by the end of the weekend had developed a cynicism about the concept of leadership that led me to shirk any type of titled leadership role through college and had decided to pull away from that particular part of scouting once the aforementioned banquet was to take place. In retrospect, the detail that says the most about young Joe is the contradiction between the manner with which I discuss that entire weekend (as if I had been taken there in handcuffs) and the reality that I had actually driven myself there but never once thought to just stand up, drive home, take whatever discipline was to come from it, and move on, but that is also too much to cover in this blog. A non-insignificant amount of the angst came from the fact that I did not get to watch this football game of great significance. I remember checking ESPN.com during a bathroom break on my phone and feeling a bitter sort of glee that everyone who wasn't stuck in the leadership seminar didn't get to see any offense either.
I spill all of that ink to demonstrate that everything that happened that fall had this effect on me, because everything that happens when you're sixteen has that effect on you. I have illustrative anecdotes like that about Robert Griffin III, David Freese, and the 2011 Lions as well. Tebowmania intersected with that anecdote, oddly, as we had to pre-emptively reschedule that banquet I was assistant-coordinating, held in the conference center at Arrowhead Stadium, after it became clear that the Chiefs would lose the AFC West race to the Broncos, miss the playoffs, and leave the stadium open during the second weekend of January 2012.
The caveat here is that I can, and will, identify things that were significant to me, but not transcendent. The opening season of Sporting Kansas City at then-Livestrong Sporting Park was hugely significant to me, for example, but not in the zeitgeist. There was an awesome Shaun White moment at that year's X Games that I'll always remember watching live in my parents' living room during a day off from Band Camp, but it was not a subject for Grantland Quarterly. I could differentiate between big *to Joe* and big *to culture*.
2) We are decentered
I was listening to Bomani Jones' The Right Time podcast a few weeks ago when he had Harold Bryant on as a guest. Bomani said something about his relationship to baseball that really struck me -- "I felt like I knew more about what was going on in baseball when we were watching SportsCenter every night." I hadn’t realized it, but that’s happened to me as well. Regular season baseball pairs well with nightly highlight shows and newspapers, in which a viewer can get an eye on what’s going on around the league but not stare intently at everyone. It allows viewers to accumulate information through repetition over time. I sincerely don’t know if SportsCenter still fulfills this purpose on a nightly basis or not, as I don’t make a habit of watching it, and I don’t really pay attention to anything related to baseball outside of coverage of the Royals on The Athletic. As a result, I don’t know that much about baseball anymore, whereas I used to know more about it without even really trying to learn it. College basketball has suffered from this as well.
I have a theory that the move away from print and television to the internet reduced many of the chances we had to unintentionally interact with a topic. For example, take this recording of college basketball highlights from a SportsCenter episode in 2008. If I only really cared about seeing the highlights of the Kansas/Iowa State game, I would’ve needed to wait through six other games to get there. At least through osmosis, I’d learn about BYU and New Mexico, Drake and Missouri State, Memphis and Tulsa, et cetera before getting to what I wanted. There’s a Jimmer Fredette highlight in there three years before his NPOY season, and I would’ve learned about him as a freshman. If I were instead presented with those six highlight packages as a series of video thumbnails in that exact order, I am certain that I’d scroll down past the first five to the Kansas/Iowa State highlight, watch it, and learn nothing more about those other teams. I could choose to watch those other five highlights, but I don’t really care about them.
I was reading Sports Daily in the Kansas City Star in the waiting room at my doctor’s office the other day and had a similar experience. I don’t really follow news about the Chiefs, being the way that I am, but I scanned my eyes over the sports section and saw an article about Chiefs offensive lineman Jawaan Taylor and his recovery from a meniscus tear in his knee, which I read. I thought it was sort of curious how the Chiefs had so many good offensive linemen but Patrick Mahomes seemed to be so frequently hurried by defensive pressure last season. Having read that article, I now know that their left tackle, arguably the most important position in the protection of a right-handed quarterback, played much of last year with a knee injury. I would not have clicked on that article, but my life has been enriched, if only slightly, now that I’ve read it.
This is the double-edged sword of the agency that the internet has given us: I only have to see what I know I want to see, but I’m also able to silo myself away from everything else. My personal example here is that I care more about American soccer than anything else in sports. I have paid subscriptions to MLS Season Pass, Backheeled, Jon Arnold’s Getting Concacaf’d, and Soccerwise. I follow John Muller’s USL Tactics blog, Arman Kafai’s Footy Analytic Musings blog, Alessandro Acquistapace’s Medium blogs, and American Soccer Analysis. This is more information than I ever could’ve found on American Soccer pre-internet, certainly, and even during the 2010s there weren’t so many extensive, insightful options to follow. The tradeoff here is that I am the only person in my personal life who cares about this to this extent, so I don’t really gain any cultural touchstones over which I can connect with others. My knowledge about this topic is closer to arcana than water cooler fodder. There is very little potential for cross-over, even among soccer fans generally. I feel something akin to paternalistic pride about the breakout years that MLS veterans Andy Najar and Michael Boxall have had in 2025, but didn’t know who Rodrigo De Paul even was before he signed with Miami last month.
Since I spend so much time, energy, and money on that topic, I don’t end up spending it on other sporting topics that might actually serve as those touchstones for cultural crossover. I don’t know who the AL Cy Young front-runner is. I couldn’t even tell you with 100% confidence which players from either of my favorite MLB teams made the All-Star game. I couldn’t tell you who’s projected to be good in football in the Big Ten this season, even. I suspect that most other people are in their own silos as well, to varying degrees, which makes it more difficult for the sports to cross over.
This is probably best exemplified within the collection in the essay “Tim Tebow and The Miracles” by Chris Ryan, which points to the social media proliferation of the “Tebowing” pose as evidence of Tebow’s transcendence past the game of football. That it broke containment made it feel significant. Late night talk show hosts worked “Tebowing” into their monologues, it was in SNL sketches, people did the pose at mountaintops and on cruise ship decks and the grocery store freezer aisles then shared those images on social media, your parents knew about it, local news segments covered it outside of the sports block. I’m thinking of significance as something defined by that cultural crossover, but so few of us look at those typical sites of cultural crossover now that it’s harder for anything to feel like it’s making purchase culturally. And in the odd cases that something makes purchase
3. We are drowning in the discourse that felt novel back then and we hate it now
The Onion had this funny recurring bit back in 2019 where they’d rerun an article with the title “Report: Make it Stop” and just update the accompanying graphic to reflect whatever new thing was defining public discourse at that moment. They did this every few months and the point resonated the same way every time, because there’s very little joy or fun in transcending from sports culture to popular culture anymore. In fact, it seems like it’s in everyone’s best interest to avoid becoming that sort of transcendent figure, because becoming that transcendent figure leads one to be churned up and processed into a talking point for an ongoing, endless, and ultimately self-destructive discursive culture war.
I mentioned the Chicago/Indiana rivalry in the WNBA earlier as an example of a rare culturally significant sporting phenomenon, but it strikes me that neither Clark nor Reese seem to particularly enjoy the spotlight they’ve received. It cannot be fun for either of them to represent what people in a very cynical industry have decided that they both represent, to have every statement and action analyzed and aggregated by commentators who don’t sincerely care about their sport. It starts to feel as if anything that happens in sports has the potential for podcasters and Twitter users to grind axes against.
Brian Phillips identifies this phenomenon way back in 2011 in his essay “Tim Tebow, Converter of the Passes”:
Somewhere within all our reptilian hearts lurks an instinct for trial-by-combat. This instinct tells us that when a person is strongly associated with an idea, we can use that person’s success or failure within the sphere of competitive athletics as a legitimate indication of the quality of the idea.
This was very clean with Tebow. Since he was so devoutly and outwardly Christian and seemed pleased to take on a role as a symbol of Christianity, it was easy to make the leap out of just that football context. Part of the problem now is that these athletes get conscripted into their symbolic statuses, regardless of whether they want to take them on. Travis Kelce did not yearn to become a figure in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories when he started playing football. Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid did not yearn to become proxies for racial bias in sports media. Tyrese Haliburton did not yearn to become the symbol for ‘not being cool’.
This is all forced by a media ecosystem that needs these metatextual debate points to survive now. The algorithmic backbones of social media sites like TikTok and Twitter give priority to those who post more frequently and about emotionally-charged topics. People whose careers require 4-5 hours of podcasting per week need to have things to discuss, and if they need to devote that much time to talking about something, they probably won’t spend it in thorough film analysis, they’ll need to reach out for those simpler, easier to grasp topics. Those podcasts then get chopped into the most reactionarily fertile pieces which get shared out of context on those social media sites. This has always been the case in sports talk radio, but it’s become the default approach to sports media generally.
I really recommend that you read that Phillips essay about Tebow. He touches on the obvious religious live-wires about Tebow, but he identifies the inherent absurdity underlying the discussion as well. He does this in a column of about 1,400 words, which takes a few minutes of dedicated focus to read. This is just not how the vast majority of sports commentary is created and consumed in 2025, which leads me into the final thought:
4. Sports commentary of today would not (and could not) be collected in a printed volume like this
There are, throughout the book, single-page excerpts from a few podcast episodes. They are very easy to skip and provide little insight. I’ll provide one for you here:
There are maybe ~ten excerpts from Grantland podcasts included in this book, and they all work about this poorly in a printed medium fourteen years after the fact. These shows were not created to work in a printed medium fourteen years after the fact, to be fair, and they’re only supplemental to the writing that fills the rest of these pages… But that’s the problem. The hierarchy has shifted. Sportswriting (especially longform sportswriting) has taken a backseat to podcasting, livestreaming, and debate shows. As I’ve stated several times in this piece, I listen to some sports podcasts. I really have no qualms with sports podcasts – But there is not a situation in which I’m going to go back and listen to a sports podcast from 2011. Commentary podcasts (and livestreams, and a lot of YouTube videos) are a kairotic medium, they have expiration dates after which they become irrelevant.
Good sportswriting can stand the test of time, though. The Weinreb and Pierce essays about Penn State still resonate, not just in how they reflect the emotions of the time, but how they define the hypocritical environment that allowed those crimes to take place, which helped me to see where those same hypocritical environments lay currently and analyze what changes have been made in years since. Though there is still a lot of really good sportswriting online and in print, it’s not the default manner (and probably not one of the top five manners) in which fans interact with sports commentary, having lost a lot of ground to these easier, more ephemeral forms.
As a result, the complex, the nuanced, and the evergreen qualities produced by good sportswriting take a cultural back seat to the knee-jerk, the reactionary, and the stakeless qualities that have rendered sports commentary such a miserable endeavor.
So, to answer my question, sports in 2025 feel so much less significant than they did in 2011 because the culture of commentary surrounding them has spoiled. The unique blend in the hierarchy between social media, television, print, and online media has changed to benefit the worst aspects of each and leave people without shared cultural touchstones.
I can see a manner in which this improves, but it would require the diminishment of social media or even the internet in general (which seems more likely than it used to, given the ongoing degradation of social media sites in the late stages of “Enshittification”, the encroachment of LLM-powered spam into online communities, and age verification legislation with the potential to cause so much friction in one’s internet experience that they check out entirely) and an intentional move back towards traditional media like print and television. This will require people to repair their attention spans and unlearn their aversion to paying for writing that they’ve developed in the past few decades. This is possible (I know from personal experience and I’ve met others who have done so), but on a mass cultural scale, it’s hard to foresee it happening.