NYDN drops Manning bombshell

None of those is anything new on anything Peyton Manning did. It's possibly --- just possibly --- a little extra information on something a teammate said, something his daddy said and something 2 members of the athletic department said.

And exactly how many paragraphs into the story was this revealed since it's, you know, so important?

 

Well, as mentioned before, take the writing portion out of it, because we're all in agreement that the story structure is crap. I would say a teammate, under oath, saying that Peyton Manning's mooning defense was garbage is a pretty damning piece of evidence. Again, that's just me. But keep defending him.

 

Not defending him.

A decade ago I said he did a stupid and crude thing as a college junior. Today I say he did a stupid and crude thing as a college junior.

But the story told me nothing he did that I hadn't already read.

 

Stupid and crude is one thing. A criminal act is another. Again, how nobody delved deeper into this is mind-boggling. She filed a complaint. There must be some sort of record of that.

 

Heard Cam Newton stole a laptop.

 

I have no knowledge of Tennessee law, but if a complaint was filed 20 years ago and nothing came of it, it might well have been broomed out of the records by now, either by action of Manning's lawyers, by rule, or the usual bureaucratic morass.

 

What about the lies he and his father told under oath tearing down the trainer? They were reported before, but weren't widely known.

 

Then maybe Shaun King shouldn't spend 80 inches building up to this like he had a scoop.

I get it. He was trying to write a piece of narrative journalism, which wasn't a bad approach with an old story. But he failed miserably at it. I mostly blame his editors.

 

You know what else occasionally pops up on those feeds? News of the death of Leslie Nielson, Joe Cocker and plenty of other people that actually died years earlier. If you're "judging" this story's significance by your twitter feed then I suggest you might be using the wrong barometer. We live in a weird age when one can take an old story, wait long enough until people have forgotten, re-report it and plenty out there will react it like it's new again. Doesn't mean it actually is.

Despite the misleading way King presented it, this is old news. This may reveal some salacious new details, but the substance of the story is still old. I remember reading all about it and thoroughly discussing it 13 years ago, and I'm not inclined to get up in arms about it all over again.

 

So it's a poorly written story that has some "wow" appeal. I suppose there can be some agreement with that. I certainly didn't remember this coming up.

News bulletin: In today's society, page clicks count. And this got page clicks, whether it's years-old news or not.

 

Page clicks count for about as long as it takes for the next click.

 

I wouldn't take that theory into the nearest 2016 newsroom.