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Paul Zimmerman (b. October 23, 1932 at New York, New York), known to many fans as "Dr. Z", is a football sportswriter who currently writes for the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated. A college football player at Stanford and Columbia Universities, a member of an Army football team, and a four year player in New Jersey semi-professional football leagues, Zimmerman started his journalism career at the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram & Sun before moving on to become a regular at the New York Post in 1966. In 1979 he moved to Sports Illustrated, where he writes a weekly column and game predictions, and awards the magazines yearly All-Pros. Since the mid-1990s, Zimmerman has been a frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated's website. There he adds a weekly column, "power rankings" of how teams line up against each other, and a very popular mailbag to his other contributions to the magazine.
Zimmerman's method of football analysis is a comprehensive one, in which he records several football games on television per week, sometimes as many as eight, and then watches and re-watches each game while charting the onfield action in notebooks. His charts include both subjective opinions on the players and gameplay as well as objective statistical information. At any point afterward, he can then give detailed analysis of the players, teams, and games that he charted, tracking who plays well against whom, which players are improving or declining, which superstars are over-hyped, and which underrated players to "plug" in his writings.
The weekly mailbag that Zimmerman writes is a rambling one, breaking out of the conventional webpage mailbag format in which the reader's question or comment is presented which the writer then replies to. Instead, Zimmerman writes in a stream of consciousness, moving fluidly from one subject to another, liberally sprinkling in tidbits of football history, pieces of popular culture, quotations, admittedly bad jokes and puns, rants on one subject or another, and sometimes even answers the readers' questions. He often uses the literary device of his wife, the "Flaming Redhead", as he calls her, to comment on his own ramblings, ideas, or the insults his readers send him. Whether or not Zimmerman's wife actually sits near him and throws in her clever remarks is debateable, but her snearing, sarcastic, and honest character blends nicely with Zimmerman's gruff, opinionated nature.
Zimmerman is also the author of 1971's football classic The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football' and his 1984 update of that book, titled The New Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football.
Annually Zimmerman rates the performance of television network sportscasters, criticizing those football announcers who do little more than hype the stars while making inane comments on the game, ignoring the strategy or play of the game, or generally making mistakes in their commentaries. Zimmerman also goes out of his way to praise the sportscasters who provide meaningful, intelligent commentary for football fans.
While at the New York Post, Zimmerman also wrote a regular wine column, and his wine opinions still hold a prominent position in his weekly mailbag, with football fans adding wine queries to their football questions or comments.
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