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Comics editor Tea Fougner, writes for Bleeding Cool in response to Denise Dorman’s article on the current challenges for those exhibiting at comic conventions.

Once upon a time, I didn’t get convention cosplay. As an industry professional, I felt like it was missing the point: why spend hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to walk around in uncomfortable shoes and sweaty makeup, just so strangers can take your photo? I found it distracting, and got irritated by people clogging up aisles to pose for photos. Cosplayers rarely had shopping bags, and didn’t seem to contribute to the convention economy. I thought these people were just looking for attention, hoping to get a snapshot in the local newspaper, and I didn’t understand the appeal.

Something happened in 2010 to change all that.

As a submissions editor, I frequently find myself at the mercy of creators whose sense of timing is incredibly inappropriate– anyone who has ever been in my shoes knows what it’s like to have someone grab you on the way to the toilet because they have to pitch their cartoon right now, or come stop me when I am a captive audience stuck behind a table. As a woman attending fan conventions, a news reporter once asked to interview me, and then almost instantly decided to can the interview, that I “knew too much about comics for a girl.” Well, yes. Knowing something about comics is my job.

One day, when I was exhibiting for work, I put on a pink wig on a whim. People stopped asking me to look at their art and started asking me what character I was supposed to be. They wanted to know about me, what I was interested in, what brought me to the convention. They no longer cared about my professional status; they cared about my interest in attending the convention.

The next day, I donned a costume, and I never looked back. This is going to be my fifth NYCC in costume, and each year convinces me more that cosplay makes conventions better.

Cosplay is primarily— not exclusively, but primarily— a hobby of the young. The vast majority of cosplayers I know are in their 20s.

As a sometime-exhibitor myself, I know how expensive it is to table at a convention. But for a lot of very young people, simply attending is also pricey. In an economic environment that glorifies the unpaid internship and where recent college grads often work for minimum wage, a comic convention weekend badge can cost a full day’s pay. And for young parents, add in the cost of gas, lodging, and food to badges for a family of four, and there may not be much money left to spend on merchandise. Young people often cosplay to show their appreciation in a way that doesn’t require a lot of money. The news often focuses on the most outrageous costumes we see, but anyone with a pair of slacks, buttondown shirt, and a trenchcoat can transform themselves into Castiel from Supernatural, and a young woman with a black leotard and a pair of fishnets can dress like Black Canary.

For many new creators, the first time a congoer shows up dressed as one of their characters is a banner moment to be cherished— even if that cosplayer can’t afford to buy art, or doesn’t yet have a home where they can display art. As homeownership crumbles with the rapidly diminishing salaries of emerging young adults, many young people don’t have a place to store art or books, and depend on digital comics for most of their comics reading– which can’t usually be purchased or signed at a convention. A costume can be stored in a dresser, closet, or even a duffel bag for the most transient of us. It doesn’t need to be handled with care or stored in a climate-controlled environment.

There are tons of young people who are going to conventions and taking advantage of the panel viewings, or simply walking the floor to look longingly at the art they one day hope to afford, regardless of whether they are in costumes or not. The fact that they are spending all of their spare cash simply to attend the convention and be in the same place as all that amazing creative energy is a testament to their love of the art form, even if they don’t yet have the money to contribute to individual creators. Of course, many of us do have money, and many of us ARE spending it on works by creators. At my most recent con, I walked the floor with a fellow cosplayer in her mid-twenties, who made small purchases from six different creators. My friend was eager and excited to show her cosplay to her favorite creator, who was absolutely overjoyed to see her costume. It also gave my friend, who is normally shy around people she admires, something to talk to her favorite creator about.

Many of the more traditional reasons to attend conventions are falling to the wayside. Rare books, toys, and other paraphernalia are now available online. Shipping is cheaper than a con badge. I’ve bought an entire out-of-print run of a favorite comic from the early 90s with a few taps on my phone screen. I don’t paw through back issues at conventions anymore. People can chat with their favorite creators on Tumblr or Twitter every day, and have a much richer interaction with them, spanning the course of years, than they might have in a short exchange in a rushed line for a signed book. But people who might have given a con a pass when they discovered they could get their favorite book more cheaply from Amazon may still be enticed to come so that they can see the amazing costumes that cosplayers work on for weeks, months, and even years. Every single one of those people coming to see cosplayers might turn around and make an impulse purchase.

Many comic publishers have been taking strides over the past few years to become more inclusive in the titles they put out. Conventions are also becoming more woman-friendly and LGBT-friendly over the past decade. Most cosplayers are female, and a relatively high percentage of cosplayers identify as LGBT. They don’t always read the same comics or look at the same art that the main demographic of cons of yesteryear appreciate, but young creators who publish coming-of age stories about teenaged lesbians and menstrual cramps don’t jump to the conclusion that classic comics fans are not spending money at cons simply because their comics are not selling to that group. Cosplayers, like anyone else, comission sketches from the artists whose work speaks to them, and those may not always be classic science fiction, fantasy, or superhero artists. Then again, the cosplayer friend I mentioned a few paragraphs above came armed with a list of longtime DC Comics luminaries she wanted to meet and buy from.

If cosplayers aren’t buying within a genre, similar fans who don’t cosplay are probably not buying that work, either– the addition of wings and horns is not what’s preventing a transaction. For creators who feel their convention sales are lagging, the question should not be “Why are these people outside my target demographic not buying my work?” but “Why are *my* fans not finding me to spend money at these shows?” If your fans aren’t interested in attending conventions in certain cities, ask where you might reach them instead, or what might encourage them to attend. If they’re not spending money on what you’re offering, ask what would interest them. Remind your fans that their support is important should they wish to continue to see you at conventions. Having been on both sides of the table, I know that no amount of crowding in the aisles, by cosplayers or otherwise, will stop a fan who wants to come support a particular creator. There are tons of great ways to engage fans online, to make sure they know what events you’re at, and where your table is. Many creators have done an amazing job of promoting fan enthusiasm online that translates into lines at their booths– lines that often include cosplayers!

“But,” you say, “I never see cosplayers carrying merchandise. You must be the exception to the rule.” You’re absolutely correct– you don’t see us carrying merch in costume. For the most dedicated cosplayers, shopping on the con floor in costume is rendered prohibitive by our unwieldy props, and it ruins the illusion for other fans.

But we often choose a day, or half-day, to make our purchases. I always do my shopping on Sunday, once I’ve managed to look at everything. That’s been my MO since my first con in 1998, long before I began wearing costumes.

Dealers and creators whom I meet in costume almost never recognize me when I come back in street clothes or a more low-key cosplay. Heck, some of my close friends don’t recognize me when I walk up to their booths in a wig– I don’t expect creators I’ve only met a few times to know who I am when they’ve only seen me dressed as a comic book character. (One industry pro for whom I hold a great deal of esteem joked that he can’t recognize me anymore if I’m not Captain America.) So before declaring that cosplayers don’t buy, consider that your last customer of the day on Sunday may have been the guy wearing that neat, fully-functioning Iron Man costume on Friday. And some of us have traded years of supplying water and sandwiches and table assistance to be allowed to leave our merch at our friends’ tables, or have sweet-talked our non-cosplaying pals into letting us put our books into their backpacks.

Since I began cosplaying, I’ve often paid my own way out of my own pocket to go to conventions that aren’t part of my professional schedule— and I buy from vendors and creators at all of them. This is one congoer who is absolutely adding dollars to the convention ecosystem that would have gone elsewhere had it not been for cosplay. I’ve met and purchased from creators I might not have bothered to see if it weren’t for cosplay. Finding ways to engage with cosplayers is a way to make a sale– and maybe even a new fan. I’ve had creators wave me down because they were selling prints of the character I was cosplaying as– and I’ve purchased them.

I’ve now cosplayed on both sides of the exhibitor’s table. And I would encourage absolutely everyone— regardless of age, gender, creator status, or any other identifiers— to try cosplaying in a convention environment at least once. It’s one of the purest forms of fun I can imagine— make believe for adults and kids alike. I can’t express to you how amazing it feels the first time a child runs up to you, overjoyed to meet their favorite cartoon character, or a mom bursts into tears and asks to take your photo for her daughter, who was told by boys at school that a girl couldn’t be Captain America. Even if you only try it once, the stories you hear and the people you meet will stay with you for a lifetime.

And I guarantee you will still buy (or not buy) the same exact merchandise you would have bought (or not bought) in your streetclothes.

Tea Fougner is a professional comics editor working for King Features, blogs at http://www.comicskingdom.com, and develops websites for cartoonists.  She also cosplays a lot– at conventions, Renaissance Fairs, theme parties, sometimes even to go pick up groceries.  You can find her on tumblr at http://teaberryblue.tumblr.com

The Joy Of Cosplay, The Perils Of Commerce And The Challenge Of Comic Cons

A reader writes:

I write this from the perspective of one who didn’t participate in politics before Barack Obama, but I voted for him twice. I’m part of that “Obama coalition” that political writers like to talk about – a “creative class” member, family man, early 40s, white, with deep skepticism toward American politics and outright disdain for the two major political parties.

Watching the president last night made me think two things. First, my gut reaction was that this wasn’t the guy I voted for – what happened to that guy? Second, it made me think more deeply about why I had supported him in the first place. Sure, the idea of a black president was interesting to me, but that really had very little to do with my vote. I also didn’t vote for Obama out of fear of Sarah Palin’s lunacy or John McCain’s warmongering (though both were certainly compelling reasons). No, he was different. We didn’t vote for Obama because we hated or feared the other side, and that is actually something that makes him different from most of the milquetoast candidates the two parties typically put forward (and are already planning to put forward in 2016).

I think the disappointment in Obama stems in part from the fact that most of us who voted for him did so affirmatively.

We actually voted for Obama, not against McCain or Palin or Romney or Ryan. We voted for the guy he ran as – a profoundly intelligent, intellectually independent, thoughtful man who insisted on treating the public like adults and who, on issue after issue, self-consciously refused to be responsive to whatever the Beltway shouting about. In short, he decided he wanted to be president on his own terms.

Obama knew he couldn’t control events, obviously, but he certainly could control himself – and his composed, sober, longer view of the churn of day-to-day issues conferred an inherent dignity upon himself. The political class and some in the media didn’t always “get it”, still breathlessly chasing after the latest big story, trying to “win the hour”, etc. But Obama’s poised refusal to go along (remember how he used to deride what he called “cable chatter”? I sure do…) was a major dog whistle for people like me. I saw the president acting the way I wanted him to act. That was the guy I elected. The guy who wouldn’t play along with all the bullshit, who would insist that we actually deal with both policy and politics based on facts, reasoning, and long-term strategy.

This can seem mundane, but for people like me who have watched Obama closely over the years, that’s what we liked and what we voted for. I work in a corporate job with mostly conventional Fox-news Republican types, and time and again over the years, every argument they make bounces off me like Teflon. It was always so easy to see how they had to mischaracterize Obama in order to effectively criticize him.

Not anymore.

Last night’s speech looked transparently political. OK, so Obama goofed and said we didn’t have a strategy, a rhetorical blunder that handed the Republicans a short-term tactical advantage in the midterm elections … so, after enough Democrats bitched about it, he goes on TV to announce a strategy. The actual content was secondary to the fact of the speech itself. That’s just not the guy I voted for. It also lacked any actual strategic thinking – what are we going to do, who’s going to help us do it, how long, costs, risks and mitigants. It was a political errand dressed as a speech, which frankly was one of the things I despised most about George W Bush.

It is sad to see Obama fall this far. Furthermore, beyond even the inadequate content of the speech or the stench of midterm politics behind it, didn’t anyone bother to think of how the speech elevates ISIS around the world? I admit they’re extremely violent and completely incapable of being deterred. But they’re what – 30,000 guys? A primetime presidential address gives them stature, legitimacy … which can only help them strengthen their hold on those they already have, and recruit even more. How does that serve a real strategy to defeat them?

This is not the guy I voted for. I remembered thinking this during the first debate with Romney, and now I’m thinking it again. Is he checked out? What happened? Last night was a failure not only for Obama himself, but his political and policy teams. Every president is surrounded by people for whom part of their responsibility is to not let the president look ridiculous. Where are THOSE people?

The president looks like a solitary, adrift figure to me, a guy who may have already written off these next couple of years.

Laurie Garrett argues as much, blaming the international community for not acting on the crisis early enough:

Shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared an outbreak of the same strain of Ebola that first appeared in Zaire in 1976, outside humanitarian responders appeared on the scene to assist Guinea; they were the organizations that dominated the treatment and prevention efforts throughout the spring and into the summer, as Ebola spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. During that time the outbreaks were largely rural, confined to easily isolated communities, and could have been stopped with inexpensive, low-technology approaches.

But the world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action. Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive.

Julia Belluz flags a new study that assesses the virus’s chances of making its way to America:

In a Sept. 2 article in the journal PLoS Currents: Oubtreaks, they published their findings. “Results indicate that the short-term (3 and 6 weeks) probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible,” they wrote. Ghana, the United Kingdom, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, and Belgium were the countries most at-risk of importing at least one case by Sept. 22, the date they chose as the projected cut-off for their model. Out of the 16 countries analyzed, the US ranked 13th (toward the last) for risk of importing Ebola by that time. The risk for the US was as high as 18 percent and as low as one percent.

And as Ronald Bailey notes, the same study calculates that any US outbreak would only infect about 10 people. Meanwhile, Joshua Hunt takes a look at another promising Ebola treatment, made by the pharmaceutical company Toyama Chemical:

The Fujifilm subsidiary’s small yellow tablets are marked アビガン, which is a Japanese rendering of the brand name Avigan. They inhibit the replication of viral genes within an infected cell, while also mitigating their ability to spread from one cell to another—a two-pronged approach to fighting influenza that Fujfilm says is unique. The drug was approved in March by Japan’s health ministry as a treatment for both novel and reëmerging forms of influenza, but researchers have theorized that it could be an effective emergency treatment for Ebola. …

Avigan offers new hope because, since it received regulatory approval for sale in Japan in the spring, it has been manufactured on a much larger scale than the experimental drugs being developed specifically for Ebola. Supplies of ZMapp, which was created by the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, have already been exhausted, and its results have been mixed. Two American doctors treated with ZMapp recovered, but a Liberian doctor who also received it died. Fujifilm’s Avigan stockpile would be sufficient to treat twenty thousand people—the exact number of infections that the World Health Organization has estimated might occur before the current outbreak is brought under control.

This is nothing but speculation. Mindless speculation. No sources leaking things. No rumour. Just joining dots.

Take the solicitation for Axis #9 in November.

AVENGERS & X-MEN: AXIS #9 (OF 9)
RICK REMENDER (W) • JIM CHEUNG (A)
Cover by JIM CHEUNG
Looper variant by Paul Renaud
INVERSION VARIANT BY TBA
ACT III: NEW WORLD DISORDER
• Who will live? Who will die? Who will remain inverted? A shocking climax that promises to crack the Marvel Universe to its very core!
• An old foe must claim the mantle of his greatest enemy to save the lives of all he cares for!
• An X-Man’s horrifying fate! An Avenger’s appalling choice! If you read only one comic this century – This is it!
40 PGS./Rated T+ …$4.99

It’s that bit. “An old foe must claim the mantle of his greatest enemy to save the lives of all he cares for!”

Could Sabretooth become Marvel’s new Wolverine?

Could Sabretooth Become The New Wolverine?

Digger Harkness / Captain Boomerang is one of the most popular members of The Flash’s Rogues Gallery… and he’s also one of the members of the Suicide Squad which is part of the Arrow series which is where he’s going to make his debut.

And the casting director on Arrow seems to love former Spartacus stars – Manu Bennett (Slade Wilson), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Amanda Waller) and Katrina Law (Nyssa Raatko al Ghul) – so it’s not surprising that they’ve gone to the well once more to get Nick Tarabay.

Tarabay is best known for his role as Ashur, a former gladiator who was injured and began working as an informant. He also had roles in Star Trek: Into Darkness and Burn Notice.

Harkness is scheduled to appear in episode seven and eight of Arrow with episode eight being the crossover with the Flash.

Captain Boomerang Cast To Appear On Arrow

The twenty-fourth chapter in the James Bond franchise is set to go before the cameras this December according to Screenrant. Sam Mendes will be back once again to helm the movie along with screenwriters John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Cast wise we’ll see the return of Daniel Craig (Bond), Ralph Fiennes (M), Naomi Harris (Miss Monneypenny), and Ben Whishaw (Q). Fiennes of course took over the role of M at the end of Skyfall which will make the the first Bond movie without Jude Dench in over 20 years.

The report says that casting for a new Bond Girl and villain are underway. We had previously heard they were looking for a new henchman on the level of Jaws (played by the recently departed Richard Kiel). There is also location information coming in saying there will be shooting in Austria, Morraco and Rome (where a car chase will be filmed). The studio shoots will take place at the legendery Pinewood Studios in England.

Word is that that they plan on building on the narrative threads created in the highly successful Skyfall and carry them on into Bond 25. Co-writer John Logan has previously said that film’s themes and ideas can carry over into future installments and its “resonance” will be felt in Bond 24.

Bond 24 will be in UK theaters October 23rd, 2015 and US on November 6th, 2015.

Bond 24 To Start Filming In December And Looking For The Next Bond Girl

The Television Critics Association seem to really like Gotham. According to THR, the new Fox series that focuses on James Gordon (Benjamin McKenzie) in the years between the murder of the Wayne’s and the debut of Batman was voted the most promising new show of the upcoming season. It beat out the second and third place finishers Jane The Virgin and The Affair.

In the poll Gotham also won the drama category beating out The Affair again and How To Get Away With Murder. While in comedy Black-ish won over Jane the Virgin and A To Z.

As for actors, the category of new breakout star went to Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) with 4 times the votes of Grant Gustin (The Flash) and Robin Lord Taylor (Gotham).

“If the 2014 fall survey results are any indication, we’re in for an exciting new season of television,” said TCA president Scott D. Pierce. “This year featured a surprising number of close races, with the high quality of both programming and performers giving our voters a tough time as they made their picks. From superheroes and murder mysteries, to out-of-the-box comedies and gritty dramas, this is one of the most eclectic seasons in recent memory.”

Critics Think Gotham Is The Most Promising New Show Of The Season

If Gordon Brown thinks Scotland needs more powers why didn’t he deliver them when he was in power? #bbcgms #indyref pic.twitter.com/7xDkZ9VIle

— Yes Scotland (@YesScotland) September 9, 2014

Scotland’s independence movement has the wind at its back. But the increasing likelihood of a Yes victory sent the Pound tumbling yesterday. And the economic consequences of independence don’t end there:

Douglas Flint, the Scottish-born chairman of HSBC (HSBC), predicted that uncertainty over Scotland’s currency arrangements could “prompt capital flight from the country, leaving its financial system in a parlous state.” Independence advocates haven’t said whether Scotland would establish its own currency or maintain an informal link to the British pound. Whatever approach is taken, Flint wrote in a recent column for the Telegraph, “Scotland’s borrowing costs and those of its businesses and consumers would rise, at least in the near term.”

Should Scotland secede, Drum suspects the country will get its own currency soon enough:

The pro-independence forces probably feel like they need to support continued use of the pound for now, just to take it off the table as a campaign issue. But if independence succeeds, there’s a good chance that Scotland will adopt its own currency within a few years for all the reasons Krugman brings up. Being stuck in a currency union is so obviously dangerous that it will probably be abandoned once things shake down in an independent Scotland and the new government has time to focus on it.

Yglesias agrees that “the most sensible option might well be for independent Scotland to have its own central bank and its own currency that would trade freely on global markets”:

Other small developed countries (Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden) do this successfully, and it appeared to work well enough for Denmark and Finland in the past. Small countries are inevitably very exposed to developments in the global economy that are outside their control, and currency flexibility can help cope with that. … The downside of creating a new currency is that it would have no track record, and might be catastrophically mismanaged and destroy the value of everyone’s savings. Independence campaigners appear to feel that these fears are widespread, and have not made the creation of a new currency part of their proposal for Scottish independence.

But this all assumes the Scots vote for independence in the first place. Justin Wolfers has doubts:

In contrast with the polls, traders at the British betting exchange Betfair.com currently assess the “No” vote as the likely favorite, assigning it a 72 percent chance of winning. To be sure, that still suggests a sizable 28 percent chance that a majority of Scots will vote for independence, but the odds that it will happen seem a lot weaker than polls would suggest.

And, even if the polling is taken at face value, the goodies Westminster is promising Scotland might boost the No vote. But Fraiser Nelson wouldn’t bet on it:

So Gordon Brown has spoken, and the unionist parties are in agreement: if there’s a ‘no’ vote then more powers will be given – we’re told – ‘to Scotland’. And why? Because there’ll be another commission and another Scotland act and the Great Broon announces that the results will come out on Burns Night! Neeps and haggis all round! To me, this is only a little better than the Treasury telling Scots that they should vote ‘no’ because they’ll be able to afford more bags of chips. It’s patronizing, not credible and I doubt will make very much difference. This so-called Devo Max should have been offered six months ago; to offer it in the last few days of the campaign smacks of desperation.

Indeed it does. Peter Geoghegan remarks that the “No side might still be the favorite to stumble across the finish line first in the coming referendum, but it has singularly failed to make an emotional case for the United Kingdom”:

A Better Together activist told me recently, “It is like a business transaction. I look at the sums, they don’t add up, so you don’t do it.” This might be a good reason to reject independence, but such instrumentality hardly bodes well for the union’s future health — and such sentiments leave plenty of room for uncertainty about what will happen on September 18. Nationalists have won the argument that Scotland could be a separate state. The question now is whether they can persuade their fellow Scots that it should be. If they can, what seemed unimaginable just a few months ago could become a reality.

Should that happen, Robert Kuttner imagines that other independence movements around Europe will take notice:

If the Scots actually become independent, it’s not Britain alone that is affected. Also threatened are such venerable unitary nations as Spain, France and Italy. That’s why the leaders of the E.U. have signaled that an independent Scotland would not be welcome as a member. If Scotland secedes, Catalonia will be next. And if Catalonia, why not Brittany and Northern Italy? Why not Wales? Not to mention Quebec.

Most major nations were created by acts of conquest and often brutal suppression of ethnic and linguistic minorities. Irish schoolchildren got their knuckles rapped for speaking Irish in school. In Catalonia, kids caught speaking Catalan were warned, “Habla Cristiano!“—as if Castilian Spanish were the language of Christ and Catalan the idiom of Satan. But it is absolutely startling to see hundreds of years of political history unwinding.

by Dish Staff

Lev Grossman declares that the fantasy genre has “become one of the great pillars of popular culture and, increasingly, the way we tell stories now,” pointing to examples like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. The explanation he offers for this:

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet. You can’t compare what we’ve gone through to WWI, because that would be insane, but it’s not a trivial thing either. Lewis and Tolkien saw the physical world remade around them. The changes we’ve seen have been largely invisible but still radical: they happened in the sphere of information and communication and simulation and ubiquitous computation.

Which is why it makes sense that so much of the 20th century was preoccupied with science fiction, a genre that, among other things, grapples with the presence of technology in our lives, our minds, and our bodies, and with how our tools change the world and how they change us. Those issues are of paramount, urgent importance right now. But a countervailing movement is happening too: we’re also turning to fantasy. It’s counterintuitive, because fantasy is so often set in pre-industrial landscapes where technology is notable for its absence, but it must have something we need. We’re using it to ask questions. We like to celebrate this world, our new world, as a paradise of connectedness, a networked utopia, but is it possible that on some level we feel as disconnected from it as Lewis and Tolkien did from theirs?

Grossman’s takeaway:

God knows, characters in fantasy worlds aren’t always happy: if anything the ambient levels of misery in Westeros are probably significantly higher than those in the real world. But they’re not distracted. They’re not disconnected. The world they live in isn’t alien to them, it’s a reflection of the worlds inside them, and they feel like an intimate part of it. In the real world we’re busy staring at our phones as global warming gradually renders the world we’re ignoring uninhabitable. Fantasy holds out the possibility that there’s another way to live.

Tweeted out by Stephen Amell a little while ago, the CW has cast the character of Ra’s al Ghul with actor Matt Nable. The Australian actor and former professional rugby league footballer is most known to American audiences as Boss Johns in Riddick.

Arrow has been setting up the arrival of Ra’s al Ghul since last season when we see that Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) has ties to the Brotherhood through her ex-lover Nyssa al Ghul (Katrina Law). There is also a connection with Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) who is now a series regular.

Ra’s al Ghul is scheduled to make his first appearance in the fourth episode of the season. Arrow returns October 8th.

Please welcome Matt Nable to Arrow. You know who he’s playing. pic.twitter.com/f0I7tmujiD

— Stephen Amell (@amellywood) September 4, 2014

Arrow Casts Matt Nable As Ra’s Al Ghul

Okay, how much this creeps you out will depend upon your mileage. But one eBay comic book seller writes in his item descriptions,

Massive Comic Book Selloff!

Help me pay for my wife’s implants…

Yep! My wife has asked me to fund her boob job, and the only way I can think of is to sell off all my comic books.

I have a huge amount, ranging from some Golden Age, through Silver Age keys, Bronze Age, and beyond.

Some items will be sold as singles, some as sets.

All proceeds will be going towards my wife’s surgery. $100 is approximately equal to 1cm of extra flesh, so please bid generously!

He gives you a FAQ in case you wanted to know.

Q: Is this for real?
A: Yes. She honestly has asked me to fund implants. I didn’t put up too much of a fight to be honest :)

Q: Can I see your wife’s current boobs?
A: She’s a bit shy about this and so far has refused permission, but I will do my best to talk her round.

Q: How much is the operation costing?
A: Around $7.5K. I did try to encourage medical arbitrage, sending her to Brazil, but she’s nervous, so it has to be Montreal.

Q: Will you send me a pic of the results?
A: ALL WINNING BIDDERS WILL GET A CANDID PHOTO OF THE OUTCOME — this is optional…

At least there’s an honesty here. Considering how many superhero comic books have existed to show idealised fantasies of women in poses designed to show off their bodies with a thin veneer of storytelling to justify the whole exercise – well, for once, there’s no pretence here.

Using a gif based on this image as well:

You can browse the comics on sale, here. Then… wash your hands.

And Finally…The Comics Being Sold To Pay For Breast Enhancement Surgery

[ *This is a spin-off "Special Hidden Bonus Track" from Thor’s Comic Review Column on 8/25/14 in the form of  discussion between two of our Thor reviewers who found that a 22 page comic could spawn 4,000 words and more, most likely.]

By Adam X. Smith and Joe Colewood

[*As you might suspect, SPOILERS for Multiversity #1 are definitely below!]

Adam X. Smith: My cards have been on the table regarding Grant Morrison’s work for a long time – people seem to think I give him too hard a time of it or that I just don’t like his work. Not true. I liked Arkham Asylum, JLA: Earth 2, his work on Hellblazer and even his Happy! miniseries. What I don’t care for is this reputation he’s been trying to build over the years as being the new and improved Alan Moore of DC Comics. If I had to explain it objectively, I’d have to describe it as something akin to Newton’s law of pretentiousness – the quality of any Morrison book is in direct proportion to him working with artists whose work I actually like, and in inverse proportion to the amount of hype attached to its release.

Multiversity #1 gets off to a wonderful start by focusing on the parasites on the surface of someone’s skin in macro and then focusing on a whole bunch of weird stories-within-stories nonsense before showing us Nix Uotan, the last living Monitor in the Multiverse, and his pirate-chimp sidekick Mister Stubbs (don’t ask) investigating bad goings-on on Earth-7, where it’s revealed that creatures from another dimension called the Gentry (think H.P. Lovecraft crossed with Clive Barker crossed with Black Parade-era MCR until very little Lovecraft remains) are bent on destroying the universe for Reasons. Nix stays behind so that Thunderer, an Aboriginal expy of Thor, can go to get help.

I’d summarise more of this, but that would do the book a service that it doesn’t really deserve. It’s not that there’s no plot – on the contrary, it has a pretty straightforward plot once you get past the weirdness of the presentation; it’s just not a particularly clever or original one.

After about the two-thirds mark I came to a realisation: invading army of depressing, gritty stereotypes trying to suck the life out of everything? Lone survivor escaping to warn others of impending danger and recruit aid from a group of elaborately dressed and eccentric heroes? Travelling through dimensions in a suspiciously familiar mode of transportation that runs on music whilst encountering bizarre individuals and making thinly veiled parodies of existing pop culture concepts?

GRANT MORRISON JUST RIPPED OFF THE PLOT OF YELLOW SUBMARINE!!

The story only finds a footing once it decides to focus on the Superman of Earth-23, who is not only from an Earth where the majority of superheroes seem to be non-Caucasian but also happens to be President of the United States (that’s some good political allegory there, Grant), but even that only lasts for six pages before he’s zapped to the Orrery of Worlds (again, don’t ask) to be his Earth’s representative in an all-singing all-dancing Multiversal Justice League.

Ivan Reis’ art is competent but suffers from Morrison’s insistence on overly busy composition. Morrison is trying to use the nine-panel format favoured by many of Moore’s artists, but there’s a reason that those comics usually use angles akin to a POV shot or a well framed close-up: because that’s how Moore tells stories – it feels like you’re in the scene. Reis is clearly trying to replicate that feeling, but it’s too inconsistent and feels like a pale imitation – it’s there just because Morrison wants it to be.

Even in the scenes that really should be splash pages or double-page spreads, even before the Orrery and the multitude of inter-dimensional heroes cramming the panels, Reis feels shackled to Morrison’s panel layouts. Scenes like the Earth-23 Superman fighting a robot, or the encounter between the heroes and a group of what I can only be intended as a veiled knock-off of the Ultimates and the Fantastic Four are given no room to breathe, and by that point in the process the impression the art gives me is that they were rushing to finish the damn thing. In any scene with more than a half-dozen characters or indeed the crowd scenes that this comic seems obsessed with, anything that’s not in the immediate foreground becomes crudely rendered the further back it goes.

Joe Colewood: It’s interesting, my initial experiences with Morrison weren’t particularly positive–Arkham Asylum was actually one of the first comics of his that I read, for example, and I think it’s still one of my least favourite. It was Seven Soldiers that turned the tide for me–I picked it up because it was his next big project at the time, with the attitude that I’d give it a real shot and see if I could see what everyone else saw in him. I almost didn’t get beyond the first issue, which was busy and bewildering and seemed pointless (the heroes of that issue–SPOILER for a nearly decade-old comic–all die abruptly at the end). But I persevered, and found the next issue to be a lot more interesting. By the time the whole series was out, it had become one of my favourite comics series of all time.

I bring this up because I see a lot of parallels between Seven Soldiers and Multiversity, even beyond the structure, which is obviously going to be similar. But this first issue goes down a lot smoother than SS #0 did. It’s possible that it’s because I’ve read everything Morrison’s been doing with the DC Universe in the last few years (The Yellow Submarine-ish Ultima Thule, the Obama-esque Superman Calvin Ellis, and the Orrery of Worlds all originally appeared in Final Crisis, for instance) but that’s the thing about Morrison’s writing–it’s kind of holographic, in that each piece makes up an element of the whole, and the more context you get the more you understand the broad sweep of what he’s doing. Seven Soldiers certainly worked that way, with prior issues making more and more sense the further into the overall series you got. But Multiversity strikes me as far less intimidating; even with all the DC history it draws on, everything from Captain Carrot to the original Crisis on Infinite Worlds, it’s not actually particularly hard to follow.

That said, I can agree with you, Adam, that the various episodes can feel a little rushed; in many ways this feels like four or five “issues” packed into one. But this speaks to something Morrison seems to be specifically addressing about comics storytelling in his recent career, and it’s one I’ve been sympathetic to: comics can be a much “denser” medium than film or TV or even some books. You don’t necessarily need to spend an entire issue on an incident to feel the emotional impact of it, and indeed, old-school comics had a hyper-compressed storytelling style that we’ve largely left by the wayside. Morrison seems to be trying to get back to that. Your mileage, as ever, may vary, but I think Multiversity #1 handles this pretty well from a certain perspective. Look at the Retaliators, the superhero team that the ad-hoc multiversial Justice League encounters (and, inevitably, fights) when they first land. They’re pretty obviously the Avengers, and we can extrapolate everything we need from that. But even without that connection, I think the few pages we spend with them tells us everything we need to know, with a broader context implied and left to our imaginations. I *like* this kind of storytelling–back in the days before trade paperbacks and archive collections, superhero comics had to rely on this kind of suggestion of “greater worlds” all the time, because it was unlikely that anyone but their most rabid fans had read all the issues that lead up to the current one, let alone the tie-in issues with other characters in the same universe. It’s an invitation to use your imagination. That said, I would hardly hold this up as the best example of it.

AXS: The Seven Soldiers comparison seems pretty apt from what I’ve heard, and that’s one of the many series that I kept hearing about as being the be-all-and-end-all when it was ongoing but due to its length and frustrating release schedule I never got round to it then or since. Certainly I’d be the first person to say that context is everything – I’ve not read Final Crisis in years – but it’s less the strangeness of the content and more the mish-mash presentation I find vexing. Our esteemed colleague Mr. Devon Sanders mentioned the other day that “Morrison is getting to that Alan Moore point where his narratives are ridiculously self-annotated but needs a Jess Nevins-type person to make sense of it all”, and maybe that’s true. The ultimate difference as I see it is that I can always make sense of Moore’s works, however complex or idiosyncratic he makes them – everything about Multiversity’s content and presentation seems handpicked by Morrison to confuse and annoy me.

There certainly seems to be something to be inferred by the encounter with the Retaliators – Thunderer (the ersatz Thor of Earth-7) finds himself confused when they arrive on Earth-8 and doesn’t recognise them as “his” fellow heroes, which combined with their bellicose attitude seemed to me to imply that they were supposed to be a pastiche not of the Avengers but their Ultimate Universe counterparts. This is followed by a sequence involving a pastiche of the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom, which makes me suspect it’s a shout-out (or possibly a dig – it’s so hard to tell with Morrison) to fellow Scot and appalling writer Mark Millar.

This is all very well, but what exactly is the overarching message to all this? That the grim and gritty approach has run its course, and that making comics relentlessly dark and morbid is sapping the fun and creativity out of DC? Fine, but the only reason Morrison gets to play in the DC sandbox to the extent that he does is because he’s ingratiated himself upon the very editorial staff that has made all DC books look like 90s Image books, vetoed Batwoman’s wedding and turned Harley Quinn into Deadpool with boobs. I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s a case of Morrison biting the hand that feeds – you don’t get to hog all the toys while the up-and-comers fight for table scraps – but since everything about this screams vanity project I have to rationalise it as him trying to fashion the collective back-history of DC in his own image. Given his history of inserting himself (sometimes literally) into his own comics, I’m wagering that’s not far off the mark.

JC: Well, is it really fair to paint Morrison as some kind of collaborator here? He’s clearly been kicking against the wrongheadedness of the Nu52 since it got started, regardless of his relationship with the editors. Indeed, most of his work since the Nu52 hit, and even before that (with Seaguy, for instance) has been about trying to critique and subvert the mentality behind it. It’s entirely possible he’s out on the back nine every weekend with Dan Didio and Bob Harras, followed by sherry and cigars in the clubhouse while they all slap each other’s backs, but I don’t think that’s necessarily relevant. This isn’t the Vichy government, it’s the entertainment biz. I think it’s perfectly valid to maintain a professional relationship with those you disagree with, while using the actual artistic work you’re doing to try to shape the zeitgeist, or in this case the editorial philosophy.

I mean, look at this comic: the villains are The Gentry, where “Gentry” connotes “land owners”, and there’s a consistent theme of those who own property vs. those who live on it (starting with the first page, where a landlady tries to collect rent from a comic book reader). It’s pretty squarely opposed to the people with the money, who are obvious stand-ins for the corporate IP farms who control the fate of superheroes, while celebrating the idea of smuggling rebellious concepts into this purely commercial product. The thing about Calvin Ellis is that Morrison has been, since his appearance in Action Comics #9, making the case for him as the “real” Superman, while the guy starring in the actual Superman titles, the guy with the high collar and the constantly glowing red eyes, is an impostor.

That goes a little further than simply kicking back against grim ‘n’ gritty; it’s basically making the case for creators, and the audience, to take these characters and the things they stand for back from the huge corporations that nominally “own” them (i.e., control the right to make profit from them). That’s also partly why he brings in the Marvel analogues, I think–there’s an interesting parallel with how Marvel is currently letting quirky, creative people bounce around within their superhero universe, both in comics and film, while still delivering the huge blockbuster entertainments. Marvel’s arguably a *little* more receptive to this kind of thing, even if the recent Ant-Man film debacle shows there’s a limit to how much control real creative types will be allowed to wield.

I think Morrison is well aware that DC is a more forbidding environment, and sees himself as a double agent within the system, trying to strike a blow for creativity. Now, you can argue that’s he’s going about it all wrong, that regardless of his intent he’s still playing along with the soulless corporate mindset that wants to reduce art to something that can be farmed for profit. Still, that very tension proves that there IS some interesting territory here to be mined. And if Morrison’s honestly trying to reclaim the DC Universe for creativity and fun–and he’s probably the only person currently in a position to do so–shouldn’t we be cheering him on?

AXS: I could blame my unfamiliarity with a lot of the details and characters on my year-long abstinence from DC books, but none of it is anything that a quick visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wikipedia couldn’t cure – for me it runs deeper than that. Certainly the Marvel analogues are open to interpretation when it comes to their purpose and where they came from – I just used an educated guess based on his preoccupation with his time at Marvel (and what he portrayed as his less than amicable split with them over his treatment on New X-Men) and the relationships he has with Millar and Dan Didio, all based on information gleaned from the book Supergods. A certain amount of that (i.e. probably a large amount) could have been name-dropping for the sake of it, but even before the New 52 he was hardly an “inside man”.

I’m actually glad that you brought up the subject of Quislings and prevented me from breaking Godwin’s law. Is it objective for me to say or even imply that he’s a “collaborator”? Maybe not. Is it fair? Honestly, I could care less – fairs are for tourists and Grant Morrison doesn’t care what I or anyone else thinks about him – why should he? He’s got the keys to the kingdom, and I’m some schmuck with a laptop and too much time on my hands. Morrison is not some underdog fighting The Man from inside the organisation and hasn’t been for a long time – much as Warren Ellis has said that he gets paid considerable amounts of money to revamp moribund books and characters for Marvel, Morrison has made it clear that he has pretty much the same deal going with Didio. If this is Morrison giving a massive middle finger to the people who pay his bills and give him the run of their considerable back catalogue, you could have fooled me. Don’t forget – I wasn’t exactly drinking the DC Kool-Aid before I stopped reading them last year, and haven’t for quite some time.

Regardless of my own prejudices, authorial intent only carries weight if what is in the book is consistent with it. Certainly I will admit that you could argue that the Gentry are what you suggest they are meant to symbolise, but unless the follow-up to this storyline explicitly shows that the Earth Prime/“real world” or whatever counterparts of them are the editorial staff of DC (and Grant along with them, because as author he is himself complicit, no matter what anyone else thinks on the subject), I don’t buy it. As far as the “real” Superman stuff goes, that means nothing to me – both because I haven’t got any real connection with him as a character and because even if it were explicitly stated in the story, it can be written out of continuity with a penstroke. Everyone has got “their” Superman – this is not mine.

And as for the fact that it has a gay couple in it – I do not know these characters nor know why I should care about them; it’s not Flash and Green Lantern – it’s a pair of generic lookalikes that have no previous context for me to hook onto and they have exactly one scene together. Sorry, but Marvel or DC, you don’t get a prize just for showing up – you have to do something with it to impress me.

Let’s be frank – if Morrison was the last sane man in the room at DC, he wouldn’t be getting carte blanche to write a glorified miniseries with no clear end point. And I’m sorry, you don’t get to complain about the ivory tower while sipping cognac on the penthouse balcony – Grant hasn’t had to fight for creative control in a long time (c.f. New X-Men), and all the trappings of the Multiverse, both those he’s created and those he’s appropriated, can’t mask the mediocrity of this story, even from you, Joe, the person out of the two of us most likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t enjoy feeling so cynical on this. I want to like Morrison and his output; I want to believe that he’s our man on the inside. But the more I look at this book the more I feel like the Multiversal fanservice is just window-dressing. For something that has been hyped to the extent that it has, it’s disappointing to see it begin in such a tepid and pedestrian manner. I’d say that this is the kind of thing a teenager would think is deep and original, but that would be an insult to the intelligence of teenagers.

Unlike some who have already given this issue rave reviews, I will not be recommending the series on the basis of this opener alone. However, I will be keeping my eye on its progress – there are certainly storylines that have intrigued me if only to see how derivative they are (the fourth one-shot, Pax Americana, is being described as an overt rip-off of Watchmen; I reserve the right to say “I told you so”), but I’m not holding my breath.

I could be wrong, I could be right.

JC: I didn’t say the Gentry were meant to be stand-ins for the editorial staff of DC specifically, just that they represented the concept of IP farming and corporate control of superhero characters, along with the desire to make everything, yes, grim ‘n’ gritty. (Oh, and there’s also a moment where that flying eyeball thing says “WE WANT 2 MAKE YU LIKE US” which can be interpreted a couple of different ways in light of how desperate DC is these days to be the cool kids on the block…) I’m not sure why you need the Gentry to explicitly reveal themselves as Didio, Harras, et. al for me to be “right”…that’s not really how fiction works, dude. There’s not necessarily one single interpretation for all this, and indeed, any writer worth their salt is going to create something with multiple interpretations. In fact, that’s something else the book seems to be arguing for, a diversity of opinions and philosophies–hell, it’s basically right there in the title!

Morrison is, after all, the one who’s been fighting to bring back the multiverse, which was eradicated from DC in the first place partly because the company wanted to maintain a simplified canon, where there was one authoritative version of everything, and I think both the corporate mindset and overly-literal fanboys still resist the concept of having so many versions of their favourite characters. But it’s precisely that which enables Morrison to have his “own” version of Superman, or yours, or mine, within the narrative framework of the DC Universe. The whole idea of a multiverse, which Morrison obviously didn’t invent but is championing, is the idea that corporations cannot fully own an idea, no matter what the contracts say, and they certainly can’t stop people from reinterpreting their characters however they see fit. You don’t have to personally love Calvin Ellis; that’s the whole point. You can have your own Superman. Morrison’s brought in “his” version, but it could have just as easily been your own.

That said, it’s not unreasonable to claim that someone who’s working for a huge corporation is ideologically tainted, regardless of their intent. All I can do is look at the full context of Morrison’s work and identify what he’s trying to do, which is to find a way to work creatively within the system (something superhero comics have been historically pretty good at allowing, even if things have been different lately). Even if I’d rather see there not be a system at all, I think it’s a valid approach; after all, the dilemma of modern storytelling is that to get your ideas out into the public sphere, you have to engage with corporate structures, be they Hollywood or the publishing industry. You can self-publish your own black-and-white zines in your basement and maintain ideological purity, but you’re never going to reach the kind of audience Morrison does here. It’s the perpetual paradox of those who want to rail about the power structure, but finds all the platforms for conveying their views owned by that same power structure.

My reading of what Morrison’s doing here–and again, this is based on having actually read his work at DC and elsewhere for the past few years, and seeing how it all fits into a broader context–is that rather than punching back at the system, he’s trying to mutate it into more benign, creative forms. It’s entirely possible that he won’t succeed, though it’s worth noting that DC has launched a number of “out of continuity” comics, particularly the digital Adventures of Superman, since Morrison’s started working on this project. But I think it’s undeniable that Morrison has more interesting ideas than anyone at DC at the moment, and he clearly thinks it’s worth making the effort.

Ultimately, of course, this is one issue, and one that ends with a cliffhanger, so we’ll basically have to wait months to see if there’s any vindication for you, or me, or anyone, at the end of the story. I’m guessing not, because as I say: this seems to be a story about diversity of viewpoints, and no one’s going to be proven “right” or “wrong”. Different ideas can co-exist within a huge multiverse. That’s how it ought to be. That’s how Morrison’s trying to make it.

Joe Colewood is a great man, a man of vision. No one understands him. He had good reasons for doing the things he did. Consider the 20 years of peace in Lichtenstein, not to mention the electric toothbrush, and ask whether it was all worth it. The whereabouts of the bus full of nuns was never ascertained, anyway. You’ll see. History will vindicate him.

Adam X. Smith is a paranoid android from the Planet X. For the last 27 years he has been living amongst the people of Birmingham, England (and more recently the University of Lincoln) ostensibly as a student of the school of hard knocks (also BA Hons Drama), but secretly on a mission to scout out the planet for invasion by alien forces; his weekly communiques on his various blogs are actually highly coded messages to his extra-terrestrial masters. He enjoys the musical stylings of local chiptune-metal band Elmo Sexwhistle, the fiction of Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, and his hobbies and interests include film-making, drama, occasional Youtubing, journalism and plotting the subjugation of humanity. He can be found on Youtube, Tumblr, Twitter or by jamming an ice-pick through the optic chiasm.

Trying Not To Be Cynical: A 4000 Word Discussion Of Multiversity #1 By Two Bleeding Cool Columnists

In his lolling north Alabama accent, the word “ours” makes Philip Rivers sound like a pirate. Fresh from an August practice and leaning against a wall outside Chargers Park, he’s using it a lot. “I feel like it’s ars,” he says. “I feel like it’s ar offense.”

Rivers is talking about the system that head coach Mike McCoy brought with him upon arriving in San Diego last season. When McCoy and Ken Whisenhunt, then San Diego’s offensive coordinator and now the Tennessee Titans’ head coach, arrived, it meant the only significant schematic change of Rivers’s career. What the quarterback thought might devolve into a rookie head coach making his mark — and a point — turned collaborative. “I have to imagine in other places, coaches come in, and it’s wholesale change — Here’s how we run this offense; learn it our way,” Rivers says. “This has been a lot more about making it the easiest transition we can.” The language of the offense has shifted, as McCoy says, from a system reliant on numbers to one based on words — but certain ideas, code names, and route designs survived.

The holdovers were a bridge, designed to return Rivers to the quarterback he’d been for much of his career, and beyond the muck of the past couple seasons. At the end of 2012, his status as a great quarterback had been left for dead. He’d thrown 35 interceptions in 2011 and 2012 — the fourth-worst mark in football. Add to that a tie with Mark Sanchez for the league lead in fumbles with 24 over the same stretch. The Chargers had gone from a high-powered offense to living under the auspices of inevitable disaster. Head coach Norv Turner was fired, and Rivers was dropped to the middle class of the quarterback hierarchy.

Soon after McCoy arrived, he told Peter King he thought Rivers could complete 70 percent of his passes — the sort of endorsement new coaches offer a quarterback in need of revival. In nine years, Rivers had never bested 66. When the season ended, McCoy’s vision had failed to come true. Rivers ended the year at 69.5 percent.

After a two-year banishment, Rivers was again one of the best quarterbacks in football. But reentry to the club doesn’t go far enough — not after the season he had a year ago and the seven he put together before that. Last season placed Rivers alongside Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, players who have long been his peers, even if he is rarely considered in the same breath. By some measures, Rivers is one of the five best quarterbacks of the past decade. But many would list him third in his own draft class — the famous 2004 group that includes Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning.

Those two have one claim that Rivers doesn’t — each has won a championship. Same as Peyton, Brees, and every other quarterback comparable to Rivers during his 10 years in the league. He’s done enough to earn his generation’s title as the best quarterback without a Super Bowl. But he’s been so much more.

Rivers is also bigger than you might think. His name is never mentioned along with Roethlisberger’s or Andrew Luck’s when people talk about “big” quarterbacks, but even standing here in a pair of brown Crocs, Rivers is an honest 6-foot-5.

At 228 pounds, he’s sturdy enough to withstand a beating. And he has. In eight seasons as San Diego’s starting quarterback, Rivers has never missed a start, including the 2007 AFC Championship Game, which he played on a torn ACL. He’s 32 now and says he still feels great. “And those two years at the beginning gave me an extra two on the back end,” he says.

Those two years were spent in relief of Drew Brees, the Chargers’ starting quarterback when Rivers arrived back in 2004. Owners of the first pick in the 2004 draft, the Chargers opted for the North Carolina State quarterback after Eli Manning made no secret of not wanting to play in San Diego. Rivers didn’t have Manning’s last name, but his early years were similarly steeped in football. Rivers, whose dad was his coach, was a quarterback from the time he could hold a football. The ball barely fit in his tiny hands. To compensate, his passes were part push, and they stayed that way. Rivers’s unconventional delivery dominated talk about him before the draft. But two things were certain about those sidewinding throws: They got where they were going, and they got there more quickly than anyone else’s.

San Diego may not have landed Manning, but it had a worthy franchise quarterback — one who threw for nearly 4,500 yards as a senior. Taking Rivers was a hint that Brees was not long for the Chargers. And when Brees severely injured his right shoulder in his last game before free agency, it made his moving on an even more logical step. With all Brees has done since, it’s a testament to Rivers that a torch-bearing mob has yet to descend on Qualcomm Stadium.

Rivers took over as the starter in 2006 — San Diego went 14-2, but lost coach Marty Schottenheimer after fizzling in the playoffs. Schottenheimer’s replacement was Norv Turner, who kept the team’s Air Coryell offensive system in place. Don Coryell’s offense wasn’t born in San Diego, but it made a home there. When Coryell brought his vertical passing game to the West Coast in 1978, the Chargers — ultimately led by Dan Fouts, Kellen Winslow, and Charlie Joiner — began torching NFL records in the late 1970s by pushing the ball down the field. More than two decades later, offensive coordinator Cam Cameron brought Air Coryell back to San Diego, and Rivers became a master of it.

Rivers threw 34 touchdown passes in 2008, while also totaling 4,009 yards and finishing first in passing DVOA. It was the first of three straight seasons in which Rivers would lead the league in yards per attempt. The Chargers’ offense was designed to attack teams down the field, and they’d built the perfect group to do it. With Vincent Jackson and Malcom Floyd, Rivers had a 6-foot-5 receiver to either side, while Antonio Gates patrolled the middle of the field. For his part, Rivers has always thrown one of the more beautiful deep balls in football.

The fit of system, quarterback, and cast turned the Chargers into one of the league’s top passing offenses in those years — first in DVOA in 2008, first again in 2009, and second in 2010 — and Rivers into maybe its best quarterback. According to Pro-Football-Reference.com’s Approximate Value metric, no quarterback did more for his team from 2008 to 2010 than Rivers, just ahead of Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees.

Tom Brady’s left knee pushes him down that list, but for the most part, those four quarterbacks are Rivers’s only company since 2006. He ranks behind only Brees in Approximate Value.³³ He’s fourth in touchdown passes. Only Rodgers has averaged more yards per attempt.

In every statistical category, Rivers has produced at a higher level than both his 2004 draft mates. What separates him from Eli Manning and Roethlisberger is also what separates him from the rung of Peyton, Rodgers, Brees, and Brady: Rivers doesn’t have his Super Bowl.

And by the end of the 2012 season, it felt like his window had closed.

Since he got to San Diego, Danny Woodhead’s friends have all asked him a version of the same question: What’s Philip like?

It’s the barking, flailing lunacy that defines Rivers’s on-field persona. Peyton Manning and Jay Cutler each have their own demonstrative flair, but where Manning’s is practical and Cutler’s is condescending, Rivers’s is just cranky. When Rivers was stomping around in Denver last year, Broncos defensive end Robert Ayers couldn’t help but perform a mock waddle in response. Not engaging with Rivers’s antics is next to impossible, and it drives the fascination that those like Woodhead’s friends have always had.

There’s more to it than being really competitive, though Rivers is really competitive. “I think you’re hinting at more of a turnaround than it really was,” he says of last year. “The previous seasons, a lot of guys would love to have those seasons.”

He’s probably right about 2011. That’s the year Rivers threw 20 interceptions, five more than any other season of his career — but he also threw for 4,624 yards and 27 touchdowns. He finished ninth in yards per attempt and eighth in DVOA. A lot of quarterbacks would love to have that season.

The next year, not so much.

Rivers fumbled 15 times, more than anyone in football. He averaged just 6.8 yards per attempt, his worst figure as a starter. He plummeted to 22nd in DVOA.

Part of the decline was the crumbling of San Diego’s offensive line. For most of his time as a starter, Rivers had the reliable Marcus McNeill protecting him at left tackle. But in 2012, a host of injuries pushed undrafted rookie Mike Harris into that role. Harris was overmatched all year, and with right tackle Jeromey Clary not faring much better, the Chargers finished dead last in adjusted sack rate.

Evading rushers was part of the problem, but Rivers wasn’t blameless. On film, there were sequences when he “would watch and go, ‘Shoot, that’s about as good as I can play,’” but that backbreaking turnover was always lurking. “Sometimes, when it’s starting to get away from you a little bit, as it was those previous years, you’re fighting and clawing and trying to find a way to get it going, and you try to do too much,” he says. “There were times when I was trying to make something out of nothing. My intentions were good. My intentions were right. But it doesn’t work that way.”

The task for McCoy, Whisenhunt, and quarterbacks coach³⁴ Frank Reich was to sway their quarterback away from taking so many risks. “The big thing was just trusting the system, taking what the defense gives you,” McCoy says. “That’s what we preached from day one here, in the meetings, everything. If he didn’t take a certain pass, Frank [Reich] would say, ‘Hey, listen, this is what we want you to do.’”

Completions became the goal — a mantra, almost. “It wasn’t a completely new idea to me,” Rivers says, “but it really was, ‘Just throw completions. Just keeping throwing completions. Just keep getting first downs.’”

And they got plenty. Only the Broncos and Patriots had more, and no team converted on third down more times and more often than the Chargers. They finished second in offensive DVOA, with Rivers finishing third among quarterbacks.

It was a return to the results from five years earlier, but by way of a considerably different process. Gone was the downfield passing game dependent on chunks of yardage. In his first seven seasons, Rivers averaged 8.58 air yards per attempt, the eighth-highest total over that span. Last season, it was 7.68 — 30th in the league. His completion percentage jumped from his career average as a starter of 63.7 to his career-high 69.5. Throw it to who’s open seems too simple an explanation for such a turnaround, but San Diego’s bevy of short and intermediate passes was a considerable departure from what Rivers had done in the six years prior. The offense wanted something different. So he did something different.

At times, it led to competing voices whispering in his ear. “It was just like, Don’t get bored with that little completion. ‘Ah, but I want to try to hit this deep in.’ Well, no, here, there’s a completion. Throw it.”

The voices eventually met in the middle. Rivers took San Diego’s old “chunk plays” when they were there, but he was also the type of high-efficiency quarterback he hadn’t been in a long time. “This offense is funny because it has a mix of what I’ve done in the NFL before, and then a mix of what I did at NC State,” Rivers says. “There was a lot of this intermediate, get the ball out of your hands [passing]. I think it was senior year, I was like 72 percent.” It was exactly 72 percent.

“I don’t like doing this to Danny, because it’s not fair to him,” Rivers says of the running back who isn’t exactly known for his running, before doing it anyway. “But we haven’t had that type of back since [Darren] Sproles left.”

Danny Woodhead came to San Diego last offseason, in the initial wave of moves by the Chargers’ new coaching staff and front office. A legendary Division II running back, Woodhead had made most of his contributions with the Patriots as a receiver — which was just what San Diego needed. He caught 76 passes last year, nearly doubling his career high.

Some of what Woodhead offers is a product of the offense’s structure. Many of San Diego’s plays used Woodhead as a release in the middle of the field, an outlet for when the efficiency whispers were just a little louder. There were ample plays, though, that asked Woodhead to simply beat whoever was tasked with covering him. And he did, often.

System and scheme deserve a lot of credit for what Rivers and his offense accomplished in their first year, but there’s also an ineffable quality that shows up again and again when they play. “You have to have feel,” Rivers says. “Danny has that feel. Gates has always had it. Keenan’s got it.”

Keenan Allen was the Chargers’ third-round pick in last year’s draft. Based on his 98 catches for more than 1,300 yards as a sophomore, many thought he’d be a first-round pick, but when the combine came around, Allen clocked in at 4.71 in the 40-yard dash — a number that’s difficult to overcome for any receiver. A bum knee played a role, but even those campaigning for Allen did it with lines like, “On tape, to me, he’s a 4.55 guy all day long.”

A 4.55 won’t turn heads either, but what Allen lacks in pure burner speed, he makes up for in feel. For Allen — and Woodhead, and Gates — “feel” is knowing how to get where he wants to be on the field when he wants to get there. Put simply, he just knows how to get open. “You have to be within the framework, but in certain cases, whatever it takes, you’ve just got to get open,” Woodhead says. Allen usually is — wide open.

Rivers says there’s “an element of the backyard involved in how we’re playing,” which sounds ridiculous but also like something every quarterback would want to say about his offense. There’s something else about Rivers — something that at first mention might sound silly, but Woodhead is willing to back it up: His passes are strangely easy to catch. “He throws a very catchable ball,” Woodhead says, “whether it be a diagonal in the flat, or going over the middle. It’s very catchable.” That line is attached to a lot of quarterbacks, but for Rivers, it seems to be true. The Chargers have finished in the top four in drop rate for four straight seasons,³⁵ a stretch that’s seen almost complete receiver turnover outside of Gates. Whether it’s his unorthodox release, the way the ball spins off his hand, or some other explanation, Rivers’s passes get caught.

Whatever intangible connection Rivers shares with his receivers becomes even more crucial this season. San Diego is moving to a no-huddle approach on offense, giving Rivers more authority at the line of scrimmage. “I hate the term ‘freedom,’” Rivers says about the characterization of the no-huddle. “It’s not freedom. Within the confines of what we’re doing, we all have to see it. [The receivers] have to see it how I see it.” With this group, they usually do.

The open lines of communication from his initial meetings with McCoy and Reich have continued into this year. “They give us that sense of ownership,” Rivers says. “Because we have the leeway on the field to get to certain plays, and because they’re so open to listen to wrinkles for certain guys. We have guys in charge, but it very much has that feel of, ‘This is ars.’ And to has to be that way for it to work in the no-huddle.” There’s still no “o” to be found in ars.

For all the success he and the offense had last year, what Rivers wants to carry over most is the notion of “getting in,” as he calls it. The Chargers snuck into the playoffs at 9-7, but that’s a start. Roethlisberger’s first Super Bowl came as a 6-seed, Manning’s as a 5. Rivers has been around. He knows how it works. It takes only one year when it all breaks the right way. “That’s why we, as a team, not for me, have to keep getting in,” Rivers says. “I know that’s a long way from now, and we have to focus on the division, one game at a time, all that, but you have to give yourself a chance. And that’s what those teams did. They got in.

“That’s where you’re sick the most,” Rivers says. “I know I was. For three years, we didn’t give ourselves a chance.”

Rivers will be 33 in December. He’s watched players like LaDainian Tomlinson and Kris Dielman — men he played with for years — retire. The end is closer than the beginning. A Super Bowl would do more for him than any quarterback in the NFL, but he says it’s no more important now that it has been for the last decade. “I don’t want us to win a championship more than I did [in earlier seasons],” he says.

With his back and one foot up against the wall, he’s searching for the right words to describe the feeling. “It’s hard to really explain this,” he says. “Will I be disappointed if we don’t one day win a championship? Yes. But I know I’m going to be able to be at peace either way.” He even sounds like he believes it. 

Frank Grillo played S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Brock Rumlow, better known in the comics as Crossbones, in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Brendon Connelly left us a little present before he left Bleeding Cool for pastures new, an embargoed interview with Frank Grillo, embargoed until the release of the Captain America DVD and Blu Ray. You can hear the whole thing below, even though Frank Grillo sounds a little like Rob Brydon doing his “man trapped in a box” voice.

He talked about getting the call from Marvel when shooting Homefront with Jason Statham, and being flown to LA by the Russo Brothers, fans of The Grey, how the movie was sold as an origin story for him, to be told over more movies, so we can expect to see him return. “I’m cautiously optimistic that it’ll be something great”, he said. He also talked about signing a four picture deal with Marvel and how he has to consult with Marvel now when signing up for other films in case of schedule conflicts, including Warrior and the remake of The Raid.

Brendon tells Grillo that he basically looked like a muscle in the film, but Grillo wasn’t offended. He talks movies like this being a combination of acting and working out, saying “I’ve hit the jackpot”.

Grillo is asked about the movies’ politics, and he compares it to Robert Redford‘s film Three Days Of The Condor. He also talks about how his character doesn’t see himself as evil, but good, being on one side of an ideology, and talks about how members of the Nazi Party would never see themselves as evil, despite committing acts of atrocity. Time for this clip, I think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh look, Brendon even references it at the end, talking to Grillo. We are still, it seems, of the same mind.

It’s fascinating to learn how these people were blinded by prejudice and ideals and they did crazy things, so that’s how I approached this.

You have to understand the circumstances and you have to believe, through and through. There’s a great thing where the mind goes, the body follows, you have to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing as this character.

Grillo also talks about choosing action films, but films with a message, over and above their popcorn nature. He asks why Americans are obsessed with guns, over other countries, “Why in my country, do people go into schools and kill children?”

Brendon also asks about the justification for director Patrick Hughes remaking The Raid at all.

It is a remake but its also a different movie. It’s a risk, I’m not saying it isn’t a risk. That first movie is loved by people who are true fans of it. You don’t ever remake The Shining, but it’s been remade, it wasn’t remade well. You have to really, and this is why I think instead of shooting in September they pushed it to January

They really want to be meticulous with what we shoot, how we reshoot, its a long process to the set. And I respect them for taking their time. Hopefully it goes next year and doesn’t conflict with Captain America 3.

He also talked about his character in The Purge being based on Batman, including the coat… and of wanting to return to the stage. 

Go have a listen… just be careful with the volume levels.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Captain America The Winter Soldier is available on DVD and Blu-Ray now, easily on Amazon in the UK. But not in the US. Yet. You’ll have to go to a shop or something.

“Why, In My Country, Do People Go Into Schools And Kill Children?” – Frank Grillo On Playing Crossbones In Captain America; The Winter Soldier

You already know that the defending NFL champions are a unique team. The Seattle Seahawks have a quarterback who is two sizes too small, a running back seemingly powered by candy, and an unconscionably loud home stadium. Something else is strange about the Seahawks, too: how they’re structured. The Seahawks are unquestionably a team built around their dominant secondary under the auspices of Pete Carroll, once and always a defensive backs coach. There are Super Bowl–winning teams from the past with great secondaries — the 2010 Packers come to mind — but the position you associate most with this Seahawks team, more than anything else, is defensive back.

That’s very uncommon.⁴¹ Earl Thomas and Richard Sherman were first-team All-Pros in both 2012 and 2013, attesting to Seattle’s strength in the secondary; the last time two defensive backs from the same team were first-team All-Pros in consecutive seasons, per Pro-Football-Reference.com, was when Herb Adderley and Willie Wood pulled the same feat off for the Green Bay Packers in 1965 and 1966. Kam Chancellor made it to the Pro Bowl in 2011 and 2013, and while the fourth spot in the secondary has been a revolving door, that three-man core has been so good that I started wondering: Do the Seahawks have the best secondary ever?

It’s too early to say for these Seahawks, of course, but in researching the question, I started wondering what the best secondaries in league history looked like and how long they stayed together. The answer to that question, especially in the salary cap era, is not very long. It might take only another couple of seasons at this level of play to declare Seattle the best secondary in league history, and there’s little reason to think that Sherman, Thomas & Co. will slip. And naturally, if it’s not these Seahawks, I wanted to figure out who was in the best secondary in league history, and then the best linebacking corps in NFL history, and then it was four in the morning and Pro-Football-Reference.com actually started playing a MIDI version of “Closing Time”⁴² and refused to respond to any more of my searches.

Click here for more from our 2014 NFL preview.

I eventually came away with a list of the best positional units on one team at any given time in league history. Some are closer than others, and much of it’s a matter of personal opinion, but there’s something more than mere trivia to be gained here. How long does a star unit last, especially in the modern era? How much harder is it to build a particularly incredible group of players at one position than it is at another? And are there any current personnel groupings who could make a reasonable run at the star teams of the past? I’ll try to answer those questions as I go along.

A few quick rules I tried to follow in picking the right candidate(s):

It’s not enough to have a great player on your team if he was well past his prime or wasn’t playing like he had been at his peak. Say the Seahawks traded for Charles Woodson tomorrow and used him as their seventh defensive back this season. Woodson’s résumé is incredible, but as a backup defensive back playing out the end of his career, his actual impact on the team (and its candidacy for best secondary alive) is negligible.

A player’s level of play at the time he was on the team is more important than his past/future level of performance, but both matter. The very good Eagles secondary from the turn of the decade had Al Harris as their nickelback; when he would later get a chance to start in Green Bay, Harris would reveal himself to be a Pro Bowl–caliber player, which helps put his performance in Philadelphia into context, but he’s more valuable to those Packers teams for the purposes of this piece than he is to those Eagles squads.

All press is good press. Having a Hall of Famer in your positional unit is of enormous value. Having two is a surefire way to be in the running. All-Pro and Pro Bowl appearances mean a lot, too. If your group was notable enough to acquire a famous nickname, that helps.

Longevity helps. That 1994 49ers secondary with Deion Sanders was incredible, but Sanders was there for only one season before leaving to join the Cowboys. They might have burned extremely bright while Sanders played by the Bay, but it’s tougher to put that unit over a group like Seattle’s, which has had its three core components together in the starting lineup for three seasons.

It’s harder to do this in the modern game. For a number of reasons, it’s harder to build an incredible positional unit in the current NFL. The salary cap prevents teams from investing heavily at a given position, while the league has grown from 13 teams in 1950 (the earliest point I considered for candidates) to 32 teams here in 2014. I didn’t write off combinations from the past altogether, as you’ll see, but I gave extra credence to succeeding in the modern NFL.

All right. Preamble aside, let’s run through the best positional groupings, spot by spot, since 1950:

Quarterbacks

Winner: Joe Montana and Steve Young, 49ers, 1987-92

A pretty obvious winner here, as Montana and Young were a rare case in which a team had a pair of Hall of Fame quarterbacks on the roster for an extended period of time.⁴³ Young was hardly an unknown when he was sitting behind Montana, either; he had been a prominent player in the USFL before being taken with the first pick in the USFL Supplemental Draft by the Buccaneers, who promptly gave up on him after two seasons and traded him to the 49ers for second- and fourth-round picks. Montana’s nagging injury issues meant that Young started 10 games during his first four seasons with the team before taking over as the full-time starter after Montana went down with an elbow injury during the 1990 playoffs.

Current Candidate: Peyton Manning and Brock Osweiler, Broncos

There’s no team in football at the moment with two quarterbacks who have any prayer of both winning MVP awards or making the Hall of Fame. The position is just spread too thin, and there’s no team out there with both a very good starter and a first-round pick waiting in the wings. Because of that, I just chose the best quarterback of all time and his backup, who might surprise us all and turn into something. The last real challenger to this throne would have been Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers when both were on the Packers from 2005 to 2007, but Rodgers threw only 59 passes before Favre left town. They’ll both be Hall of Famers one day and finish a close second to Montana and Young for a long, long time.

Running Backs

Winner: Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell, Browns, 1958-61

After Brown led the NFL in rushing yards and touchdowns as a rookie in 1957, Cleveland took Mitchell, an Olympic hopeful in track and field, with its seventh-round pick in the 1958 NFL draft. With the bruising 232-pound Brown at fullback and a 192-pound Mitchell at halfback, Cleveland had a perfect big man–small man act. From 1958 through 1961, with Brown and Mitchell at the helm, the Browns ran for 8,768 yards, nearly 1,000 yards more than the second-place Packers, while averaging 4.9 yards per attempt. The partnership ended in 1962, when the Browns dealt Mitchell to Washington as part of a package for the first overall pick, Ernie Davis, who wouldn’t play for a Washington team that had famously refused to sign or trade for black players. Davis would sadly die from leukemia before ever playing an NFL down, as depicted in The Express. Mitchell, instead, became the player who integrated Washington while moving to wide receiver, where he also excelled before becoming a longtime member of the team’s front office.

Brown would also have another Hall of Fame running back as a teammate several years later in Leroy Kelly, but Kelly really made his mark only after Brown retired at the age of 29 in 1966. Their closest competitors are another pair of ’60s running backs: the duo of Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor in Green Bay, who dominated from 1958 to 1966, with a one-year exception for Hornung’s season-long gambling suspension in 1963.

Current Candidate: Adrian Peterson and Jerick McKinnon, Vikings

In 2014, running back is a relative wasteland, so there’s not really a strong one-two punch to compete with the players of yesteryear. In much the same way I chose the Denver quarterbacks, I went with Peterson, a future Hall of Famer, and the young player who might develop into something behind him.

Wide Receivers

Winner: Cris Carter and Randy Moss, Vikings, 1998-2001

Oh, this can head in so many directions, and all of them are going to make a group of fans angry. You could easily justify a half-dozen other combinations as the winners here. Lynn Swann and John Stallworth both made the Hall of Fame.⁴⁴ Elroy Hirsch and Tom Fears were a dominant duo in an era when the game was totally different. If you want to expand out beyond a two-person combination, you can point to the Art Monk–Ricky Sanders–Gary Clark trio that powered Washington to Super Bowl wins with different quarterbacks in 1987 and 1991, or the Greatest Show on Turf’s four-wideout set of Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Az-Zahir Hakim, and Ricky Proehl.

You can make a reasonable case for any of those teams over any of the others. Carter and Moss stand out, though, for how freakishly dominant they were in their pomp. Carter was already a superstar when this run started, given that he was 33 and coming off of five consecutive Pro Bowl seasons across from Jake Reed. Reed was a good player. Moss was an otherworldly force of nature. Carter slowed down in 2002, but during the four years of this partnership, the duo were first (Moss) and fourth (Carter) in touchdowns by a wide receiver while each finished in the top 10 for receptions and receiving yards. What takes it over the top for me is that they did it with three different quarterbacks; the breakout debut season in 1998 came with Randall Cunningham, who made it to the Pro Bowl without having been an effective starter since 1994. They were almost as great a year later, when Cunningham gave way to Jeff George, with Daunte Culpepper taking over for a multiyear run in 2000. Carter is in the Hall of Fame, and Moss should be in a few years. It’s a narrow victory, and the combination of their names sounds a little too much like a TNT show, but I’m giving this one to Carter and Moss.

Current Candidate: Demaryius Thomas and Wes Welker, Broncos

I don’t know that Thomas and Welker are the best one-two punch in football in terms of talent; you’d almost certainly draft Randall Cobb and Jordy Nelson or Alshon Jeffery and Brandon Marshall over them if you had to pick a duo. In terms of impact, though, Thomas and Welker reign supreme. Welker has an interesting Hall of Great case as quite possibly the best slot receiver of all time and a guy who was wildly productive for six seasons in New England, while Thomas has posted back-to-back 90-plus catch, 1,400-plus yard, 10-plus touchdown seasons with Peyton Manning around. Their role in what might have been the greatest offense in NFL history will not go unnoticed.

Tight Ends

Winner: Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez, Patriots, 2010-12

Wait, really?

Yes. There’s not a combination of tight ends any better than Gronkowski and Hernandez, who put together a three-year run that feels like ancient history after what’s happened to each of them over the past two years. No tight end duo in history has ever come close to matching their 2011 campaign, when the two Patriots combined for 169 receptions, 2,237 receiving yards, and 24 receiving touchdowns.

Part of this is that the position of tight end is evolving, and the players who suit up there over the next 30 years are unlikely to resemble the often-plodding blockers who suited up there over the previous 30. Even given the stars of the past, there was never a time when a Hall of Famer like Mike Ditka or Kellen Winslow Sr. had a notable second fiddle at tight end for any stretch of time.⁴⁵ Gronkowski and Hernandez were the first of their kind and drastically changed the way teams think about building their receiving corps; that helps prove how important their partnership was, even if it didn’t last very long.

Current Candidate: Antonio Gates and Ladarius Green, Chargers

Other teams have emulated the Patriots with limited success; Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Minnesota have all tried to build chunks of their offense around a duo of tight ends. The pair with the highest upside is in San Diego; Antonio Gates is at the end of a Hall of Fame–caliber career, and if you could make the Hall of Fame on a wave of fantasy sleeper articles, Ladarius Green would already have his own wing in Canton. That selection admittedly might look very silly next year.

Offensive Line

Winner: Art Shell, Gene Upshaw, Jim Otto, George Buehler, and Bob Brown, Raiders, 1971

You can spin this one of two different ways. The core of the Raiders team was that Shell-Upshaw-Otto combination on the left side of their line, a group that stayed together from 1968 through 1974. All three of those guys made the Hall of Fame, and the trio combined for 27 Pro Bowls, 17 first-team All-Pro squads, and 45 years of Raiders football. I’d be comfortable picking that trio, but I want to specifically focus on the 1971 team. Buehler was a competent guard, but that season saw Bob Brown — who had made five All-Pro first teams in the previous six seasons — come over to Oakland to play right tackle. He would be a Pro Bowler in 1971 and eventually make the Hall of Fame. Oh, and the swing tackle was Ron Mix, who had made eight Pro Bowls and been a nine-time first-team All-Pro for the Chargers in the ’60s. He, incredibly, was the fifth Hall of Fame offensive lineman on this one Raiders team. There are other great offensive lines — the Hogs in Washington come to mind — but nobody can match this Raiders line for decoration.

Current Candidate: Joe Staley, Mike Iupati, Alex Boone, Anthony Davis, and various centers, 49ers

Boone was the guy who really took this line to the next level when he entered the starting lineup for Adam Snyder in 2012, and ironically, his ongoing holdout may be the event that precipitates its fall from the top of the charts. A mauling group of run-blockers who work perfectly in tandem with methodical veteran Frank Gore, the San Francisco front five are on their third center in five years, having replaced Jonathan Goodwin with backup Daniel Kilgore. If Boone leaves, they’ll struggle to replace his overwhelming athleticism, which might be just enough to push the multitasking unit in Philadelphia into this spot.

Defensive Line

Winner: Carl Eller, Gary Larsen, Alan Page, and Jim Marshall, Vikings, 1967-73

Oh, this one was tough. It was tough enough to toss aside the Richard Dent and Dan Hampton–led lines of the mid-’80s Bears and the Steel Curtain up front on those legendary Pittsburgh Steelers teams of the ’70s. I ended up with two remarkably close candidates, with the Deacon Jones–led Fearsome Foursome of the Rams going up against the Purple People Eaters in Minnesota.

You could, honestly, make a great case for either team. Jones and Merlin Olsen were the leaders of a unit that fundamentally pushed the game of football forward; Jones literally came up with the term “sack” and came to define the archetype of the dominant edge rusher. Eller and Page weren’t as influential, but they might have been more celebrated at their peak; Page was the first non-skill position player to win the AP’s version of NFL MVP and remains one of three to pull off that feat, alongside Lawrence Taylor and KICKER MARK MOSELEY (WHY?). Larsen and Marshall also stayed alongside their two stars longer than any of the variations on the Fearsome Foursome, and in 1969, each of the four men in Minnesota’s defensive line made the Pro Bowl. Even the Fearsome Foursome failed to pull that off. That gave the Vikes a very narrow victory.

Current Candidate: Chris Long, Robert Quinn, Michael Brockers, and Aaron Donald, Rams

Already possessing the best one-two punch at defensive end in football, the Rams used one of their first-round picks this past year on Donald, the best interior pass-rusher in the draft. Carolina had the best line in the league last year, and the Texans are about to combine J.J. Watt and Jadeveon Clowney⁴⁶ in their pass rush, but nobody has horses like this.

Linebackers

Winner: Jack Ham and Jack Lambert, Steelers, 1974-82

Pro-Football-Reference.com has a fan rating system that lets readers use an Elo-style head-versus-head system to rank the greatest players in the history of professional football. Lambert and Ham (somehow another TNT show?) are each rated as among the 22 best players in football history at any position. That should tell you a lot. They were so valuable that I didn’t feel the need to pick a third linebacker, but among the starters who lined up alongside them, the best was probably veteran Andy Russell, who made the Pro Bowl in 1974 and 1975. I’ll hear arguments for the 2000 Ravens, the Lawrence Taylor–era Giants, and the Orange Crush, but Ham and Lambert are beyond reproach for me.

Current Candidate: NaVorro Bowman, Patrick Willis, Aldon Smith, and Ahmad Brooks, 49ers

This group looked a lot better one year ago, before Smith went to rehab and Bowman suffered a gruesome knee injury in the playoffs. Carolina has a pretty incredible one-two punch with Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis, but if this four-man group can get back on track by the end of 2014, nobody in football will be able to touch them.

Defensive Backs

Winner: Dick LeBeau, “Night Train” Lane, Yale Lary, Lions, 1960-64

This was the hardest one to pick, mainly because there really weren’t many secondaries with multiple Hall of Famers who stayed together for five years or more. I thought about the aforementioned 1994 49ers and turned to the early-’80s foursome of Ronnie Lott, Eric Wright, Carlton Williamson, and Dwight Hicks, each of whom made the Pro Bowl in 1984. Lott, though, is the only Hall of Famer from that bunch. The Raiders arguably possessed the best one-two punch at cornerback in league history during the early ’80s, thanks to the combination of Lester Hayes and Michael Haynes, but they were (relatively) weak at safety. The Packers could boast a trio of Hall of Famers in the mid-’60s with Herb Adderley, Willie Wood, and Emlen Tunnell, but Tunnell joined the team at 35 and made only one Pro Bowl as a Packers player.

The Lions, meanwhile, had a five-year run with three Hall of Famers in their secondary. Lane and Lary were among the best defensive backs in NFL history, and while LeBeau’s induction certainly owes something to his impact as a defensive coach, he made three consecutive Pro Bowls between 1964 and 1966. If he ends up as the Chancellor to the others’ Sherman and Thomas, that’s not the worst thing.

Obviously, the current candidates for this honor are in Seattle, and this exercise showed me just how limited the life span of great positional units really can be. It seems like we’re just getting started with the Sherman-Thomas-Chancellor trio, and while this group is signed through 2017, it’s difficult to imagine them playing together for that long. They’re not yet the best secondary in NFL history, but given how effective they’ve been through three seasons together, the Legion of Boom is certainly on its way. More than any other positional grouping in today’s NFL, they have a chance to go down as the best group of players at their position in league history.

A friend told me a funny story the other day: On a routine subway ride headed uptown, he spotted a slumped-over man who resembled Jon Lovitz. He gazed at the man, trying to get his attention. Then, in an egregious violation of train etiquette, my friend blurted, “Hey, you Jon Lovitz?” The man who resembled Lovitz glanced at him quizzically and then rose from his seat as the A train pulled into Penn Station. Approaching my friend, Lovitz stood before him just as the doors opened, gazed back into his eyes, and in that inimitable, grandiloquent, Lovitzian way, he announced, “Jeeealous?”

And then, through those doors, Jon Lovitz was gone.

Moments like these are why Jon Lovitz is my favorite Saturday Night Live cast member, forever and ever. If this story is true, and I believe it is, he is as I always imagined him. His essence was imprinted on me at a young age, surreptitiously watching SNL years before I was allowed and well past my bedtime. Members of the show’s ever-changing repertory company — 139 in all — can cast an unusual spell. For me, Lovitz’s “Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar” character — an odd amalgam of Edward G. Robinson, Ratso Rizzo, and a drowned ferret — still transfixes. Decades on, the magnetic power of these people is undeniable. What is it, exactly? It has a little to do with comedy, a little to do with history, and a lot to do with the collision of those two things.

Want to vote now? Click here to go straight to the bracket.

“We did a show with Steve Martin (April 22, 1978) that probably came off as well as any single show that we’ve ever done. There was a thrill of feeling that everything went right, that we got all the breaks — it’s the only time I remember having that feeling.” That’s James Downey, the hallowed, longtime SNL writer best known for his mastery of the cold open. Downey said this in the book Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years, released 20 years ago. I suspect he still feels that way.

So, 40 years in, why do we still care so much about Saturday Night Live? Its threads of nostalgia are stitched deeply into our memory. And while a show that began as counterculture slowly became culture culture, the mythology has only grown. SNL may never be as special to you as it was when you first discovered it, huddled alone and marveling at Will Ferrell or Gilda Radner or Eddie Murphy or even Rob Schneider. The quest to determine which cast member is “best” may seem frivolous. But everyone’s got a favorite. Because while SNL may not be the star-making factory it once was³⁰ — it retains a kind of glow and a roster-watching cottage industry that resembles fantasy football for bloggers. When cast members are fired, along comes a trundle of think pieces examining who and why and how could they? But if you’re really good, when you move on after a lauded run, you might get to dance with your boss on TV. This is a wholly unique, wholly contained biosphere composed of fascinatingly strange people who sleep all day and work all night. Even at its worst, the show is imperfect perfection — even when no one’s watching and another “Saturday Night Dead” autopsy finds its way onto newsstands. That’s largely because of the people on your TV screen.

And as Downey noted, all they do is fail. Except sometimes they don’t.

To see the expanded version of the bracket and vote now, click here.

So what constitutes a great SNL cast member? Our criteria in assembling the 64 names you’ll find was fairly simple. 1. Impact. How did he or she change the culture of the show? Chevy Chase appeared in only one full season, but his smarmy fingerprints are still smeared across the halls of Studio 8H. 2. Quality of Tenure. Forget about every non-SNL-related aspect of his or her career. You loved Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock. That is immaterial here. Likewise Bill Murray, Amy Poehler, Chris Rock, the host of The Tonight Show, and the dozens of other alumni who went on to greater things after their run on the show. 3. Versatility. Once upon a time, Dennis Miller was considered very funny. But even then, he was mostly just a (fine) “Weekend Update” anchor. This matters. 4. Funny. No explanation needed. 5. Haircut.³¹

Over the course of the next seven days, we’re asking you to vote for the cast member that you obsessed over, that you foolishly followed into movie theaters (R.I.P., Tim Meadows fans), that you always swore had a breakout season on the way (we hardly knew ye, Michaela Watkins). And along with those votes, we’ll tell some stories about former cast members’ lives, explore the show’s forever-unraveling arcana, and prognosticate a bit about the future of what has become, curiously and four decades later, NBC’s crown jewel of original programming. So vote, read, immerse yourself. You’ll feel better about something you loved … or fall in love all over again … or love Saturday Night Live even more than you thought possible.

Yeah, that’s the ticket …

Vote here now!

Photo illustration by Linsey Fields

Actress Evangeline Lilly has been cast in the upcoming Ant-Man film as Hope Van Dyne, the daughter of Janet Van Dyne and Hank Pym. With the movie now filming in San Francisco, Lilly posted photos on Instagram of her new hair and of her with co-star Paul Rudd. The new haircut does lend itself to the idea that she will end up being the Wasp, who has mostly been portrayed with short hair. Whether that comes up in the initial movie that is already slated to have two shrinking characters (Ant-Man and Yellowjacket) or just set up for a sequel remains to be seen.

This seems like the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to bring in the Wasp character and avoid all the negative connection to the spousal abuse issues from the comics between Hank and Janet.

Evangeline Lilly Looking Very Wasp-like

It all started in a bar. A friend and I were watching Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals between the Pacers and Heat at Old Town Pour House in Chicago. Miami was up just two with 8:37 left in the fourth quarter when Ray Allen started to go off. He went 4-of-4 from behind the arc in the final frame, including three splashes from the corner. The Heat cruised to a 12-point win. After we finished watching Allen pour in his jumpers, my friend posed a question I’d never considered: “What is football’s corner 3?”

The corner 3 has become a signifier of the NBA’s analytics revolution. Because the league average on 3s from the corner and 2-point shots away from the rim is nearly even, the former is now widely understood as the most valuable jump shot in basketball — it’s more than a foot and a half closer than the top of the key, but still worth three points. An effective offense has players who can create and make them, and a good defense is built to stop them. Better shooters and better creators help maximize their value, but across the league, corner 3s produce better outcomes than any field goal attempts that aren’t layups or dunks. Despite being an available option since the 3-point line’s invention, only in the last few years have they become basketball’s gold standard for efficiency.

After thinking about the question for a bit, I admitted I didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “But we should find out.”

The Methodology

The NFL’s corner 3 should be the play that creates the highest expected value, independent of factors like team construction and game situation.

Success in basketball and football isn’t a one-to-one comparison. Possessions in basketball are, for the most part, created equal. If one ends with the ball going in, it’s a successful trip. Football involves a few more factors. Five yards on first-and-10 and five yards on third-and-6 are two very different outcomes. ESPN’s “expected points added” stat takes that into account. You can find a full explanation of how EPA works here, but the gist is this: It measures what impact individual plays have on a team’s chances to score, all while taking into account influences such as down, distance, field position, and time left on the clock. It provides a chance to see what teams can expect from individual plays across situations.

The Run Game

The simplest distinction of offensive plays is between runs and passes. If we’ve learned anything in the past decade or so in the NFL, it’s that great passing is what defines great offense. It’s not a surprise, then, that the numbers bear that out. Runs have accounted for about 43 percent of offensive plays in the past five seasons, with an average EPA per play of minus-.04 and a successful play percentage of only 37.9 percent. Only four teams over that stretch have an average EPA above zero: the Eagles, Panthers, Patriots, and Vikings. It’s a fairly predictable list. LeSean McCoy and Adrian Peterson are both involved.

New England is also atop the list of best passing teams with .23 EPA per play, tied with New Orleans for the best mark in the past five years. They’re just two of the 20 teams with a positive EPA in that span. The league average is .04, with an SPP of 44.1 percent. The takeaway: Passes are typically more efficient than runs.

That doesn’t help us much, though. We want to know what type of pass is most efficient. When my buddy first brought up this idea, my gut response was screen passes, based on nothing but anecdotal evidence from watching a lot of football. It seems like every screen ends with a lot of yards, and I’ve wondered why they aren’t a more central part of offenses.

The Screen Pass

As it turns out, screens don’t have that much more value than passes in general. They yielded .07 EPA per play in our five-year stretch, with an SPP of 42 percent — a sign that there was a bigger discrepancy between teams that used them well and teams that didn’t. Denver tops the list at .29 EPA. Just thinking about what Knowshon Moreno did on middle screens last year makes the Broncos a logical choice, but they’d actually been proficient in the screen game even before Peyton Manning arrived, finishing third in EPA per play from 2009 to 2011. Thanks to the nightmare that is McCoy in space, the Eagles rank second. Tampa Bay has the distinct pleasure of being both the worst screen team in the past five seasons (minus-.22 EPA/play) and also running screens on fewer plays than anyone else. No sense in beating your head against the wall, I guess.

What separates screens from other play types is that they’re highly dependent on situation. Screens on third down, when defenses typically have more defensive backs on the field, are about as useful as the average run (minus-.04 EPA). When defenses blitz, though, a screen is actually one of the most efficient plays available. Against five or more rushers, teams averaged .22 EPA on screens, with 27 teams having a positive EPA. That’s consistent with conventional football thinking: When a defense sends more bodies after the quarterback, it vacates the middle of the field. But catching a team in that spot requires knowing when it is sending extra rushers, which isn’t easy. What we’re looking for is a type of play that transcends situation and doesn’t rely on having to find a match for what a defense is doing.

The Answer

Just like screens, play-action passes have always felt like an approach that consistently leads to quality offense. The 2012 Washington offense, for example, used an abnormally high number of play-action throws in its pistol-heavy scheme — and often with excellent results.

It turns out my memory’s interpretation of play-action is clearer than screens. Independent of situation, across the entire league, play-action throws had an EPA of .17, with a 47.6 SPP. Only the Jaguars had an average EPA of less than zero¹⁹ and, again, the Patriots were at the top, with a per-play average of .38 EPA.

The success across situations is relatively similar, with the differences coming about where you might expect. The prevalence goes down as teams get further into a series, with the majority of play-action plays coming on run-heavy first downs and only about 6.7 percent coming on third down. The success is fairly even from first to second down (.17 SPP and .18 SPP) and drops slightly on third down (.11 SPP), when the threat of a run isn’t quite as real.

While some offenses do play-action passes better than others, teams can generally expect positive results. The question, then, is Why?

The Reason

Last season, no team used play-action on a higher percentage of its total drop-backs than the Seahawks. Seattle’s offense revolved around a steady, even gluttonous, diet of Marshawn Lynch; making teams pay for overcommitting to him is just good strategy.

This play is from Seattle’s Week 1 win against Carolina, a game we all would have been paying more attention to had we known what we did by the end of the season. It’s first-and-10, with Carolina up 7-3 more than midway through the third quarter. The Panthers’ defense is in a nickel formation — their base defense — to match Seattle’s three wide receivers. Linebackers Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis are manning the middle of the field.

The main targets of the play-action fake are linebackers, and every element of this play is designed to make Kuechly and Davis think it’s a run. Even before Russell Wilson fakes the handoff to Lynch, they’ve both taken a step forward, based solely on Seattle’s line blocking like it’s a power run play. By the time Wilson shows the ball, Kuechly and Davis are two yards closer than where they started.

That leaves Zach Miller plenty of space in the middle of the field. Maybe the best pass-defending linebacker in football — Davis — is down in the muck near the line of scrimmage, and Wilson has a fairly easy throw that goes for a first down.

Watching how the Panthers react is a good way to understand how play-action translates to different areas of the field. EPA/play is highest between the numbers, right in the spot vacated by charging linebackers. The numbers tend to dip as throws move toward the sideline, where defensive backs are operating without as much worry for what’s going on in the backfield.

Seattle is an example of what a bruising running game can sometimes lend to play-action. The Seahawks enjoyed the league’s fourth-highest change in EPA/play last season when comparing play-action plays to other passes. Just as a slashing John Wall creates more opportunities for his teammates to bomb corner 3s, a running back like Lynch can make a run fake more effective. There are several cases in the past five years where play-action success is connected to run-heavy offenses like the Seahawks’. Houston, San Francisco, and Washington all rank in the top five for the largest difference in EPA/play between play-action passes and other throws. But there are plenty of examples that show a great run game doesn’t guarantee better returns.

One of the teams that’s run the most play-action passes since 2009 is, unsurprisingly, Minnesota, which faces a defense every week that’s geared up for Peterson. When it comes to their success on those plays, though, the Vikings rank 21st in EPA/play. This is a blow to the notion that establishing the run is the vital factor in play-action. A defense being preoccupied with Peterson doesn’t guarantee a chunk of yards through the air when he’s used as a decoy. In fact, of the four teams that finished with a positive EPA/play in the run game, only one (New England) finished in the top 10 on play-action plays.

What is a slight surprise, however, is that none of the teams near the top would be considered running teams. The Packers, who are 18th in rushing attempts since ’09 and had been shuffling backs for years before Eddie Lacy showed up, rank third (.33 EPA). The Broncos are right behind them, at .31 EPA, and most of that damage was done since Manning arrived.

That’s because play-action passes are still passes, and the teams with the best quarterbacks still typically get the most out of them. In 2013, Denver led the way with .57 EPA, and San Diego, second in passing DVOA, was no. 2 (at .55 EPA). Supporting the claim that establishing the run doesn’t necessarily mean play-action success are last year’s Bills (minus-.18 EPA). Buffalo led the league in rushing attempts but ranked last in EPA/play on play-action. For a team like the Bills, those numbers tend to have a significant relationship. Head coach Doug Marrone’s tendency to lean on his ground game was a way to protect his group of young quarterbacks, a group that isn’t set up to make the quick reads necessary on play-action throws.

Still, even with Manning under center, the quarterback is only half of what makes play-action so effective. Take this play from Denver’s win last season over the Giants. The way New York’s linebackers react to Moreno is the same way Carolina responded to Lynch in that Week 1 game. Quality of running back and frequency of rushes matter only so much, and the numbers showing who gets the most significant boost from play-action support that. Twenty-three teams are within .1 EPA/play of each other when looking at the difference between plays with play-action and passes without. There will be teams at either end of the spectrum, but for the most part, offenses get a fairly uniform advantage from run fakes. The effectiveness of play-action has as much to do with knowing how to pull a defense’s strings as anything else. Over time, Manning is probably going to put up better numbers than most, but this is a lot of real estate for any quarterback:

A defense’s response to a run fake is based as much on instinct as it is on logic. Play-action throws from the typically pass-happy shotgun produced an EPA/play of .21 last year, making play-action from the shotgun even more effective than it was from all formations.²⁰ With three receivers on the field, teams averaged .21 EPA/play a year ago. Take a receiver off, and that drops to .14. This is just another reminder that even though we typically link good play-action teams with good running games, equipping your quarterback with the best possible options may actually be more important.

The Limits

There are cases, though, when just going through the play-action motions isn’t enough. Two years ago, Washington used play-action on 36.9 percent of its drop-backs. It was the main weapon in easing Robert Griffin’s transition to the league as a passer. With teams scrambling to figure out the zone read — and living in crippling fear of Griffin as a runner — adding a play-action wrinkle was almost unfair. Washington averaged .49 EPA/play while racking up 10.35 yards per play.

As Football Outsiders pointed out in its always-useful play-action numbers, Washington’s usage dropped significantly in 2013, but its effectiveness fell even further. Only four teams had a worse EPA/play on play-action passes in 2013: St. Louis, Jacksonville, the New York Jets, and Buffalo. That’s a rough list.

It’s a decline that makes sense considering the outside factors. Griffin’s knee limited him as a running threat and stifled him as a passer, playing from behind made run fakes less credible, and defenses were much more comfortable diagnosing zone-read plays.

Just as there are exceptions with the corner 3, there are a few teams that just aren’t built to lean on play-action. Despite building a defense formatted to prevent the corner 3, the Bulls ranked 25th in rate of corner 3s taken last year. They simply don’t have the crop of shooters. For play-action passes, that shortcoming usually comes in the form of a bad offensive line. Because play-action throws take longer to develop, they typically lead to more pressure. Since 2009, quarterbacks have been pressured on 27.9 percent of play-action drop-backs, compared with 22.2 percent on all throws.

That’s one reason a team like Miami, which ranked 30th in adjusted sack rate, was able to use play-action on only 14 percent of its drop-backs — near the bottom third of the NFL — despite ranking in the top half of the league in EPA/play with play-action. When a quarterback barely has enough time to get quick passes away, including a fake handoff in the process probably isn’t going to help.

Expect Miami’s use of play-action and even its proficiency with it to improve this year. The Dolphins have a brand-new offensive line, and although their guards still leave a lot to be desired, Branden Albert and first-round pick Ja’Wuan James should at least keep Ryan Tannehill from spending the year on his back. Add Bill Lazor, the Dolphins’ new offensive coordinator and Chip Kelly’s quarterbacks coach in Philadelphia last year, and there should be a lot more play-action in Miami.

The Growth

Miami’s hiring of Lazor is just another example of Kelly’s influence, and an increase in play-action comes along with that. The Eagles offense used play-action on 30.8 percent of its drop-backs last year, second only to Seattle. Philadelphia does qualify as a run-heavy team that can use play-action as a counterpunch, but it’s probably not a coincidence that the most innovative offensive mind in football relies on the most efficient type of play available. We see the same trends in the NBA. Kelly’s willingness to be radical is similar to the approach Daryl Morey has taken with the Rockets. Houston ranked fifth last year in use of corner 3s²¹ and also happened to rank fourth in offense efficiency. Among the top five teams in offensive efficiency, three — the Heat, Clippers, and Rockets — also ranked in the top five in attempting corner 3s. Using that shot and being a high-quality offense have become intertwined.

Football isn’t quite there — yet. Run-first offenses are still using the most play-action. But as more teams recognize the positive effect of play-action independent of a quality run game, that may change. All it takes is a little nudge. It may seem like the corner 3 has exploded of late, but the shift has actually been gradual. Last season, it accounted for 6.7 percent of all shots, compared with 5.9 percent in 2010. The NFL’s use of play-action has been fairly steady for years, and there are reasons some teams don’t use it more often. It has a limited effect on third down, and it does heighten the chance your quarterback has to deal with a 300-pound lineman bearing down on him.

Still, teams should probably keep in mind what even a marginal increase can do for an offense. Hesitance on third down is fine, but leaguewide, more play-action on second down seems like an easy choice. There’s no good argument for 57.6 percent more play-action on first down than second. Football Outsiders’ numbers show that the Cowboys are one of the main culprits there. They ranked 31st in second-down play-action rate last year — a number that makes absolutely no sense considering their excellent running game and that they’ve ranked sixth in EPA per play-action pass since 2009. The Cowboys might be the worst offenders, but they’re just one example. There are still too many play-action options left on the table.

How defenses would react to more play-action is another issue. For years, the main concern of NBA defenses was cutting off paths to the paint; with the increase in corner 3s, defenses have started planning how to run shooters off the line, sometimes at the expense of a drive to the rim. Ask any NFL defensive coordinator about his first priority, and he’s likely to say “stopping the run.” If we were to see teams rely more on play-action, those priorities would have to change. Making an offense prove it can hurt you by running the ball would be a safer option than being gashed by play-action. In any case, it’s inevitable that defenses would ultimately adjust. They always do.

The Standard

Their recent late-season failures have clouded the greatness of the Patriots’ offensive dominance. New England’s offense has been in the top five for EPA/play every season since 2009. They’re tied for first, with New Orleans, in the passing game and are tied with the Vikings for third on running plays.

The superiority of Tom Brady’s offense shows up everywhere. No team has been better at converting first downs. No team has been better in the red zone. And, predictably, no team has been better using play-action. At .38, New England is .05 EPA/play ahead of runners-up Green Bay and Pittsburgh.

It follows that the league’s top offense would also be its best play-action offense, but in some ways, that makes Brady the NFL’s equivalent of Ray Allen. The best shooter in basketball will also likely be one of its best corner shooters, but by building his game around the most efficient shot available, the Heat spent the past two seasons wringing out every drop of his value. Any Patriots play from the past five seasons had a good chance of ending well, but play-action still yielded them about .15 more EPA/play on passing plays — the 12th-best total in the league.

That increase is similar to what most of the teams in the league have seen, and like every other team, the Patriots probably should have relied on play-action even more than they did. Mining hidden value from sports often requires pressing against the game’s framework to the point of discomfort. The NBA’s push for more 3s has meant players and coaches stepping outside long-held beliefs. But finally the game is catching up to the math. There may be a similar opportunity waiting in the NFL. The question is whether anyone will take it. 

Going to do a quick Arrow round up as I have three bits of news that have come in so far this week.

First has to do with the Felicity backstory episode that was originally entitled Oracle. But now, according to EW, the title has changed to the less fangasm inducing The Secret Origin Of Felicity Smoak. Felicity’s mother will be played by Charlotte Ross (NYPD Blue) while the mystery of her father will not be resolved.

Second, folks hopping to see Connor Hawke as a child pop up this season may have to wait. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim told TVLine that it needs to be handled in the right context and that could be in season 3 or season 10… he didn’t know. Sounds like this one may be hanging over Ollie’s head a while.

And finally, from EW we get the news that a more modern Green Arrow villain will be showing up this year. The part of Simon Lacriox, aka Komodo, has gone to Matt Ward (Tron: Legacy). In the series the character is a mercenary and will show up in the second episode, but in a change this season the villain-of-the-week motif will now tie better into the overall story arc for the season. So Komodo’s appearance is definitely part of the bigger picture.

Arrow will return in October 8 at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Arrow News: Villain Casting, Title Change And More

It is the best selling comic book in the world.

But Attack On Titan has now been given a countdown to its demise.

Crunchy Roll helpfully translated The University of Tokyo Newspaper that has interviewed the almuni editor of the comic Shintaro Kawakubo, where he says that he expects the series to last three or four more years, solving the mysteries it has already set up – but not setting any new ones up.

Anime News Network also reports that Shintaro sees the series living on,

 ”The serialization is slated to end in three to four years, but Attack on Titan is a work that will be passed down from generation to generation for a decade — no, five decades.”

Yeah, I’m been too lax on this. I think I feel a “reading Attack On Titan from the beginning as a complete newbie” column coming on…

Attack On Titan To End In Three Or Four Years, After Solving All Its Mysteries

We already know about the crossover coming up between Arrow and The Flash, but another reminder of the shared universe is going to happen in episode seven of the new CW series (according to TVline). Robert Knepper will be reprising his role as William Tockman / The Clock King, but this time he’ll be facing the Scarlet Speedster instead of the Emerald Archer… and he won’t be alone.

Executive producer Andrew Kreisberg said:  “We wanted to give Barry a real challenge… TWO bad guys! Barry will be fighting both a new enemy and one of our scariest and most successful Arrow villains in The Clock King.”

Who the new villain is remains a mystery at this time.

An Arrow Villain Returns In The Flash

When watching the pilot episode of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Every show is better when they add Clancy Brown.” I stand by that… which means The Flash just got better.

THR is reporting that the veteran actor is joining the freshman series as General Wade Eiling that heads a special black ops force that is hunting down the character of Plastique in hopes of using her as a human weapon. This storyline is set for the fifth episode of the season with Kelly Frye (Rake) already cast as Plastique.

In the comics General Eiling was a villain for Captain Atom and the JLA. After learning he had an inoperable brain tumor, he transferred his consciousness into the indestructible body of The Shaggy Man and became the villain know as The General.

The Flash premieres Oct. 7 on The CW.

Clancy Brown Pulls Rank On The Flash

One Million Moms usually has to fight an advert that dares to have a gay couple in it. Or some ad for burgers that uses the phrase “nice buns”. Seriously, they have slim pickings.

Well, this is the fight they’ve been waiting for. They probably can’t believe their luck. And neither can the Cartoon Network.

It’s time for Black Jesus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In an email the pressure group writes:

One Million Moms Vs Black Jesus

When the Philadelphia Eagles hired Chip Kelly away from Oregon in January 2013, they thought they were getting a coach who’d field an innovative offense run at a madcap pace. What they probably didn’t realize, and what the rest of the league surely didn’t know, was that they were also getting a coach who intended to rethink much about how NFL teams operate, from huddling (why bother?), to traditional practices (too much wasted time), to player nutrition habits (bye-bye, Andy Reid’s Fast Food Fridays).

If they didn’t realize this, they should have, because Kelly has always challenged the status quo. “I was probably a pain in the ass as a little kid,” Kelly said recently. “I questioned everything. I’ve always been a why guy, trying to figure out why things happen and what they are and just curious about it from that standpoint.”

The result of all of that questioning was a successful debut season for Kelly, whose Eagles went 10-6 and won the NFC East one year after going 4-12 under Reid. And they did so thanks largely to approaching things just a little differently from the rest of a league that largely likes to leave well enough alone. But the NFL has a conflicted relationship with new concepts, as defiance often gives way to rapid-fire assimilation. And unsurprisingly, that’s already happening with Kelly’s ideas.

So far, most of the attention surrounding Kelly has centered on his spread offense, particularly the way in which he gives his quarterbacks multiple run, keep, or pass options on the same play, all from a no-huddle, up-tempo pace. And those ideas are certainly having an impact. The Dolphins hired Kelly’s quarterbacks coach, Billy Lazor, to implement a version of Kelly’s scheme in Miami; the league in general is trending toward more no-huddle; and several NFL coaches have told me their teams will be using “Chip Kelly plays” this season.

But Kelly’s influence extends far beyond read-options and the no-huddle, and into the subtler and more fundamental aspects of the game. In just one year, Kelly’s question-everything approach has caused many smart NFL coaches and executives to ask themselves why they’ve been doing things the same way for so long. And many are realizing that Kelly has better answers.

Click here for more from our 2014 NFL preview.

It’s hard to get a first down in the NFL. The defenders are fast, the tactics are sophisticated, and the state-of-the art technology and exhaustive scouting reports mean there are no secrets. What’s innovative one week is passé the next. As a result, modern NFL game planning is an arms race of minutiae, with coaches sleeping on couches and sifting through hours of film in an effort to find even the smallest advantages.

Over the last 25 years, however, there have been increasingly diminishing returns on spending 35 hours a week engineering a situation in which there’s a 41 percent chance that a receiver who runs a 4.43 40 will match up against a cornerback who runs a 4.47 on a seven-yard route. NFL offenses have begun changing drastically in the last few years to find a better way, and Kelly’s teams have been at the forefront of that evolution, first at Oregon and now in the NFL.

Now that Kelly’s Eagles have found success — they led the NFL in rushing and yards per carry and finished second in total offense in 2013 — the conversation has shifted away from whether his offense would work in the NFL to whether that success is sustainable, and particularly whether defenses will have figured out the attack over the offseason. This line of questioning misses the mark, however: Kelly’s offense isn’t unique because of specific schemes; it’s unique because of how he organizes and implements them.

“I’ve said it since day one: We don’t do anything revolutionary offensively,” Kelly said recently. “We run inside zone, we run outside zone, we run a sweep play, we run a power play. We’ve got a five-step [passing] game, we’ve got a three-step game, we run some screens. We’re not doing anything that’s never been done before in football.”

Instead of drawing up a new play to get that one-on-one matchup for that seven-yard pass, Kelly, like some football hacker, is attacking the very logic of defenses by deploying two-on-one, three-on-two, and four-on-three advantages, whether in run-blocking schemes or pass patterns. This is why the Eagles led the NFL in plays of more than 20 yards last season. Kelly is actually trying to break defenses.

Take, for example, Philadelphia’s 2013 season opener. Before the game, Washington defensive coordinator Jim Haslett said he’d watched not only the Eagles’ preseason games, but also “23, 24 Oregon films.” He thought he’d seen it all. He hadn’t.

Early in the game, Kelly identified a particular weakness for Washington: an inability to properly defend Philly’s “unbalanced” offensive line sets. Throughout last season, Kelly frequently put offensive tackles Jason Peters and Lane Johnson to the same side while keeping only the offensive guard and a tight end on the other.²⁷ And in that Week 1 contest, which the Eagles won 33-27, the Redskins repeatedly failed to account for interior gaps when the Eagles went unbalanced.

As bad as Washington’s defense was last season, few opponents fared much better against the Eagles’ unbalanced sets, which remained a key part of Philadelphia’s offense throughout the season, with Kelly continually devising new iterations, particularly on the sweep.

Kelly’s sweep is an updated version of a football classic: the old Green Bay Packers Vince Lombardi sweep, but with a particular wrinkle — a pulling center who’d lead the way for the runner.²⁸ By the end of last season, the copycats had already sprouted, with the Chargers and Broncos running Kelly’s version of the sweep. Philadelphia running back LeSean McCoy delivered numerous huge runs on this play, and the Eagles ran it three times on the game-winning drive in their Week 17, division-clinching win against Dallas. The best example of Kelly’s take on the Lombardi sweep, however, came against Lombardi’s old team.

“We’re in two tight ends on this [left] side, so there’s concerns from a passing standpoint, but we have two tackles to the other side,” Kelly explained after the game. “With two tight ends to the left, the secondary support is on that side, so there’s no secondary [run] support to [the right] side.” In other words, because defenses try to match the “strength” of an offense’s formation, Green Bay’s safeties followed the tight end and wide receiver left, which gave the Eagles a numbers advantage to the right: four blockers to handle just three defenders.

This breakdown occurred not because Packers defensive coordinator Dom Capers doesn’t know how to match up against an unbalanced set. (He does. I think.) It happened because, against Kelly’s offense, it doesn’t matter what the other coaches know. The 11 defenders on the field need to be able to identify the unbalanced set and call the right adjustments, on the fly, at a super-fast tempo, while worrying about 50 other things.

“Through our formations and adjustment, we want the defense to show us how they are adjusting and playing us. We may go unbalanced or use motion to make the defense adjust,” Mark Helfrich, Kelly’s offensive coordinator and successor at Oregon said at a coaching clinic in 2013. “Early in a game we want to show things we saw on film and watch the defensive adjustments. Defenses do not have time to adjust too much when you push the tempo. What the quarterback sees is what he generally gets.”

With Kelly, it’s usually about more than what we see. What makes him so interesting is his ability to seamlessly mesh old-school tactics and NFL-style attention to detail with an approach that attacks the very structure of defenses. College football has produced a lot of innovation over the last 10 years or so, but many of the great college innovators lack the attention to detail to succeed in the NFL. At the same time, many NFL coaches are too ingrained in the old ways to adapt to an evolving game. Kelly has always been at home blending the old and the new. That’s where the NFL is going, but Kelly is already there.

Despite his reputation for both innovation and secrecy, Kelly is surprisingly open about his X’s and O’s. He even participated in a series of videos for the Eagles’ team website last season in which he candidly explained specific plays and the strategies behind them. But there are two subjects he refuses to openly discuss: his no-huddle communication system and the particulars of how the Eagles use sports science.

The former makes sense: Why would Kelly give out his signals so that opponents could steal them? Kelly’s secrecy over his team’s sports performance and recovery methods, however, points to his belief in the powerful competitive advantage that sports science provides.

From top to bottom in the Eagles organization, the first rule of sports science seems to be “Don’t talk about sports science.” Despite the limited information at our disposal, however, here’s what we know:

• While coaching at Oregon, Kelly began investing significantly in sports science, both by bringing in outside consultants and by developing in-house expertise and technology. He built principally on research first conducted for Australian-rules football.

• Many of those studies, which have since been expanded to cover a range of sports, used heart rate, GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscope monitors worn by players in practice to determine how to train for peak game-day performance²⁹ and how to prevent injuries.³⁰ These studies also tracked the movements that players made in games³¹ so teams could mold practices and training to what players did on an individualized and position-by-position basis.

• When Kelly arrived in Philadelphia, the Eagles invested huge sums into their sports science infrastructure, and Kelly hired Shaun Huls, a sports science coordinator who’d worked for the Navy Special Warfare Command for nearly five years, training SEALs and focusing on reducing the incidence of their noncombat injuries.³²

• Kelly’s team uses the latest wearable player-tracking technology, and his staff monitors the resulting data in real time to determine how players should train and when they become injury risks. “On an individualized basis we may back off,” Kelly said recently. “We may take [tight end] Brent Celek out of a team period on a Tuesday afternoon and just say, because of the scientific data we have on him, ‘We may need to give Brent a little bit of a rest.’ We monitor them very closely.”

• At least so far, it’s worked. In addition to their on-field success, the Eagles were also the second-least-injured team in the NFL last season, according to Football Outsiders.

• Just as important, the players think it works. “What happened with our players is all of a sudden when we started to get to game day every week they were like, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt this good,’” said Kelly. “And I know every guy, to a man, in December — Todd Herremans, DeMeco Ryans, Trent Cole, guys who’ve been around a long time — said I’ve never felt this great in December.”

Of course, other NFL teams have begun using sports science, and every NFL team can afford to buy the same equipment and hire the same Australian rules consultants to churn out similar data. But there’s a difference between having the data and knowing what to do with it, and Kelly and his inner circle have years of experience analyzing performance information for football. This is why Kelly is so tight-lipped: He knows that, eventually, other teams will catch up.³³ But he’s not going to help them get there.

Kelly makes the most practical use of his research where players spend the vast majority of their time: in training and at practice. By this point, it’s common knowledge that Eagles practices are the most unique in the league: They feature blaring music (the team kicked off training camp by playing “Return of the Mack” over the loudspeakers), weird contraptions, and passing drills with every quarterback dropping back and throwing simultaneously. When Kelly took over, many commentators, former players, and coaches wondered whether his frenzied practices and up-tempo style in games would wear down his own players, particularly the veterans. Kelly, always one step ahead, accounts for this in his practice design and real-time workload monitoring.

Yet Kelly’s practices are also frenetic because he believes that’s the best way for his players to learn. “When we teach, we implement it in the classroom. We talk about what we are putting in that day,” he explained at a coaching clinic in 2011. “After that, we go to the practice field and do it. The practice field is not where we talk. It is where we do the skills. We want to keep the words there to a minimum. The words you do use must have meaning. [Players] do not want to hear you give a 10-minute clinic in the middle of the field.”

Kelly’s chief commitment isn’t to running a no-huddle offense; his goal is for the Eagles to be a no-huddle organization. For Kelly, the benefits extend far beyond the effect on opposing defenses. “One of the benefits we have from practice and the no-huddle offense, where every period is no-huddle, is our second and third [teams] — and I’ve gone back and charted this — get almost twice as many reps as other teams I’ve been at when you’re sitting in the second or third spot,” explained Eagles defensive coordinator Billy Davis, a longtime NFL veteran. That has a recruiting benefit when it comes to attracting backup players, which in turn helps the Eagles discover hidden gems. “If you’re [second or third string], you want to be in our camp because you get more reps than anyone else,” said Kelly. “Because of the reps we get in practice, our guys get a chance to develop a little more. You go to some teams and the threes aren’t getting many reps — they are losing time compared to our guys.”

The Eagles are different in how they practice, and also in when they practice: On the day before games, Kelly’s Eagles conduct a full-speed, up-tempo practice, rather than the leisurely walk-throughs run by essentially every other team in the league. “Through our research, through science, [we learned] that you need to get the body moving if you’re going to be playing,” Kelly explained. “We used the same formula at Oregon and I spent a lot of time on how to go about it, how we think you should train, and it worked for us there and it worked for us here.”

Specifically, while at Oregon, Kelly visited with trainers of elite Olympic athletes, and those trainers balked at the idea of doing next to nothing physically taxing in the 48 hours prior to competing. Kelly switched his approach and began conducting full-speed practice the day before games, and the results speak for themselves.

No NFL team practices more efficiently than the Eagles, and it’s these little details that accumulate to help Kelly achieve big advantages in the untapped peak performance arena. Doing anything that much better, especially something as fundamental as practice, will eventually spawn copycats. And sure enough, following the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, which puts significant limits on the number and length of organized practices, other teams have been forced to play catch-up to methods Kelly has been using for years.

Shortly after Kelly took the Eagles job, one Oregon staff member gave me his read on Kelly: “What people think Bill Belichick is like — thinks about football nonstop, all day, every day — is how Chip actually is. He’s a bachelor and has no kids. Football is what he’s about.” Focusing on football so completely, and questioning everything about the game, can’t be the most peaceful way to live. But that’s how Kelly’s wired. He once told a room full of high school coaches — who were eager to hear his wisdom on how to coach the spread offense and draw up cool plays — that it “bothers” him when he visits a high school practice and sees “the coaches are standing around talking to one another or throwing the ball around” while the team is stretching. Kelly’s sense of humor is well documented, but when it comes to football, he’s all business.

He knows his business is never finished. “I give myself a 58.8 percent,” Kelly said this spring, grading his first season as an NFL head coach. “That’s winning 10 games out of 17.” Kelly knows that if his team stumbles, he’ll quickly stop being “Chip Kelly, successful innovator” and become “Chip Kelly, latest college coach to fail in the NFL.” And he knows there’s always another question to ask, another long-accepted belief to challenge.

Regardless of what happens in 2014 and beyond, Kelly has already sparked change that will outlast whatever his tenure in Philadelphia winds up being. “Coaching is one thing and one thing only: It is creating an environment so the player has an opportunity to be successful,” Kelly told those high school coaches. “That is your job as a coach. When you teach him to do that, get out of his way.” In turning a 4-12 team into a division winner, Kelly also reminded a lot of his NFL peers of that lesson, and then showed them some new ways to act on it. Now it’s up to the rest of the league to catch up — and up to Kelly to stay one step ahead. 

For more on Chip Kelly’s influence, check out Seth Wickersham’s ESPN The Magazine piece on LeSean McCoy’s growth.

When you decide that spending about 27 work hours determining the holders of the American Band Championship Belt going back to 1964 is a good, even noble idea, you quickly come up against two inconvenient facts.¹⁷ One, many of the best bands ever aren’t from the United States. You could even say that a majority of the best bands ever aren’t American. Just try talking about punk, metal, or dance music using strictly domestic acts — you won’t get very far. Even groups that seem like American bands aren’t really American bands. America is one-third British. The Band is four-fifths Canadian. Grand Funk Railroad appears to be telling the truth in “We’re an American Band,” but I’m afraid to administer a blood test.

Two, the strain of stubborn individualism in the American character inevitably screws with our groups. Either the lead singer is set apart as an “and the” figurehead — as in Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band or Prince and the Revolution — or the singer leaves, à la Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, for a solo career.

As if this didn’t make the process difficult enough, there were the self-imposed rules I set down before sifting through 50 years of pop history and picking the winners. Four rules, to be exact.

1. No “and the” bands.

A very important rule that clarifies the process and makes the list more interesting. Without it, the belt winners would simply be the same old familiar list of popular singer-songwriters with celebrated backing bands. While I agree that, say, the E Street Band is a vital organization, its identity is absorbed by Springsteen’s persona. Springsteen is known simply as “Springsteen” whether or not he’s recording with the E Street Band. Therefore, it is not a true band for our purposes. Every band on this list is known first and foremost as a band. (Warning: I violate this rule twice.)

2. The band can include non-Americans if it identifies as American.

Arcade Fire is not an American band, even though Win and Will Butler hail from Texas, because it formed in Montreal and is generally associated with Canada. The Velvet Underground is an American band, even though John Cale is Welsh, because VU is the quintessential avatar of New York City scuzz. Please direct all other questions to your local immigration office.

3. Overall legacies matter, but belt distribution is weighted toward output in the specific years listed.

Self-explanatory, but I should add that I avoided repeats, so if a band is listed for one period I didn’t list it again for another period when it might’ve otherwise been a worthy challenger.

4. Obviously this boils down to personal opinion, but it’s not all personal opinion.

I tried to be as impartial as one can be when handing out a fictional prize on the basis of perceived artistic value. There are times when I chose groups that I personally don’t feel that strongly about, but whose résumés were indisputable. There were also times when personal favorites got the heave-ho. One of my favorite American bands of all time is the Replacements. The Replacements were not awarded an American Band Championship Belt. This enrages me, and yet it seems just.

That said, my personal biases inevitably infected the process in ways I’m not even conscious of, but will surely be obvious to readers. My advice: Deal with it.

Are we ready? Let’s hand out some belts.

The Beach Boys, 1964

Key music: Shut Down, Vol. 2 and All Summer Long

Overview: The first great American rock group, the Beach Boys are generally associated with the eras when they were decades removed from being actual boys. It’s not just a matter of kids not understanding that this is the band that made freaking Pet Sounds — there are individuals pushing 30 for whom the Beach Boys will always be the doddering, dog-shirt donning geezers who principally influenced Jesse and the Rippers.

It’s true that, for years now, tests have shown that a Beach Boys concert is a very sad thing. But let’s give credit where credit is due: The Beach Boys helped to set the template for many of the bands on this list. They had an acknowledged genius (Brian Wilson); the acknowledged genius’s asshole antagonist (Mike Love); a wild drummer who died tragically (Dennis Wilson); a quiet, historically undervalued genius (Carl Wilson); and another guy (Al Jardine). I included the Beach Boys here (and not in ’66, the year Pet Sounds was released) because in ’64 they were still a working band releasing indestructible radio fare like “I Get Around” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” In December ’64, Brian Wilson had an anxiety attack while on tour, and by the following month he had officially retired from the road.

Biggest challenger: According to Diana Ross, the Supremes weren’t really a group but rather a Diana Ross solo act rounded out by Ross’s lackeys. Nevertheless, the Supremes rank among the finest executors of classic singles in American pop, and ’64 marked the beginning of their reign, with three consecutive no. 1 hits: “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” and “Come See About Me.”

Booker T. & the MG’s, 1965-66

Key music: Otis Redding’s The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (1965) and Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul and The Soul Album and Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (1966), plus the songs “Hold On, I’m Comin’” by Sam & Dave and “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, among many other excellent Stax hits

Overview: Backing bands may seem tricky, because they might appear to violate the “and the” rule. But given the sheer volume of soul classics that Booker T. & the MG’s played on as the house band for the iconic Memphis label Stax (which makes them more than sidemen for just one figurehead singer-songwriter) and the fact that the MG’s were also a self-contained unit that recorded hits on their own (which sets them apart from Motown’s Funk Brothers or the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section), I feel they warrant inclusion. If nothing else, an interracial band hailing from the region that incorporated rock, R&B, gospel, and country into an unassailably sleek and badass sound is the most inherently American thing I can imagine.

Biggest challenger: If the Beach Boys influenced the composition of the classic American rock group, the Byrds shaped the sound. “Chiming guitars plus a driving rhythm section plus philosophical lyrics” is a bedrock formula of American music, serving everyone from Tom Petty to R.E.M. to Real Estate exceedingly well. Whenever somebody grows a beard and aspires to take guitar-based music in weird, druggy directions, the Byrds deserve a royalty check.

Second-biggest challenger: The Four Tops are my favorite classic-era Motown group (which partly explains why they’re here and not the better-regarded Temptations). This is perhaps their greatest two-year period — it includes the hits “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” and “It’s the Same Old Song.” Levi Stubbs is one of the all-time American pop belters — his range was limited, but his ability to express mind-melting romantic anxiety is unparalleled. Stubbs sang like he could take on the world if only he weren’t held captive by his own paranoia. I suspect Elvis Costello secretly wished he sounded like this.

Third-biggest challenger: In the history of L.A. rock bands, Love is usually overlooked in favor of more famous contemporaries like the Doors and the Byrds. But Love could go darker than the former and prettier than the latter. Rock geeks know 1967’s Forever Changes, but I ride for the rawer, more rocking early records. Plus, they lived in a castle, man!

The Velvet Underground, 1967-68

Key music: The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and White Light/White Heat (1968)

Overview: If this were the Coolest American Bands Championship Belt, you would have the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Ramones, Run-D.M.C., and a lot of other very self-conscious musicians who wished they looked as good in black. Anybody who forms a band in 2014 is still trying to sound, look, and act this fierce.

Biggest challenger: The Velvet Underground minus 75 IQ points plus a gallon of Boone’s Farm equals the Doors. As someone who loves both bands, I mean that as a compliment.

Second-biggest challenger: After hours of consuming the Velvet Underground and the Doors and the things one consumes when consuming that music, the only band that makes cognitive sense is Blue Cheer, a pioneer of early heavy metal and modern brain damage.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969-70

Key music: Bayou Country, Green River, and Willy and the Poor Boys (1969), and Cosmo’s Factory and Pendulum (1970)

Overview: Not as cool as the Velvets, but arguably better. This two-year period is insane — no band passed the Five-Albums Test in a shorter period of time. In just 24 months CCR produced definitive singles that critiqued privilege (“Fortunate Son”), exemplified the American work ethic (“Proud Mary”), chronicled the downside of show business (“Lodi”), provided cool background music for guy-to-werewolf transformations (“Bad Moon Rising”), predicted the awesomeness of Licensed to Ill (“Down on the Corner”), and soothed the Dude (“Lookin’ Out My Back Door”). You know what most bands do in two years, even great ones? Play the same songs over and over. CCR in that amount of time produced a body of work that’s unparalleled in American rock. This band is so magnificent, it deserves a different belt than all the other bands get. The CCR belt shall be forged out of gold and spray-painted flannel.

Biggest challenger: Speaking of groups that had entire careers’ worth of greatness in the space of a few years, consider the Jackson 5’s run of singles in ’69-’70: “I Want You Back” (no. 1), “ABC” (no. 1), “The Love You Save” (no. 1), and “I’ll Be There” (no. 1). You catch my drift — Michael Jackson could’ve retired in 1971 and still had four songs that remained fixtures on the radio more than 40 years later. But why stop when you come out of the gate kicking this amount of ass?

Second-biggest challenger: MC5 made it acceptable for pudgy white men from the Midwest to grow helmet-haired Afros. So, yeah, including them here is personal for me. Also, because it bears repeating: KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Sly & the Family Stone, 1971

Key music: There’s a Riot Goin’ On

Overview: James Brown and George Clinton generate more dialogue, but Sly Stone was arguably the most innovative. Still, it might seem counterintuitive to award Sly & the Family Stone the belt in 1971, as the group was in pretty rough shape at the time. To illustrate this, watch this clip from Woodstock in 1969, when Sly was an undisputed champion:¹⁸

Imagine the sheer number of babies conceived during this performance. The rate of procreation boggles the mind. Nobody was more exciting live than Sly & the Family Stone at their peak.

Now, watch this clip of Sly & the Family Stone performing the same song on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971.

It’s not terrible. But it’s noticeably less good. The band sounds exhausted. As for Sly, it’s not clear if he is really talking to Dick Cavett or if he’s teleporting an image of himself down to Earth from Pluto.

Nevertheless, Sly & the Family Stone acquired the belt because they put out There’s a Riot Goin’ On, one of the great “end of the ’60s” albums, a murky haze of bummed-out drum machines, demonic anti-harmonies, and poisoned vibes that plays like grimy audio verité for the Family Stone’s own apocalypse. Don’t bother waking Sly up — I’ll just lay the belt at his feet.

Biggest challenger: Had Duane Allman’s death in October 1971 not cruelly ended the Allman Brothers Band’s promising and oft-brilliant original incarnation, I might be handing them the belt for multiple years in the ’70s. It’s amazing to consider that Allman was only 24 when he died, and yet his body of work (both with the Allmans and as an in-demand studio musician) had already made him a legend. He was just a kid when he died, but Allman remains one of this country’s greatest guitar heroes. I’m not in the habit of pushing guitar solos, but Allman’s playing on any live version of “Blue Sky” will make the coldest day in February feel like the middle of July.

Second-biggest challenger: At the risk of falling down into a guitar solo rabbit hole, here is Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic playing the title track from 1971’s Maggot Brain and slowly vaporizing all maggot brains in the vicinity.

Grateful Dead, 1972

Key music: Europe ’72, plus a whole lot of live recordings, both official and bootleg

Overview: The Dead put out their most acclaimed studio albums, 1969’s Workingman’s Dead and 1970’s American Beauty, a few years prior. In fact, the Dead released no studio records in ’72, just the live triple-LP Europe ’72. So why did I award them the belt for this year? You gotta listen to the tapes, maaan. When it comes to live Dead, any year between ’69 and ’74 is pretty reliable — now more than ever, because enjoying live Dead no longer involves spending time with actual Deadheads. I went with ’72 because of the band’s consistently strong performances and the fact that it was their last year with original keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who exited the band that June and died in March 1973.

The Dead belong here for a variety of reasons — they successfully invented an entire subculture around their music and iconography, they are a core influence for rock, folk, and jam-band artists, and (as Mr. Rosso advised) when you’re stressin’ out, the Dead always help.

Biggest challenger: I was very tempted to give the belt to Big Star, which put out its self-jinxing debut #1 Record in ’72. But putting them on the precipice of success without allowing them to achieve it seemed like a more appropriate tribute.

The Stooges, 1973

Key music: Raw Power

Overview: On some days, I think 1970’s Fun House is better. Occasionally I even prefer 1969’s The Stooges. But Raw Power is really the apex of the Stooges, and therefore the apex of filthy, scary, funny, not-funny, seriously-this-is-the-real-fucking-shit-and-this-shit-is-bottomless American punk rock. Raw Power is the only album in rock history that could justifiably be called Raw Power, because titling any other album Raw Power would seem silly compared with whatever Raw Power would be called. People in this alternate dimension would constantly argue, “No, that Stooges album not called Raw Power deserves to be called Raw Power, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT FUCKING IS!”

What else can I say about Raw Power that hasn’t already been said about prison riots or a unicorn having sex with a ’55 Chevy? Raw Power single-handedly made hailing from the upper Midwest seem dangerous. Iggy Pop can do this and this and it doesn’t matter because he made Raw Power. You know that part in the original Superman movie, when young Clark Kent is called out to the barn by that glowing crystal, and his superhero fate is revealed to him? For every subsequent band that mattered at all, that crystal is Raw Power.¹⁹ Raw Power was transformative then, and it’s transformative now.

Biggest challenger: None.

Steely Dan, 1974-76

Key music: 1974’s Pretzel Logic, 1975’s Katy Lied, and 1976’s The Royal Scam

Overview: When people talk about critical revisionism in pop music, they typically focus on how writing analytically about the first Destiny’s Child record is now considered more valuable than writing analytically about the first Animal Collective LP. But for me the most amazing flip-flop for what’s currently deemed to be “good” taste concerns Steely Dan. Ten years ago, Steely Dan’s reputation seemed dubious. It was regarded as L.A. session-musician porn. Any argument in favor of Steely Dan had to be couched in “guilty pleasure” language. Now, it’s the people who hate Steely Dan who are on the defensive. The conversation has shifted from “Steely Dan is great and I don’t mean that ironically!” to “Steely Dan is great and I don’t have to explain it because it’s self-evident!” I’m not sure how or why this happened — I suspect Kanye West sampling “Kid Charlemagne” on Graduation was a turning point — but I’m glad it did or else I would’ve had to fight hard to justify giving Steely Dan the belt for three years in the heart of the ’70s. But now, as any major dude will tell you, I’m obviously correct.

Biggest challenger: Arguing in favor of Aerosmith, on the other hand, is still a hostile action. It actually makes people angry if you insist that Aerosmith was ever great. They will vehemently argue against it, in spite of never spending some quality time drinking six-packs and jamming out to 1974’s Get Your Wings, 1975’s Toys in the Attic, and 1976’s Rocks. I have no patience for this. Nobody would think Steely Dan was cool if Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had started recording Diane Warren songs in the late ’90s. That Aerosmith did do this shouldn’t be held against their golden-era output.

Second-biggest challenger: Since we’re on the subject of quality American rock bands that smart people pride themselves on not understanding, I must also mention Lynyrd Skynyrd, who peaked during this period with 1974’s Second Helping, 1975’s Nuthin’ Fancy, and 1976’s Gimme Back My Bullets. In some circles, declaring your love of Skynyrd is like declaring Glenn Beck as your favorite author. It immediately puts you inside an uncomfortable demographic box reserved for bigots and dullards. But in the ’70s, when original leader Ronnie Van Zant was still alive, Skynyrd wasn’t yet the musical version of Fox News that it later became. They were into whiskey drinkin’ and butt-kickin’, sure, but also gun control (see “Saturday Night Special”) and Jimmy Carter. There’s also the fact that these albums rock like a goddamn sonofabitch, which seems pertinent.

The Ramones, 1977

Key music: Leave Home and Rocket to Russia

Overview: Below is a video of the Ramones performing at CBGB in 1977. The four men onstage are now dead. That’s what we’ve been told, anyway. I don’t really believe they are dead. Just look at them. Do they look dead to you? Looking at them makes me feel like I’m the dead one. I’ve never rocked a leather jacket and half-shirt simultaneously. I don’t have enough life force inside of me to pull that off. Few humans do. The Ramones are beyond our comprehension — in 2001, they would’ve been the monolith and the apes. You can’t bury this.

Biggest challenger: As much as I admire the Ramones, I don’t love them as much as Cheap Trick. If I awarded the belt based purely on my own opinion, Bun E. Carlos would be wearing it around that majestic beer gut of his right now. The best thing about Cheap Trick if you live within 200 miles of the band’s headquarters in Rockford, Illinois, is that you can see them playing at some casino or community festival at least once every year. And every time you see Cheap Trick, it will be amazing. AMAZING. Rick Nielsen will toss guitar picks, Robin Zander will turn psychotic for “The Ballad of TV Violence,” and Tom Petersson will be more suave than any bassist not named John Entwistle. (Bun E. sadly won’t be there, but that’s a whole other story.) I don’t take this for granted. Cheap Trick still being so accessible is like if the Fantastic Four were your local police department.

Second-biggest challenger: Is there a band with more squandered potential than Television? How did they put out only three albums? Television could’ve been better — should’ve been better, even — than the Ramones or even my precious Cheap Trick. Instead, we have to be satisfied with Marquee Moon, merely one of the four or five best debut albums ever.

Third-biggest challenger: I like the Eagles! I think Hotel California is great! Come at me, bros! Seriously, if 1977 was Year Zero for punk, it should be noted that the most trenchant criticism of the corporate rock machine that year came from a curly-haired drummer preoccupied with a spooky public lodging metaphor. Who but the Eagles had a better idea of how dehumanizing the stadium-rock beast could be? And yet, because they were true nihilists, the Eagles embraced it anyway. Like the man says, “Shit don’t float.”

Van Halen, 1978

Key music: Van Halen

Overview: What are the arguments against giving Van Halen the belt? Was Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing too flashy? Was Alex Van Halen’s drumming too bombastic? Were Michael Anthony’s backing vocals too shiny and perfect? Was David Lee Roth too magical for our world? Is joy overrated? Is having a sense of humor unnecessary? Is life not worth living?

I’m sorry, but these arguments are not persuasive. Van Halen’s debut has brightened more lives than the cure for polio.²⁰ The belt is theirs.

Biggest challenger: Devo was Van Halen for people who preferred reading critical theory to having sex. This is not a criticism. For some of us, sex wasn’t an option for a long time.

Talking Heads, 1979-80

Key music: 1979’s Fear of Music and 1980’s Remain in Light

Overview: Talking Heads is my no. 1 band that I wish would reunite that never will reunite. And I know this is probably for the best, because nothing lasts forever and disappointment awaits whoever doesn’t accept that. Still, how incredible would it be to see this in person?

I don’t think there ever was a band better at doing everything than the Talking Heads on these two albums. The music contained therein is catchy and confounding, accessible and alienating, funky and rigid, visceral and intellectual, dorky and hip, and so on and so on. I honestly believe that the return of the Talking Heads would make pop music seem less polarized, because this was the rare band capable of reconciling so many different contradictions. But, hey, if David Byrne can’t get along with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth for the good of mankind, so be it.

Biggest challenger: Hey, did you know Chic isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in spite of inventing the sound of modern pop with “Good Times”? Just thought I’d mention that because it’s extremely stupid.

Black Flag, 1981

Key music: Damaged

Overview: The ’80s is the best decade for American bands, hands down, and it all starts with Black Flag, one of the groups primarily responsible for establishing the network of basements, VFW halls, and dive bars that constituted the indie-band tour circuit during the Reagan era. Black Flag played anywhere and everywhere, often for audiences not used to seeing fire-spitting punk bands, and planted the seeds of future music scenes in their wake. (To name just one example, one Black Flag show in Seattle during the band’s sludgy My War period is credited with kick-starting grunge.)

Have I mentioned how incredible the music is? Henry Rollins’s hectoring delivery made him a star, but the meat of Black Flag’s sound will always be Greg Ginn’s ungodly guitar, a thick and whizzing buzz saw that sounds like Tony Iommi being fired out of a cannon.

Biggest challenger: In 1981, loving Black Flag usually meant hating the epitome of AOR, Journey. For some people, this dichotomy is still meaningful and needs to be preserved. I am not one of those people. I love Damaged and I love power ballads about city boys raised in south Detroit. I understand why some people feel like they have to choose. At one time, it appeared that bands like Black Flag had to exist as an antidote to the omnipresent cheese of bands like Journey. But now they both exist in history, where the old divisions matter less. Ultimately, Henry Rollins and Steve Perry are wailing the same life-affirming message: Don’t stop believin’, because you’ll rise above.

R.E.M., 1982-84

Key music: Chronic Town (1982), Murmur (1983), and Reckoning (1984)

Overview: In 1983, R.E.M.’s full-length debut, Murmur, placed second in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll of American music critics, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Rolling Stone went further, declaring Murmur its album of the year. Given R.E.M.’s peerless reputation among American bands, this might not seem all that extraordinary. But consider that R.E.M. was based in Athens, Georgia, far outside the country’s major media centers, at a time when not living in New York or L.A. essentially equated to residing in Siberia. Or that R.E.M.’s Southern boho sensibility perplexed big-city music writers accustomed to bands aggressively jabbing fingers in their chests. Those writers couldn’t deny Murmur, but R.E.M. (in its early-’80s incarnation, anyway) would always seem a little exotic for how it personified the world as it existed in the hinterlands. This proved an empowering message for countless other artists: Don’t move away. Make your hometown matter. Represent who you are.

Biggest challenger: I already mentioned how heartbroken I am over not awarding the Replacements the belt. If ever there were a remote chance of Paul Westerberg becoming my personal friend and mentor, I’ve squandered it now.²¹

Second-biggest challenger: If I am brutally beaten because of this column, I know it will be over my failure to properly honor Metallica. Let me just say, should this happen, and my attacker is put on trial, please inform the court that I recognize the greatness of 1983’s Kill ’Em All and 1984’s Ride the Lightning, it’s just that the competition in the ’80s bracket is that intense. If mid-’80s Metallica were competing at any time in the 21st century, it would be no contest. James Hetfield would be drinking James Murphy’s blood out of a Master of Puppets chalice. Blame history, not me.

Third-biggest challenger: There has never been a sweeter relationship between bandmates than the union between Mike Watt and D. Boon in the Minutemen. It truly is the greatest love story in rock history. If you can listen to Watt talk about D. Boon in We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen and not get choked up, you are made of sterner stuff that I. It’s like the end of It’s a Wonderful Life multiplied by the end of E.T., only with better bass lines.

Run-D.M.C., 1985-86

Key music: King of Rock (1985) and Raising Hell (1986)

Overview: In the video for “King of Rock,” Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels force their way into a rock-and-roll museum, mildly accosting an elderly security guard (played by Larry “Bud” Melman) in the process. At the time, this scenario was a metaphor for rap’s fight for artistic credibility as it entered into the mainstream. But it also was a depiction of events that actually occurred in 2009, when Run-D.M.C. was inducted into the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Run-D.M.C. imagined rap taking over pop music and then initiated the takeover with Raising Hell. Run-D.M.C. didn’t win the belt; they took it by justifiable force.

Biggest challenger: Hüsker Dü is my no. 2 band I wish would reunite that will never reunite. Everyone who loves Hüsker Dü is resigned to this, as the relationship between Bob Mould and Grant Hart is Mike Watt and D. Boon’s antimatter. (And Mould’s relationship with bassist Greg Norton isn’t much better.) All of which prompts an obvious question: How do we hologram this?

Second-biggest challenger: You know what great mid-’80s American rock band still tours regularly? The Meat Puppets. The iconoclastic midpoint between Black Flag and Grateful Dead, the Meat Puppets have survived myriad trends, record-industry busts, and addictions and come out the other side as a true national treasure.

Guns N’ Roses, 1987-90

Key music: Appetite for Destruction (1987) and G N’ R Lies (1988)

Overview: This is it, the best period for American bands in the last 50 years. To give you an idea of how plentiful great American bands were during this time, here’s a list of groups I won’t be slotting as challengers for the belt, in spite of their formidable résumés: Pixies, N.W.A, Jane’s Addiction, Los Lobos, De La Soul, Living Colour, the Feelies, Galaxie 500, Digital Undergound, Faith No More, the Black Crowes, Eric B. & Rakim. (These were also good years for previously mentioned bands like R.E.M., Metallica, the Replacements, and Hüsker Dü.)

So, why GNR? Well, you had Appetite for Destruction, which is the best album released during these years. You had G N’ R Lies, which had one of the best songs of the period (“Patience”) and the most controversial (“One in a Million”). And you had their performance at Farm Aid in 1990, which prompted Steven Adler’s dismissal and signaled the end of GNR’s glory years. No American band would ever be this huge ever again.

Biggest challenger: There are at least six credible challengers for the belt during these years, and the top three are virtually even. But since I am required to rank to them, I’ll go with simple math: Sonic Youth is the top challenger because they put out three great albums, 1987’s Sister, 1988’s Daydream Nation, and 1990’s Goo. I’m sure people whose taste is superior to mine will insist that Sonic Youth deserves to be placed ahead of GNR. So why do I already feel bad about the decision to not rank Sonic Youth behind the other two challengers?

Second-biggest challenger: Seriously, is it too late to change my mind? Putting Public Enemy as the second challenger seems ludicrous. This group put out 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (possibly the greatest rap LP ever) and 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet (which I actually like more than Millions). You can’t understand America in the late ’80s without studying those records. Chuck D is already writing a “She Watch Channel Zero?!”–style protest song about how pop-culture websites are shallow noise because of this slight. I don’t blame him.

Third-biggest challenger: The Beastie Boys “only” put out Paul’s Boutique in this period, though the singles from Licensed to Ill were still dominating pop culture throughout 1987. How does a game-changer like Paul’s Boutique warrant only a third-biggest challenger slot? I have no idea. 1987-90 is killing me. Let’s move on.

Nirvana, 1991-93

Key music: Nevermind (1991), Incesticide (1992), and In Utero (1993)

Overview: OK, this one was much easier. Not that the early ’90s weren’t also flush with benchmark American bands. It’s just that Nirvana owned these years like no other band on this list. I could’ve given another band the belt for ’91-’93, but that would’ve created a smoking crater where this column used to be.

Biggest challenger: Pearl Jam was never considered as culturally important as Nirvana, but Pearl Jam was more popular and ended up surviving much longer. I’m amenable to the argument that Pearl Jam should be slotted ahead of Nirvana because it successfully navigated the career gantlet that Kurt Cobain opted out of. I don’t agree with that argument, but I see its value.

Second-biggest challenger: Characters in music documentaries that choke me up, part 2: Phife Dawg in Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest. I want to give him a hug and a record contract whenever he’s onscreen. Q-Tip is still A Tribe Called Quest’s main attraction on two of the best rap albums ever, 1991’s The Low End Theory and 1993’s Midnight Marauders, but Tribe would’ve gotten nowhere without Phife doing the microphone checks.

Third-biggest challenger: Is Pavement a band that people born between 1965 and 1980 are cursed to love without the ability to properly articulate why we love them? Like Weezer, Pavement has an appeal that seems to elude anybody outside of that generation. I feel like the sexiness of not giving a shit should be obvious, but it is not.

Wu-Tang Clan, 1994-95

Key music: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993), Method Man’s Tical (1994), Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version (1995), Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx … (1995), GZA’s Liquid Swords (1995)

Overview: In his essential 2010 book The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, Dan Charnas details the brilliant behind-the-scenes wrangling that allowed the Wu-Tang Clan to sign separate record deals with different labels for the group and for each of the group members. As Charnas explains, this unprecedented business arrangement allowed Wu-Tang to harness the promotional power of the entire recording industry, as any solo project inevitably involved other Wu-Tang members and therefore fed into the group identity. So, while Wu-Tang’s historic debut, Enter the Wu-Tang, technically came out in November 1993, its full impact wasn’t felt until ’94 and ’95, when the Wu-Tang mythos proceeded to take over the culture.

Biggest challenger: Trent Reznor emerged as America’s most charismatic post-Cobain rock star at Woodstock ’94. He subsequently fired up a mythos of his own in the wake of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 album, The Downward Spiral, directly (Marilyn Manson) and indirectly (Stabbing Westward) building an army of clones. But Reznor was always the muddiest of them all.

Second-biggest challenger: Bob Mould once likened Smashing Pumpkins to the Monkees; he intended it as a put-down. Billy Corgan, meanwhile, filled the commercial gap left by Nirvana in much the same way that the Monkees stepped in to exploit a market left behind by the late-’60s art-rock Beatles, gladly writing the radio hits their visionary counterparts couldn’t be bothered to supply. You can still hear all the big singles from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness played on heavy rotation on rock radio, no matter Billy Corgan’s current “cat-stroking Bond villain” phase.

Third-biggest challenger: While not nearly as famous as Wu-Tang, Nine Inch Nails, or Smashing Pumpkins, Guided by Voices produced more great songs than any of them during these years. This is a fact and not a subjective opinion informed by my intense personal experience with GBV.

Outkast, 1996-2000

Key music: ATLiens (1996), Aquemini (1998), and Stankonia (2000)

Overview: How great was Outkast during these years? When André 3000 and Big Boi made the perfectly reasonable decision to mount a perfectly entertaining tour this year, the reaction to the initial shows was disappointment over Outkast merely performing Outkast songs and not redefining music as we know it. Our idea of what Outkast should be had overshadowed what Outkast actually is, which is the most incredible rap duo there ever was.

Biggest challenger: There was a time in my life when Wilco’s late-’90s albums — 1996’s Being There and 1999’s Summerteeth — were like the worst kind of drinking buddies, pushing me to punish my liver with stronger and stronger chemicals while wallowing deeper and deeper in my own neuroses. I’m older now, and my buddies and I have chilled out. Now when we get together, I’m usually driving my wife and son around in the car.

Second-biggest challenger: Yo La Tengo is to the ’90s what Spoon is to the ’00s — never considered the era’s best band, even though it put out more great records than anybody.

Third-biggest challenger: I like Portlandia and all, but Carrie Brownstein doing sketch comedy is like Jimmy Page deciding to join Monty Python instead of recording Houses of the Holy. The world is already drowning in comedy TV, but the sort of riffs that Brownstein deployed in Sleater-Kinney are in dangerously short supply.

The White Stripes, 2001-03

Key music: White Blood Cells (2001) and Elephant (2003)

Overview: Look, make fun of Jack White all you want for being a humorless scold who looks mournful at baseball games, but don’t pretend like White Blood Cells wasn’t murderous when it made the White Stripes MTV stars. There are only two songs that I can remember where I was when I heard them for the first time: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.” White’s guitar-playing on that song was a supercharged Jordan Shrug at rock history. White might’ve been arrogant, but it was earned. On the next record, he wrote his generation’s “We Will Rock You”–style sports anthem, cinching immortality.

Biggest challenger: Another case of squandered momentum, though in retrospect the Strokes were set up to fail by all the hype that greeted Is This It. I still love this band, and probably always will. I bought Angles on vinyl, for crissakes. I don’t expect my stubborn Strokes true-believerism to be vindicated, but I don’t rule it out either.

Second-biggest challenger: Drive-By Truckers is one of my all-time favorite bands, and it pains me to deny them the belt, especially since Mike Cooley would cream Jack White and Julian Casablancas in a fist fight.

Third-biggest challenger: If I were awarding belts for rock records, Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf would be hoisting it above all comers. Until then, I’m risking Nick Oliveri’s wrath by putting QOTSA in the honorable mention category.

LCD Soundsystem, 2004-07

Key music: LCD Soundsystem (2005) and Sound of Silver (2007)

Overview: LCD Soundsystem is an emblematic band for the last 20 years of rock music not because it made era-defining records (though LCD did do this), but because it stopped making records prematurely. Post-Nirvana, important rock bands reach a certain level and either break up or deliberately make themselves seem less important. Nobody ever decides to just go bigger, the way Guns N’ Roses did. Voluntary marginalization is the name of the game now.

Biggest challenger: The Hold Steady’s first three albums — 2004’s Almost Killed Me, 2005’s Separation Sunday, and 2006’s Boys and Girls in America — hit my aesthetic buttons so squarely that I sometimes mistrust my reaction to them. Do I love this band or do I love how this band repackages what I already love? Whenever I feel this way, I take another swig of beer, turn up the volume, and within seconds I’m back to being lost in my own joy.

Second-biggest challenger: This was back when the National still wrote the occasional “screaming” song. I miss those songs in the National’s recent catalogue, which I otherwise love. Memo to Matt Berninger: Please shout “fuck!” in your songs more often. Your pal, Steve.

Third-biggest challenger: Did you think I’d forget Spoon? Well, you were (almost) correct. I really wanted to put Mastodon in this spot, because 2004’s Leviathan and 2006’s Blood Mountain are among the most potent metal records to come out this century. Then I realized, “Hey, I just wrote a column talking about how Spoon isn’t held in the proper esteem, and now I’m doing the same thing.” I will not be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me, so I’m putting Spoon and Mastodon here.²²

Deerhunter, 2008-10

Key music: Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. (2008) and Halcyon Digest (2010)

Overview: I love Deerhunter. My favorite album of the ’10s so far is Halcyon Digest, and I like Microcastle nearly as much. But let’s be frank: The last six years are the weakest ever for American bands. It’s not even close, really. There are still good bands, but they don’t matter like the other groups on this list. If you don’t know who Deerhunter is, you’re likely with the majority of readers. Please listen to them. You’ll thank me later.

Biggest challenger: Vampire Weekend isn’t just a challenger, it’s arguably the favorite. If I liked Vampire Weekend more, Ezra Koenig would be holding the belt. But I don’t, so he’s not.

Second-biggest challenger: If you are familiar with Titus Andronicus’s 2010 release, The Monitor, there’s a high likelihood that you love The Monitor. It’s a record that demands and often receives intense adoration. Of all the bands that have claimed to be influenced by Bruce Springsteen in the past 10 years, Monitor-era Titus Andronicus was the best at communicating potentially embarrassing (or just embarrassing-embarrassing) thoughts and emotions in a similarly galvanizing fashion.

The Black Keys, 2011-14

Key music: El Camino (2011) and Turn Blue (2014)

Overview: The Black Keys perform a thankless role in our culture: They’re a mainstream rock band making mainstream rock songs that can be slotted comfortably next to the popular hits of every other genre. Even more than their testy rival Jack White, they are responsible for keeping blues-derived guitar music — the most familiar form of American music from the past half century — alive as a relevant pop genre. The Black Keys are the only youngish American band that’s a credible headliner for a Super Bowl halftime show; they’re also the only band that seems worthy of the belt for reasons that go beyond my personal preference. It’s the closest thing there is to a consensus favorite.

Biggest challenger: Really, the only other band I can think of to compete with the Black Keys are the Roots, a group that’s never been a significant force commercially but nevertheless can be seen every night on our nation’s top late-night talk show. Can any other band on earth play with as many different artists without it seeming forced or weird? The Roots are practically a national mascot of genre versatility at this point.

Photo illustrations by Ben Buysse