A JoeBlogs Fall Update
First off, I would like to welcome all you new readers who joined up as part of anniversary week! I hope you’ll like it here. We do try to have a lot of fun.
I want to give all of you — and everybody else — a little update on what you’ll be getting this fall from JoeBlogs. We are, of course, going to be all over baseball during the pennant races and playoffs. Will Paul Goldschmidt win the Triple Crown? Will the Phillies make the playoffs and inspire all sorts of new Ellen Adair dances? Will Tony La Russa intentionally walk more batters with an 0-2 count? Will the Padres fall into the sea? Will the Red Sox turn off all their fans and play in front of an empty Fenway Park?
Only time will tell.
There are also a couple of football features to talk about. Our main update today revolves around The Football 101. As those of you who have been here for a while know: I tend to dive into ridiculous, months-long, years-long projects. I just can’t help myself. Some of these projects (eventually) turn into incredible things, such as The Baseball 100. Others pound on me like Mike McCallum working the body.
The Football 101 has been a bear, I’m not going to lie. I think I have made a couple of mistakes with it. One, for a long time I treated it like it was just a football version of the Baseball 100; it can’t be that. Football is too different from baseball. Football fans are too different from baseball fans. And two, I decided to make it 101 players. It should have been much less — 50 players at most, but probably 25 players was the right length.
That’s not to say it hasn’t been fun — it HAS been fun. I think it’s great stuff. But it has not resonated with most of you the way I had hoped, not even close.
As such, I’ve taken a different philosophy; from here on the essays are going to be shorter, punchier and much more about the EMOTION that these great players inspired. I think this fits football much better. I hope you’ll agree.
Starting on Sunday night, paid subscribers will get a different Football 101 player every day, leading up to the first Sunday of the NFL season. That will take us to the Top 25.
And then, we’ll count down that Top 25 every Wednesday of the NFL season, taking us all the way to Super Bowl XYELDIII or whatever this one is. I do hope you’ll like it.
If this is simply too much football for you, there’s a super-easy way to opt out of the Football 101 posts; all you have to do is go to the right right-hand corner of this account and click on “Manage Subscription.” You’ll then see all the sections of this site with checkboxes next to them. Simply uncheck “Football 101,” and you won’t get those emails anymore.
For various logistical reasons, there will be no free previews on these, so if you’re a free reader, you will not get any version of these in your email. If you’d like to subscribe, of course, that would be awesome. And if, for whatever reason, you would like to request a free subscription, generous readers on this site continue to donate them, so you can just email me here.
OK, so that’s the Football 101 story.
Then there’s the future of the Browns Diary. As I have written: After 50-plus years I no longer have feelings for the Cleveland Browns. I’ve been yelled at about this a few times, which is fine, but, I mean, you can’t feel what you don’t feel. I want to reiterate that I have never once even suggested that any other Browns fan leave the team; I’m not interested in starting a movement. This is just something that happened to me.
And so the Browns Diary will become something else — it will be a weekly “Pick a Team” diary. I’m really excited about the way this is shaping up. The idea will be that each week, I will pick a new team to try on for size.
The exciting part is that people are already volunteering to convince me to pick their team. This is unexpected and wonderful. For example, on the PosCast, Mike Schur has begun pitching me on becoming a New England Patriots fan. Here’s 10 minutes of Patriots’ salesmanship:
That’s a tough pitch to beat. But someone else — a huge Bears fan — has already invited my daughter Katie and me to Chicago to watch a Bears game. So that is probably going to be a tougher pitch to beat.
If you’re interested in trying to convince me to become a fan of your team, send me your pitch here. Really, I’m open for anything. Let the journey begin.
Disappointed to see that readers haven't connected to the Football 101. Baseball was/is my first love, so I pretty much knew every player you wrote about in the Baseball 100. What I've loved about the F101 is reading about players I've never heard of, or I'm not that familiar with. The series has certainly resonated with me.
Totally agree on the Football 101. Speaking personally, I can only get so excited for an offensive guard from the 1970s.