Jeremy Lin: Sports Illustrated Needs to Tone Down Its Linsanity Obsession

Given how much Jeremy Lin is being hyped, you would think he's the next coming of Michael Jordan. Or maybe the next coming of Tim Tebow. Or perhaps some kind of mix of the two.

Whatever Lin is, he's apparently important enough to appear on not one, but two Sports Illustrated covers. He was on last week's cover and SI spilled the beans about this week's cover on Twitter on Tuesday.

SI was also courteous enough to point out that the last athlete to appear on back-to-back covers of its magazine was Dirk Nowitzki in June of 2011. That may or may not have had something to do with him leading the Dallas Mavericks to an NBA championship and establishing himself as one of the greatest players of all time in the process.

Now that was a great story.

The Lin story is a great story, too, and goodness knows there's been enough coverage of it. The hype started to come as soon as Lin first broke out against the New Jersey Nets earlier this month, and it proceeded to explode soon after. 

Sports Illustrated pretty much hit the nail on the head with its first cover, which promised an article about "The Sudden and Spectacular Ascent of Jeremy Lin." It also tried to trademark the term "Linsanity" by peddling the hashtag "#SILinsanity" on the cover, which was a bush-league thing to do.

Nevertheless, that SI cover was all part of the fun. And don't get me wrong, Linsanity has been fun.

But let's face it, the whole Linsanity thing has gotten some cold water thrown on it in the last couple of days. His New York Knicks have lost two of their last three games, making it abundantly clear that Lin is not, in fact, superhuman. He's a very good player, but Lin is no different from every other very good player under the sun in that he can't single-handedly win basketball games.

The Linsanity hype hasn't gone too far just yet, but consecutive SI covers is the line. There is way too much going on in the sports world for Jeremy Lin to grace the cover of SI twice in a row. He may be the biggest story in the sports world, but putting him on consecutive SI covers is a bit much.

If SI was looking to do a follow-up feature on Lin, that's fine. But it didn't need to feature him on the cover twice in a row. That's a blatant attempt to make an easy buck and SI is better than that (granted, at least they went with a non-offensive headline).

Here's hoping Lin doesn't make it onto a third straight SI cover. But honestly, it worries me that I can't rule it out.