To the great rejoicing of many, it has been a relatively quiet few weeks from me. That’s the way my offseasons tend to go at this point: I burn myself out during the season, take a bit to recover, then dive back in earlier than I originally intended to. It’s a healthy way to live. (It is not.)
There’s a series I wanted to do this offseason and needed a way to kick it off without starting my initial article in the series with a long, rambling intro to the series itself. So, instead, you get a full post out of that intro. Isn’t that fun? I can tell by the look on your face that you think it’s fun.
It’s a series that I’ve been calling “Things I’ve Learned From Watching Film,” because I am creative and don’t know how to shorten anything I write.
As I’m sure you know, I’ve been writing about football for a while. While I’ve always been a fan of the game, I’ve been digging into it from a film perspective for 9+ years at this point. During the offseason, I spend a lot of time trying to learn more about aspects of the game I don’t know. That’s a combination of reading books, listening to podcasts, watching videos, asking questions, etc.
Suffice it to say, I have a lot of useless knowledge knocking around in my big dumb head, so I wanted to have a way to get some of those out. I spend so much time during the season in the week-to-week that I seldom talk about football from a wider view. Even during the offseason, I tend to look back at the prior season and see what the Packers performed well at and some areas they may need to look at. So, while the look is wider, it’s still pretty narrow.
Over the coming weeks/months, I'll be writing about football from the wider view. A “how does this work” type of series. I don’t really know how many posts it will be, but I’ve got 3-4 articles sketched out already. Stuff like “why doesn’t the QB always throw to the ‘open’ receiver” and “teams don’t simply just play man or zone defense on any given play,” and “why are playcalls so long”, and so on.
A lot of these are born from conversations I’ve heard or comments I’ve seen over the course of a game. People looking at screenshots and saying, “if the QB had thrown to this man, it would have been a better option.” I wanted to take the chance to really dig into the thought process of a lot of that, and, since the offseason is long and filled with horrors, I thought it would be a good time to kick off this series.
So, in the next couple of weeks, look for the first installment of that series, which will be dealing with “why didn’t the throwing man throw it to that specific catching man”. It’s already going to be way too long and I’m having entirely too much fun writing it, which means 2 of you will read it. I’m hyped.
I am not conceited enough to think that I have all the answers. Far from it: in fact, the more I learn about football, the more I understand just how little I truly understand. I just wanted an opportunity to spew forth some of the lessons I’ve learned over these past 9+ years, and I hope you will be able to learn something in the process.
Before we get out of here, I did want to post a couple videos I’ve done during the playoffs.
I did a video on the 49ers frontside Leak…
…and also on the opening touchdowns from both the Chiefs & Jaguars in their Divisional Round match-up, so that was something.
Maybe I’ll do something for the Super Bowl. Maybe I won’t. Who knows, really.