Cover: SI should have gone with NFL concussion book excerpt over Kate Upton

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OK, nothing wrong with a little fun. The Upton cover concept was clever.

Besides, the presence of Kate Upton on the cover will help newsstands sales, even if she isn’t in a skimpy bathing suit.

However, there was a better choice this week. Sports Illustrated has the excerpt from Mark and Steve Fainaru’s new book about concussions and football, League of Denial.

The headline on the SI.com: An exclusive excerpt from the book the NFL doesn’t want you to read

Indeed, there’s some eye-opening stuff in the excerpt. It is going to generate considerable talk. Given the gravity of the story and the anticipation for the book, it would seem to be cover material. Certainly more so than Kate Upton in a baseball uniform.

By the way, the excerpt from the book led with a terrific passage featuring the legendary David Halberstam:

Late in 1994, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue appeared with two other commissioners, the NBA’s David Stern and the NHL’s Gary Bettman, in the auditorium at New York City’s 92nd Street Y to discuss the state of their respective leagues. The panel’s moderator was the journalist David Halberstam, who had gone on to a career of writing books, including several about sports, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The New York Times.

After dispensing with questions about labor relations and league finances, Halberstam turned to the NFL’s growing concussion problem. Tagliabue dismissed the matter as a “pack journalism issue” and claimed that the NFL experienced “one concussion every three or four games,” which he said came out to 2.5 concussions for every “22,000 players engaged.”

For Halberstam, it was a moment of déjà vu. He seemed to be taken back to the days of the Five O’Clock Follies, the name the Saigon press corps bestowed upon the surreal, statistics-crammed U.S. government press briefings. Halberstam compared the NFL commissioner with the U.S. defense secretary of the 1960s. “I feel I’m back in Vietnam hearing [Robert] McNamara give statistics,” he told the audience, which howled.