Friday Recap: Mulling Mullens, the MVP debate and truffle theory

This week's recap covers a wide range of topics. On the Vikings side, most of it focuses on the QB, but there's also MVP talk, zoning laws, the end of twitter and more.

Every week, I feel like I don’t have enough content for a Friday recap and almost every week I’m proven wrong. In addition to the pieces I’ve produced we’ve got pieces tackling the MVP debate, more on plagiarism in YouTube and some non-sports stuff, like zoning laws, Scott Pilgrim, cooking with truffles and the history of the wheel.

I will do my best to isolate when pieces I link are videos, podcasts and/or behind paywalls (marked with a $).

Sports Work I Produced:

• My recap of the Raiders game, with an emphasis on Ivan Pace

• Luke Braun wrote a piece on how we count drops, with particular reference to the Las Vegas Raiders game.

• My piece on why Nick Mullens is the right choice, even if you argue Joshua Dobbs played better football

• James’ piece previewing the Hell League playoffs goes over the Week 14 MVP.

• Podcast: I interview Joe Goodberry to preview the Bengals game

• Podcast/Video: The Minnesota Football Party drafts Christmas movies and discusses Jake Browning

Sports Work I Liked

• I had been considering writing a piece on the My Cause My Cleats initiative and how it has delved into fraught political territory, but the Defector beat me to it. It’s a good piece that focuses primarily on the sex-trafficking organizations that have been promoted by Sound of Freedom.

• Video: Last week, a number of YouTubers discussed plagiarism in the space, most notably a YouTuber named HBomberguy. In the Sports YouTube space, JaguarGator9 goes into detail about one plagiarist poisoning the platform

• Video: Kurt Warner reviews the film of Joshua Dobbs’ game and concludes that he didn’t play as poorly as you think he did

• Ted Nguyen on the Brian Flores defense and how it’s mastered the art of psychological warfare on quarterbacks

• Ben Solak on why Amazon’s Prime Vision might stick

• And his piece on whether or not Brock Purdy deserves an NFL MVP

Non-Sports Work I Liked

• Leftward Bound, who I’ve followed for a little bit, just launched his own Substack. His first piece is about what impacts people the most: local politics. Leftward discusses zoning and specifically how Tax Increment Financing fails at generating economic development

• The Verge has an incredible series of pieces under the banner of “The year Twitter died,” which is not only designed well as a landing page but includes a number of well-written pieces.

• Video: Scott Niswander of Nerdsync released a video on the new Scott Pilgrim show and analyzed the fan reaction to what is ultimately a good show.

• Video: The Premodernist goes into why precolonial Africa didn’t use the wheel

• Video: Ethan Chlebowski explores truffles — whether they’re worth it, what substitutes provide and how they work and how to use them