Cal Newport

And he's just riffing on a lot of ideas about football as a sport and its cultural position and its relationship to his own life.

And I've always really enjoyed his writing.

So it's good.

How did it compare to America's Game when you read that a couple years ago?

You know, it's very different because America's Game is a history.

It's like, what is the history of the NFL?

Like, how did this go?

Klosterman, he just, like, has ideas and runs with them.

So it's esoteric, kind of nonlinear.

eccentric observational essays like on football.

Like the tactics or like the media component of it and stuff?

A little bit on tactics.

I mean, different stuff, right?

Like, so let me be specific.

Like there's one long essay where he's just trying to grapple with the question of like, who's the best football player ever.

Okay.

And then from there, he really gets into like how do we measure such a thing because like training technology has gotten better.

And if you take an athlete from today and brought him back in time to the era of Jim Thorpe, like they're going to be incredibly more athletic than Jim Thorpe.

But relative to other athletes, Jim Thorpe was –

way more impressively athletic.