So You've Subscribed To Wide Left

Wide Left has seen a lot of new subscribers. Here's what they're in for.

Yesterday, I received overwhelming support for my piece detailing the story behind The Draft Network. Much of that support came in the form of new subscriptions, which is enormously appreciated.

For a quick background on who I am and what I intend to accomplish with this newsletter, you can always click on my initial announcement or read the About section of the newsletter. You’ll note there that I fully intend to share my political beliefs along with my beliefs about the sportswriting industry, football and culture. I’m also a traditional sportswriter who often discusses the minutiae of football itself.

New readers might expect a series of in-depth, independently reported novelettes like with the piece on The Draft Network. That kind of reporting is not typical to my portfolio, though those pieces will still occur from time to time. My strength is more oriented towards research, rather than reporting.

If you’re solely interested in that kind of work in the football space, I highly recommend Tyler Dunne’s Substack,

Go Long

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That’s not to say there aren’t stories featuring original reporting, those that dive deep into lawsuits or otherwise happen to be lengthy explorations on a single subject. Linked below are a number of pieces that characterize this newsletter.

I’ll touch on pieces featuring original reporting, discussions of the sportswriting industry, the deployment of analytics in football, film analysis of the game, my off-the-cuff rants and my political writing.

Original Reporting

One of my most recent pieces that featured deep reporting was my piece on the S2 Cognition Test and how it interacted with the C.J. Stroud story. For that piece, I talked to a number of cognitive scientists and lead sports science staffers on college and professional teams.

• The S2 Cognition Test: C.J. Stroud and the Failures of Science Journalism

Skepticism isn’t unusual for football reporters in the analytics space. It isn’t uncommon to see a new email every week about a radical new technology, approach or tool that can help improve football outcomes for teams or gambling outcomes for bettors.

Almost all of them are bullshit.

The experience is magnified for NFL and college personnel. Jack Marucci, LSU’s Director of Performance Innovation, agrees. “I was in your shoes, right? So, everyone's coming at us with anything that looks at personality,” he told me. “There's been so many experts, I guess. They're trying to sell us stuff. And I know our players. We'll take the test. But I promise you, if it doesn't match up, obviously, we don't want to use the product.”

But Marucci isn’t a skeptic of science, he’s a skeptic of marketers promising solutions.

He and Scott Kuehn, LSU Football’s Director of Applied Sports Science, have worked closely to help build one of the most analytically integrated football programs in the country.

I was also able to recently have a discussion with a number of stakeholders at the NFL Combine to ask a counterintuitive question.

• Is the NFL Combine Dying?

Nine running backs performed the short shuttle this year, an enormous uptick over the previous year – two – and incomparably higher than in 2022, when no running backs performed the drill. Between 2018 and 2020, at least 15 running backs performed this once-crucial drill each year for the position.

The same trend holds true at receiver; between 2018 and 2020, an average of 27.7 receivers performed the short shuttle drill. In the last three years, that number has been cut in half, to 13.3. This has led to some quirky outcomes – Rome Odunze was free to attempt the three-cone as often as possible in order to hit 6.60 seconds while Luke McCaffrey performed the short shuttle seemingly a dozen times as he tried to break four seconds – but it primarily means less data for fewer prospects.

The Sportswriting Industry

The Draft Network story drew interest in part because it’s about the sportswriting industry. If you’re interested in that and want more deep dives on that subject, check out my piece on the growing encroachment of “artificial intelligence” into the sportswriting space.

• "Artificial Intelligence" Is Coming for Sportswriting

As the datapoints grow, so do the space demands on the server and processing power of the chips involved in calculation. Amazon does this very well with their deep-learning platform that uses trillions of data points to recommend items but they have the resources to do that and a clear return on investment. Would a sportswriting platform?

And even so, it’s a tall task to assume it knows how to deploy all the information it has.

When Patrick Mahomes got injured on a quarterback sneak, it prompted a discussion on injury risk for the play, the success rate of the sneak and so on. The “AI” might have access to all of that data but it won’t know to use it in that moment.

And perhaps when this gets pointed out, it would be fixed. The next time an injury alters the game for a star — something the “AI” would have to identify, perhaps through social media significance, generated EPA or some other proxy — it could delve into its database for discussions of injury likelihood and risk-reward analysis on the kind of play that was used. And now the “AI” can do that.

Should it have done that for Damar Hamlin?

If you want something a bit more personal about sportswriting, you can read my piece about the Senior Bowl.

• What the Fuck Am I Doing At the Senior Bowl?

For years, the Senior Bowl has been a networking event for NFL media. There was value in watching the prospects, but there was more value in the fact that every team would be in attendance – which meant media from all over the country gathered in one spot, a rare occurrence.

There’s value in that – not just in reconnecting with friends, but in building new connections, finding new jobs, developing new sources and getting the lay of the land.

On top of that, the ability to talk to team personnel across the league meant new angles to stories, breaking new ground on team dynamics and getting first-person feedback on what teams have been thinking.

It’s also fairly well known that the Senior Bowl, as a meeting location, is fading. That’s no knock on the event but a product of the realities of the modern media environment. More media entities have shut down travel for their reporters while teams have tightened the leash on their personnel – no longer will media members cull information by offering a drink to a wayward team scout.

Analytics

My entry into the industry was shaped by the production of blogs and sports media sources that focused on data and analytics in football. I don’t spend very much time discussing the conclusions that the data provide us with but rather spend more time on how analytics are produced and what they can or cannot tell us — I seek to find interesting applications of the concept more than anything else.

One piece explored why analytics experts preferred Myles Garrett to T.J. Watt or didn’t like Brock Purdy even though Watt and Purdy had objectively incredible statistical outputs.

• Myles Garrett, T.J. Watt and Brock Purdy: Why The Data and the Film Agree

This lays out a very clear case for Watt, so why all the fuss about why Myles Garrett might be the better player? Why, in spite of this data, did I personally rank Garrett as the better player?

A lot of it has to do with how one arrives at these statistics and what the process is to produce these micro-outcomes.

Often, when presenting data, one has to make a series of decisions. Determining which data to use or to trust involves asking some questions. Some of the questions are fairly obvious – is the data reliable? Is it consistent? Is it random?

In those cases, there are clear choices to make – use consistent, non-random, reliable data. But other questions involve some more involved interrogation. One might be trying to figure out whether to use a statistic that does a better job of explaining what happened in the past or a statistic that helps predict what might happen in the future.

I also want to discuss when I find unusual or weird outcomes that are produced by analytical approaches to evaluating football. Something that caught my eye in October was ESPN’s receiver tracking toolset, one that produced bizarre results.

• ESPN’s Receivers Tracking Metrics — Confusing Mess or Valuable Tool?

But some of the overall scores are truly mind-boggling. While new analytical models should always have some counterintuitive or unexpected results — what’s the point of a model telling you everything you already know? — this doesn’t quite pass the sniff test.

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These, to me, represent significant weaknesses in the model — weak enough that it would be difficult to use in any serious football analysis.

At least in any analysis meant to break down the game. It’s very useful in breaking down how models are created, what we can learn from them and how to read them.

Film Room

Wide Left also features film breakdowns, focusing on scheme or players, something I became interested early on in my sportswriting as I tried to stretch beyond my analytics background. I’ve enlisted the help of a writer named Luke Braun to do film work here, but I’ve also done some myself.

• The Vikings Are Going to Use the “Big Nickel” - What is That?

I asked Cody Alexander at Match Quarters, whose Substack you can find here, about modern Big Nickel usage. He had a lot to say.

[Defenses] now carry 3 different types of nickels:

1) You have the traditional "biscuit away from being a LB" guy. He is more of a LB hybrid. [Think Jeremy Chinn, Mark Barron or Jayron Kearse].

2) You have the "mid" hybrid, which is a Safety that can play coverage but is more of a TE killer/early-down defender. [Eric Rowe, Kyle Dugger or C.J. Gardner-Johnson]

3) Slot CB. This is what you see the most in the NFL. He is a coverage-first defender & has great slot coverage skills. [Mekhi Blackmon, Chandon Sullivan, Mike Hilton, L’Jarius Sneed, Bryce Callahan and so on]

As for its most recent revival, it’s the same as it was in the early 2010s – 12 personnel. “Big Nickel is great on early downs and will become a more significant piece in how defenses play because of the increased usage of 12 personnel,” said Alexander. “You are getting ‘bigger’ packages, but offenses are still using ‘spread’ schemes within their 12 personnel,” he added.

• Luke Braun's Film Room: Michael Penix Jr.'s Biomechanics Explain His Inconsistency

Football, especially for positions with torque-based movement like quarterback and kicker, shares a lot of traits with golf. There is an undeniable and immeasurable mental aspect to each game. They both necessitate a balance between distance and precision. And both games rely on certain biomechanics that encourage consistency, power and control.

The reality of Michael Penix Jr. is that he has a weird throw like Furyk has a weird swing. To project him to the NFL, you have to reconcile with the same question that Jim Furyk’s college recruiter got so wrong. It looks wrong, but what if it works anyway?

Off-The-Cuff Rants

Sometimes I’m moved to rant. Or as newspaper columnists might say, sound off. These are less structured pieces of organized analysis and more of-the-moment reactions to emerging NFL discussions. One concerned my issue with the MVP debate - I was never of the opinion that Brock Purdy should have been an MVP frontrunner but I was nevertheless annoyed when the 49ers loss to the Ravens dropped him out of the race.

• Brock Purdy and the Stupidity of MVP Discussions

The game was catastrophic and Purdy didn’t play well, but it seems absurd that one game could dramatically derail his odds. That bizarreness is magnified by the fact that the case for Purdy has been broadly statistical and centered around his remarkable scores in traditional statistics like passer rating and advanced statistics in EPA per play.

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Most of this is still true following his disastrous game against the Ravens. He leads the league in passer rating and yards per attempt. The gap between his performance in adjusted net yards per attempt and Tua Tagovailoa, in second place, is a full yard. His lead in EPA per play is substantial, mind-boggling even.

If that’s the case for Purdy, it’s kind of ridiculous that one game – which didn’t change the aggregate truths – could modify the standings this dramatically. Jackson lost to the Steelers in a much more important divisional matchup with a passer rating of 65.2 and minus-0.250 EPA per play.

Once I saw a bizarre Twitter discussion emerge after Tyreek Hill pulled off another incredible game and his receivers coach, former Randy Moss teammate Wes Welker, made the case that Hill was a better receiver than Moss. That turned into an asinine discourse about whether or not Randy Moss could run routes.

• The Randy Moss Route-Running Discussion: What Are We Doing?

There’s a certain moral component to criticisms of Moss. There seems to be an unspoken idea that it is somehow distasteful to do something more valuable – catch the ball deep – instead of something more common to the game and more damaging to the body, like a catch over the middle.

Players who excel in deep ball situations but nowhere else are sometimes characterized, nonsensically, as “better receivers, but worse football players” than those “willing to do the dirty work” and catch a hospital ball over the middle.

It also serves a reflexive purpose. “People who really watch the film know what’s important to receiver play. You may have been dazzled by the deep ball highlights, but I look for the gritty six-yard slant on 3rd and 5.”

Positioning one-self as a ball-knower for talking about aspects of play outside of the highlight reel has been a tried and true strategy for ages.

Politics and Culture

This newsletter has a particular perspective, one suggested by its title — a play on the fact that it’s a bit Vikings-focused on the NFL side and carries a specific viewpoint on the political side. The hope is to treat these pieces with the same care and nuance that the pieces about football and sportswriting are treated.

The first piece I’m sharing is much closer to the kind of deep-dive, intensely researched article that subscribers may have signed up for.

• Aaron Rodgers' Sandy Hook Conspiracy-Making Is Not Surprising, Even If It's Disgusting

The Kentucky Derby story was from 2013, which is also the year he and Seneca Wallace were on the Packers roster together. Seven years after that, Wallace shared a story about Rodgers “asking questions” about chemtrails.

This is a long-standing conspiracy that posits that the government is spraying the populace with cancer-causing chemicals in order to keep the population docile — often through “mind control”-type chemicals. It also has the bonus of “enriching” the pharmaceutical industry through “higher” cancer rates.

In addition to believing the chemtrails conspiracy, Rodgers would also share conspiracies about aliens. Brett Hundley, who was his backup quarterback from 2015 to 2018, and Joe Callahan, a backup in 2016, both shared stories about how Rodgers would “unabashedly” believe in the existence of aliens through the presence of UFOs and would “frequently” engage in long discussions about who built the Pyramids of Giza. Put a pin in that UFOs thing by the way.

After Jim Trotter filed his lawsuit against the NFL, I pored over the complaint itself and provided some historical research on the throughline of history and the league.

• Racism in the NFL and Jim Trotter's Lawsuit Against the League

The sentiment that coaches are set up to fail is backed by data. The Post found that Black coaches were twice as likely as white coaches to be fired after a record of .500 or better and were more likely to be fired in every win-loss bracket than white coaches.

The Athletic found that Black coaches are much more likely to be saddled with poor quarterback play, allowing the team to tank for a higher draft pick that the Black head coach would not have the opportunity to coach.

This is not a case of Black coaches being less effective at developing quarterback talent, either. Those coaches are much more likely to go one-and-done after a bad season from their starting quarterback than a white coach with a similar quality passer.

They are less likely to be given a second chance with another quarterback and are often stuck attempting to develop a quarterback from a previous regime and fired before they can develop the next quarterback.

A third look at the issue, this time a study conducted by Joshua Pitts, Associate Professor of Exercise Science and Sport Management at Kennesaw State University, used Eric Bieniemy as a case study and found that in 2020 Bieniemy had a 42.5 percent chance of becoming a head coach.

After the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, the NFL and its teams put out statements in support of Israel. I spent time talking about that and how we conceive of violence in the first place.

• Israel, Palestine and How We Talk About Violence

Saying “violence was inevitable” in response to these conditions ignores the fact that violence has been happening, every day, to Palestinians. This distinction between the violence of the everyday versus the violence committed by a known, specific actor has been called the difference between objective violence and subjective violence – that is, where one can identify a clear subject engaging in a specific violent act.

Typically, this distinction is reserved for describing objective violence – acts of structural violence committed by systems rather than people – the absconding of resources away from communities, ghettoizing minorities, underfunding their social safety nets and refusing to develop infrastructure to access food, water or medicine. Certainly, that has been happening in Palestine to Palestinians.

But there has been direct, subjective, violence committed towards Palestinians.

After the shooting at the Super Bowl Parade, I reflected on gun violence and the history of Second Amendment jurisprudence in the United States.

• The Super Bowl Parade Shooting: Guns and the Inevitability of Violence

In the strictest legal sense, the Constitutional argument is accurate. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution recognizes an individual right to bear arms. That ruling was surprisingly recent, coming in 2008 in United States v. Heller.

There is no long-running legal tradition of the courts recognizing an individual right to firearms and originalists and textualists — often legal philosophies associated with conservatives and Republicans — would be hard-pressed to find arguments defending this interpretation.

The belief that this is a part of a long-standing American legal history is a fiction, as Politico pointed out in a piece in 2014. Neither the text of the Second Amendment nor the Founder’s intent gives us that interpretation — and neither do court rulings between the 1770s and the 1930s.

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Legal tradition at the time included the norm that officers arrest those openly carrying arms. Courts in the early period of American history would explicitly deny the individual right to bear arms because police officers fulfilled that function.