On TV this weekend: Les Miles, More Favre

The Couch
by Jason Gay
The Wall Street Journal
October 22, 2010

This weekend the Couch asks baseball to sort out this year's World Series before the East Coast is snowed in for the winter (done), wonders if Les Miles can possibly pull off one more crazy win as LSU faces Auburn (he couldn't), and sees if Green Bay can still work up the anger toward Brett Favre as the Packers host the Vikings (yes).

Trick Plays
by Yoni Brenner
Shouts & Murmurs
The New Yorker
October 4, 2010

The Open-Source Sweep
A week before the big game, team officials engineer a "chance encounter" between the opposing quarterback and the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, The pair become fast friends, attending a number of folk concerts and rummage sales together. As their relationship blossoms, Gyllenhaal inculcates the quarterback with progressive ideas about transparency and freedom of information, and by the end of the week he convinces the quarterback to post his team's playbook on WikiLeaks. The team loses five of its next six games, and the quarterback is benched. As for Jake Gyllenhaal, he is eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, and is hired by Fox Sports to join Howie Long and Michael Strahan on the Sunday NFL pre-game show.

West Coast Misdirection
During the off-season, the opposing quarterback is again approached by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. The quarterback warns Gyllenhaal to keep his distance, but Gyllenhaal tells him that it isn't like that---he wants to offer the quarterback a part in an independent film he is producing, called "The Quarterback and the Dame," about an unlikely romance between a gridiron hero and the English stage legend Judi Dench. The quarterback reads the script, and he has to admit it's pretty good, so he signs on. The quarterback arrives on the set for the first day of shooting, only to find Gyllenhaal costumed in shoulder pads and eye black. The quarterback goes berserk, believing that he'd been promised the part. "No, no," Gyllenhaal coos, "you're playing Judi Dench."