The End of My SPP Obligation

Dear my beloved audience,

My apologies for the length of this letter. If I’d had more time, I would’ve written a shorter one.

As I sit here, on Sunday November 9, I have a piece detailing Ben Roethlisberger’s 2008 close enough to finished that I can get it out for Monday morning, but instead I find myself sitting here, writing this, wondering whether or not I ought to say anything at all about what I’m feeling, and if I do end up saying anything, wondering what exactly I should say.

On the left hand, I’m not arrogant enough to believe I’m somebody. I have had the gall to write about myself as the primary subject a couple times in the past, and you guys have had the gall to like it, but by and large, Robbie Marriage is the narrator. He’s here to tell you the story of the game that you really care about. He’s here to break the numbers down for you. He is not here to be cared about in his own right.

At the same time, you’re my audience. You guys are the reason I get to talk about football on the internet at all. You’re the reason I get invited to be part of collaborations (almost all of which don’t work out, due to my flavour being quite unique, and difficult for others to mesh with). You’re the reason SPP ever became such a significant part of my life in the first place. You deserve some explanation on why I plan to disappear for a little while.

So here I sit, wondering whether Robbie Marriage the internet presence is important enough in anybody’s life to warrant a letter from Robbie Marriage the human being about why SPP as currently situated has to end.

I’ve come to the decision to make a compromise. For once in my life, I’m going to put the relevant information at the top. Only 345 words into the article, we’re already getting to the point, which is that from this point forward, the weekly posts are at an end. The daily Notes are at an end, although I do still plan to continue to operate this publication on a less frequent basis moving forward, which I will define at a later date.

That’s the headline, and if that’s all you need to know, I don’t begrudge that. You can click off from here. However, if you’re one of those who may have been with me for a while, and may be interested in my personal reasons behind this change, read on.

It’s been eating at me, wondering just how honest I want to be with you guys. It’s a bad habit/in-joke of my Sports Passion Project that I lie to my audience constantly, but I go to great expense never to lie in a way that harms. I’ve said there would be no article on a day, and then published anyway. I’ve said topics are too much for me to cover, and covered them anyway. By the dictionary definition, this is lying to my audience, which is normally the ultimate no-no, but my lies, to the best of my knowledge, have only made my audience better off, delivering more than I’ve promised, or delivering on something I’ve promised not to deliver.

However, there is always such a thing as too much honesty, and there are many things I’ve always taken care not to mention. Mainly, this has come in the form of keeping Robbie Marriage the football writer, and Robbie Marriage the real person, as far apart as I can. This is why my profile contains no photo of myself, my social medias contain no photos of my cats, I don’t wish people happy holidays, and etcetera.

When you talk to Robbie Marriage on the internet, you talk about football. Occasionally the history of some other sports also, but it’s a very focused, single minded conversation. Unfortunately, to properly explain what’s changed about me to induce this change in my Substack publication, I have to let a little bit of real life in. This may be just enough rope to hang myself with, but here we go.

That is me, smiling for all of you. The glasses are anti-glare for my eyes, which sometimes go through spells of being extremely light sensitive. Even at my age (25), I’m too old to have grown up with a phone screen, but I blame screens nonetheless. The pink baseball cap was a gift from an Ecuadorian Indigenous tribe. I’m not kidding about that, and yes. That is a Steeler shirt I’m wearing. Just because they were division rivals with my Jags 20 years ago does not mean I still have to hate them today, but enough about my appearance.

I show you myself to let everybody here know that there is indeed a real person behind this Substack publication, even if I try to act like there isn’t, and unfortunately, some real life stuff has begun to get in the way of my internet pursuits.

I’ve said this before, but for those who don’t know, I pay my bills via pursuing a PhD in economics. Everybody on Substack, barring the extreme one percent, pursues their love of writing while juggling their real job on the side, and I’m no different. I just happen to be in the position to have a real job that pays enough to keep the lights on, while also coming with a fairly light workload, and hours that I choose myself.

People affiliated with universities get paid for their human capital, rather than for their time. That’s a fancy economic way to say that the workload is not very high in terms of time spent, but extremely dense, and mentally taxing. To a young man like me, with the foolish delusions of invincibility that we all either have or used to have, all I could see was the low time investment required for my real job, and jumped in headfirst into another relatively low time investment, highly dense project.

This one.

There was a long time where I could handle this, and the arrangement left me in the best possible position to pursue both my passions (sports and economic theory) at a high level. For the last two and a half years (I cannot believe it’s been that long) I’ve been here writing about games, while continuing to do my real work/studies in parallel.

Unfortunately, the young 22 year old man that began this Sports Passion Project better than two years ago did not realise that he was making a commitment to burn the wick at both ends, indefinitely. The point of a job that oftentimes only features a half day’s work, but a full day’s worth of mental exhaustion, is to spend the other half of the day not being productive, refilling your mental reserves for the next day. The point of such a job is not to fill the other half of the days with a second relatively quick but mentally exhausting process: researching, writing, and editing for a Substack publication.

For a while this was my process. For a while I could do it, and for a while it worked for me. My good friend Gary Davis once told me to ‘be less prolific.’ I never felt comfortable using such a word to describe myself, because at the time it felt normal, but right now, as I look back on specifically the last year and a half, over which I’ve missed a weekly post just twice, writing a SPP-style article every week except two over a span of almost 80 weeks, it feels monumental.

And I can’t do it anymore.

No different than the athletes I cover, I’ve been willfully ignoring this reality for months now, lying to myself in order to keep myself going, because I knew what the end was, if I allowed myself to think on it, but two moments forced me to come to my senses.

First was a couple months ago, when I visited my parents for the first time in a while. My sister still lives in my hometown and has a beautiful new baby boy, so came over to see me. I love kids, so spent a long time enjoying my time with both of them, but once play time was over, I went to grab my computer, and began to type out some listicle of some kind. I forget which it was. She asked what I was doing. I told her, and then she asked me ‘do you ever give yourself a rest from your computer?’

This proved a powerful moment for me, because just as many words as I say on my Sports Passion Project, I say in real life. I’m a talkative human. I’ve got an answer for everything, and yet, all it took was this one yes/no question to leave me completely speechless. I had no answer to it.

The truth was that the answer was no. Between my PhD work and my SPP work, I never gave myself a rest from my computer screen. I never felt I needed one. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that I’d been repetitively telling myself I didn’t need one, in my efforts to keep going, but it proved much much more difficult to lie to her, with my beautiful nephew in her arms, than it was to lie to myself.

The second moment occurred last Monday, on the same day that I’d just released a story (His Year: Stanley Morgan 1986) for the first time in a while, a process which made me remember just how much fun I have writing them. At ten o’ clock that morning, I had an academic meeting with a professor who is not my direct supervisor, but whom I respect and have always had a good relationship with, during which she told me that my past academic performance had gotten me a year ahead of schedule, but that my current performance was completely squandering it.

It’s not as if I didn’t know that already. This is not a school-specific feeling. If you’ve ever been good at anything, you can tell good work from bad work, and I knew I’d been doing enough just to get by and little more, but I needed to hear it from somebody else to truly get it to sink in. My performance is slipping.

This finally broke the dam, and made me look over on this side of things. Was my quality slipping here too?

In terms of writing process, absolutely. Sunday night editing sessions for Monday posts used to be an occurrence so rare they would shock those around me. These days, Sunday night editing sessions for Monday articles are more common than not. It used to be that I would rarely ever let even a small mistake slip through the cracks. These days, I got the score to Stanley Morgan’s playoff game wrong.

As far as how the articles read, that’s tough for me to say, because I intend every piece I ever write to be the best one I’ve ever written, but ultimately, there are a group of S-Tier SPP articles (Mike Brown vs Grant Langston, The Night Courage Wore Orange, plus a few others), and most of those are getting pretty old now. I think the article on the Patriot drama between Kraft, Parcells, and Belichick verges on that tier, but beyond that, it’s been a while since I’ve produced a truly great one, in my opinion.

I’m still trying just as hard. I still love this just as much, but on the one week results schedule, I simply cannot get the results I used to get.

This reality of the situation been messing with my mind in a serious way for a longer time than I’d like to admit, because on the ground, nothing has changed. It’s a simple matter of me no longer being able to handle a workload I used to be able to handle with ease. That’s what this is.

Considering I’ve always treated my real job and my Sports Passion Project with equal priority (they’re both my passions), both are equally to blame for the way I feel. I suppose burnout is the word that typically goes along with the things I’m feeling, although I think that word is overused, but I’ve been on the rev limiter for a long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I finally need to take my foot off the gas, for the first time in almost two years.

When I began this Sports Passion Project on March 25, 2023, I promised myself that I would do this for fun, but I would never allow myself to feel obligated. At some point along the line, I broke that promise. I have become beholden to getting the article ready for 7:30 on every Monday morning, for almost two years straight.

It’s funny (in a sad way) to reflect and think that I’ve taken almost two years to realise that I’d broken the promise that I founded this publication on. I was going to write about football because it was fun, and because I had something new to add. When did that morph into ‘I need to get it done for Monday?’ I’m not sure. It just did.

I’ve contemplated quitting altogether, or at least giving into the ‘take a break’ chorus that always seems to yell extremely loudly when the thought is even entertained, but I must honestly give a lot of credit to Stanley Morgan’s 1986 story for roping me back in.

His Year articles about players who are not very famous don’t do very well in terms of the numbers. For perspective, Stanley Morgan is the worst post I have done for week one views in almost a year, but damn it. It was so fun to research for, so fun to write for, and fun to read, even as the man that wrote it.

That type of article is what I do best. It reminded me that writing about football is still fun, and that I still have a unique perspective to add. So long as those two facts remain true, my Sports Passion Project will never die out altogether, but I feel I can no longer offer that unique perspective most days of the week, between social media and blog posts.

What this means in practice is that I’m freeing myself of any obligation to talk about football. I’m not going to guarantee a post every Monday any longer. I’m not going to post most days on Notes and elsewhere any longer. SPP is going to continue on much more of an ad hoc basis moving forward. When I have something to say, I will say it, but on days and weeks where I have nothing to say, I will not say anything, and I will make no apology beyond this one.

If you subscribed based on the idea of regular posts from me, I apologise. That idea was once true, but isn’t true anymore. Those who have been fans of mine for any amount of time know that I tend to find lots of things to say, so you’ll still see my name on a regular basis, just not every week.

Do not worry. I’m not leaving. There are still many goals I have yet to accomplish. I still have the Trent Green story to finish. I’m dying to talk about the NFL in 1995 in general. I’m still on a roll, analysing old WRs, and so much more. I’m just going to give these ideas a bit more time to gestate moving forward, rather than pushing one on every Monday of the year.

Once again, my sincerest apologies if I’ve caused any disappointment. Getting right down to the meat of the matter, a 22 year old kid bit off more than he could chew, selling his audience (and himself) an idea that was never going to be sustainable, of articles in the SPP style, delivered on a weekly basis. Now the 25 year old version of that kid has to scale it back, or else suffer serious consequences due to diminished quality both in my real job and in my passion project.

It’s all my fault. I brought it on myself, but moving forward I’m going to strive to never put out anything of lesser quality again. Not everything can be S-tier, but the days of rushing or half baking a piece on Sunday night for Monday publication are over. In this way, the change can be a positive move. That’s how I’m going to choose to see it.

I love you all. Thank you for reading my Sports Passion Project. The title of this letter may read ‘the end,’ but to me, this is the beginning of a much healthier interaction between myself and this publication, and for you, I truly believe the increase in quality will make up for the dip in quantity. Only time will tell on that front, but I believe, and if I’m lucky, you will too.

With great love,

Rob Marriage