First off, I would like to welcome all you new readers who joined up as part of anniversary week! I hope you’ll like it here. We do try to have a lot of fun.
I want to give all of you — and everybody else — a little update on what you’ll be getting this fall from JoeBlogs. We are, of course, going to be all over baseball during the pennant races and playoffs. Will Paul Goldschmidt win the Triple Crown? Will the Phillies make the playoffs and inspire all sorts of new Ellen Adair dances? Will Tony La Russa intentionally walk more batters with an 0-2 count? Will the Padres fall into the sea? Will the Red Sox turn off all their fans and play in front of an empty Fenway Park?
Only time will tell.
There are also a couple of football features to talk about. Our main update today revolves around The Football 101. As those of you who have been here for a while know: I tend to dive into ridiculous, months-long, years-long projects. I just can’t help myself. Some of these projects (eventually) turn into incredible things, such as The Baseball 100. Others pound on me like Mike McCallum working the body.
The Football 101 has been a bear, I’m not going to lie. I think I have made a couple of mistakes with it. One, for a long time I treated it like it was just a football version of the Baseball 100; it can’t be that. Football is too different from baseball. Football fans are too different from baseball fans. And two, I decided to make it 101 players. It should have been much less — 50 players at most, but probably 25 players was the right length.
That’s not to say it hasn’t been fun — it HAS been fun. I think it’s great stuff. But it has not resonated with most of you the way I had hoped, not even close.
As such, I’ve taken a different philosophy; from here on the essays are going to be shorter, punchier and much more about the EMOTION that these great players inspired. I think this fits football much better. I hope you’ll agree.
Starting on Sunday night, paid subscribers will get a different Football 101 player every day, leading up to the first Sunday of the NFL season. That will take us to the Top 25.
And then, we’ll count down that Top 25 every Wednesday of the NFL season, taking us all the way to Super Bowl XYELDIII or whatever this one is. I do hope you’ll like it.
If this is simply too much football for you, there’s a super-easy way to opt out of the Football 101 posts; all you have to do is go to the right right-hand corner of this account and click on “Manage Subscription.” You’ll then see all the sections of this site with checkboxes next to them. Simply uncheck “Football 101,” and you won’t get those emails anymore.
For various logistical reasons, there will be no free previews on these, so if you’re a free reader, you will not get any version of these in your email. If you’d like to subscribe, of course, that would be awesome. And if, for whatever reason, you would like to request a free subscription, generous readers on this site continue to donate them, so you can just email me here.
OK, so that’s the Football 101 story.
Then there’s the future of the Browns Diary. As I have written: After 50-plus years I no longer have feelings for the Cleveland Browns. I’ve been yelled at about this a few times, which is fine, but, I mean, you can’t feel what you don’t feel. I want to reiterate that I have never once even suggested that any other Browns fan leave the team; I’m not interested in starting a movement. This is just something that happened to me.
And so the Browns Diary will become something else — it will be a weekly “Pick a Team” diary. I’m really excited about the way this is shaping up. The idea will be that each week, I will pick a new team to try on for size.
The exciting part is that people are already volunteering to convince me to pick their team. This is unexpected and wonderful. For example, on the PosCast, Mike Schur has begun pitching me on becoming a New England Patriots fan. Here’s 10 minutes of Patriots’ salesmanship:
That’s a tough pitch to beat. But someone else — a huge Bears fan — has already invited my daughter Katie and me to Chicago to watch a Bears game. So that is probably going to be a tougher pitch to beat.
If you’re interested in trying to convince me to become a fan of your team, send me your pitch here. Really, I’m open for anything. Let the journey begin.
[trying to be reasonable about the Pats]
I don’t think now is the time to jump into the Patriots- it’d be like jumping into Breaking Bad for the last two episodes. Wait for Bill to retire, and then tune in for Better Call Saul.
The Panthers might be a fun one, at least for this year. The Baker Redemption Arc, it’s a team without a *ton* of history and they’ve got a scrappy underdog vibe relative to the Bucs and Saints.
Maybe the tact is to find an interesting team each year to follow, like Hard Knocks without the needs of a reality show.
I really liked the football 101 stuff. I was a football fan before I was a baseball fan, and I've always felt like the personalities of great football players were more interesting that great baseball players.
Baseball demands a certain level headedness that football does not. You think that Pete Rose was relentless? Man, he'd be average on a pro football team. His motor? In football terms, meh. In football, the different positions demands such different things from players, and even among a particular position, there is so much variance. And then you combine the incredibly physically demanding violence of football with the fact that it is only played once a week? Players need to be so complex to be able to get up for games and NOT be psychopaths the days of the week. Some of them even succeed at that.
I get the elegance of baseball. I feel the fascination. But baseball is obsessed with all those numbers because it lacks the drama and passion of football and of the football life. Football is both more intellectual and more violent. It is more strategic and more animal.
Other than Joe Montana, name another great football player was just boring. Can you? I cannot. We thought Marvin Harrison was, but it turns out...
Yeah, there history of race in America in the last 100 years in America is clear there in baseball. But it's there in football, too. It's still there.
I grant you that the international nature of baseball just doesn't exist in football. That Spanish-English thing in baseball is fascinating, but even you don't much write about it. Is there any sportswriter who REALLY dives into the sociology of that stuff? Has there been a Ball Four (or anything like it) for THAT stuff? Sure, football doesn't have that, but baseball writing doesn't really dive into what it means, not even today. I know more about Japanese-English lines in baseball than about Spanish-English lines.
So, give us more football. Give us more of your great writing about football. The sport demand so much of players -- the pain, the amount of practice, the study, the recovery. Man, there's got to be LOADS to write there.
Why isn't football writing as good as baseball writing?