Welcome to the Too Deep Zone

Introducing your new favorite NFL micro-distillery.

Mike Tanier here: mad prophet of the sports-media apocalypse; voice crying forth from the wilderness; sad clown Pagliacci (Good joke. Everybody laugh); NFL court jester, still with plenty of gibes and gambols left; a galley oarsman freed from the shackles of trending keywords and search-engine-optimization mandates. Oh sweet, terrifying freedom!

I have come to cover the NFL, chew bubblegum and reference Network, the Gospel of Matthew, Watchman, Hamlet, Ben-Hur, The Simpsons and They Live! in rapid-fire succession as regularly as possible. And I am fresh out of bubblegum. 

They wouldn’t let me do this sort of thing at most of the other outlets I worked for, certainly not in the last decade. Heaven forbid. We’d risk alienating the target audience of hypothetical 20-something backwards-cap clad fantasy bros by referencing anything besides Fortnite. Better to cram Aaron Rodgers, Bill Belichick, Taylor Swift and words like “Super Bowl” or “MVP” into the first two paragraphs a dozen times to trick someone into clicking something they soon decide that they don’t want to read because it is crammed with too many keywords.

I’ve tossed so many SEO keyword salads over the last few years that just riffing for a few paragraphs feels downright transgressive. It’s like showing up in the boudoir in leather chaps with a belt sander and a box of Roman candles. Am I still into this? Was I ever into this? Was anyone? Is this safe at my age? At any age?

Don’t get me wrong: a strong thesis statement, delivered early in an essay/column/tirade, is the hallmark of great writing. It keeps things clear and concise. But I don’t want my epitaph to read “He was clear and concise,” though that indeed would be clear and concise. I miss discourse, spontaneity and personality, the attributes which launched my career and made the rise of Internet journalism feel like a revolution. 

I’m wagering that you miss that stuff too.

My goal in starting Too Deep Zone is not just to escape the ice-floe-to-ice-floe steeplechase across an ever-warming sea which has become the only way to survive in the dying sports-media industry. I also hope to reconnect: with an audience, with the joy of watching football itself, and with the whispering muse that lured me away from teaching high school mathematics in the first place. 

I began covering the NFL as a hobby, labor of love and side hustle in the early-2000s. There was an exuberance and punk-rock energy to the “blogosphere” of that era. It felt like stealing money. It felt subversive. It felt like communication, like REAL engagement: a dialogue, not an idle push of the “like” button. 

Those feelings are hard to come by on the modern sports Internet. Short pieces feel like commercial jingles, not rock anthems. Longer pieces are more like infomercials. Most outlets have dispensed with the comment section: the Internet audience is so transient that no one even pauses to call you a snowflake or a dipshit anymore. Even social media has fractured to the point where I cannot find longtime friends and colleagues, let alone readers who dropped by Football Outsiders to laugh or argue or just acknowledge that someone actually read what I wrote and reacted to it.

Too Deep Zone will be our front porch, our corner tavern, our maker’s space, our place to share a passion for the NFL that goes beyond hot takes, fantasy/wagering advice and OMG reactions to highlights. I say “ours,” because you probably think of your favorite coffee shop as “yours.” When everyone feels invested – emotionally even more than financially – customers become collaborators, co-conspirators, a community. 

Ah, but what does this coffee shop/brewpub serve, besides scrambled metaphors? That’s simple: NFL content, served in a variety of signature styles:

• Free subscribers will get occasional columns and features, plus samples of long-form features, as well as the chance to comment and (when we’re ready to enable it) chat. My launch feature, Worst Coaching Hires of the 21st Century (coming right after the Super Bowl), will be free to everyone, as will my first few Walkthroughs (coming in March).

• Paid subscribers get everything, including weekly Walkthroughs. For my upcoming Top Five QBs for Every Team series, paid subscribers get all 32 teams, while free subscribers will get select teams.

In case you don’t know my story: I wrote for Football Outsiders for nearly 20 years before that trusted source of analytics was mismanaged into extinction by incompetent robber-barons. I wrote for the New York Times from 2008-11 and again from 2020-23, only to see their entire sports department outsourced to The Athletic under my feet. I wrote for The Messenger, which exploded upon launch as if it were built by Space X. In between, I spent six years at Bleacher Report until they abandoned the written word in favor of emojis, plus two NFL seasons at Sports on Earth, the baby that USA Today and MLB.com left on the steps of a convent in the early 2010s. 

My career has turned into one long bullet-hell video game level, but along the way I have learned to entertain, amuse, inform, engage, instigate and inflame a wide-ranging audience. I will serve up something for all of those audiences here: brainy stuff, zany stuff, geeky stuff, spicy stuff. I may also be a little more unscripted and open than I was when there were bigwig investors and column-inches on a dead tree to worry about: without a little self-indulgence, there would never have been Led Zeppelin.

It’s at this point that I should note that the folks at Substack warned me that “generalists” have a hard time attracting an audience. I don’t doubt that: if there’s one thing the free NFL Internet can be described as, it’s “general.” So general it’s generic, stripped of its flavor and substance, a million grab-and-go heat-lamp hamburgers , barely nourishing and rarely satisfying but always free of charge or obligation. Better to sell pasta or falafel in such a marketplace than the mushroom swiss burger on sourdough.

Sadly, I am not much of gambling guru, nor fantasy expert, nor film grinder, nor an ultra-connected expert on one specific team, nor someone steeped in the sociopolitical issues in sports, though I have dabbled heavily in all of those genres. Twenty years in this industry made me a jack of all those trades. That does not make me a “generalist,” however. I’m a writer, someone who longs to share thoughts, ideas and jokes on the page or the screen. If you have gotten this far, then you are a reader. Let’s connect and continue on this journey together.