A Thanksgiving Message from Too Deep Zone

I'm thankful in so many ways ...

Last Thanksgiving, it was already obvious that The Messenger was going to go out of business. It was only a matter of when. The would-be Internet media giant was reportedly “out of money”, just a few months after its launch and less than four months after my hiring. Oh, and the New York Times had already turned sports operations over to The Athletic, robbing me of my steadiest/highest-profile freelance gig. 

As Thanksgiving approached in 2022, the writing was on the wall for Football Outsiders. Parent company EdjSports was essentially out of business, with its Louisville headquarters shuttered and most of its employees let go by the shady investors at Champion Gaming. Important brand-voice writers were not being paid; the first payroll checks had started arriving ominously late. 

As Thanksgiving approached in 2020, with my sons attending high school in their bedrooms and my wife teaching to a camera in an empty classroom, I juggled four separate freelance gigs, one of them for a content farm that butchered my columns to make them more search-engine friendly. My elderly mother could not even have dinner with the family that year. It’s a good thing she didn’t: the rest of us contracted COVID and spent early December in a dark, achy quarantine-within-a-quarantine.

There were other crises, big and small, personal and global. During one three-week stretch early in 2023, my mother slipped and fell, my car broke down, my paycheck didn’t show up and, yes, my dog died. I nearly wrote a country album. But the employment-related issues were the ones that hit hardest as Thanksgiving, Christmas and some family birthdays approached. It’s been a while since I felt secure about my job at this time of year. And when you are insecure about your job, well, you’re insecure. 

Before I launched the Too Deep Zone in February, I cashed in my old teacher’s pension. I assumed I would be living largely off it for months. I paid off a pre-owned Honda with my last two Messenger checks, cancelled Hulu and Sirius XM and made other efforts at real and performative belt-tightening. The belt was already rather tight: we had been economizing in lots of little ways since Bleacher Report downsized its NFL department right after the 2020 draft. Oh, we’re not paupers, but we weren’t equipped financially to embark on a self-employment experiment in middle age with a second child entering college, either. So we braced for a long, cold winter of a year. I even dusted off my old teaching certificate and braced to join my elder son on the local substitute lists.

Then you showed up.

You read. You subscribed. You stayed. You sent me personal notes, which gave me hope and strength. You shared my links on the socials. You contributed by chatting in the comment threads and sending more Mailbag questions than I knew what to do with. Jerry Wolper signed on as copy editor, a job which Vince Verhei and others will tell you should come with hazard pay. Some of you recommended me on your own Substacks or on podcasts. A few of you rushed me stray corrections that Jerry didn’t catch (usually because of last-minute rewrites) on Monday morning. 

You supported me, and not just financially. The pre-Champion Football Outsiders and the New York Times were good to me. But The Messenger was a chore, and I refuse to dignify that 2020 churn-and-burn factory with a mention. It grew easy to feel washed-up and irrelevant. I became too comfortable suppressing my voice and writing in the language of search engines. It felt, at The Messenger and elsewhere, that no one was reading. 

But now you are in the comments, the Mailbag chats, on the DVOA Discord: some names I have recognized for decades, some newcomers.  I can see and hear you like regulars at the tavern. A few dozen likes and comments from you mean more than the gaudy six-figure “clicks” (from folks who barely bothered to read the whole headline) that old B/R articles generated. That’s because I know that you care and are invested in what I (and other readers) have to say.

The pension money is still (mostly) squirreled away. The teaching certificate is back in its filing cabinet. I’m still trying to grow the Too Deep Zone, but at least I know that some investor won’t sweep away the rug on a whim. There’s a LOT in the world to worry about, but when I sit down to compose a Walkthrough or study a draft prospect I feel invigorated, because I know you are waiting to read what I have to write. Your support has given me self-confidence, pride and a measure of peace of mind. After years of uncertainty, those things are priceless. 

Thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you on Monday.