Playmakers is a Next Big Idea Club Season 18…

PublicAffairs

The Next Big Idea Club finally has hatched its first really bad idea. It has made Playmakers a nominee for its Season 18 competition.

The list of non-fiction nominees is compiled by Panio Gianopoulos and gradually whittled down to two winners by the Next Big Idea Club’s quartet of curators: Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink.

It’s a special double season for the Next Big Idea Club, which means that the already slim chances of Playmakers winning are instantly twice as slim. But that’s fine. What’s the saying? It was an honor being nominated.

That may be the first time that sentence has even been truthfully articulated. The Next Big Idea club is big-brain, high-concept stuff. Playmakers is just a bunch of essays about football.

But maybe those essays, taken together, carry lessons about the intersection of high-level athletics and major businesses owned almost exclusively by American oligarchs whose qualifications consist of having enough money to buy the franchise, or the right DNA to inherit it.

Playmakers is holding steady (for now) at 33-percent below list price on Amazon. Now is the time to stop procrastinating and just buy the damn thing.

After all, the Next Big Idea Club sees something in it. Which probably means only that the Next Big Idea Club needs glasses.