elite

ARLINGTON, Texas — Brandon Aubrey and Brandon McManus traded short field goals in overtime, and Micah Parsons’ highly anticipated return to Dallas ended with the Cowboys and Green Bay Packers in a 40-40 tie Sunday night.

Dak Prescott and Jordan Love had three touchdown passes apiece in regulation, which included seven consecutive lead-changing TDs before McManus’ tying 53-yard field goal as time expired.

McManus kicked a 34-yarder as the clock hit 0:00 in overtime, after Love’s pass into the back of the end zone fell incomplete with just a second remaining.

What started as the hyped return of one of the game’s elite pass rushers exactly a month after the Cowboys (1-2-1) traded Parsons to the Packers (2-1-1) ended up as the second dramatic duel of quarterbacks in two home games for Dallas.

The Cowboys beat the Giants 40-37 in overtime two weeks earlier when Russell Wilson was starting for New York.

The second-highest scoring tie in pro football history, behind the Raiders’ 43-43 draw with the Boston Patriots in the AFL in 1964, was the first for Dallas since 1969. The Packers last tied in 2018.

The Cowboys had a first down at the Green Bay five-yard line to start overtime after Prescott ran away from pressure from Parsons for a spectacular 34-yard completion to Jalen Tolbert, who came back for the throw and just barely got his feet inbounds.

The drive stalled with help from Parsons, who caught Prescott from behind for no gain and was credited with his first sack of the game. The Cowboys settled for Aubrey’s 22-yard field goal.

Love completed a 14-yard pass to Matthew Golden on fourth-and-6 and led the Packers to a first down at the Dallas 12 before that drive stalled as well. The Packers QB was fortunate he still had a second remaining after he waited for Golden to get open in the back of the end zone and threw incomplete.

Romeo Doubs caught all three of Love’s TD passes and finished with 58 yards on six catches. Josh Jacobs rushed for two touchdowns and finished with 157 total yards. Love threw for 337 yards.

Javonte Williams powered in from the 1 in the wildcat for Dallas after Prescott split wide. The Cowboys took a 30-27 lead on Williams’ plunge with 4:50 remaining. Three more TDs would follow.

Prescott threw for 319 yards and ran for a score, and George Pickens had eight catches for 134 yards and two touchdowns with No. 1 receiver CeeDee Lamb sidelined by a high ankle sprain.

Parsons’ OT sack was the only one given up by a Dallas offensive line missing two starters. The banged-up Green Bay front was equally effective.

The only sack of Love came on a fumble that led to the second Dallas touchdown in the final 41 seconds of the first half.

The Packers were up 13-0 after Love’s second TD toss Doubs when Juanyeh Thomas blocked Brandon McManus’ PAT kick and Markquese Bell returned it for a two-point conversion, the first such 2-point play in Dallas franchise history.

That three-point swing was still the difference when Dallas took a 23-20 lead into the fourth quarter moments after Prescott’s eight-yard scoring toss to Jake Ferguson.

There are people and there is leadership, but numbers are becoming ever more influential in assessing performances and deciding who truly is the best of the best.

Speed, distances, heart rate, VO2 max aerobic capacity tests, biomechanics, injury risk, sleep, mood, stress, positions, heat maps, formations – it is too much for most of us to contemplate.

“Football is the hardest sport. You know, fundamentally, it’s hard to analyse because there are not many goals,” says Ian Graham, founder and CEO of analytics company Ludonautics.

“I was director of research at Liverpool Football Club for 11 years. In the Premier League, certainly every move is analysed.

“For every game, you get this data, which is this list of what happened, where and who did it. Most leagues now have something called tracking data, where you see 25 frames per second, the positions of all of the players. That tells you something about the off-ball impacts of players.”

It does not come cheap, though. Graham says it will cost anything from £1.5m to £3.5m for clubs such as Liverpool, Arsenal, Brighton and Brentford, who are known to be invested in the numbers.

Then again, in football at least, that is a steal if you are paying £100m for a player.

Data will tell anybody with knowledge of how to use it an awful lot, but can athletes understand it themselves?

Certainly – just ask English golfer Lottie Woad, who recently won the Scottish Open aged 21, a week after turning professional in a sport which demands accuracy.

“I love data, so that’s kind of how my brain works,” Woad says.

“I record stats from each round and put them in a system called Upgame – it’ll tell you everything about your round, strokes gained and stuff like that.

“And then in my practice using launch monitors, showing you all the stuff you need for your technique as well as looking at ball flight, spin rates, stuff like that. It’s helped a lot.”

Incremental improvement is the name of the game, but there’s a more sophisticated phenomenon on the horizon which could change elite sport forever and needs a scientist, not a sports star, to explain.

“Artificial intelligence is a form of computer science. So it uses systems that can perform tasks which mirror human intelligence, such as the likes of problem-solving, decision-making and learning,” says the Open University’s Mark Antrobus.

“The real benefits of it is it can be used to collect and streamline data and data collection processes really quickly. We can identify patterns, and make predictions just like humans do through experience.”

When Vogue tastemaker Anna Wintour announced late last month that she would be stepping down as editor in chief after 37 years, the news sent shock waves through the media business and fashion world.

Wintour, who will remain chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director for Vogue, is a grand symbol of a magazine empire that includes Wired and Vanity Fair: a demanding, glamorous longtime chair of the Met Gala who has set fashion trends and made world-famous designers, some of whom she helped create, bow and tremble. She covers news, she creates news, she is news. Predictably enough, word of her changing status ignited frenzied speculation about who might take on the newly created role of U.S. head of editorial content for Vogue and eventually succeed her.

Condé Nast, which publishes enough other glossy magazines to fill a newsstand (if any still exist), remains very much alive, and it’s the subject of Michael M. Grynbaum’s new book “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.” But as Grynbaum makes clear in his book, the Condé sway isn’t quite what it used to be. The company’s most powerful editors, including Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) and Tina Brown (Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker), have stepped aside. More importantly, the rise of TikTok, Instagram and the like have created a world where almost anyone with an opportunist’s instinct can be an influencer.

“The means of glamour production were brought to the masses,” Grynbaum tells The Times in an interview taking place after Wintour’s announcement. “If you look at TikTok and Instagram, a lot of people are re-creating the status fantasies that Condé Nast was notorious for: the real estate tours of somebody’s mansion that are right out of Architectural Digest, or the fit check and outfit of the day that ascended from GQ, Vogue and Glamour.”

The man most responsible for the Condé Nast that readers know today was Samuel Irving “S.I.” Newhouse Jr., better known as Si. The son of a first-generation American who built a massively successful newspaper chain and purchased Condé Nast in 1959, Si took the family’s rather sleepy and traditional magazine business and injected a shot of sex, celebrity and pizzazz. The Newhouses were for many years seen as arrivistes and interlopers, a perception tinged with antisemitism; New Yorker institution A.J. Liebling, himself Jewish, labeled the elder Newhouse a “journalist chiffonier” — a rag picker.

When Si took over as chairman of Condé Nast in 1975 — and then bought the New Yorker in 1985 — he set about to become a sort of outsider’s insider, obsessed with status and the good life and determined to shape a collection of magazines that represented aspirational living. And he insisted that his most valuable employees walk the walk. To work at the company at its peak was to live extravagantly by a journalist’s standards.

Grynbaum, who writes about media, politics and culture for the New York Times and grew up reading Condé Nast magazines, was struck hard by that extravagance. “I was writing about magazine editors who had 24-hour town car service, limousines that would drive them around to their appointments, wait outside at the sidewalk while they ate a giant lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant, and it all got expensed back to Condé Nast,” he says. “Empire of the Elite” is laden with comical examples of privilege. One of my favorites: the Vogue editor who “charged her assistant with the less than exalted task of removing the blueberries from her morning muffin; the editor preferred the essence of blueberries, she explained, but not the berries themselves.”

Author Michael M. Grynbaum, who writes about media for the New York Times, was struck by extravagant expense account spending at Condé Nast.

(Gary He)

The Condé Nast glory era really kicked off in the 1980s, as conspicuous consumption swept through the land. “The idealism of the 1960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life,” Grynbaum writes. But much of Newhouse’s approach now seems like standard operating procedure. When he bought the New Yorker, a set-in-its-ways magazine with a limited readership and articles that could take up half an issue, it had largely turned up its nose at the idea of soliciting new subscribers. He tapped Tina Brown, a brash Brit then serving as Vanity Fair editor, to run the magazine in 1992. This set off culture clashes that resonated throughout the industry — and yielded some piquant anecdotes.

For example: Some at the magazine were aghast when Brown assigned Jeffrey Toobin to cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a subject they saw as beneath the magazine’s standards. Critic George W.S. Trow actually resigned, accusing Brown of kissing “the ass of celebrity culture.” Brown responded that she was distraught, “but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”

Newhouse, who died in 2017, made FOMO fun. It should be noted that he also helped create Donald Trump. GQ featured him on its cover when he was, as Grynbaum writes, “a provincial curiosity”; of more consequence, Newhouse, as the owner of Random House, came up with the idea for “The Art of the Deal,” the 1987 Trump business manifesto ghostwritten by magazine journalist Tony Schwartz.

Wintour has been a powerful force in the Condé Nast machine; her turning over the daily reins of U.S. Vogue signals even more change for a company that has seen plenty of it. “I think it is an acknowledgment on her part that she won’t be around forever, and that there needs to be some kind of succession plan in place,” Grynbaum says. “It’s amazing how much the influence and power of Vogue is predicated on this one individual and her relationships and her sway.”

Condé Nast isn’t what it used to be, because print isn’t what it used to be. Like so many legacy media companies, it hemorrhaged money as it proved slow to adjust to the digital revolution. At times “Empire of the Elite” reads like an ode to the sensuous experience of reading a high-quality glossy magazine, and wondering who might be on next month’s cover and what (or who) they’ll be wearing. Condé Nast still means quality. But the age of empire is mostly over.