Thanks and thoughts; 5 years of the Chief in the North Newsletter.

Happy five year anniversary! Let's reflect a little bit.

Five years ago today, I published the first “post” of the Chief in the North Newseletter.

Entitled “Welcome to the Chief in the North Newsletter,” it was a basic introduction to a new website that I hoped would stick. It feels simultaneously like it was much more recent and much longer ago. I wrote what my hopes were for the site, and five years later, I’ve done my best to deliver those hopes by providing (or at least trying to provide) non-clickbait, non-SEO, in-depth coverage of the Chiefs to the best of my ability. That was five years and 596 articles ago.

Today, on the anniversary of this site starting, I want to reflect on the journey a bit while I say thank you. This site (as I’ve often noted) has grown from a “side project” to the sole outlet in which my writing is published. Now that five years has gone by, I want to talk a bit more about how that happened, and perhaps talk about sports media a little bit in general. By doing this, I want to really explain why this site (and all of you supporting it) means so much to me.

If that’s the sort of thing you enjoy reading, great! If not, feel free to wait for the next article to drop (a Kingsley Suamataia film review is next on the list) and let me just say to you THANK YOU. For the rest of you, let’s talk about this site, sports media, and what the future (hopefully) looks like here.

When I talked about why this site was starting five years ago, I was a tad sparse in some of the details. But the farther removed I get from that time, the more interesting I find the circumstances that led to me coming to Substack and the more I think of it as potentially reflective of an industry (sports media) that’s in the middle of a multi-year extreme upheaval, and one that shows no sign of calming down any time soon.

So full disclosure… I’d never planned on starting my own website. That decision was somewhat forced on me in May/June of 2020. The Athletic, where I’d worked for multiple years, was trying to make some tough decisions in a world of uncertainty. When my contract came up for renewal, the option that was presented to me was to take a significant pay cut and reduction in how often I’d write for them… or move on. I don’t blame The Athletic, which treated me quite well for years. They were stuck trying to figure out how to move forward with sports coverage when some people were questioning if there would even BE a 2020/21 NFL season. But that was what was offered me.

This is a very common tale in sports media. In a world where there’s an incredible amount of competition and so many people who are willing to work for pennies (or for free, as I did for years) to get their foot in the door, the reality is that “take it or leave it” offers are the norm for all but the very biggest names (and even they, at times, find themselves on the chopping block). I don’t blame sports content company for working within the framework of the field they are in. That’s life. But it definitely makes for tough sledding when you’re trying to make your way into the field. It’s a field that has always been tough to gain traction, and I think that’s more true today than five years ago.

The sports media field is just as much in flux now as it was back in 2020, though for different reasons. The “tiktokification” of sports content, the rise of the YouTube content provider (think how few podcasts used to livestream and have a video format… now it’s a virtual necessity), the ever-increasing importance of 30-60 second soundbites over anything else, the way social media now utterly dominates an industry that it was once merely a part of… those of us who bemoaned how search engine optimization and clickbait were “ruining” content have raised our eyebrows ever higher at a world in which what seems to matter most isn’t presenting new, unique information, but rather presenting an argument in an ever-louder cacophony of debates. And now, with AI looming as the new Bad Thing That Is Happening In Sports Media, well, it’s safe to say that uncertainty continues to be the norm.

If it seems like I’m digressing a bit, well, that’s pretty normal. But the longer I do this job the more interesting the nature of the industry is to me. There are so many odd things about this job. The way teams take themselves deadly serious, especially in the NFL (sometime I’ll tell the story of how much pushback I, an attorney who specializes in child protection and deals with incredibly private and confidential information every day, got about a media pass at Chiefs training camp). The way that sports discussions mirror our discussions over much more serious topics in terms of tribalism, cognitive dissonance, and shouting over one another. The sheer volume of people who work in sports media and spend most of their time complaining about the sport they cover (I’ve got something of a theory that many of my colleagues, whom I love dearly, would much rather be talking politics… while I do everything I can to avoid it). The way the best content often struggles to gain attention while ridiculous hot take artists and professional aggregators rise to the top… even as most people complain about said hot take artists and aggregators. And so on, and so forth.

The short thought I’m trying to get to is that sports media is a weird world, and one that I’m at times amused to have stuck around in so long. Well, perhaps amazed is a better word for it. I guess I keep waiting for people to get tired of going beyond the box score and talking Chiefs. And yet, 14 years after I started doing this job, here I am. And five years into what was supposed to be a side project, here we are. A place where we get to talk Chiefs all year round. A place where the comment section has remained relatively unscathed. A tiny corner of the internet where, I think, we’ve managed to hang on to talking ball, at least for the most part.

SO much has changed during these five years. Like I said earlier, the sports media landscape has evolved an incredible amount. Newspaper coverage has continued its downward spiral, and legacy media continues to hemorrhage talent and relevancy. Even larger online content providers feel the squeeze, and the newest trend appears to be the rise of the individual content provider, whether it’s via Substack (or a similar outlet), YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, podcasts, or another venue.

Another change that is unique to covering the Chiefs is that they’ve gone from a one-time Super Bowl champion to a legitimate three-time-SB-champ dynasty (perhaps my favorite article to write over the course of this website’s life). Patrick Mahomes has joined legitimate discussions in the “GOAT” argument. Travis Kelce has become the most famous football player in the world while dating the most famous woman on earth. Chris Jones has gone from underrated to an almost universally acknowledged Hall of Famer. And that’s barely scratching the surface of what has changed with the Chiefs.

A lot has changed for me personally during these five years, too. I’m 40 now, and have started getting the “veteran” treatment in both sports media and as an attorney. I’ve watched my oldest son (14 when this site began) grow up into a young man and move out, starting a life on his own. I’ve watched my other kids (4, 7, 9, and 12 when this site began) all grow and change in ways I could have never imagined. My former boss and dear friend Jonathan passed away and I changed jobs to a neighboring county shortly thereafter, as I lacked the strength to endure feeling like I was passing a ghost’s office every day. My grandmother-in-law moved in with our family and then, after a truly wonderful year and a half, passed away after getting a chance to tell me one more time she didn’t think much of me when she first met me two decades ago (I’ll never not laugh at that memory, and I’ll never stop being grateful that I got a chance to change her mind). A lot of things are different than they were.

Some things are the same, though. Arrowhead is still one of my favorite places on Earth, with sights and sounds and BBQ smells that are unlike anywhere else you could visit (including any other NFL team’s stadium). The Z-man remains a perfect sandwich. The red and gold of the Chiefs’ uniform remains a gorgeous complement to a green field on a sunny day. Jas is still the most beautiful woman in the world, my best friend, and my partner in everything, including this site. My kids still fill my heart with love and with worry. My two older sisters and parents are still my biggest fans and supporters. I still can’t stop saying “long road to a short thought” or adding parentheses to virtually every paragraph I write. You can still subscribe to the CITN for the “startup coupon” of $12 a year, and find typos in every post. Josh and Nate and I are still talking Chiefs, though now with our friends at KCSN (run by my old friend BJ Kissel, whom I’ve known longer than almost anyone else in this business).

And I still love football. I love watching it. I love learning about it. I love studying it and trying to find little bits of information that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I love writing about those things and talking to people about what a great game this is. And it really is a great game. Nothing else combines incredible nuance, awe-inspiring feats of athleticism, and raw violence like this crazy, stupid, wonderful sport where the ball isn’t round.

Finally, I still love this job. I still cannot believe that I get to do it. And I absolutely never could if it weren’t for all of you. The people who, when I wasn’t sure what would come next, stood up and supported this site and then KEPT supporting it to the point that it has grown into something I could have never possibly imagined, let alone hoped for. I could say thank you a thousand times in a row and it would not adequately express the gratitude I feel that you’ve all come on this journey with me.

In an ever-changing industry, who knows what the next five years will look like. But my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing here, talking Chiefs and going beyond the box score to learn just a LITTLE more every week about this great game. And I can’t wait to find out what it looks like. If it’s half as good as the last five years has been, I’ll still have it better than anyone else in the world. And with how wonderful all of you have been in supporting this place, I’ve got high hopes that it’ll be even better than that.

Thank you. Happy anniversary, from the Chief in the North. It sure has been a great five years to be a Chiefs fan.

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