Written Down (solution)

by Benjamin Mako Hill and Mika Matsuzaki

Each of the quotes is a quote by a famous writer but has been mangled so that it is now about (American) football instead of whatever the original topic was.

The original quotes are:

Each of the authors shares a last name with an NFL player. For most of the players, there is only one player. For a few quotes, there are more than one NFL player with the last name of the author of the quote. In these cases, additional information on a position and team will identify the player uniquely. The quotes are also each sorted alphabetically by the first name of the football player to offer a further aid to identify the particular player in question. The quote by Marx is from the Communist Manifesto which was also authored by Engels; however, there is no NFL player who has ever played with that last name.

The list of football players and their rookie seasons is:

Antonio London
Bobby Joe Conrad
Bob Clemens
Brian Milne
Derrick Frost
Ed Luther
Greg Marx
Jim Yeats
Larry Fitzgerald
Marquez Pope
Matt Darwin
Mike Kafka
Pat O’Neill
Stanley Shakespeare
1993
1958
1955
1996
2003
1980
1973
1960
2004
1992
1986
2010
1994
1987

Each quote is followed by (perhaps even attributed to?) a different NFL player in parentheses. These represent indexes into each of the NFL players’ names above. The players in question were each drafted (and first played) in the same year that the players with the same last name as famous writers played their rookie seasons. This clues the use of rookie season or draft year as an ordering mechanism and help confirm each player. The draft order of the players in parentheses are the index into the answer.

If you reorder this list by the rookie seasons and index into each player’s full name using the draft order/number of the players given in parentheses after each clue, you get the solution ADRIAN PETERSON, star running back of the Minnesota Vikings.

Watson 2.0
Watson 2.0