The problem with publishing a daily literary website about sports, on a (I'm assuming) constrained budget is that it will be hard to produce daily content, let alone quality, daily content. Not every article is going to be an in-depth story on the finer points of the South Korean table tennis national team. Thus, we end up with columns like the Reality TV Fantasy League. Does the Grantland Quarterly really need an article about "Snooki's Wilt Chamberlain Performance?" No, it does not.

Thus reflects my disappointment with this issue of the Grantland Quarterly. There were some great articles ("The Art of Seat Poaching," "(Almost) Winning in Milwaukee," "The Fallacy of the Nets," and "Rise of the Blur Offense") but then there was some obvious filler (the aforementioned Snooki article and "The Hunks of College Football.") Not everything published on the website is going to be a winner and unfortunately the print edition suffers from some of the same pitfalls.

Fitting in the with theme of the difficulty in producing daily content, the issue fails to include any original material.* I don't manage to catch Grantland.com every day so there are plenty of articles in here the I failed to read on the website. But I'm sure there will be a few diehards out there who will be disappointed in the lack of at least a couple original pieces. Additionally, original pieces would help replace the filler because presumably the author would not be under a time crunch the same as if he or she were writing an article for the website. I did enjoy the snippets of conversations from the various Grantland podcast programs. I am glad to see those made it into Issue 3 as well.

Finally, since articles published on Grantland.com are so contemporaneous, by the time the Grantland Quarterly arrives in my mailbox I've already heard enough about the Penn State scandal and Tim Tebow to where I don't care to read four articles on these two subjects. But I understand that the Grantland Quarterly is supposed to be a collection of the best stories published on the website within the past few months. It's understandable that there will be some stories which feel like they have overstayed their welcome.

The presentation of the Grantland Quarterly is again wonderful. Issue 1 was a basketball and this time Issue 2 has a dust jacket that is a double sided poster with a reprint of the iconic Iceman poster on one side and... I'm not sure how to describe the other side. It's a visual depiction of Bill Simmons' and Jay Caspian Kang's dream renegade basketball league. In addition, there are color portraits in the front and colored illustrations throughout. The presentation alone always makes me excited to read the Quarterly.

Overall, this issue was a step back from the debut but I think fans of Grantland will still enjoy what Bill Simmons has presented.

*Editor's Note: I wrote this review with about 30 pages left in this issue and it appears that there is a short story included at the end that was not published on the website. My apologies. ( )