New York Times, Friday, July 25, 2014

My biggest concern with this one was the seed entry — DOWN GOES FRAZIER. While it certainly has resonance with me, it is over forty years old and it's about a sport whose popularity has largely dimmed in the public eye. So how many younger solvers and non-sports fans are going to go be flummoxed by that one, I don't know. For those of you who don't know the reference:

Also, I think it helps if you say "Down goes Frazier" in your best Howard Cosell accent — if you know who Howard Cosell was.

I laughed at Pete's comment about not knowing Howard Cosell. How could anyone not know Cosell, perhaps the most iconic sportscaster of the 20th century? And then I remembered that Matt Fuchs (who debuted a few days ago) was only alive for about three years of the 20th century. Huh. Thankfully, Pete and I have had some laughs over his constantly changing photos, which usually show him going back in time. I'm demanding a prom photo next.

At first I was a little worried that this puzzle wouldn't have many long entries — puzzles featuring 15's often lean heavily on those grid-spanners for jazz, leaving not much space for other long entries. But Pete gives us a neat optical illusion, making it look like the puzzle has a lot of 15's because of all the open space, but there are actually only two. He includes about the normal number of long entries (a dozen 7+ letter entries is roughly the minimum for themeless puzzle), but all scattered around. I appreciated getting pieces of great long stuff through the puzzle — most themelesses concentrate all their good material in the four corners.

Huge, wide-open spaces give solvers a lot of ways to break into any one section of the puzzle. Today's was almost TOO wide-open, if such a thing exists, as there were very few places I could grab a toehold. Typically there's a small area with a couple of gettable four or five-letter entries that get me going, but there wasn't much that was easy. I struggled to inch into each bit of the puzzle, but with multiple ways to attack any region, it was more than fair. Nice workout.

The wide-open layout does make construction more challenging, because if you change a little section of the puzzle, the effect cascades far and wide. Check out the ON CLOUD NINE and AT ALL COSTS crossing, for example. It causes some difficulty in the east region, with OISE and ASSN and COSA all crammed together. But if you change ON CLOUD NINE to something else in an attempt to smooth out the fill there, so many other entries must also be changed.

Overall, there was a bit too much of the TOD, STDS, ELAM, ASTI sort of fill for my taste, but all the great fill like CHINCHILLA, CRUDE OIL, and OLD GOATS (ahem, not applicable to me or Pete) was fun to uncover.