Catching up before the 2024 season
or, the future is open wide
Been a while since I’ve lived in this space, so I wanted to check back in, see how everyone was doing and give some updates.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve used this space as a way to post football things I wasn’t doing anywhere else. That usually ended up being a weekly RPO report for the Packers and the occasional mailbag or play from another team.
Over the offseason, quite a bit as changed in terms of this football-writing hobby of mine. For the past 5 years, my writing has lived between Cheesehead TV and Packer Report, two incredible sites that I’m honored to have been a part of. However, a couple of months ago, I got an opportunity to join the good folks at Acme Packing Company, which is where I’ll be doing all my Packers writing (including the RPO Report that has been living here). I’ll still be associated with both of those sites in one way or another (another season of the Packers Playbook with John Kuhn at Cheesehead TV and a weekly film review with Ross Uglem at Packer Report), but my writing is moving. So probably not a massive change, but a change nonetheless.
I also got a great opportunity to write about the Colts over at The Colts Wire. It’s a really fun and interesting offense, so I’m thrilled to have an excuse to dig into what they’re doing on a weekly basis.
Since RPO Report is moving as well, I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing with this space. I’ve always seen this as my “writing for fun” space. The football season can be a grind at times, and writing simply to meet my quota can start to make it feel like a stressful job. This has been my outlet: my way to write about something I wanted to write about, rather than something I was required to write about.
All that being said, I want to keep this space alive and active, even if I may not have the time to cover something every week during the season. So, for now, the plan is to use this as a recap of my weekly activities, as well as the occasional post about something else (a play from another team, a new album I’m obsessed with, etc.).
With that in mind, let’s just recap some stuff from the past week or so.
With the Packers trading for Malik Willis, I watched all of his attempts from the preseason. I wanted to see what kind of QB he looked like at this point in his career. I did a film room for that on YouTube, but I also wrote it up for APC.
Also with Malik Willis in mind, I started looking at the history of Liberty players to suit up for the Packers. That led me to find that the last Liberty player to log an official passing attempt as a Packer was none other than Samkon Gado. So, of course, I wrote that up.
I also wrote my first piece for Colts Wire, digging into a staple of the Colts offense: the vertical RPO.
It was only the preseason, but when the machine gets fired up it gets all the way fired up. Looking forward to another season of writing about the Packers and my first season of writing about the Colts It’s gonna be a good one.
Oh and we’ll just close with some music. I have long been a fan of shoegaze, having fell in love with the genre from blindly buying Starflyer 59’s “Gold” album back in 1995. They have gone through a lot of musical transformations over the years, all with Jason Martin at the helm. The fact that he’s still around making music I love is something I will be forever grateful for.
Recently, SF59 released their new album, Lust for Gold. Kind of a throwback to that noisier, feedback-laden era that made me fall in love. I’ve had it on repeat for weeks and that’s unlikely to stop anytime soon. A marvelous album that takes me back to a very specific summer, while also reminding me of exactly how much time has passed since then.