Looking, Being, and Chasing the Concept of Unique
Reflecting on how and why a Japanese kid who never played and hated writing is here, writing about football for you.
If you are not aware: I am half Japanese.
The overwhelming majority of Japanese people do not play football. My parents wouldn’t let me because my brain was “too valuable”, even while I was using it to memorize every player in the NFL and every Division I mascot instead of learning history. English was my worst subject in school and writing was the worst part of it. I went to college to be a software engineer before I changed course and got a psychology degree. Basketball was my primary sport: Linsanity took over my life in middle school and made me want to be an NBA player, even if I had to be the only one that looked like me.
So how did an Asian kid who hated writing, had no journalism background, and never played football end up on a Substack with someone who actually knows what the fuck is going on?
This is Brett Kollmann’s fault
Five years ago, all of this was a pipe dream. My roommates Luke, Nick, and I were only a few weeks removed from our hypothetical ascension to Olympic-level curlers and had moved on to becoming the smartest draft analysts in the world, as three college boys left to their own devices are wont to do.
So we watched all 17 quarterbacks that got invited to the 2019 NFL Combine, using All-22 cutups posted on YouTube back before Catapult started tightening its grip on the industry. We kept notes so that we could argue about players later and catch each other waffling on opinions. Luke showed us a new website called The Draft Network that had a mock draft simulator. We watched Brett Kollmann videos and read the r/NFL_Draft subreddit.
One weekend, I had some extra time, so on a whim I wrote up our notes into an article and linked it as a post on r/NFL_Draft. People liked it, almost a little too much, and I got recruited to watch the Big 12 for the 2020 draft. Suddenly, things had gotten a bit more real, and despite my best efforts to coax them into starting something up, Luke and Nick were content to experience it through me.
I skipped a week of class my senior year of college to attend the Senior Bowl in 2020, spending my last $600 on a flight and a spot on the couch in an Airbnb. I met Kollmann in a bar and talked to him about Dane Jackson for an hour and a half. I followed him around so much afterwards that he let me film an interview he did on the field with Quartney Davis. He and EJ Snyder, who had yet to start their Bootleg Football podcast together, endorsed my potential and were among my first 300 Twitter followers.
I learned quickly that leaning into being unique was the best way to succeed. The quickly recognizable Asians in football media are countable on one hand: Mina Kimes, Ted Nguyen, Pablo Torre (not a football-exclusive member of this club). None of them are Japanese. (Figuring out which ethnicities they actually are is left to the reader, and if you get it wrong you will be reprimanded.) Not many people were willing to talk to offensive linemen and special teamers, so I did. Nobody was really keeping track of anything back then, so I did.
What I did not do is learn anything at all about the nuance of the sport. The majority of my schematic knowledge still comes from playing Madden as a kid, where I learned the basics of Cover 2 vs. Cover 3 vs. Cover 4. I ran 989 Hook and threw the post thousands of times in Madden 10 and learned what the 989 in that play call is maybe 18 months ago.
That, as it turned out, mattered less than I thought it would and less than it probably should have. By my second Senior Bowl in 2022, I chanced into a dinner with the staff at Chargers Wire thanks to a series of tweets chronicling the journey of introducing my friend Luke Carr to the US by way of eating at fast food chains on a drive from Atlanta to Mobile. Yapping about the state of the team, and whether I thought they should draft Jordan Davis, Chris Olave, or Zion Johnson, got me a job by the time we hit the parking lot at Dreamland.
Writing for Chargers Wire has changed my life. Unbeknownst to anyone else, I was planning on the 2022 Senior Bowl being my last trip as a “serious” analyst. I was about to be promoted at my day job, was using my entire PTO allocation to make these trips, and had never really seen football as a legitimate career option for myself.
Chasing the unknown
When I officially signed my Wire contract in April 2022, everything flipped. I promised myself I was going to chase a full-time job in football by the time I turned 25. I didn’t know what I wanted - media, scouting, college personnel, analytics, anything.
Covering the Chargers beat in 2022 from my house [outside California] forced me to manage my time better in order to also produce the spreadsheets I’d become mildly famous for and the draft content I wanted to produce. There wasn’t enough time in the day to do everything I had on the agenda.
I got a call in January of 2023 asking if I would be interested in being the assistant director of player personnel at a G5 school on the other side of the country. I wasn’t ready to move for a job I wasn’t sure I was going to love. Turning it down made me start to think about what it was that I wanted out of this journey.
Less than a month later, both Kollmann and members of the Shrine Bowl staff let me know that NFL teams were using the spreadsheets I had been making for three years. I knew someone was seeing them - they’d already been plagiarized by three outlets far more famous than myself in the short time I’d been making them. But hearing that the shield was using them made my head spin. Twelve months earlier, remember, I was about to let football take a backseat.
I turned 25 in September. I did not have a full-time job in football secured. I did, however, have a roadmap.
Relearning to be unique
The path I have taken to this space is a unique one. The niche I’ve carved out in the space is unique, too. The way I look and the way I dress are unique to this space.
The thing I’m chasing is, surprise! Unique.
I often have a hard time explaining to my friends what my end goal is, because the job I want is not a job that exists. I am not interested in being the next Mel Kiper Jr., or Dane Brugler, or Brett Kollmann. With all respect to them, they don’t do everything I want to be doing, only parts.
That’s why Devin and I are here on Two Gap. Even though you can find my content on Chargers Wire, Huskies Wire, the Guilty as Charged YouTube channel, my dedicated Patreon for the spreadsheets, and like four other places, there is content I want to make that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those boxes. There’s content I want to make that nobody else is making. There’s content we want to make that can only be created by leveraging both of our unique skillsets.
So what now?
I’ll take probably one more week off of scouting as part of my yearly summer break. This year is going to be my biggest undertaking yet, and I need time to make sure I have everything in order so that I can hit it the way I want to.
I’m also going to use that time to force Devin to teach me what a mint front is.
Then, you’ll get the usuals to keep the lights on. Summer scouting, mock drafts, big boards. We’re hoping to impart our own flavor onto those, including some graphics-driven projects that are really going to push me out of my comfort zone as a designer.
We’ll have interviews - I have a few from this year’s Shrine Bowl still taking up storage on my phone that I think you’ll enjoy. We’ll have feature stories, driven by Devin and I’s mutual adoration of long-form content. We might fuck around and make Devin do evening news sports segment-style hits again. We’ll break down film - Devin will actually teach you shit, while you and I will learn in real time together.
In short, we are going to do everything. And if that seems like too all-encompassing of a goal, that’s sort of the point. We’re not here to be next. We’re here to be first.