This is my 481st Tunnel Vision. It is also the last. This one took 28 years to write.
I also write the weekly Predictions and Projections, where I will have broken down 7,501 games as of the Super Bowl. Projected over 100,000 player performances. Published 15 million words. Through three decades of illnesses, life’s tragedies, and even 28 radiation treatments during the nightmare COVID season of 2020, I never missed a deadline.
Not once.
I have a sign in my office that reads “No one ever asks if the paperboy is okay.” I answered the phone at the circulation desk at the Tyler Morning News when I was in high school. They really don’t ask. They will say unkind things if their paper wasn’t delivered. People just want what they paid for. That’s a guiding light.
But, if you can indulge me this one time, I’ll focus on the one thing you did not come here for – me. And how I got to this day and this final column. A quick look behind the site. A fond farewell after almost three decades.
But first – a football story.
I grew up in Tyler, Texas and when I was in fourth grade, I joined the Andy Woods Raiders flag football team. I loved football. It is the only sport I ever played or followed or cared about. Getting to play as a ten-year-old was a thrill.
But – I wasn’t a starter. We had a great set of athletic and disciplined kids. We had more than enough for a starting lineup so I was a backup. We went undefeated that first year, rolling scores like 60-0 in a world that had not yet discovered the mercy rule. I loved being with my friends but I spent most of my time on the sideline. I intentionally stood next to the head coach, hoping he’d look up from his clipboard and bark, “Dorey – get in there.” Didn’t happen.
I’d play at the end of the game when the other team also trotted out their backups. Lining up across from some under-sized kid sucking on an asthma inhaler wasn’t as much fun as I hoped. But only so many kids could play, and we were already a peewee juggernaut. I wanted more.
The next summer brought excitement. My goal was to become a starter. On that first practice a few weeks from the start of the season, we exercised and ran a big lap around the playground to burn off enough energy so that a group of boisterous boys might actually listen to the coaches for a few minutes.
The head coach went through some housekeeping about jerseys, water and whatever (I stopped listening). And then he pulled out a piece of paper. I hated that piece of paper. He wanted to practice our plays and he read the old starting lineup out loud. Now, as an adult, that made perfect sense. We demolished every opponent, so why wouldn’t he use that as a starting point? Nothing was set in stone, just written in pencil on a folded piece of paper from last year.
But I was an 11-year-old kid. In my mind, I could already see another season of standing next to the coach and dodging him when he ran down the sidelines as we scored another long touchdown. I reasoned it was not fair. That I did not have a chance. Living on the sideline of a fifth-grade flag football team wasn’t what I wanted. Just weekly proof that I did not measure up enough to play the only game that I cared about.
So, in my disappointment, I decided to quit. Screw it. That made sense. I wasn’t good enough, and even if I was, I would not get the chance. After dinner that night, my father motioned me into the den.
“I hear you want to quit football.”
I was ready. I had my arguments ready for whatever direction the talk took.
“Oh yeah, just not into it, I guess. No big deal.”
“But I thought you were looking forward to it.”
“Okay, look, I’m not going to start, and I’d only get a few plays, and it is not fair, and I don’t have any chances, and the coach keeps running into me…”
He stopped me.
“Hold on. Answer two questions.”
This was expected. I was ready.
“First – do you like football?”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Unfair. He knew I loved football.
“Yes. But sometimes that is not enough.” I thought that was a great counter.
“Okay, can you look me in the eye and honestly tell me that you gave 100% every time you practiced and every time you played?”
Dammit.
“Okay, so no, I did not give 100% on every play. We were already so far ahead that no one cared anymore. There was no reason to …”
He waved off my defense.
“Son, you love football. And you have not given 100%. David, how could they know who you are? I’ll make you a deal. You go to practices for the next two weeks and give 100% all of the time. And at the end of two weeks, if you still want to quit, then okay.”
Again, being an 11-year-old knucklehead, all I heard was suffer through two more weeks with a team that won’t give you a chance and where it is not fair. I wasn’t motivated, I wasn’t disappointed, I was just mad.
And so, I held up my part. When I went to practice, I did not tell anyone. I just tried as hard as I could on everything. Ran hard. Paid attention. Did my best on all I was given to do. Just paying off my debt to quit. I remember the offense practicing and they called me to fill in for defensive tackle. When the ball was snapped, I kept disrupting the play. The coaches yelled at my friend who wasn’t blocking me, and I felt really bad for him. But I had to fulfill my part of the deal, and I would soon be gone, so it did not matter. After I shot through again, the coach said, “I am sick of this,” and made me switch places with my friend.
Naturally, I interpreted it to mean, “Let’s embarrass you.” So, I got mad. And I blocked while the coaches watched and whispered. It went on with that sort of thing for the next week until I had finally fulfilled my part of the deal with my dad. It was the final practice before our first game and at the end, coach had all the kids sit down. I saw him pull that piece of paper out of his pocket. I picked at the grass and decided who to tell that I quit and what to say.
Then I felt the pain of someone slugging my upper arm a little too hard, which is the only way boys that age know how to hit. “Hey stupid, get up – he called your name.”
A meaningless and inconsequential event in the world. A huge lesson for an 11-year-old boy. Never underestimate the power of a moment to a kid.
It taught me not to listen to those voices in my head about fairness, what others think, or comparing yourself.
It taught me that if you really want something, then give it 100%, balls out, get-out-of-my-way, commitment. Keep your head down and the lights on. Get tired. Get mad. Don’t stop.
I always wanted to thank Dad for that life lesson. Finally, one night 50 years later, we had a heartfelt talk and I recalled that moment, how it impacted my life and how grateful I was. How it guided me and drove me through so many goals and challenges that eventually led me to The Huddle. He nodded but all he could say was “good for you.” He passed away a few hours later.
When I was 26, I returned to college to finish my degree. That drive helped me get through five exhausting semesters of working full-time and attending school full-time while on the Dean’s List.
A few years later, I switched from being an Operations Manager at EDS to a technical role despite having no education or experience in programming. With a high failure rate, I agreed to be fired if I failed. I had a family and a mortgage as added motivation. I turned on the lights, kept my head down, and spent nights teaching myself enough coding to catch up. I loved the analytics, logic and problem-solving.
I still kept my eye out for whatever could be The Next Big Thing for me.
At my 1996 EDS fantasy football league draft, my friend and fantasy football nemesis Whitney Walters leaned over and asked, “Ever think about opening a fantasy football website?” I owe Whitney a lot.
The Huddle
The Huddle was born in January 1997 at a Round Table Pizza in Rancho Cordova, California. Just two system engineers who loved fantasy football and saw an unserved opportunity on an emerging internet. There were no “best practices” to copy. There were no preconceived notions as to what a website was or could be. There was nothing. The first year, we wrote the site in raw HTML. Producing the site was more programming than journalism.
As someone who lived for football, analysis, writing, and technology, The Huddle was the collision of everything that I loved. It checked every box. I already knew hard work, so a second job was nothing unusual. You cannot imagine the thrill of doing something that had never been done. The joy of discovering “your thing.”
Those early days were straight-up intoxicating.
The internet was a techno-Wild West. With websites popping up like boom towns and disappearing just as quickly. There were no rules. I loved the saying,” What is the difference between a mega-corporation website and one that a teenager threw together in an afternoon? Answer – Nothing, really.” It was an incredible leveling of the playing field, a world where all that mattered was the quality of your content. Suddenly, it didn’t matter what you looked like, what school you went to, who you knew, or what you did in your free time. You were measured 100% on what you had to say.
Email was new and more personal then. I would write an article late at night, publish it, and when I woke, run to the computer to the dozen or more emails from people asking questions or just caring to comment how much they enjoyed it. I answered over 2,000 emails that first year.
We innovated many things in those early days. As the scorer of my work league, I had the stats and spreadsheets that I used to develop player strength of schedule based on fantasy matchups. It was my secret weapon. I’m sure others would have figured it out, but ours was the first ever published. Other measurements and techniques along the way helped differentiate us, at least until they became common on other sites.
Like some grumpy old man, I often think “you don’t know how easy you have it,” about fantasy football players and other web sites. When passing targets became a popular stat, I spent one season manually recording every pass to every player in every game and then adding them to our weekly stats.
I’ve seen the progression of fantasy football from simple work and family leagues to million-dollar contests involving thousands of participants. The introduction of reception points. The death of mock drafts and the birth of “best ball” leagues. From not knowing your weekly results until your league scorekeeper told you on Tuesday to instantly knowing everything all the time about everyone.
I saw the NFL try to kill fantasy football. They wanted nothing that remotely suggested gambling and sent out threatening letters to league software sites and contests to cease their operations based on “right to publicity” for the stats. They sent a legal minion to those early conventions to take names. The NFL has since embraced fantasy football and now happily dove head-first into gambling, considering the bulk of advertising, Vegas venue, and even official partners.
I remember when the NFL draft was just a listing in the back of the USA Today sports page. When The Huddle started, I had to cut out the box scores from the newspaper and tape them to pages in a binder as my reference guide.
But the way of the world is to always get bigger, faster, and more complex. Fantasy football is no different. Keep up or get left behind. It just is.
What began as two friends working in spare bedrooms on a website that cost $29.99 a month became so much more. Our ISP kicked us out for crashing their servers that first year. Ten years later, when we sold our ownership in the business, it had a write-up in the Wall Street Journal. It’s a great country.
Through it all, in my mind I was never here to feed information to the masses. When I wrote, I’d picture some parent up late at night holding a sick kid while surfing the internet. And if I could help them beat the loudmouth at work, learn a few things and maybe have a chuckle, then I did my job.
It is hard to walk away from Everything You Ever Wanted. But, for a variety of reasons, it is time.
Time to raise my head and turn off the light. I’m not sure who I’ll be without The Huddle. But I know who I was – someone who lived his own version of the American Dream. Who exceeded every goal I set for myself. Who spent the last 28 years passionately devoted to something we created from nothing. Like that 11-year-old boy, I still love football. And I can look at myself in the mirror and know that I gave it 100%. Life isn’t what you prove to others, it’s what you prove to yourself.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people. Whitney first and foremost. But also everyone who worked with us on the site. John Tuvey. Cory and Ryan Bonini. Countless great writers. Carl, the imaginary technical support we blamed when anything broke. A wealth of friends I’ve known in the industry. Andrew Carey and Steve Gallo for always being there.
Most of all, I offer a heartfelt appreciation to you. Someone who gave me a moment in their day, who allowed me to pursue a rewarding life’s purpose in the ways that I measure success. I hope I helped. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
It’s been a blast. The time of my life.
And just one last thing.
Thanks Dad.
DMD
P.S. Just for clarity, I will be with the site until April and help with the transition. The site remains as is and there’s a great set of analysts to take over. I already scaled back this past season. I’ll still be around the boards. I’m not disappearing.
Now get back to work…
