do NOT click this link!

i'm serious: do not click the links in this post. navigating the wealth of sports writing online can be an arduous undertaking. bloggers and journalists jostle each other for position in this wide open field. snark or craft? innovation or sleepwalking?

both sides have their drawbacks. both can resort to cheap tactics to drum up page views.

since i write and am therefore compelled to read a bunch of shit i'd rather not read - see, i must stay on top of what hack analysis don banks is spouting so i can lap his ass even though i lack contacts and training - i thought i'd save you, dear reader, some precious time and braincells.

below are links to articles you should not read along with a synopsis so curiousity won't get the better of you. you save yourself five minutes, i purge the dross from my brain. everyone wins! (sorta.)

'packers' hand being forced' by michael silver. did you read peter king's article monday detailing the various scenarios in the brett favre un-retiring clusterfuck? good (if not, you should). then you have virtually no reason to read michael silver's tuesday column. silver simply restates what king hustled to confirm, that favre did in fact express interest in returning to the team.

oh, sure, silver waxes on at length about football being a cutthroat business, but his analysis in a vacuum approach - suggesting that favre and aaron rodgers battle for the starting spot in training camp - does little more than stick a knee in the crotch of this week's monumental storyline.

'favre should come back immediately' by andrew perloff. perloff is sports illustrated's version of blogger, running the football side of their fan nation site. i have this image of perloff painfully combing the web for everyone's opinion, then creating a graph with the 'x' axis as least agreeable and the 'y' axis as least intellectually challenging, then filling in the blanks to his si.com approved 'this is a blog post' form.

okay, that's a little harsh. but perloff does have some annoying writing tendencies. flatten people into two dimensional characters, check. vacillate wildly in the middle of the post, check. in this one, perloff starts with saying favre should come back, moves to praising rodgers as a leader and the team's bind, then concluding with favre should just play for the green bay. trust me, that makes it sound more informative than it is.

'expect wade phillips to be gone next season' by jean-jacques taylor. this is a tough time in the nfl season. even the weeks immediately following the draft are littered with minicamp reports and bios of sixth round camp bodies. and taylor has written some good stuff, providing a good social perspective (like the sheer number of strip clubs in the dallas area to tempt pacman jones). but this one, eh, this one's a cheap attention getter.

while the premise isn't ridiculous - that wade phillips is in his last year, either winning a super bowl into retirement or being axed because of another playoff disappointment - taylor doesn't really add any new insight to a topic discussed every couple of months. and there's no explanation of why phillips wasn't fired at this most recent playoff disappointment. taylor's better than this and he knows it.