I'm of No Use to a Gambler

A personal discussion of my writing and why I do it.

My name is Robbie Marriage, and this post is about me.

That sentence alone is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever written, because while I’ve now written eight articles on Trent Green (more on the way!), three articles about Steve McNair, three about Tom Brady, three about Chad Pennington, two about Josh Allen, two about Jordan Love, and just one about countless NFL players (from Damon Huard straight on down), I have never in my life written about myself.

Normally this day would’ve never come. While some people write Substacks about themselves, and live their best life doing it, this publication is wholly and completely dedicated to the stories of other people, and I like it that way. The people I speak about on here are far more entertaining than me.

However, I saw something the other day that inspired me to cross over to the dark side, write one of these posts about writing that Substack seems to love so much, and at least attempt to tell this story about myself:

Sadly, if You Want to Make Money in Sports Writing, Your Content Had Better Be Useful to Gamblers

This post from

Ethan Strauss

over at House of Strauss (who does not need my promotion, but gets it anyway) discusses the past and future of sports writing, detailing the rise of modern sports journalism out of the blogosphere and into the world of business, where one can actually make a salary for this fun thing that we all do.

The main point of this post of Ethan’s is that the desires of audiences have changed from a desire to understand what has happened to a voracious desire to understand what is going to happen. Ethan talks in his post about his mixed emotions being used as a source for gamblers on whether a player’s ‘toe is still hurting,’ instead of accurately capturing the historical significance of what he was watching the 2016 Warriors do every day as a beat writer, which is surely representative of the feelings a lot of sports writers had around the time the industry began to change.

Everybody who’s ever lived in (or near) a place with a casino knows that gambling money is extremely powerful. Therefore, the entire sports writing profession pulled itself into being as useful to gamblers as it could possibly be. As this happened, the preferences of audiences went along for the ride, leading to a modern sports writing landscape where what happened has never been cared less about, and what will happen has never been more cared about.

In the final definitive statement of the piece, Ethan states that “to make a decent living in the business [these days], you must either offer superior analysis or faster news,” which leads me into why I in particular felt the need to say something about this.

I do neither of those things.

I’m going to expose myself a little bit here, because I hear you. Considering the fact you’re reading this you’re likely a subscriber or at least a fan of mine, and you’re saying “huh? What? I quite like your level of analysis.” I thank you very much for saying that, and don’t get me wrong. I think my level of analysis is quite high, but I’m going to explain to you why my level of analysis falls well short of the word superior.

I recently wrote an article titled “All These Unqualified Quarterbacks are Hurting the NFL,” discussing the proliferation of tanking in the NFL and how teams being bad on purpose is an underrated component of the league’s offence being down, because nobody is talking about it.

This is a good article. I’m proud of it, and I think you should check it out. However, I believe the level of analysis contained within falls well short of the lofty word ‘superior.’ In writing that article, I did not watch a single snap of football played by any of the eight QBs discussed as being part of the problem (Anthony Richardson, Gardner Minshew, Bryce Young, Caleb Williams, Kyler Murray, Jayden Daniels, Bo Nix, Deshaun Watson) in the mold of a

Nick Kehoe

(I’m in a shoutout kind of mood today. There’s going to be a lot of links in here). I also did not create any complicated and especially accurate projection model equalizing all external factors like a

Kevin Cole

would do.

You know what I did? I looked up two numbers from a database, and I made one very bad looking graph.

You may think I’m joking, because that article is 3658 words long, but I’m not. For each QB I mentioned, I looked at their CPOE, and I looked at their EPA/Play. I wrote 16 paragraphs based on a graph I saw on Twitter that irked me before getting anywhere near the point I was trying to make, and even once I got to that main point, it was as simple as saying “teams should not use obviously bad players.”

Once again, this is not a takedown of my own piece. I still think it’s good for reasons that I will get to, but strictly as far as football analysis goes, this falls very very far short of superior. Any person on Earth could’ve done it. Perhaps they couldn’t have turned it into as good of an article as I turned it into, but they could’ve done it.

The same goes for the most viral piece I’ve ever done: “Josh Allen and the Most Harmful Play in NFL History.” I will give myself the credit that understanding why the 2022 Vikings were so dangerous was aided by having previously written an article about the 2022 Minnesota Vikings, but beyond that, here is an exhaustive list of the research done for that:

1. Become interested in bad offensive plays

2. Begin wondering what the worst play in NFL history is

3. Go on the NFLFastR play index to find the answer to that question

4. Discover the answer is Josh Allen fumbling the ball in his own end zone trying to kneel the clock out

The first four steps required about 34 seconds of work combined, and were only supplemented by two more:

1. Watch the game

2. Retrospectively fill in gaps using play by play data

You may think I’m being reductive, but considering NFL games are about two hours ten minutes without commercials, I would posit that the research for that article took 2.5 hours at most. Can you do superior analysis in 2.5 hours?

For one final time I will make clear that I believe my level of analysis is high (2.5 hours is more time than anybody on ESPN will put into anything), but it falls short of the lofty heights of the word ‘superior.’

As a result, I fail both of Ethan’s two criteria for making money in the sports writing industry. In my own opinion, I provide neither superior football analysis nor fast news, and I even fail on a third front. My publication is almost entirely focused on the past.

Just for a fun exercise, I decided to go back through everything I’ve written in order to see how long it’d been since I wrote anything that could’ve been considered of any use to a gambler:

We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Part 6: Absolutely not.

All These Unqualified QBs are Hurting the NFL: Maybe you can argue somehow that a gambler would be interested in this, but I don’t think so.

Josh Allen and the Most Harmful Play in NFL History: Fun story, but it’s over and has no bearing on the future.

The Truth About Playoff Tom Brady in the 2010s: Tom Brady is retired. Have fun gambling on anything he’s doing.

The Truth About Playoff Tom Brady in the 2000s: Repeat the above.

His Year: Steve McNair 2003: Gamblers get nothing out of doing justice to a dead man’s legacy.

What Netflix Didn’t Tell You About Steve McNair: Ditto.

We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Part 5: Nope.

NASCAR Got What They Wanted: I would go so far as to say this post is anti-gambling, since the credibility of a sport is the last thing on the mind of a gambler.

A Numerical Analysis of Why Touchbacks are Still Optimal: Anybody smart enough to bet on the games would know this anyway.

2017 Jaguars: The Most Underrated Team of My Lifetime: Nothing applicable to the future here either.

We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Part 4: No value at all to a person who doesn’t care about the past.

The Confounding Case of Jordan Love: This is the most recent post I’ve created that unequivocally speaks about the future. It came out on July 27.

That means it’s been almost two months since I’ve said anything that a gambler would have any interest in. I won’t bore you with naming everything I’ve ever done, but I looked at every one of my 64 pieces on this publication, and seven of them discuss the future. Most of those are so old that future is now past (like an article I did a year and a half ago about the Lamar Jackson contract situation).

I am of no use to a gambler.

This is where I occasionally run into problems, because there are benefits to being useful to gamblers. Let me show you:

These are my post analytics for the month of July, and you can clearly see the difference when I delved into talking about the future. Notice the open rate never changes, meaning my subscribers love me no matter what, and I love you guys too, but the clicks from humans who aren’t subscribers jump from almost nothing on some of the best work I’ve ever done (seriously. Check out my Trent Green series. It’s daunting, but it’s fantastic) to large enough to actually be noticeable on a rather mediocre article I wrote one afternoon talking about how Joe Burrow isn’t as good as you think he is. Even on my small scale, there’s a noticeable difference in interest between speaking about the past, and speaking about the future.

This sent a clear message that quality is not the main issue at play when dealing with the specific goal of levelling up and gaining more subscribers. You’ll notice that Joe Burrow article didn’t gain any new subscribers because it was rather mediocre, but if it were better it would’ve stood a much better chance of gaining me subscribers than some of the best things I’ve ever written, and at the time it bothered me.

It bothered me a lot.

Notice the next two things I come out with after that Joe Burrow article are both also relevant to the current NFL fan, as I had a slight identity crisis around the end of July:

However, something happened on July 29 that would change my outlook, and put me back on the path I wanted to be on. I shared my Trent Green idea in the (mostly dead) Substack Sports chat, mostly just fishing to see if I could get any replies. It was a last ditch effort to attempt to save this brilliant work from being lost to the Substack void forever. Being honest, I didn’t think I would get any bites, but I got two.

Gary Davis

(from Chiefs Chronicles) and

Ryan Mac

(from Ryan’s Reviews) both subscribed to my publication that day, and I’ve regularly interacted with both ever since. I’ve never asked either whether their subscription actually had anything to do with Trent Green, but what their subscriptions did was give me faith that talking about the past can work, and if you’ll notice I haven’t written a post about the future (and just three about the present) ever since.

For the whole time I’d been writing this publication (which on July 27 had been approximately a year and a half), my family and friends had consistently told me how good it was, which I knew also, and by itself that’d been enough to keep me going up until then (if there’s any more interest in my story, I will tell of the time I came closest to quitting, and what changed my mind), but I was beginning to wonder if I was selling a great product that nobody wanted.

For instance, if I were selling the highest quality no-pedal road bicycles in the land, I’d still have no customers, because there is no audience for road bikes with no pedals. I’d been beginning to wonder if that was the case with really well-researched, context laden, stories about the NFL from 20 years ago. It was entirely possible to me at the time that nobody wanted them.

Weirdly enough, I think this process has caused me to accidentally stumble into my ‘niche’ that everybody always claims to be looking for, because nobody else does what I do, but it took a year and a half to even break double digit subscribers doing this. That year and a half was way more than enough time to get it crystal clear in my head that I do this writing thing for me, and I do it for the reasons I want to do it, which is really what I wanted to talk about.

In typical fashion on my Sports Passion Project, I have taken 2226 words to get to the point. If you’re still with me at this point, thank you very much. Let me talk to you.

In my years before I started writing, especially when the CoVid shutdowns were happening, I used to have the existential problem of feeling like I was constantly wasting my time. We all have this feeling every now and again, but I was 21 years old, and I simply couldn’t escape the feeling that I was wasting what all around me were telling me were supposed to be the best days of my life.

I knew I had the talent to do something important, but I didn’t have anything important to do, and I couldn’t figure out anything important to do. I could work some job somewhere, even a rather high paying one (by 21 year old standards), but all that would do is bring in some money that I didn’t need at the time. I could be one of the best players in Canada at Gran Turismo Sport back when that game was still in vogue, but what was that doing for me?

I never really liked partying, mostly because in my locale that generally meant booze and fights. I don’t mind a fight every now and then, but I’m straight edge, and have been since 19 years old, so that was never going to be a part of my plan. I disliked most of my surroundings for more reasons than that (being a rather progressive human born in rural Canada). I at one time had plenty of friends, but most of them were beginning to spread their wings and fly away, and so there I was in my hometown wasting my days away.

This would continue for a while, but the one saving grace is that throughout this process sports were eating up quite a bit of my time. This was a good thing on the surface, as thinking about them kept me from thinking about other things, but what I didn’t realize I was doing was building up a wealth of knowledge about the NFL and its history. I was using my far-too-abundant spare time to build skills that are bearing fruit right now in the Substack world.

As this continued, my friend

Josh Bishop

(I’m shouting out people that don’t even write now) would continuously tell me that my NFL talk conversing between friends was better than the talk he would see traversing the internet looking for football analysis. He encouraged me to become a part of it. For a while I didn’t, but his continued insistence did wear on me until finally I got the spark I needed.

It was March 25, 2023. I remember very vividly needing to study for the most important university exam of my life, and truly not wanting to do so. Writing had always been a hobby of mine. I’d written short stories and rap songs and plays and various things, but nothing consistently and nothing good enough to be worth sharing, and also never about football.

On that day, after being bothered about it for so long, I decided to see if I had any chops for writing about football. The magic was instant, and the result of that session was His Year: Chad Pennington 2002. I got no studying done that day whatsoever, but what I got was an immense sense of fulfillment, because I’d told a story that nobody had ever told before.

I’m preaching to the choir writing this on Substack, but it’s just a feeling you can’t understand until you experience it. There’s no reason writing an article about the performance of a football player that nobody cares about anymore on a team nobody cared about even at the time that I didn’t even plan to have anybody read should’ve felt so good, but it did.

It made me feel like I had accomplished something that day, a feeling all too lacking in my life at the time. Even though I had failed my main goal for the day, I still went to bed feeling like the day had been a solid use of my limited time on the Earth. That’s the same feeling I write for today.

I showed it to a few close friends and family, and they immediately let me know that it was good, and ought to be seen, hence the existence of this Substack page, but because of my origins and how I came upon writing as a common hobby, I did not run the internet growth grift. What I loved (and still what I love) is creating the content. Writing the articles. Responding to comments. That’s what makes me feel good. That’s what gives me my sense of accomplishment.

All the rest of it (reading and commenting on other people’s stuff, using Notes, or in general doing anything to try to cultivate an audience) was not what I got into this for, so for the most part I didn’t do it. In essence, I spent a year and half screaming into the Substack void about once a week. Over all that time without any audience to please, I had to find other ways to judge success, which led to me heavily boosting my quality behind the curtains while nobody was looking.

I have found my voice as a person who tells stories using football as my medium. In the words of my friend

The Pro Wrestling Exuberant

, what I do is get the personalities over, and create interest in the general subject, whatever that may be that I’m speaking about.

However, this position of being a football storyteller blocks me off from accessing the vast pool of readers that would read if I were to talk about the future, because how can I craft a story if I don’t know the ending?

What I do is write in a fashion where everybody knows the ending (because it’s already happened), but I attempt through diving into the personalities involved and into the context surrounding the situation to discuss in a deeper way the events that we’ve all watched, and describe exactly why they’re so heartbreaking, or jubilant, or funny, or whatever the case may be, in order to do full justice to the story.

The problem in sports is that the lead is so often buried. There are fantastic stories happening everywhere all the time that are oftentimes just ignored or left unseen. I’ve deemed it my job to do justice to the stories of the past because these stories are fantastic and entertaining yes, but also because the contemporary sports media fails to do so.

This is why I was proud of my unqualified QBs article despite the rather limited level of analysis. Everybody already knew that offence was down. I just gave a quick primer to fill in the gaps in people’s minds, and make it easier to understand why that’s happening. This is my goal, and if I am able to accomplish it with every article I ever write, I will be happy with my newsletter experience, paying subscribers be damned.

Ethan Strauss is likely right that I won’t ever make much money doing this. I do have a (as in one) paying subscriber (and he knows I love him), which is more than some people have, but it’s likely the truth that with my talents, I’m actively choosing to throw money away by taking the lane I’ve taken.

This is the unfortunate truth about sports writing in 2024. Stories with soul are not what people want to see, which forces humans like myself, who want to write with soul, to make the decision between writing mediocre Joe Burrow articles and fantastic Trent Green ones. Because of my very specific story and motivations for coming to be the writer I am, I’ve remained on the Trent Green path, but imagine how many fantastic stories we’ve lost into the dust of a mediocre Joe Burrow speculation?

This is not to say that all publications that talk about the present or the future in the sports world are soulless. My friend

Aaron Knodell

at Puck Over the Glass is an example of a publication full of excellent stuff that could also be interpreted as being useful to gamblers, but in general I tend to stay away from present and future speculation stuff on Substack’s sports platform. All due respect to my friends

Gary Davis

and

Smayan Srikanth

and others like them. They’re all doing great stuff and I’m happy for them, but that’s just not my lane.

My lane is with

GabArr

, who likes to correct the narrative on the NHL’s goaltenders much like I do it with football players. It’s with

The Pro Wrestling Exuberant

who likes to tell the stories of the wrestlers that never made it to TV. It’s with

Ryan Mac

and his chronological review of wrestling in 1990. It’s with

Trades Ten Years Later

, who has the most self-explanatory Substack name of all time and my respect because of it, and it’s with everybody else that I either forgot to mention or haven’t found yet because sports content with no use to gamblers has trouble finding its audience.

This is a shame, but I won’t let it get me down. I hope all those I’ve mentioned won’t let it get them down either. My motivation to write is burning hotter than ever, and like I’ve always said, unless something interesting happens I’m not going to compromise and start writing about the present and the future. My lane is the past, and telling interesting stories, and I plan to stay there, because that’s what I do well. It’s what brings me the greatest sense of fulfillment, and most important of all, it’s what I enjoy doing.

For all those who’ve elected to join me on this journey, I thank you very much. I hope you like what you’ve seen and will continue to enjoy what lays ahead, but we will never be useful to the gamblers around here. It’s much more prudent to keep our souls.

Thanks so much for reading.