Tag: nfl

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Quarterback

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The NFL season starts on Wednesday so I thought I’d write abou tthe Netflix series Quarterback today, which has now had three seasons – the latest of which came out in mid July.

Each season follows a group of quarterbacks across the course of an NFL season. The first series followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota across the 2022 season, the second saw Cousins return with Joe Burrow and Jared Gough across the 2024 season and the third season in Joe Flacco, Jayden Daniels, Baker Mayfield and Cam Ward in the 2025 season. If you’re wondering why the gap between the first two seasons – the 2023 season saw a documentary series called Receiver about Wide Receivers instead, reportedly because of the difficulties in finding quarterbacks to feature in a second season at the time.

Each season the quarterbacks featured are at different points in their careers. If you know NFL you’ll have already twigged that, but for those of you (most of you?) who don’t, in the first season Mahomes was aiming for his second Super Bowl, Cousins was a decade into his NFL career and the established starter at the Vikings and Mariota was trying to establish himself as a starting quarterback at Atlanta after having spent a couple of seasons as backup or injured.

Quarterback has got great access to the teams and players – it has the subjects mic’d up during their games which was a first for the NFL. It also has Peyton Manning as one of the producers (it’s made by his production company and Patrick Mahomes’ one) and I suspect Peyton is the reason for this. For the non-NFL fans, he’s part of the Manning dynasty – his dad Archie was an NFL quarterback, his younger brother Eli was an NFL quarterback and his nephew Arch is currently quarterback in college footbal for the Texas Longhorns – he’s the son of Peyton’s older brother Cooper who was a highly rated college footballer before his career was cut short due to a spinal condition. Among his many, many accolades Peyton won two Super Bowls and an Super Bowl MVP and he’s rated as one of the best quarterbacks of all time. So if anyone was going to be able to persuade the NFL to give access and players to be involved it’s him.

Because I watch NFL it’s hard for me to judge how appealing this is going to be for people who don’t, but this was one of the first of the series to appear off the back of the success of Drive to Survive and it’s one of the better ones. Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf) appeared earlier in the same year as Quarterback and I didn’t make it through a whole series of either of those. I have watched a bunch of series of Amazon’s documentary series All or Nothing which started with NFL but hasn’t done an NFL series since before the pandemic and has branched out to other sports and I think this offers more for the casual fan because unlike All or Nothing which follows one team each year, this has the wider focus. I watched the first season back when it came out and binged it, tried Receiver when that started and didn’t get through it, then forgot about Quarterback until the third season came out – but then I binged series two in one day and then series three across the next week around actually doing other things, so I clearly enjoy them – even if they haven’t featured Dak Prescott (from my team the Cowboys) yet.

Once I’d finished this, I moved on to Any Given Saturday which is about the 24/25 season in the SEC conference of college football, which was fine – but missing some of the big teams and just generally not as focused as this. So if you like your NFL documentaries it’s an interesting watch, but it’s not an entry point series really.

Happy Sunday – and enjoy the NFL when it starts with the reigning Super Bowl champions the Seahawks at home to the Patriots on Wednesday. I’ve got to wait until next Sunday when the Cowboys open their campaign against the Giants at the stadium which is back to being known as the MetLife after spending the summer as the New York New Jersey stadium for the World Cup.

not a book

Super Bowl Sunday again

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It’s the final word of the NFL season against, and this year the Vince Lombardi trophy will be handed out in Las Vegas. I don’t think I’ll be staying up to t watch this year, but I might try and make it to the half time show, which this year is Usher.

I’ve written about the NFL before – here are my posts about me and the NFL, the Chicago Stars series and Swamp Kings. I’ve just finished watching this season of Hard Knocks, which was following the Miami Dolphins, and I’ve also been watching The Franchise, which has been following the Kansas City Chiefs – defending Super Bowl champions, who play the San Francisco 49ers tonight.

I was talking the other week about trends in romance – we’ve had famous people and normal people, we’ve started getting Taylor Swift-influenced romance s – and u expect in the next little while we’ll start getting pop star and NFL player romances. Mark my words!

Enjoy the game if you’re watching – enjoy whatever else tire doing with your Sunday if you’re not!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June 2022 Quick Reviews

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I read a lot of books last month. But there were also a lot of rereads, and I do have this terrible tendency to have already written about al lot of books by the time we get to this point in the months. But I have a plan to try out for that in July, so I’ll keep you posted…

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Cover of Lessons in Chemistry

Elizabeth Zott is a scientist. The trouble is that it is America in the 1960s and women apparently women aren’t meant to be scientists. Her Nobel nominated colleague Calvin can see that she’s a scientist and a lot more and the two of them start a relationship. But three years later Elizabeth is a single mother and is presenting the world’s most unconventional cooking show on regional TV. I need to give you a warning serious sexual assault early in this book and a death a little while after, but if you can cope with that once you get out the other side you’re ok. And we all know that I’ve had trouble with dealing with stuff like that recently and I was find with this. Elizabeth is an brilliant character – she knows what she wants to do and refuses to understand people who tell her no or change what she’s doing if she thinks she is right. The book is told from various different character’s perspectives, including her dog and her daughter and it’s just a delight. Six Thirty is the smartest of us all. This s Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel and it’s such a delight it was nearly BotW yesterday. It’s had a lot of buzz so you should be able to get it really easily – and if you are going on holiday, it was definitely in the airport bookshops when we were there!

Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron by Julia Quinn and Violet Charles

This is much referenced in the later Julia Quinn novels, and now we finally have (a graphic novel version of) Miss Butterworth! In the books it’s a romantic and gothic novels – much play is made of its outlandish plot – a character is pecked to death by pigeons for example. And it’s everything you would expect – utter, utter madness, beautifully illustrated by Quinn’s sister Violet Charles. I enjoyed this and I’m so glad it got published – for reasons that will become clear if you read to the end.

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle by Neil Blackmore

Benjamin and Edgar Bowen head out into Europe on a Grand Tour that their mother has devised for them to help them meet People of Quality so they can come back with an enhanced social standing to help the family. But when Benjamin meets Horace Lavelle, the brothers’ paths and goals diverge. This came out in 2020 – I got a copy from the work book sale a few weeks back and then realised that I had it in the NetGalley backlog as well. Oops. Anyway, I liked the premise and the writing style, but it was a bit too bleak for me in the end. I don’t do well with books that are hurtling towards disaster at the moment, even if they are dealing with expectations and society and judgment and constructs and stuff that I am interested in. I wanted it to be ok for Benjamin; but I knew it wouldn’t be. But historical fiction isn’t always neat and happy, and may be that is the point. I suspect that pre-pandemic I would have been more enthusiastic about it – so I suspect other people who are not in need of neat resolutions and/or happy endings at the moment may really enjoy it.

Paper Lion by George Plimpton

So this was one of the longest of the long runners on the still reading pile. And that’s partly because it was a paperback so didn’t go in the work rucksack but mostly because I managed to lose it for ages! Anyway, this is a legendary book about American football in the 1960s when a journalist managed to persuade the Detroit Lions to let him join their preseason training camp as a quarterback. Obviously a lot has changed in professional football since then, but this is a fascinating glimpse of how sportsmen trained and lived at the time as well as the workings of an NFL team. If you like sport it’s definitely worth looking out for.

Enjoy!