Outstanding. Now the real question? Want to be a Footballguy?

That was the e-mail I received from David Dodds on June 6, 2002. The co-owner of Footballguys.com then and now, Dodds was replying to a freelance article I submitted to his site. Two days later, my article was posted, and I had become a paid writer. Today, I will share some of what I have learned over the last 17 years with you.

• The more you write — and read — the easier writing becomes. Writing every day or writing a long piece sounds daunting, but you will be aided by momentum for most of the journey. Reading other work in your field will naturally elicit a thought that you can put to paper. And anytime I write an article, there’s always an idea for a future piece embedded in that work. I have now written a post for 2,548 consecutive days, and I can promise you it gets easier.
• Serious writers need to do three things: Write, Publish, and Promote. Many want to write, or think they would be good writers, but that’s about as far as they ever go. There are no barriers to entry when it comes to writing. Other people will write but delay to publish their work. For me, reader feedback is an incredibly important (hence the promote part) part of the process. Vince Lombardi said it best: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Without outside feedback and criticism, you are likely to continue making the same mistakes. You are essentially living in a one person bubble, and that’s a bad environment in which to grow. There are many problems with people on the internet, but one thing people on the internet are really good at is telling you when you did something wrong. For writers, I think that’s a good thing.
• Read good writers. As often as you can. It remains the cheat code to becoming a good writer.
• There is no money in writing. There are exceptions, of course, but readers of this blog don’t get blinded by exceptions. I wish there was money in writing, but that’s just not the case. Do not go into writing to make money. I think of writing the way I think of exercise: it’s just plain good for you in ways that, ironically, are difficult to articulate. But it’s for you the way exercise is for you: do it because you enjoy it, not to make money. Please don’t go into writing to make money.
• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This applies in a couple of ways.
  • Occasionally, my posts will have typos or errors. That happens and it doesn’t bother me. 100% accuracy should not be your goal in writing just like your goal in life shouldn’t be to never make a mistake. I post something every day, and being 95% accurate every day of the week is preferable, I think, to being 100% accurate three times a week. Also, nobody is 100% accurate.
  • We all want to write that seminal piece that changes the way people think forever. That’s great, but it takes also takes forever to write that piece. And here’s a neat trick: if you publish Part 1 of your topic early on, you can use reader feedback to get to your destination much quicker than you can by brainstorming. I have also found that you are more likely to write That Great Article if you write 10 articles that you think are decent than one article that you think is The One. That’s because you will be shocked at how bad you are at predicting what reader reaction will be to your article. Unless it’s about Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.

• Remember the golden rule: it may sound hokey, but treating others the way you would like to be treated is excellent advice for everyone in every field. I’ve found and maintained a lot of great friends by following this advice. Don’t be a bad person.
• Be humble and honest with your audience. If you don’t know all the answers (and you probably don’t), say that. If you are unsure of something, say that, too. People are pretty good at detecting these sorts of things, anyway, and you earn reader credibility by treating your audience with respect. I maintain that this very small site has some of the best commenters in the community, and I think that’s because I write with this rule. Whenever I have found myself drawing a lot of criticism for my work, it’s because I have violated this principle. Also, listen to good criticism and ignore bad criticism. Trust your gut on that one.

From time to time people ask me how I got into football writing. The rest of this post (an update from 2013) will explain just that. Seventeen years ago, there was no twitter, and neither blogging nor fantasy football was mainstream. My brother was and is a sports anchor/reporter (and a great one at that), and he was the writer in the family. I was just an 18 year old who hated writing and was good at math.

I began playing fantasy sports in the late ’90s, and it was discovering Footballguys.com that began my writing career. The articles were terrific and opened my eyes to the intricacies and strategies of the game. But the real treasure was the site’s message board. I could post on the board and minutes later someone would reply. That was my first introduction to the value of reader feedback. I didn’t think of “posting” on the message board as writing, but it was there that I learned the appropriate ways to craft an argument. The board also helped me develop a pretty thick skin for internet criticism, the sort of armor every blogger needs. I know that Reddit draws a lot of justifiable criticism, but it’s probably the modern equivalent of old message boards, and there’s value to be mined at places like that even if it is intertwined with garbage. Writers need feedback, and the quicker, more frequent, and blunter, the better.

In the summer of 2002, Dodds announced that he was requesting freelance articles from fans of the site. At the time, Pro-Football-Reference was in its infancy, which still made it the best resource for the casual fan to access statistics on the NFL. I spent a few hours copying and pasting some of PFR’s data and used that to create my freelance article for Dodds.

Every bit of success I’ve had can be traced back to that response by Dodds, and the decision by Dodds and the great Joe Bryant (also a co-owner at Footballguys) to keep me on staff every year since. Once I became a staffer, I was able to graduate from incompetent writer to novice, but more importantly, I made some fantastic connections. I was able to convince Doug Drinen, then and now one of the most important people at Footballguys, to mentor me. That’s probably what happens when you e-mail a guy 1,000 times.

After writing for a couple of years, I e-mailed Doug in 2004 and asked how I could become as good as he was at writing football articles. Here was his response:

With almost everything in life, the only way to get better at it is to do more of it. Practice, practice, practice, blah, blah, blah.

Writing is different. Yes, practice helps. But there is a “shortcut.” It is my opinion that reading helps your writing as much as writing does. Really, any kind of reading is good. For the kind of writing we do, you need look no further than the best that ever lived. I don’t even need to tell you who that is.

Go to amazon and pick up Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, or the New Historical Baseball Abstract, or whatever. For the next month, take one hour a day that you used to spend reading the free-for-all or watching TV and spend it reading Bill James instead. You will notice results in your writing with zero effort on your part. It just happens.

Writing for the web is a bit different from writing on paper. Paragraphs should be shorter and bulletted lists and bold headers should be used more. People have a much shorter attention span when reading the web than they do when reading paper, so you have to break up the text a bit more.

The only other thing that pops to my mind is the old standard: use fewer words. Usually, I write a rough draft without thinking about style too much. Then, when the content is all organized, I go through and ask myself “do I really need that word?”, “Could I rewrite that 10-word sentence with 7 words?”, etc. You don’t want to get too choppy, but trying to cut out as many words as you possibly can is a good exercise. As far as I can remember off the top of my head, your stuff is pretty tight and well-organized as is. No need for an overhaul, just keep doing what you’re doing.

In terms of conveying high-tech stuff, I always like to walk the reader through my thought process. It usually goes something like this:

1. Here is a question, and the fantasy implications of the question
2a. Here is a way to use data to answer that question
2b. Here are the problems with what I’ve come up with in 2a.
3. Here is the data. (if the data set is large, this can come after the conclusion, as sort of an appendix.)
4. Here is a conclusion.

Now all the technical stuff is in 2a. People can skip it if they want and still follow the article. I also find it helpful to walk through a particular example with a particular player (e.g. “For example, last year the Jets ranked #10 against QBs, their YPA allowed as 17th, …., so they go down as a XXXXX”). That way, if people have trouble reading the table of data, they can go to the Jets line and get their bearings.

One last thing: I think the second best sportswriter in the world is Maurile Tremblay. Seriously. See what tips he has for you. Hell, forward them to me.

D

That e-mail rings as true today as it did in 2004. If an aspiring young football writer asked me for advice, I would copy and paste that e-mail. And I’d have them read all of the old articles Maurile and Doug wrote, too.

My next big breakthrough came in 2006, when Doug told me that he was going to start blogging at his site, Pro-Football-Reference.com. He knew he would struggle to post every day, and lacking better options, offered me the opportunity to join him at the PFR Blog. I jumped at the opportunity, and made my first post on July 7, 2006.

What has distinguished me from every other writer since then has been good fortune. A year later, Doug and Sean Forman (the owner of baseball-reference.com) brought the sports-reference sites under one umbrella: Sports-Reference LLC. I have been extremely lucky to become good friends with Sean, who is many times over The Man in the baseball community. Thanks to Sean and Doug (and later on, Neil Paine, Mike Kania, and a host of others), PFR acquired a ridiculous amount of data and allowed me to access those files in my writing. This is still true, even though I have not written there since 2011. I am under no illusions that without the generous help of Doug, Sean, Neil, and Mike, I would be just another hack sportswriter (but I am under the illusion that with their help, I am not!). Their generosity with their time and other resources has made all the difference for me.

Acknowledging my bias, I think we wrote a number of outstanding and thought-provoking articles at the PFR Blog. In our own small way, we helped inch forward the analytics movement in pro football. My good luck continued when Doug asked commenter “JKL” to join the team, and Jason Lisk remains a close friend to this day. I’m very proud of the work Doug, Jason, Neil and I did there, and we helped PFR join places like Football Outsiders and the now defunct Advanced NFL Stats at the forefront of the analytics revolution. Aaron Schatz and Brian Burke remain friends to this day, and it is inspiring to see all the young writers that have followed the trails those men blazed.

In October 2009, Toni Monkovic of the New York Times asked if the PFR Blog would like to contribute material to their football blog, The Fifth Down. Sean and Doug let me write there, and I contributed weekly articles in-season for Toni (another superstar person I’ve been fortunate enough to work with) and the Times for about a number of years.

In late 2011, Sean encouraged me to start my own site, as the Sports-Reference sites were moving away from blogging and devoting all resources to their core business (which remains the best in the industry). I had become friendly with Chris Brown over the years, and he allowed me to continue writing at Smart Football for the rest of the 2011 season.

In May 2012, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to start a website. I’m very grateful to people like Chris, Matt Waldman, Jeff Williamson, Jene Bramel, Brian Burke, Aaron Schatz, and Jason Lisk, among many others, for giving me the encouragement and necessary advice to make starting my own site a successful endeavor. The site has lived on for far longer than I ever expected, and I’m very proud of where it is today. I have made many friends along the way since I opened this site, and without supporters like Bill Barnwell, Adam Harstad, Bryan Frye, and a dozen other people, this site would be inferior.

Writing this post allows me to thank just a few of the many people who helped me write for the last seventeen years. I’ve only named a fraction of the people who have been kind enough to donate their time to me, but I’ll always be grateful to all of those who helped me along the way. I am blessed to have been able to get so much support and guidance over these last 17 years, and I thank all of you who have been there with me.