About Me :)

I never played football. A basketball guy growing up on account of being taller than everyone else, I wasn't nearly ambitious enough to try two sports. I did actually have the chance to play provincial level competitive ball throughout high school. Whenever my team travelled to Toronto to get our asses handed to us by CIA Bounce, I would even share the court with the likes of NBA benchwarmer Kyle Alexander and pro-hopeful Tyler Plummer. That was by far and away my athletic peak. I’ve been rightfully resigned to the writers desk ever since graduating grade school – I’m 20 years old now, currently in my fourth year of a journalism/political science degree at Trent University. I have Kyle Alexander’s Wikipedia page bookmarked on my phone in case I need to show it at a moment’s notice to someone who questions my ability to play high school-level basketball against G-leaguers. Inspiring stuff. All basketball means to me anymore is pickup games at the Y and dunk mixtapes I will shamelessly promote here (somebody’s gotta see them, right?).

So with that considered, what made me so infatuated with football wasn’t the act of playing it. I don’t know what shoulder pads feel like. The backyard bouts with the boys were closer to a WWE royal rumble than a legitimate game of football, and they’re all I have to go off of what it’s like between the hashmarks. What I love about the game is the strategy and team building, generally the sheer amount of thought that goes into what we see on the field. Professional basketball has grace, coordination and feats of raw athleticism that you’ll never believe, but the beauty of football is in the game behind the game. Two teams of 53, every player with their own very niche roles, battling it out for 60 minutes in something close to real-life chess. Basketball gives us pop-culture icons like LeBron, Kobe or MJ, guys who are appointment television for how they have turned their sport into a work of art to single-handedly elevate their team. It’s fantastic. But football gives us the story of years of drafting, signing and developing different types of talent to create a championship team.

Me (right) and Cam, the notorious Madden duo that sparked the NFA

Orchestrated park mixtapes with no defense are all I have to show for four years of competitive basketball anymore - I figured it was time to put away the sneakers and pick up a pen

I like to think of this project as my love letter to the game. A Madden simulation is just a microcosm of the intricacies of the NFL, so diving into it is my way of showing appreciation for all the little factors that go into a team playing winning football in the real world. It was a labor of love every step of the way. I wrote one team at a time - without fail I’d get super stoked to finish a team, hit the left trigger and find a whole new story to research and uncover with the next franchise on the docket. That 84-overall HB with the cool name on Brooklyn would be in the back of my mind for days until I suddenly got an idea for what to write about him at the supermarket or something. Because of this, my notes app is chock full of hastily-written jot notes for what I’m going to sit down and elaborate upon whenever I get the time. And speaking of time, I have a rough breakup, COVID lockdown, and the ability to turn off my camera on Zoom calls to thank for actually getting this pipe dream off the ground. The more arduous work of copying stats, formatting Word files, creating links and generally setting up a website that looks half decent without spending any money did get mind-numbingly boring at times. I'll admit that it may not have gotten done had I not been forced to choose between it and staring into the endless void of self-isolation in quarantine – or worse yet, paying attention to my online classes.

But really, even the boring parts had their virtues. Putting a website together let me look back for once, revisiting and doing the (very) necessary editing of what I wrote back when I first began to take this semi-seriously in the tenth grade. I've found that when you write stuff for years on end, you get put into the headspace of past renditions of yourself when you eventually read it over again. So with the NFA, I have a weird time capsule of a nostalgic period in my life. This little hobby only occupied a small fraction of my mind on a daily basis but did it over multiple years. I came home from my first date with my first girlfriend to discuss the great potential of Jason Chandler, eased my nerves before the 2017 OBA championship by questioning Justin Iodessa’s durability, and recovered the morning after my first university party by bitching about how Elias Floyd is treated in the NFA Twitterverse. And reading all of it again for the first time is almost akin to opening up a diary. I dunno, that stuff matters a lot to me. If you're the same sort of way, I really recommend finding a long-term hobby of any kind to work on in your free time, even if it's just for the luxury of looking back on the process. The eyes of the self-portrait that took you years to paint could remind you of how nervous you were on the first day of your job, when you spent the night before meticulously shading the pupil with the iris. Or the finishing on the backyard deck you worked so hard to build could remind you of throwing yourself into that project to distract from the hurt of a breakup, and you can laugh at how you never thought you'd be over them like you are right now.

My work is far from done here, and hopefully it never will be. For as long as I can find beauty in the team-building aspect of football, I want to continue expressing my admiration with this league. Right now the Wisconsin Badgers (or as they're called in Madden, the Austin Armadillos) look completely hopeless. How cool would it be to watch and analyze every step of the process as Madden tries to turn their ship around? Will Ryn Graham ever improve to become the franchise quarterback they need? As long as I'm still asking these questions, I'll always have that urge to come back and check on my NFA sim.