- Reuters
- Chargers fans may want to look away right about now.
To truly appreciate New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees’s 2011 campaign, which has now seen him break Dan Marino’s 1984 record for most passing yards in a single season, it helps to break it down by game. Brees has thrown for 5,087 yards so far this year—that’s 339.1 yards per contest. He has completed 70.7% of his passes—best in the league by almost three percentage points—and only 2.1% of those passes have been interceptions. He averages 2.7 touchdown passes a game.
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that the Saints are 12-3, and third in the NFC to San Francisco and Green Bay – one of the only teams with a quarterback having a season anything like Brees’s, Aaron Rodgers. The other one, the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady, needs 187 yards in Week 17 to also pass Marino’s mark. But until then, Brees is the sole leader.
At this point it’s pretty safe to say San Diego made the wrong call when it sold short on Brees after he spent five good years there. True, at 6 feet tall, Brees calls himself short enough to not have seen Darren Sproles score on his record-breaking pass in a Saints blowout of Atlanta Monday night. But the Chargers sent him packing to make room for draft pick Philip Rivers. Rivers has blossomed into a strong quarterback in his own right, but Brees has since cemented his case as one of the top passers of this and most other generations. And because he almost broke Marino’s record back in 2008 before falling just short, it became all the more important to the team to make sure Brees got it this year. “With all due respect to the Falcons (9-6), the Saints needed to get the record out of the way,” writes Jeff Duncan for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “The last thing they needed was to deal with the issue for another week. Now they can focus on the playoffs and the main priority: another Super Bowl run.”
In helping Brees to get the record, the Saints ran up the score on the playoff-contending Atlanta Falcons, who looked awfully feckless against Brees’s arm. The question now becomes whether Brady will also shatter Marino’s mark—the Patriots play Buffalo in Week 17 having clinched their division but not yet home-field advantage. (Rodgers also has an outside chance of breaking 5,000 yards; he needs 357 in his final game against Detroit.) Yes, Marino played in a different era, and so his record can’t be seen in exactly the same light as the one Brees just set. Different rules or not, though, Brees has come a long way since once being benched for Doug Flutie.
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It’s been a rough start to the season for the two most recent NBA champions. The Los Angeles Lakers, they of the vetoed Chris Paul trade and Andrew Bynum suspension, have dropped their first two games of 2011. The first was a tight Christmas Day loss to the formidable Chicago Bulls; 2010-11 MVP Derrick Rose put Chicago ahead with a gorgeous, physically improbable arcing runner in the lane.
The fact that that game ended with Kobe Bryant being blocked by three Bulls at once wasn’t reassuring for Lakers fans—Bryant, despite scoring 28 points, posted eight turnovers in the loss—and, after the Lakers fell to Sacramento last night 100-91, many Angelenos have already entered full-on crisis mode. Despite Bryant trimming his turnovers to two, he struggled down the stretch and shot 10-for-24 from the field. More worrying were the other Lakers’ performances: aside from Kobe, only Metta World Peace and Pau Gasol scored in double digits, and the porous defense allowed Kings Marcus Thornton and Tyreke Evans to both go for 20-plus. It’s hard to judge the Lakers until Bynum returns from his suspension, which has two more games remaining. That being said, a win in tonight’s match-up at home against the Utah Jazz, the third game in L.A.’s season-opening back-to-back-to-back, would do nicely to stave off terror sweats around Southern California until he returns.
At the very least, the Dallas Mavericks can empathize with these struggles. The reigning NBA-champions have been blown out in each of their opening two games, first by the Miami Heat and then by the Denver Nuggets, after letting defensive lynchpin Tyson Chandler head to the New York Knicks in the offseason. “A crowd that roared as the franchise raised its first championship banner one day earlier rained boos on the team late in the first half after consecutive turnovers led to two of the Nuggets’ 20 fast-break points,” Jeff Caplan wrote for ESPN. “In two games, a revamped Mavs squad that did not return six players from the title team and added five new faces – including a so-far disappointing Lamar Odom and Vince Carter – allowed 97 points in the first three quarters of both games and a total of 51 fastbreak points.”
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It’s well known that soccer carries more weight for fans outside the United States. But compared to cricket, soccer might as well be the American national pastime. Cricket is a virtual unknown to most Americans despite being a phenomenon in Southern Asia and elsewhere. With this in mind, ESPN the Magazine sent Wright Thompson to India for the 2011 Cricket World Cup and a test match between England and India, where he encountered some of the most famous cricket stars in the world—and, subsequently, some of the most famous people in the billion-person nation of India—from a place of relative ignorance.
“I knew the rules and knew that a Test match was the original and purest form of cricket, a game that can go on for five days,” Thompson writes. “Forty hours. I thought the same thing any sane person would think: How can a sporting event that lasts five days possibly still exist? There was also a personal aspect of that question: How was I going to pay attention to a game that lasts five days?”
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