Use these player groupings to make smart draft decisions.
With one week to go before the first game of the 2022 NFL season, there’s still time to have your fantasy draft. That makes it more important than ever to examine your fantasy positional “tiers.” Unlike my regular player rankings, which you can also find on Sports Illustrated, tiers group players of similar value together. So, if you miss out on a particular player, you can see alternatives on his tier.
A new Pokémon means, well, lots of new pokémon. And the lead-up to Pokémon Violet and Scarlet has been full of monster reveals, the most recent of which is an artist who stays up all night and is a bit of a loner.
Grafaiai, as it’s called, was revealed today in a clever documentary-style video clip that really makes me want a David Attenborough narrated series all about pocket monsters. The toxic monkey pokémon is cute, of course, but as with many of its adorable contemporaries, things get pretty dark when you look at the details. Here’s the official description:
Grafaiai is a moody pokémon with a fastidious disposition. It doesn’t form packs, preferring to roam alone, and it is constantly caught up in territorial struggles with other…
The AirPods Max are the most premium listening device offered by Apple, but don’t pay full price. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge
Holy hell, it’s September. A major Apple event is next week, and summer is pretty much over (except for the crippling heat, that is). Before you know it, we’ll be talking about “Techtober” and holiday shopping. Wait, before you throw your keyboard or phone at me, I’ll get to the deals.
First up, you can pick up the AirPods Max in select colors (silver, pink, blue, and green) for $429, which is a cool $120 off their full price. This is the best possible price for a new pair of AirPods Max so far. They are regularly discounted to $479, so you should never pay full price, but this deal doesn’t come around all the time.
While $429 is still a sizable amount for headphones, the noise-canceling AirPods Max are some of the best options around…
My wallet now contains dozens of Bahamian Benjamins, with a picture of a very perky pre-jubilee Queen Elizabeth II on one side and an enormous sailfish on the other. The result of a helpful sign at a bank on Freeport indicating the smallest note available was $100, and me assuming that must be small change. In the context of what I was in the Bahamas for, it certainly was.
(Ocean Cup)
Fresh off the plane from London, I’d spent a day inhaling caffeine and Domaine Michel Lafarge at Balthazar in Manhattan before heading to the Bahamas to hop into a 52-foot, flame-red, 2,700 horsepower, dual Mercury-engined twin-hull Mystic powerboat, with Cocaine Cowboys overtones and numerous Guinness Book of World Records entries to its name. Capable of reaching an insane 165 mph on the water.
(Ocean Cup)
I scratched my head and determined that this was definitely an occasion for the triple-lined incontinence pants and beta blockers. Especially as I would not be driving it, but strapping myself into a carbon fiber monocoque hull at the mercy of a dynamic duo known as “JHook” on the P1 offshore powerboat racing scene.
(Stu Jones)
The JHook being veteran racers, American Jay Johnson and Brit Nigel “Captain” Hook. The previous day they had yet again one-upped themselves and their Lucas Oil-liveried missile by breaking their own record from Palm Beach, Florida to Freeport in the Bahamas in the burgeoning Ocean Cup series.
Taking just 58 minutes or so to complete the nearly-100-mile trip that Google tells you takes 4 hours and 58 minutes by boat. Back in the 1980s, Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta would have hired them in a heartbeat.
Having secretly, or not so secretly, nurtured the desire to pick up a 60-foot Cigarette boat for quite some time for the Nice to Saint Tropez run, when my editor at Maxim suggested someone look into powerboat racing for a story, my ears pricked up and I did an impression of Donkey from Shrek.
(Lisa Mazzoni)
Duly chosen, I flicked my 1980s rolodex, picked up the Bakelite Batphone and dialed a guy I knew who runs with the Goldrush Rally crew—and also happens to frequent powerboat races with throwback lunatics who look like the rockstar Formula One drivers of the late ’70s and early ’80s, haircuts, cigarettes and all.
Having watched reruns of dashing Donald Campbell eating the pond at nearly 300 mph on his final waterborne world speed record attempt in January 1967, as preparation for this particular jolly, I was keen to understand the hydrodynamics at work in these Cigarette-eating rockets, where two hulls and an enclosed cockpit turn ’70s hairdresser chic into Space-Age James Hunt.
(Gerardo Ramirez Lopez)
For it seems to me this is really what it comes down to. Speed freaks pushing the outside of the envelope in one of the last bastions of freedom on the high seas. Just as with all truly beautiful things there are undiscovered pockets where Instagram doesn’t yet roam; because it is real, and you can’t hang off it and take a selfie, and you need to really be part of the club.
Meanwhile, up front in first class Jay Johnson and Captain Hook are hooked up to more telemetry than astronauts on the Space Shuttle with failsafe cellular and satellite connections to their onshore team much like Formula One. Aside from monitoring heart rates, skin temperature and respiratory rates of the human team every aspect of the machine is also watched closely to aid in peak performance on every run.
(Keli Gunn)
Everyone I met had a passion, a life that revolved in some way around making the boat work, run, and thrive. Like my Mille Miglia friends whose life’s work was getting that ’57 Aston Martin DB2 to run like a whippet; only in a 2,700-hp powerboat tuned and dialed in to perfection for every run. This is a rarefied atmosphere of cool where no one knows they are the coolest people alive, because they don’t care, and you can’t just pop in to briefly join.
(Keli Gunn)
So how did it feel? Like an applicant at the best adrenaline party you can imagine. Strapped in goggle-eyed, going way faster than God intended as Jay Johnson controlled the direction, and Captain Hook adjusted the power and trim to ensure the boat stayed on plane with nothing in the water except the twin propellers; hoping to make it out alive.
You can cheer on the JHook team as they compete in P1 Offshore, and watch as Ocean Cup racing becomes the new Gumball 3000 for boats. And you heard it here first.
If you’re reading this on SI.com, you can sign up to get this free newsletter in your inbox each weekday at SI.com/newsletters.
What to look for in Week 1 and beyond
After a little appetizer last weekend, the college football season gets underway for real this week, beginning with 16 games featuring FBS teams tonight. The biggest games are Pitt–West Virginia tonight (the return of a classic rivalry), Georgia-Oregon, Cincinnati-Arkansas and Utah-Florida on Saturday, Florida State–LSU on Sunday and Clemson–Georgia Tech on Monday.
That looks like a compelling start to what should be a compelling season. Here are some of the biggest story lines to keep an eye on this year.
Alabama’s continued dominance
The Crimson Tide enter the season ranked first in the AP poll for the seventh time under Nick Saban. They already have a collection of talent few teams in the country can rival and now they’re playing this season with something to prove after losing to SEC rival Georgia in the national title game. A motivated Alabama team sounds like the rest of college football’s worst nightmare. This is a team that returns Heisman-winning quarterback Bryce Young and star linebackers Will Anderson Jr. (a leading Heisman candidate himself) and Henry To’oto’o. It isn’t a surprise that all four of our college football experts polled picked the Tide to earn the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff, and three of the four picked them to win the title.
So who else could win the title?
Alabama championships (or, at least, championship-game appearances) have felt somewhat inevitable for a while now, but as last year’s game against Georgia showed, Bama is fallible. Richard Johnson thinks Ohio State will emerge victorious in January:
In a rematch of the 2020 national title game, Ohio State’s defense will look less outmatched facing a Tide offense that isn’t that much of a juggernaut. And that’s really all this Ohio State team needs to get the job done this year, considering on offense it’ll be able to basically score at will on anyone.
Lincoln Riley’s first season in L.A.
The pressure was already going to be on Riley and USC when he was first hired—and then the Trojans went out and signed up for the Big Ten (in 2024). After reaching such great heights under Pete Carroll in the mid-2000s, USC has only one top-10 finish in the postseason AP poll over the last decade. When you’re paying Riley a reported $110 million, you’re paying for national-championship contention. John Garcia Jr. and Ross Dellenger think the Trojans could be Playoff-bound in Riley’s first season in charge. Both guys point to the impressive collection of offensive talent USC has, led by quarterback Caleb Williams (who followed Riley from Oklahoma) and Pitt transfer receiver Jordan Addison.
Players to watch
Williams and Addison both earned first-team spots on our preseason All-American team. They’re joined by a bunch of guys from Alabama and Ohio State. The Tide have six players named first- and second-team All-American, including defensive backs Eli Ricks and Jordan Battle. The Buckeyes have four, all on offense. Running back TreVeyon Henderson, receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and offensive tackle Paris Johnson Jr. earned first-team honors, while quarterback C.J. Stroud was named to the second team.
Don’t forget about the other guys
There are 131 teams in the FBS. Only one of them gets to win the national championship, but what makes college football so popular is everything that happens outside of the title picture. What will Wake Forest’s 6’5″ receiver A.T. Perry, who caught 15 touchdowns last season, do for an encore? Can North Carolina State, ranked in the preseason AP poll for the first time since Philip Rivers’s senior year, actually live up to the hype? Who will be this year’s Bailey Zappe, the small-school quarterback who puts up ridiculous stats? There’s a lot to look forward to outside of Tuscaloosa and Columbus.
Today is the anniversary of Appalachian State’s famous upset over Michigan in 2007. The Wolverines actually started 0–2 that year, after getting blown out at home the next week by which out-of-conference foe?
Utah
Notre Dame
Oregon
Pitt
Yesterday’s SIQ: On Aug. 31, 1903, which New York Giants pitcher earned complete-game victories in both ends of a doubleheader for the third time that month?
Christy Mathewson
Luther Taylor
Jack Cronin
Joe McGinnity
Answer: Joe McGinnity. I couldn’t believe this fact when I first came across it. On Aug. 1 against the Braves, Aug. 8 against the Dodgers and Aug. 31 against the Phillies, McGinnity not only started both games of a doubleheader, he pitched the full nine innings in each game as his team won. He didn’t allow more than three runs in any of those games. I wish we had pitch-count data for games that long ago because I’m dying to know just how many pitches he had to throw in a single day.
Starting both ends of a doubleheader was not uncommon for McGinnity. He also did it twice in 1901 (Sept. 3 and 12) and once in ’06 (Aug. 16), but those three instances in August ’03 were the only time he had complete-game victories in both games.
And McGinnity is far from the only guy to earn two complete-game victories on the same day. It’s been accomplished 45 times by 37 pitchers, but not in almost 100 years. The most recent example was Dutch Levsen in 1926.
McGinnity accomplished the feat more times than anybody else, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise. His unusual pitching motion made him uniquely capable of such endurance. Here’s how Don Doxsie described it in McGinnity’s SABR biography:
Although he was one of the biggest men in the major leagues at the dawn of the 20th century, at 5-foot-11 and 206 pounds, he was hardly a power pitcher. In his prime years, he relied almost exclusively on a baffling, rising curve ball that was so dear to him he gave it a nickname, “Old Sal.” He used a peculiar underarm pitching style but also sometimes threw a devastating sinker with a more conventional overhand motion. John McGraw often said he thought the use of two radically different pitching motions may have lessened the strain on his arm and contributed to making him so durable. He said that when pitching his doubleheaders, McGinnity would sometimes throw one game overhand and work the other game with underarm motion.
“It was as different as if two pitchers had been working,” [Giants manager John] McGraw said.
McGinnity died of bladder cancer at 58 in 1929. He was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame in ’46.
From the Vault: Sept. 1, 1980
Lane Stewart/Sports Illustrated
I’ve seen a lot of SI covers during my years as a reader and while writing this newsletter, and I have to say—this one is up there with the best of them. It looks like a cologne ad. Tell me you wouldn’t want to smell like the baddest cat in the game.
The player featured is one I honestly hadn’t heard of before. But on the eve of the 1980 college football season, Pitt defensive end Hugh Green was one of the most feared players in the nation, as Douglas S. Looney wrote in the cover story:
Conservative evaluators of college football talent say Green is the defensive player in what should be a vintage year for that category. Others proclaim that Green is so easily the best collegiate player—on offense or defense—that he has lapped the field. To Frank Broyles, athletic director at Arkansas, Green is “all-world.” Syracuse Coach Frank Maloney believes Green’s skills are so superior that “he just shouldn’t be playing college football.”
Looney argued that Green should have been a preseason favorite for the Heisman Trophy, a bold statement considering that no defensive player had ever won it before. Green ended up finishing second in Heisman voting behind South Carolina running back George Rogers. What makes that fact truly amazing is that, while voters around the country could pick up a newspaper and see Rogers’s stats, Green’s contributions weren’t visible in a box score. The NCAA didn’t start tabulating sacks until 2000. (The NFL didn’t even count sacks as an official stat until 1982.)
Green did add quite a bit of hardware to his trophy case that year, though. He won the Walter Camp, Maxwell and Lombardi awards. It was quite a career for a guy who wasn’t introduced to football until he was a teenager. Green was raised by his aunt and uncle in Natchez, Miss., and first started playing football as a way to stay out of trouble. Here’s how Looney described his life before Pittsburgh:
Back then, a big time for Green consisted of rolling a tire down the street with a stick during the day and sitting on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi at night. He used to spend a lot of time under the bridge that leads to Vidalia, fishing for perch and catfish, but even that was not exactly a thrill-a-minute activity. “I never caught much,” says Green. “I’d just beat at the water with my pole.” When he was 13, Hugh ran away from home. He slept overnight on a parked bus in Natchez. The next morning a policeman spotted him sitting in a tree overlooking the Mississippi, sulking. “How old are you?” the cop shouted up to the youngster. Said Green, “Thirty-five.” That witticism got him thrown into jail. A kindly judge later said to Hugh, who was obviously well built even then, “You ever tried football? That would be better for you than running away.” Green took his advice.
That judge had a good eye for talent. After his career at Pitt, Green was taken by the Buccaneers with the seventh pick in the 1981 NFL draft. He also played for the Dolphins during an 11-year NFL career and in ’96 was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Check out more of SI’s archives and historic images at vault.si.com.
Sports Illustrated may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
