An Announcement

I'm taking a leap of faith.

I was recently let go by Pro Football Network.

It’s the first time I’ve been let go from a job in 15 years and the experience has been humbling.

The news of my termination has come against a background of writer layoffs that have been occurring in the industry for the past three and a half years. Sportswriters have always known that our business is tough, but as of late things have taken a brutal turn. There’s a lot more talent sitting out there than there are places willing to employ talent and it felt like I was living my life on the other side of a coin flip as we learned of new announcements each month.

There’s a difficult tightrope to walk in sportswriting and the rope has only been getting thinner. The need for distinctiveness drives publications to invest in writers with unique voices and different perspectives. That approach, when done well, brings in new readers and establishes an audience.

But the pressure to expand beyond that, often motivated by maximizing profits rather than maintaining a successful model or keeping the covenant established with the reader, means uniformizing the content and finding ways to game various algorithms in search and social media.

I found my word counts dropping and my awareness of high-impact search terms increasing. It’s valuable to develop skills like word efficiency and audience outreach, but it often felt like I would sacrifice depth and originality along the way.

It’s not fun to deliberate over whether it was smarter to spend time covering a complex NFL labor issue or figure out what this week’s clickbait is going to be. Again, business is brutal.

Listeners to the Norse Code Podcast that I co-host with my longtime friend, James, might remember a message I left on a recent episode: both professionally and personally, this has been one of the most difficult years I’ve had. While the details of this are themselves not important, I can say that since I shared that message to fans of the show, matters have become even more stressful and difficult.

Because of this, I had briefly considered retiring from writing about football.

But there are a lot more stories I want to tell; stories within the game of football, stories that stand apart from it and some with feet in both worlds.

Writing these stories at my pace, and under the guidance of my own vision, is the best way for these stories to come out. I juggled a few offers but nontraditional storytelling has always been my bread and butter and starting my own writing platform is the best way to bring that dream to life.

To do that, I’m bringing back Wide Left — in a way.

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At this point in my career, there are a lot more people who don’t know my background than people who do know it. Hopefully, a (somewhat) brief summary can give people a clue on the kinds of things I plan on accomplishing.

I wasn’t interested in football until college, when the University of Minnesota debate team required members to join their fantasy football league. And though I didn't know the first thing about fantasy football — or football itself — I sure wasn't going to lose to a bunch of nerds.

So, I nerded out.

I tried to learn as much as I could about football. I leaned over box scores, speed-read hundreds of articles and on gamedays, I guzzled all the cheap energy drinks I could afford.

Along the way, I found most football coverage dull and lacking. The same untested aphorisms were trotted out over and over, even when they seemed to be obviously wrong.

Few writers and analysts found it worthwhile to educate their readers about the nuanced and fascinating game they were covering. The dominant tone, it seemed, was to make assertions down a one-way street. The idea of making football knowledge accessible seemed outside of the realm of possibility — much less the notion that writers be in active conversation with readers.

By process of elimination, I was driven to find blogs like Smart Football, run by Chris Brown, and Advanced NFL Stats, helmed by Brian Burke.

More than almost anything found on television or in newspapers, writing that attempted to pin down what football actually was and which direction it could go in excited me. Where else could I learn that a kickoff specialist — before kickoff changes — might possibly have more value than an elite defensive player or how much triangles might matter in a quarterback progression?

Still, I was frustrated by the lack of answers to basic questions. Does winning actually matter when evaluating college quarterbacks? Does total passing volume matter? Is passer rating a useful stat? How do we better account for the contributions of defensive players? Is there a way to compare receivers aside from receiving yardage?

Trying to answer those questions in a comprehensive way meant trying my own hand at writing about football. I began by posting my unstructured thoughts to the Daily Norseman. Soon thereafter, Chris Gates reached out to make me a front-page writer for the website.

At the time, I was doing political work for a variety of organizations, including consumer protection non-profits, queer rights groups, environmental groups and direct candidate efforts. At the time I was also in my seventh year of coaching high school debate.

Altogether it meant working 80 hours a week to make under $25,000 a year. It was fulfilling work but it was impossible for me to sustain that. Having a potential outlet that could also be a career was exciting, though it took some time to get it going.

I spent time with the Daily Norseman, Bleacher Report, Vikings Territory, Vikings Journal, Zone Coverage, the Athletic and Pro Football Network. I’ve freelanced for 1500 ESPN, the Star Tribune, Business Insider and countless others.

For most of that time, I had to find other ways to supplement my income. It’s a difficult industry to break into and it is sometimes an even harder one to stay relevant in.

To that end, I can owe some of my success to developing a unique voice. Finding ways to express my perspective — one shaped by politics and a debating culture — in ways that separate me from others in the industry.

It has also helped that I found incredible friendships along the way — the community among bloggers and sportswriters that has developed around the Vikings, the NFL and the NFL draft has been extraordinary. They’ve helped me hone my craft, refine my thinking and become a better person.

I hope to continue doing that with Wide Left, this time as a written medium instead of just a politics-focused podcast with my friend Ben Natan. When I pitched moving the Wide Left name to a blog that would primarily cover football along with some pieces covering politics or culture, Ben’s enthusiasm was heart-warming and energizing.

And hey, we might even start the podcast up again.

I hope to bring the energy from all of my experiences — politics, debate, football and more — into the Wide Left Substack.

That means I will continue to write about the nuts and bolts of football — using analytics and film study together to ask interesting questions or to interview players and coaches about what might be happening from play to play.

But I will also want to discuss how the happenings on the field interact with what happens off the field. Figuring out which quarterback does the most to help their team win is an exciting question, but issues like these also necessarily intersect with wider concerns about how the league operates, how it interacts with its workers, how it defines (or skirts) the law and when it comes into contact with hot-button social issues.

Figuring out the limits of the CBA and how it preserves (or fails to preserve) labor rights is as important to the business of football as figuring out which position teams should prioritize in the draft. There aren’t a ton of places that ask if we should even have a draft at all.

Sometimes, I might write about an issue that’s tangential to sports, but not the NFL — the end of student-athletes, the sociology of sports in general or how modern rights discourse, like trans and queer liberation, might interact with the sporting world. And on occasion, I might write about politics and culture entirely separated from sports.

One thing I’ve learned is that sport itself is not independent from politics or society. Athletes are humans and have human concerns outside of how well their team does. They carry that presence into everything they do. It’s only fair that we respect that by acknowledging that all sports occur in contact with the rest of society on an infinite array of touchpoints.

And with my own publishing platform, I plan to use that freedom to explore these touchpoints along with the more rote questions of the actual football itself.

I will still write freelance for other publications, but I plan to regularly publish content here. This is home base. I really hope that you follow, support, give your feedback, and come along for the ride as we get off the ground.