First of all, isn’t it wonderful that the Redskins didn’t get the chance to lose this week?

Second of all, Michael Lewis (celebrated author of Moneyball and a new book about the rise of the left tackle) had a great piece in the Times Magazine yesterday. It’s a week-in-the-life piece chronicling the travails of Bill Parcells, head coach/tyrant of the Dallas Cowboys (who, incidentally, took complete control of their game last night to stomp the Carolina Panthers). What’s interesting about this piece is not just the depth and access of it–Lewis gets to see and describe the minutia of Parcells’s scouting and game-planning and even his personal life–but the immediacy of it. More typically, these kinds of pieces come out after the season is over, once the information within them can no longer hurt those who gave the writer the behind-the-scenes access necessary. And Parcells is notoriously reticent to share even the most basic and innocuous info with the press. So to read paragraphs like the one quoted below mere weeks after the event really surprised me–Parcells must be feeling a lot of pressure to justify his salary to risk being maligned in the middle of the regular season (or maybe it’s all part of an elaborate plot to motivate his team–I wouldn’t put that past him, either). Either way, it’s a great read, even for a Redskins fan. Enjoy:

Now, as he conspicuously pretends not to notice his $2.5 million kicker shanking 30-yard field goal attempts in practice, Parcells wonders if he’s witnessing another one of those inexplicable and total collapses of nerves. (“And don’t tell me that it can’t happen with kickers,” he says.) He doesn’t talk to Vanderjagt, and Vanderjagt doesn’t talk to him: all this drama and anxiety occur without a word of direct, verbal communication. “But,” Parcells says, “even when he doesn’t think I’m watching him, I’m watching him.” Standing on the sideline, staring at his first-team offense as it scores yet another touchdown against the scrubs, the coach who is in the business of collecting information listens to a report from Tony Romo, the backup quarterback and the one who holds the ball for the place kicker. Romo tells him that Vanderjagt is finally hitting the ball squarely. “Yeah,” Parcells says. “In practice.”

I harbor strong antipathy for Bill Parcells, and so far his work with the Cowboys has been emphatically up-and-down, but this profile does a remarkable job of describing how unlikeable and annoying he is while somehow making it all a little bit admirable (and more than a little bit sad). Sports writing is undergoing a surprising renaissance lately, with a lot of smart people (all men, regrettably) bringing their intelligence and creativity to bear on a diversion that is as pointless as it is transcendent. It’s pretty awesome.