Peter King's Initial 2010 Power Rankings

[Wraith]

http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d8184857e&template=with-video-with-comments&confirm=true

This is more like it, Ranked 9th and 5th in the AFC with the acknowledgment that if everything falls into place they could finish first.

[jjakq27]

http://www.nfl.com/n...ts&confirm=true

This is more like it, Ranked 9th and 5th in the AFC with the acknowledgment that if everything falls into place they could finish first.

GB at No. 5? I may be wrong but that might be too high still.

[HairOnFire]

Did someone piss in his coffee when he covered the Bengals? Good Lord he loves to hate on them. It's shocking, that has got to be one of the most blatant efforts he's ever done against the team. Good on Hobson for calling him out on it.

Consider the source, and no.....I don't mean Peter King.

From it's inception Sport's Illustrated has built it's subscriber base by attacking the biggest most established personalities in sports, and nobody was a more frequent target of SI's attacks than Paul Brown.

King is simply carrying on a SI tradition that dates back at least 50 years.

[DC_Bengals_Fan]

From it's inception Sport's Illustrated has built it's subscriber base by attacking the biggest most established personalities in sports, and nobody was a more frequent target of SI's attacks than Paul Brown...King is simply carrying on a SI tradition that dates back at least 50 years.

Good God, but that's a rather dead horse, isn't it? Even by the 80s' I'd have to imagine.

I'd have figured that "Paul Brown, Polarizing Icon" would have been an old story by the time ol' Petey was learning how to write.

[HairOnFire]

From it's inception Sport's Illustrated has built it's subscriber base by attacking the biggest most established personalities in sports, and nobody was a more frequent target of SI's attacks than Paul Brown...King is simply carrying on a SI tradition that dates back at least 50 years.

Good God, but that's a rather dead horse, isn't it? Even by the 80s' I'd have to imagine.

I'd have figured that "Paul Brown, Polarizing Icon" would have been an old story by the time ol' Petey was learning how to write.

If you doubt it...just read the most recent biography of Paul Brown.

The founders of Sports Illustrated deliberately targeted the biggest sports icons as a way of increasing circulation, stealing readers from then media giants like The Sporting News by blasting away at ultra successful teams like the Yankees or individuals like Paul Brown. Now, decades later, Sport's Illustrated may represent the old dying media, with the vast hordes of internet bloggers now filling the role of cutting edge upstart, but SI's role can't change. They're still the house that helped take down Paul Brown in Cleveland, right? And thus, decades later they taught Peter King what to write, and how to do it.

In regards to the latter, the birth of the internet has increasingly dictated sportwriters pen articles specifically written to inflame rather than inform, and King was one of the first to realize how saying something stupid about sports doesn't harm your credibility...since there isn't any credibility to be had in the first place.