Remember last week, when Rick Reilly tried to pass off this stupid poem as a sports column? Since he's an adult who gets paid an exorbitant amount of money to write about sports, Reilly was rightly lambasted by most everyone who saw his poem. But we wanted to give Reilly's poetic skills a chance to stand on their own merits, so we went to someone who knows a thing or two about judging simplistic poetry.
We gave Reilly's poem to a friend of Deadspin who teaches English to seventh graders in the Bronx. We did not tell her the identity or age of the poem's author. We simply asked her to grade it as if the work was done by one of her students. So what did she think? Well, Rick Reilly is a pretty good poet for a seventh grader!
Good job, Rick! But watch out for those words that aren't actually words next time.