I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but it was sometime in the early 2000s. I was an editorial assistant at then-CNNSI.com where my job consisted of typing magazine stories into our computer system. One day, out of nowhere, my then-boss Stefanie Kaufman—who many of you don’t know because she works behind the scenes at Sports Illustrated—that Paul Zimmerman, who we all know as Dr. Z, had called and told her that from now on, the only person he wanted to deal with at the website was me.
Back then, Dr. Z wrote weekly NFL Power Rankings and a weekly column.