For this analysis, I combed through the data from 1970 to present and calculated the average annual number of Pro Bowlers, first-team AP All-Pros, and Hall of Famers by franchise and by positional group to help determine which teams were the best at each position. The data was used to help guide some of my choices here (chart at the end).
This is a piece of a much longer post I made for a site I wrote for in 2022, but I'm breaking it up by positional group to make it more consumable and focus on one position at a time.
Notes:

• Sack totals before 1982 are the unofficial sack numbers recently added to Pro Football Reference
• All references to All-Pro are first-team Associated Press All-Pro only
• HOF seasons for each team are tabulated only from the season the player played for each team (example: Washington gets 5 Champ Bailey seasons, Denver gets 10)

Vikings

A defensive unit doesn’t earn the moniker The Purple People Eaters unless they are one of the most commanding and fearsome fronts in the NFL. The Vikings dominant legacy on the defensive line stems from the 1970s but it didn’t end there. From 1970-1976 the Vikings had a top five defense in points allowed six times as they went 75-22-1 and made three Super Bowl appearances. The line was anchored by two Hall of Famers in Carl Eller and future Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, Alan Page. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s two more HOFers Chris Doleman and John Randle would continue the tradition that the Purple People Eaters began in the late ‘60s. Doleman would end his career with 150.5 sacks, the 7th most in NFL history. The four Hall of Famers, Doleman, Randle, Eller, and Page plus 4-time AP All-Pro Jared Allen combined for a total of 706 sacks and make up 25% of the top-20 list for career sacks. Kevin Williams a 300+ pound run stuffer who could also get after the quarterback (career best 11.5 sacks in 2004) was the linchpin of the defensive line in the early to late 2000s. He would go on to make six Pro Bowls and earn five AP All-Pros. All-in-all the Vikings had a HOF defensive lineman on their roster 44% of the time since the merger, and in thirteen of the 52 years they had two HOFers on the D-line, while averaging nearly a Pro Bowler every season.

Rams

Deacon Jones was arguably one of the most feared players in NFL history, and although most of his dominance was in the 1960s when he had three seasons with 20+ sacks, he kicked off the post-merger Rams era with a Pro Bowl season at the age of 32. He wouldn’t do much for the Rams after his 1970 season, but he set the stage for the rest of the decade in which the Rams would have a top-5 defense for points allowed in seven of the 10 years. The Rams never won a Super Bowl in the ‘70s, but they would make the Conference Championship half of the time. The Rams had a HOFer on the defensive line every single season during the 1970s, often more than one. In 1971 their defensive line had THREE HOFers in Deacon Jones, Jack Youngblood, and Merlin Olsen. 1971 would be Jones’ last season with the Rams, but Olsen and Youngblood would go on to terrorize opponents throughout the decade and rack up 13 Pro Bowls and six AP All-Pros between them. Book-ending this reign of terror is certain future Hall of Famer Aaron Donald who came up big in the final moments of Super Bowl LVI by stopping the Bengals on their final drive for no gain on 3rd and one and then pressuring QB Joe Burrow into an errant throw on 4th and one before and finally jumping to his feet and pointing to his ring finger as the Rams won the Super Bowl. Donald has known nothing but accolades and awards since he entered the league, winning Defensive Rookie of the Year, a Pro Bowl in each of his eight seasons, seven AP All-Pros and three AP Defensive Player of the Year awards. Jones (173.5 sacks) and Youngblood (151.5 sacks) are ranked 3rd and 6th all time, while Donald leads all players in sacks with 98 since he has entered the league.

Cowboys

Offense wins games, defense wins championships. Although this phrase doesn’t apply in the modern NFL, there is always a thread of truth to a common adage and the Cowboys exemplify this saying. From 1970 to 1995 the Cowboys have been to eight Super Bowls, winning five, and their defense was never outside of the top ten during those Super Bowl years. Their success was, in part, due to having an overabundance of great defensive lineman. The Cowboys never went to a Super Bowl without a Hall of Fame defensive Lineman. HOFer Bob Lilly (Dallas from 1961-1974) went to two Super Bowls, HOFer Randy White (Dallas from 1975-1988) went to three Super Bowls, and in a short 5-year stint with the Cowboys, HOFer Charles Haley won three Super Bowls while anchoring a defense that averaged the third fewest points per season. Since their last Super Bowl in 1996, the Cowboys have had their share of Pro Bowlers, with players like La'Roi Glover, Jay Ratliff, and DeMarcus Lawrence, but it is the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s that really carry their legacy at the defensive line position.
A case can be made for…
Bills
Key Players: Bruce Smith (HOF, career sacks leader), Kyle Williams, Fred Smerlas, Marcell Dareus
Eagles
Key Players: Reggie White (HOF, 2nd all-time in career sacks) Fletcher Cox, Charlie Johnson, Hugh Douglas
​
https://preview.redd.it/u2gofbeym65b1.png?width=780&format=png&auto=webp&s=05057761f61f51fed42bd46e270b6503fe651e94
I hope to be working on some new analyses and OC in the off-season, but things at home have been super busy and I haven't had the time. So although this is recycled content for me, you all have not seen it yet (the charts were probably pasted here, but the not words). If you like this, I'll make this into a series rolling it out position by position over the off-season. (I think I did QB about 6 months ago on here).

A while ago, I posted a test that was to determine what kind of writer someone is, based on what part of the “modernist” spectrum they fall into. Part of the reason why I did this was to see how much I understand about the subject matter, since I will always have a postmodernist tell me that I am clueless as to what any of these are. Another reason is to have writers start realizing why they think the way they do, and possibly start questioning why they write how they do. I found out that, from the dozen or so people who took the test and posted their results to me, that most people I encounter and get along with online are modernist. A lot of these people reject mainstream media and they are secluded in alternative media sites because they don’t get along with the current overton window that’s among popular sites. I think it’s safe to say a lot, if not all, of these people are anti-woke, and they received 1 or 0 answers on the woke aspect of the test.
If I can pat myself on the back for anything, at least I can say I got the woke part correct.
Although the buzzwords I used for woke might be cheating since we all know I’m referring to something woke when I say something like “inclusivity” or “intersectionality” or “oppression”, because anyone who listens to even something like Joe Rogan will know these terms and treat them like they’re dripping with vomit and diarrhea. A lot of us, especially the classical liberal, center to center-right types, and even the center-left types, are tired of this woke nonsense. Even some guy who drinks beer while watching football and shopping at a basic store like Target is tired of this tomfoolery.
So this followup is to address a lot of the complaints I received and also to bring in some insight into how I wanted to conceptualize the test and how it turned out. I will also explain the relevancy of this type of test since some are wondering why something like scoring modernist means anything.
In philosophy, you are to hit 5 branches in order for your philosophy to be considered “full” or at least “full enough” to be granted a name. These 5 are:

1. Metaphysics (study of existence)
2. Epistemology (study of knowledge)
3. Ethics (study of action)
4. Politics (study of force)
5. Aesthetics (study of art)

If you hit all 5 of these at least once, you have a full range of addressing the stuff that makes up a philosophy. I tried to reverse engineer these 5 categories into 22 questions, and after the fact(meaning this evening), I realized that I should have had 4 questions for each category and then 2 questions about the reader and then the writer. The number 22 is related to the major arcana in tarot, with the 2 extras being the fool(the writer) and the world(the reader). That or maybe something like “what exactly do you write in your story?” and then that can relate to worldbuilding or something. It would have to be a question that lets us know what the person sees as a good world to write in the first place, because then that would show us the world they aim for, which is related to their worldview.
Or maybe to question what they read so that we can see what a writer finds interest in, so that it correlates with what they would write.
That was not critiqued by others, but I know I messed up on that. I was listening to a Jordan Peterson video where he said that a good survey questionnaire takes months of planning to get the wording right for the questions and the answers, and I looked at my test and saw I did it in a day, and went “well, I think I messed up, yeah.” My own critique will be taken into consideration so that I can remake the test and make it better. To repeat what I said in the test: I wish to use this to determine who to avoid when hiring and working with people, because anyone scoring even something like 2 answers on the woke mentality is something to be concerned about.
Other critique involves question 1 where the phrase “copy it” should be changed to “emulate it”. Yeah, I agree, that makes more sense, since copy makes it sound like someone is not putting their own spin on it or putting it in their own words. Imitate, match, resemble, something that intends to retain the purpose but including your own position on the matter. Question 17, how we get our knowledge, is a very open question about epistemology, and that one seems to have given a few people the woke answer by accident, even if they aren’t woke in the way they answer. The problem with the term “lived experience” is that people think it’s a normal term and it is one of the few woke terms that go over some people’s heads. The term is used commonly in correspondence with articles that feature globohomo artwork and they talk about how it’s important to have a person in your corporation or non-profit organization who holds “lived experience” and they are referring to living as a black person to know what a black person feels.
I find this incredibly woke because, as I’ll explain further later on, the woke are saying that the only way to know something is to be that thing, thus forcing writers to be, say, autistic in order to write an autistic character. Or they must be a woman to write a woman. Or they must be a black to write a black. This enforcement is what causes the demand for diversity hires, because somehow these diversity hires hold mystical magical knowledge that nobody else in the company would even dare to understand or comprehend unless they checked off some boxes first. On top of that, the term “pragmatic action” was poor wording and that’s my bad. I was trying to say something like “scientific realization” in order to attach the modernist to science. Something that is both pragmatic(able to be done practically) and part of some kind of education/training. You’ve done it, you’ve learned about it, you see others do it, that can be the modernist idea of knowledge.
Other than those two, I think every other question went over rather well, but I will still enhance them to be worded better as time goes on and as I revisit it with more of an organized “5 sets of 4 and the 2 big ‘uns” in mind. But then there comes the elephant in the room. The scoundrel who dared to question my authority and make a critique about the test. How dare they and stuff.
Jokes aside, I really like this kind of critique and it’s great that she put it into clear questions that I can firmly address. I like it when people are clear. It’s much better than that obfuscation thing the postmodernists always do when they complain about me without really having a reason other than something where they don’t like labels or they were offended that I dared to mention any category of anything. Page Zaplendam, a fellow writer, brought up 3 important questions which you can see for yourself here:

1. Where are the definitions of the terms?
2. How do you justify reducing things to something like woke?
3. How do you prevent people from rejecting pre-modernism?

I’ll address the first one to then follow through with the rest of the answers, because they all go in a long chain of “why, why, why” and “how, how, how”.
To begin the explanation, we’re going to need to establish what modernism is so that the others can be explained. It’s the word that created the reason we see a difference in aesthetics like this because this was the moment we engaged in what’s called the enlightenment. During the early 17th century and around that time, people started to remove their dependency on kingdoms and instead create nations and industry. Religion was also being questioned because scientific advancements through record keeping allows people to give better assessments on what causes something to happen in the world. The view of the world started to become more natural and so naturalism was common, as well as rationalism and empiricism. People were using logic to make their decisions and data to come to conclusions, rather than faith or scripture from prior.
During this time, the modern age, traditions were tarnished and deemed as unnecessary. Medicine allowed people to praise science instead of pray for a mystical cure. Predictions of weather with meteorology allowed people to reduce famines and starvation. Printing presses allowed books to become more common, machinery allowed more production of goods, and life went from depending on neighbors to depending on communities and global trade. This dramatic change in both lifestyle and mentality allowed art to enter the modernist art era, which is determined as art that experiments to search for new meaning and objectivity without the necessity of a deity, tradition, or the supernatural.
Mythology became psychology, alchemy became academia, and religion became fandom. Everything mentally changed under modernism to create an environment of experimentation, the romances took over, which led to the pulp adventures and existentialist works of things like noir. Weird tales brought us ideas of cosmicism, thanks to the lack of god or at least the lack of a god who cares about humanity. With this freedom from religion, the mostly liberal environment of modernism allowed people to make up their own rules, their own ideas of what’s real, and thus we were able to focus more on the individual, rather than the collective. Stephen Hicks has a great video where he lectures about how modernism came to be and what it is, but I can simplify it into the 5 categories he has on his chart.
Metaphysics: naturalism
Epistemology: empiricism and reason
Human Nature: Tabula Rasa(everything mental is gained from experience)
Ethics: individualism
politics/economics: liberal capitalism
As you can see, modernism caused this reliance on the self, but also reliance on science as a replacement for religion. It caused the worship of money, while also opening people up to other ideas thanks to the liberal mindset. The liberty to engage with other things allowed people to mingle with both good and bad ideas. This is actually why people, like James Lindsay, say that liberals caused things like Nazism and Communism to come into fruition, because the liberal is so open and accepting that they allow terrible ideas to take over the top of the social structure and they think it won’t touch them if they are on the bottom. This is also how dictators were able to trick people into treating them like a God, because the dictator convinced people that they were able to answer prayers and did this during their campaigns to get elected or during the revolution while they’re beheading their opponents in the streets.
In other words, the uprising of democracy had people rely on voting in the same way as people relied on prayers, but here it’s where we pray to a natural government and hope they do something we want.
One thing that we don’t like to realize is that colonization occurred because of a scientific superiority among the Europeans, and this scientific advancement was caused by years of wars and immense dedication to their royalty. Then there were areas they colonized that had a crazy amount of gold, such as Australia and the Aztec empire, and this abundance of gold allowed trade to skyrocket, while Indian trade and the silk road allowed wealth to spread across the globe. Diamonds and gold found in Africa, like a sick joke from God to force white people to go to such a hellhole to get the diamonds in the rough. It’s not that white people wanted to go around and rule the world. It’s that enlightened explorers and merchants wanted to make a crazy amount of money and these environments were inhabited by people who left these literal gold mines untapped, and these explorers used technology to take over.
No wonder modernism was full of that toga wearing utopia sci-fi stuff!
It’s not hard to realize why the Europeans took over entire empires with small groups of conquistadors. They had armor, guns, ships with cannons. Those Chinese must have their face red realizing they are the ones who sold them black powder. Every alchemist should feel bad and stuff that they are the reason guns were used versus the people who didn’t have guns. It was such a destructive force to use guns against savage tribes and kingdoms because it was both physical and psychological. It was like dealing with metallic robots who fired lightning from their arms and filled the area with a concealing smoke. That’s like showing a caveman a cellphone, their brains instantly melt trying to comprehend what’s going on.
So people are angry at the modernists for being… rational and empirical, and I guess being urbanized or industrialized. People are mad at capitalism for being effective and a good way to globally get along. They’re mad at liberals for being okay with race mixing. The utter nerve of such horrid actions. How dare people mix. I’ll make sure to tell my own future mixed kids that they should be ashamed of themselves for having parents who came from different parts of the Earth and that’s about it.
So modernism, do I like it?
Well, it’s not bad. A lot of my favorite stuff is modernist and usually when people say they want to go back to the old days, they point at modernism as the example. Hell, a lot of postmodernists now are saying they want to go back to modernism, and then they say they don’t, because they feel like it's superior, but they hate the idea of accepting that it’s modernist. I mean, that’s why it’s called postmodernism, it’s the thing after modernism is gone, it’s the rejection of modernism and also pre-modernism. But more on that one later.
I noticed a lot of people got mostly modernist as their answers on the test and it makes sense. Many people online, especially on alternative social media, will be actual liberals who are open to different ideas, which allows them to engage with things that both offend them and possibly something they see as evil. They’re open to having their minds changed and they are always willing to learn more because there’s a big idea on learning more and experimenting, which is something I can relate to because I’m always trying out new restaurants in my area and I don’t mind trying a genre that I’m not familiar with. For me, I have a bit of that liberal mindset because I try out a lot of things I’m not familiar with and I end up liking some stuff, but I usually stick to what I established as my firm ideas from prior.
For example, when I was a kid I hated eating beans and I refused to eat fish that wasn’t canned tuna. Now, after being more open, I love salmon and I love eating beans, which dramatically helped my nutritional intake. There is a healthiness involved with experimenting and there is also a risk factor. But if you know how to avoid dangers, I don’t see a problem with trying out something like a new genre you’re not used to, just to see if you can get into it.
I mention this because the modernist writer will experiment, but will also claim a truth that comes from rationalism, which assumes the world we live in is logical. Even if it’s chaotic and absurd, they’ll say it’s logical, because it’s predictable and we can interact with it. This allows their writing to hold to formulas through things like pulp, while also experimenting through things like weird fiction. There is repetition that happens, and this is why genres became a big thing, so the reader can tell what form of repetition they want to deal with through what they are familiar with. This caused what’s called a comfort zone, which is the state of mind where a person feels at ease because there is an abundance of familiarity and a lack of unwanted challenges. Genres create these comfort zones, and this is then where we have to talk about individualism.
Liberalism has the problem of causing individualism to slowly become sophistry and egotism. The person declaring they are the one who is to be relied on and they are the ones who make up their own rules becomes a person who can’t tell who they’re obeying. Especially if that person puts something above themselves, like race, or science, or nation, or the opinions of others through democracy. Thanks to romanticism during this modernist time, we were able to feel like we had an abundance of freedom and capability, but then barely a century later the rise of Naizsm and Communism caused people to realize that this capability is in relation to what the shadow is capable of. The darkest, most disturbing and destructive actions a person is capable of, beyond their imagination and beyond what we’d consider a “human act”.
This quick change into the most dangerous entity nearby is why I don’t trust anarchists when they say their utopia would be functional. When it comes to real life, that doesn’t work, we need a more powerful overarching thing to keep that shadow in check, and we need that entity above the human to be in check of its own shadow on top of that. And this shadow is also what causes the modernist to engage with things like dada and a hatred of art to the point where they can say the work is for them and them alone, or that all art is equal, down to where a turd on a pedestal is the same as the Mona Lisa.
The pro of modernism is a focus on the individual, which promotes movements like poetic realism and neorealism, which grants a look into everyday lives. The mundane can be put into the forefront and average people can feel like they relate, which allows the average person to buy the work. That is a great plus, and it’s why the most popular shows out there are stuff that involves soap opera style drama and an environment that is simple, like a hospital or a police station. The sitcom is a result of modernism, because only a modernist would find value in seeing a family hang around their house while you’re sitting in your house with your family watching someone else in their house with their family.
Now let’s get on with pre-modernism, after all of that introduction is said and done. Pre-modernism is everything that came before this enlightenment and this separation from God. Atheists like to say how atheism has been popular forever and they have simply been suppressed, but something crazy that they ignore is that every civilization, without ever talking to each other, before any contact with anyone else, became a religious, spiritual, civilization. We even have a name for this basic religion, called animism. This natural desire to be religious in humans comes from how we think when we are young, as well as how we think when we are not relying on science or even words.
I know this sounds strange but we think more in pictures and visions than we do with words when we don’t know how to read. Reading unlocks a vast amount of knowledge that can be gained practically instantly, but a lack of language in our ability to think causes an abundance of symbolism in our head to fill in the gaps, meaning the ability to read locks away this visual aspect. When we’re babies, we view everything as giant, threatening, and frightening. And why not? We’re this tiny soft thing that has a skull that can easily be dented and we’re unable to feed ourselves. We need someone to throw food into our mouths like bananas into the mouth of a hippo at a zoo. We have our parents doing stuff for us, and so our brain right away connects the two.
Stuff happening around us is caused by something like a parent, like an authority, like a sky father and earth mother. The father gives me brain stuff and the mother gives me food stuff. But then we’ll grow up and realize that something like the wind moves on its own, the moon comes up to replace the sun on its own, and the seasons change on their own. There’s something we can’t see that’s doing this, something beyond the sky and under the ground, and everywhere we can’t see, especially behind our eyeballs. There’s this strange image that appears behind my vision that is not of the world but of my mind, and I conjured it.
And if I didn’t conjure it, I had someone else put it in my head through a spell, in the form of words, which cast the symbol to occur in my mind. Writers in the pre-modernist age are spellcasters, wizards, that make sure something is explained about the mysterious and supernatural world that is beyond the stuff we see around us. This “rejection of the average” causes the pre-modernist writer to talk about stuff that are not only real, but hyper-real. It doesn’t speak about an individual and it’s not for an individual, because it’s attaching everyone under the same umbrella and form. This is why I find poor interpretations of mythology humorous but also rather useless.
People will look at something like Greek mythology where a god has a child with their sister and go “well, isn’t incest a bad thing?” Not only do they miss the point, but they forget that it's a god we’re talking about and it’s not a human. It’s not some biological thing standing in front of you. It’s the supernatural, it’s beyond something like biology. Or better yet when someone reads the bible and goes “why did Adam take a rib out to get a woman? Couldn’t God just make a woman without taking his rib?”
It’s like, you missed the point and you’re ignoring the importance of symbolism, and this symbolism grants all of the meaning that you’re missing from the bible. Yes, Eve is made from Adam, and yes, it takes a rib, because rib is a bone and bone is structure. A rib is near a heart, a protector of heart. Heart is courage, love, emotions, stuff that makes our blood pump. Blood is a humor based on air, and air is one of the 4 elements. The connection goes on and on and on, because this mythology is all connected together into one giant story that goes beyond the words stated in the story. Each tiny noun or verb means way more than it lets up to mean. I’ve been studying mythology for a while, and really trying to look into them before I say anything about them, and there is so much inner history with mythology that’s both present and reachable, but it’s practically endless with how everything connects.
And at the same time, all of this is essential, of a form, symbolic, and objective.
This relation to religion in pre-modernism causes the definition to be something like “the art form that depicts hyper-reality in an objective truth that involves the supernatural as a source of the natural and as the source of truth.
Stephen Hicks puts the politics of the pre-modernist as feudalism, but it’s more like monarchy, where you believe that there should be a king, because someone has a family line that was sacred enough to treat like one. In pre-modernism, we had ancestor worship in every culture, because your family line was important to keeping your existence relevant. This is because everything in the pre-modern age involved titles, which were granted by an authority, and many times this authority is a god or an ancestor.
Your title within your family is in relation to your family members and your last name determines your family’s title for others to recognize. If someone was a smith, they would get the last name smith, like say John the smith just becomes John Smith, and they will endow their established trade to their next of kin. So if the son of John Smith wants to make a living, he’s going to be a smith as well. There is this lineage and family business that is treated seriously, because if you step out of this title, you’ll have to create your own. People could do that by entering a trade or a guild, by learning from others, from gaining a title after being born a bastard, or whatever they could to get a title.
But the key factor is that title is important to the pre-modernist. What’s even more important is form, because this religious mentality creates the environment that perfection is possible. A metaphysical manifestation separate from the material world that is able to be aimed towards and sought after, even if unable to be reached. This was well portrayed in characters like Jesus, which Christianity dedicated itself to fulfill the traits of Jesus, due to Christianity being a religion where people follow the teachings of Jesus.
I would say that every religion had their own type of Jesus, the perfect form that someone or something has to uphold and look up to as inspiration.
Later on, alchemy came out of the prototype phase and started to connect all of these religions and symbols with each other to create more overarching symbolism that went for more core ideas. At this point, people could only argue against combinations and where something is in a hierarchy, rather than the validity of the claim of something like a single god or a creator. Sects of religions were made in order to determine different end goals, or different ideas in how a ritual should be done, or whether something like a church is important for worship, and these were the biggest sources of dispute possible.
You either followed God's will or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you were a heathen. Heathens are sent to the bad place, believers go to the good place. We have a supernatural aspect of our body, beyond our body, beside our body, that went there for us, usually in the sense of a soul or spirit. The mind is an intermediary between the body and spirit that allows communication between the two at all times. This was usually depicted with gods like Psyche or Hermes or any other messenger god.
The gods would speak to us with omens and with us using clairvoyance. Any pattern in front of us or up in the stars could be used as a means to decipher a supernatural message. This message was easily able to repeat itself because there was an objective meaning to everything, which is why something like Zodiacs are constantly watched even to this day. Pre-modernist art retains this tradition of using mythology and symbolism to depict truths about the world. Romanticism was an attempt to return to this truth telling style during the modernist era, but Romanticism was absent of the religious aspect and was more of something like a neo-alchemical way of handing stories, where symbols were kept basic and for individual progress instead of a collective one.
A big part of pre-modernism is collectivism, especially the collective unconscious, which Jung coined later on when referring to his more pre-modernist analysis of psychology that heavily relied on alchemy and mythology. We used mythology to say something of value, with a universal or at least human level of objectivity, and the only way to miss the message is to deny that symbolism exists for them. Or at least, your level of symbolism in your interpretation would have to be so low resolution that it misses every point entirely and has zero context as to why mythology is important in the first place.
Mythology grants the idea that our world holds order, while the modernist idea is more about how the world is chaotic and we hold order to shape the world better. Fables grant the idea that particular personalities do particular things, while modernism declares that things change or can be grey and shows how. The black and white morality of the pre-modernist merged into grey once modernism kicked in, because there is the lack of theism under modernism.
We’re half way through the explanation and now we come to postmodernism.
Pre-modernism establishes that the supernatural causes order to cause truth, modernism changed that to say a secular natural world causes chaos to have us find truth. So what does postmodernist do to change all of that?
It rejects both and says both pre-modernism and modernism are wrong, and instead says everything that can be perceived is subjective and the objective is unknown to us. Stephen Hicks says in his video that postmodernists are really intelligent and well read into an abundance of stuff, and he’s impressed by that. I would have to disagree with him because it’s not like they read everything they did in order to understand it. They read everything and continue searching because they intend on claiming it’s not true, and use their personal interpretation to claim such. It’s very much like when a person studies mythology to then say “you know, the gods committing incest and magically transforming is really weird.”
Before I get deep into postmodernism, I would like to explain the concept of realism. Realism, in both philosophy and art, is to depict a thing as how it truthfully is. There is accuracy, there is something there that really exists, and it has attributes that causes it to really exist. Both modernism and pre-modernism have this as an axiom. Postmodernism on the other hand is ANTI-realism.
You cannot believe in something being “real” as a postmodernist because to claim something is real is to claim an objective truth, which a postmodernist is allergic to doing. They are unable to claim anything as true, because there is no proof for them to use, thus any statements they make must be an opinion and any statement they see must be perceived as an opinion as well. In all honesty, I have trouble finding postmodernists who go this far down the rabbit hole. All of them focus on subjectivity, but they’ll still try to tell others that things can be real in a colloquial way that lets them blend in with modernists. It’s hard to get people to follow you when you claim things aren’t real, so there is a form of deception and contradiction that occurs, but it’s also acceptable to the postmodernist.
This is because postmodernists don’t care about logic, and anything they want to claim as “true” is based on a social subjectivism that can also be considered an overton window that shows them what is acceptable to say and what isn’t. A lot of them try to push it, others try to blend in with it, with the intensity depending on how far they want to push their deconstructionism and reductionism. For example, phrases like “we’re all just stardust floating around” is a way for the postmodernist to seem deep with their reductionism, but it’s actually their way of saying they are nihilistic while trying to sound deep and poetic.
Stephen Hicks does have an amazing point in his presentation where he says truth no longer matters to the postmodernist and what does matter is power. That kind of concept comes from Nietzsche’s will to power (which is why Nietzsche is considered a proto-postmodernist, one who helped birth it into existence) and Marx’s historical materialism. The thought that human labor forms the material basis of society, and this idea being spread out into every 3rd world country(aka communist country during the cold war) means that a big chunk of the world is convinced of this concept of power through labor and power through capital that’s seen as “stolen labor” when it’s a bourgeoisie.
This leaning into Marxist terminology, thanks to communists and hippies, causes postmodernist politics to be considered leftist, and exclusively leftist. There is no way for a right wing postmodernist to even occur because the right winger believes in a truth through natural rights and there is no way to remove that aspect. This is why Stephen Hicks calls the postmodernist political and economic idea socialist, which what he really means is leftist. Although, socialist works a bit more for the political aspect since socialism is a wonky word that means whatever the socialist wants it to mean.
They think the worker owns the means of production and that some form of social relevancy should happen and the rest is dependent on what they want to advocate for. Not surprisingly, this socialist aspect quickly turned into syndicalism and later corporatism when relying on the government to enforce this social power upon the masses, also known as a cult of personality. The cult leader, or leaders, tell everyone that they have power, they tell everyone that they’re special, the people don’t question it because they think it’s a common opinion, and so the cult grows unrestrained. We see this at all times when people will both hold water for a politician for any little thing and also attack their opposition for any little thing, no matter how much of a double standard or fallacy they apply to their advocacy.
To the postmodernist, advocacy is labor geared towards power, with advocacy being the only thing you can do to socially stay relevant.
When it comes to postmodernist media, the key idea is exploitation, because the goal is to get as many views as possible and break as many boundaries as possible. Modernist rating systems are pushed and pushed constantly into exploitation to the point where new ratings are made and R rated material becomes the new norm. The grindhouse is a common place and is normalized, even though before these would be considered taboo, because the way the overton window moved more towards the left through their advocacy. The leftist postmodernist demands power as the social structure and so they demand power and are slowly granted it over time. But there is a bit of a weird thing that happens between how Hicks and I see postmodernism.
In his chart, he labels postmodernism as collectivist and egalitarian. I see this as a bit misleading since the leftist is not really for collectivism in the same way as a pre-modernist would claim we’re all connected. The postmodernist believes that we’re all connected in how we’re all trapped in our own subjective constructions, as if we’re all islands in this massive chain of islands and the water between us is the subjective separation.
For example, let’s say I look at a dog and another person looks at a dog. We both see the dog but the dog is one dog for me and another dog for them and there is this supposed infinite number of dogs who make up this single entity that takes up the space where the perceived dog resides. And not just an infinite number of dogs, but infinite number of things between what the dog is made of, with an infinite number of those for each smaller thing. I guess, to him, that’s collectivism, and the egalitarian thing comes from how leftist demand that people are to be treated equal, as well as all art to be treated equal.
Just like dada, which was a proto-postmodernist art movement, the postmodernist thinks that all art is equal, with the Mona Lisa holding the same aesthetic value as a turd on a pedestal. This allows the postmodernist to use juxtaposition to combine something of high regard with something of low regard, like say having classical music play during a moment where someone is being tortured in a grindhouse way. Or maybe another example is like how Tarantino combines low quality exploitation movies with high quality dialogue that people praise for its realism and tension. This is why surrealism became popular under postmodernism, because surrealism juxtaposes a high concept symbol with nonsensical low concept literal images or events.
Another aspect of postmodernism is the idea that art and real life has merged into a type of hyperreality that blurs the line where life and art meet. People record their lives online and turn that into media, thus turning even things like talking about people who are in media into a form of media itself(aka Hollywood gossip stuff and youtube drama).
Without much of a message or objective symbolism, a lot of postmodernist media focuses on playfulness, because messing with things is all that there’s left as a means of entertainment and media making. Personal interpretation as the only means of experiencing causes the postmodernist to aim for open interpretation work, using vague wording and dog whistles to hide intents that they believe a common audience wouldn’t like, but select circles would catch. And with this demand for social power came the rise of corporate media, where corporations crank out stuff with self made trends and control groups who guide the corporation towards more money, thus more power.
There is also a combination of media, usually in the form of merchandising, so that a form of media will still be advertised and thought about, even when not engaged with the media directly. For example, GI Joe started out as a toy for kids. Then it became a comic and a show for kids. Now it’s a movie series for kids. Transformers, He-Man, I think even Gundam. These things aim for sales first and then plan the story after, because it’s all one big marketing campaign. There’s nothing in these that try to say what is true, they simply try to say things that will have people think they agree with it, or at least can’t argue against it to where they disengage with the product that’s being sold.
This has caused postmodernist media to become both highly marketable but also highly forgettable. Things easily get outdated even if the tech level stays consistent because of intertextuality, which is the relationship one media has with another to grant the user of intertextuality with relevancy that can have the audience understand the reference. This is a fancy way of saying something like an inside joke or a typical reference like a meme that we see online. If you ever want to understand this one, just think of any Channel Awesome reviewer. They will try to make jokes that reference something in media, probably something they reviewed prior, in order to keep the dedicated fans in the circle of attention and make the new fans try to keep up with this intensifying requirement of knowing jargon.
Intertextuality can also be seen as a sort of specialized culture within a franchise or company or genre or just stuff that is similar, so that the people who are of the fandom can all enjoy speaking some special language with each other and keep out the people who don’t know about their niche idioms and references.
This combination of reality and media, along with removing objectivity from the equation, with high and low arts being combined through playfulness and for marketing, is why our media is the way it is today. It’s made like fast food, doesn’t offer anything for the brain to work with, and is actually more for our brains to turn off if anything. People like Ray Bradburry saw this issue with TV and determined it was going to turn us into Idiocracy, which he explored in his book Fahrenheit 451. People are indulged and distracted by the idiot tube, they stop questioning things, books start being called evil, the government enacts a war against books, all people have left are things that keep them dumb, and then they can’t even see a war that’s happening all around them and in their own backyard.
The benefit of postmodernism is that it can appear more creative and people get entertained. That’s about it. No more feeling like you need to tell the truth, now you can make a story about whatever. The only benefit quickly becomes the main problem with it: it’s a bad influence. Postmodernists can only deconstruct and so they’re never pleased.
We see this all the time with Channel Awesome reviewers where they will miss the point of everything in a movie, like say Last Action Hero, and even though Last Action Hero is a postmodernist deconstruction of action movies, the reviewer will scream and holler about how the movie can’t be taken seriously. Then when they are challenged on the integrity of their review, they will spin it around and say they were just being meta and knew it was satire all along, that nobody should take any review of theirs seriously or as their actual opinion.
Or better yet, a postmodernist fan will chime in and speak for the reviewer, like when I said Spoony’s review of Final Fantasy 8, yet another deconstruction work that people were conflicted on, was misguided and wrong. A bunch of fans came in and said “Well, that’s not his REAL opinion. He didn’t REALLY say what he wanted to during the months he spent working on that review.”
I guess the point of postmodernism is to NOT say what you mean. Because how can they? That would address there is an objective idea in their head of what they mean, and that can’t happen under postmodernism. So you’re left with this endless chain of people trying to make a satire or make fun of something that is already making fun of something and that thing is already not to be taken seriously, and… you get the picture.
But then, recently, a sort of organized idea sprouted out from postmodernism. This idea that everything is both power and subjective, while also being a social construct, coagulated into a unification of something under what is called intersectionality. In 1989, Kimberly Chrenshaw coined the term, which already was working off of ideas during postmodernism such as second wave feminism and critical race theory. Through the idea that extreme egalitarianism is the way, in a subjective way, these defenders of the marginalized demanded that media should cater to whoever they deem as marginalized.
This branch of postmodernism is known as woke.
For wokeness, there isn’t much of a history or even aesthetic choice to shift through, but there is an awful lot of jargon to explain so that people know what I’m talking about. So for the majority of the woke explanation, I will be explaining the special words used that the woke will both claim are super important to know, but will also refrain from defining because they want to keep it on the down low. They mostly want to do that because they know their reasoning doesn’t make any sense and because it’s self contradictory, but that’s okay for them because they are, by their own admittance, anti-logic and “there is no real wokeness”.
Actually, before I explain the jargon, I want to get into that “there is no such thing as woke” talking point they always do. This is the same thing as saying “I want everyone to do x and there is no x”. Or when they are less radical, they will say something like “Everyone should do x, but nobody has done x yet.” But recently it’s been more like “This thing in the media has always been x, which is why we need it to be more x”.
As you can see, the narrative is always changing and they are always telling people to do something. This is the opposite of postmodernism in how it’s authoritarian, but is part of postmodernism because of the subjective aspect, as well as the neo-dada form of anti-art. The “art” of woke art is meant to express representation, and this representation is supposed to be of a group, and this group is supposed to look a particular way, absent of any stereotypes, negative or positive, and absent of any grand narratives, pre-modernist or modernist.
Therefore, all we’re left with is… appropriation and exploitation of marginalized groups.
Something tells me they didn’t think this through. It’s almost as if their goal is to be the thing they claim to fight against, but they don’t want to be called racist or sexist or whatever phobic because they don’t want to lose social power. This enforcement of an ideology, an ideology that tries to equally exploit for money, is put under the acronym DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a profitable business to get into, because DEI is estimated to have corporations annually spend $17 billion on DEI programs and organizations by the year 2027. In 2003, it was estimated that corporations spent $8 billion. In 2022, that number was recorded at $9 billion.
What do these numbers mean? It means companies are wasting money on this and they’re losing money after enacting woke policies.
When we combine wokeness with the socialist/Marxist mentality of the postmodernist, we end up with a constant drain of capital on the end of the media maker. The one making the art LOSES MONEY when they go woke, which is why we say “go woke, go broke.” There is no intention on making money with wokeness. This is why governments added wokeness to what is called the ESG score, which is a score that governments use to subsidize companies that follow things like climate change advocacy, DEI, and following whatever regulations a country puts in like mask regulations.
Follow these things, get closer to the “leader” score, and you get more money from the government. This is why companies don’t care when they lose customers, because at the end of the day, they are kept afloat by tax dollars. Then the people in charge of these companies buy the lowered stock that was hit by a controversy, and they have it go back up between woke projects. This is why the CEO of a corporation loves woke backlash, as long as they can pretend they had nothing to do with the woke decision. This is why, for example, Budlight decided they had nothing to do with hiring Dylan Mulvaney AFTER the boycotts worked, instead of, you know, while hiring him to be a spokesperson for the beer on April Fools day of all days.
So the go broke part is for the company itself, while the people using wokeness for their benefit are grifting and taking short term gains. Same thing was for something like BLM, which is an organization that revealed the money donated for the purpose of helping black communities was instead used to buy the founders mansions. The idea that wokeness brings in the cash and it can be called “woke capitalism” is absurd due to the lack of longevity the concept has. This is like calling a stolen item that gets sold at a pawn shop “illegal capitalism”. It doesn’t mean much, and it’s just trying to tie capitalism in with something negative, which is hilarious since wokeness is meant for the left.
With that out of the way, I’m going to get into the jargon, which will allow us to see some of the “philosophy” behind woke. The first one is “critical theory” which is what everything under wokeness is based on to enact a policy. This is how they choose who is marginalized and who isn’t. The term critical race theory originated in the 1980s through discussions about laws because some people decided that equality was not enough. It’s not enough that you can treat a person as an equal, like how a liberal does, because somehow a person born in 1980 is influenced by their ancestry from 1480. Judith Butler helped popularize critical queer theory, which lost the critical part once that aspect was seen as bad, thanks to critical race theory.
They kept all of the critical theory roots, but they removed the word critical because they don’t want to appear… critical. This also happened when Lisa Tuttle popularized the current form of feminist theory, where they remove the critical part because of the stigma they know the word has. No matter what, deception and omission must be used to get their agenda through, because that’s all they know how to do. They cannot get power unless they deceive people into giving them their power. And I find that a little odd since critical theory is a Marxist theory that came from the Frankfurt School from a man named Max Horkheimer, way back in 1937.
Max’s idea was that the enlightenment was a mistake, making him anti-modernist, but the postmodernists of this school of thought will still insist that there is something modernist about critical theory. They claim it’s because Marx was objective because Marx thought something objective is whatever is practiced, yet nothing he claims that is practiced was ever true, so it’s sort of a strange way to misdirect people into thinking that his appeal to his own version of rationalism was somehow actual rationalism. In other words, it’s wordplay. But, we can still say something like his attachment to science being a key element of his ideology, with science trying to be used to determine the natural world, is sort of modernist.
And this is the first step into getting confused as to what anything is, which is why people need a clear explanation as to what something like a modernist is. A good way to explain if something is actually modernist is if you can ask a writer if they believe in marxism and objectivity. If they say no, then we can see that Marxism appeals to the postmodernist in a way that is by design, not by accident. This is why Jordan Peterson is forced to call actual Marxists “neo-Marxists” and “cultural marxists”, because of the constant wordplay that is used by the very same Marxists.
Now, I want to harp on Marxism due to the fact that every single critical theory that the woke adopted is a Marxist theory. Critical theory was based on Marxism and critical theory declared that cultural equality was required in order to prevent fascism. It determined that individuals are not the ones behind social problems, but instead these problems were caused by social structures and cultural bias. What are these problems and what are the solutions, you may ask?
Well, critical theory doesn’t have any of that covered. In fact, the goal was to NOT cover any of those and to just say “social problems are at the social level” and that’s it. Congratulations, theory complete. The social thing is about society and society is how individuals interact. So it’s not the individual’s fault, it’s how they act with each other that’s the problem. So the theory is saying we need to change our act in order to solve the problems, and this was followed by the feminists who say we need to help the women get up in life. This was followed by the CRTists who said we need to help certain races get up in life. This was followed by the Queer Theorists who said we need to help the LGBT get up in life. There is the body positivity, the handicapped, the “don’t slut shame me" movement, and the list goes on and on.
Now we’re in a world where all of these things are in our media and forced into our media because somehow critical theory is the new normal, but you’re not allowed to say it’s forced. If you say it’s forced, some people might reject it and then the enforcers lose power, so they will always say “this is how media always was”. This is how we now have people claiming that ancient civilizations were pro-trans and pro-gay, even though they weren’t and I thought the entire point in CHANGING society is because these social problems are ingrained into society?
This is how the woke say one thing and then mean another. They want the power, but claim the power is given to someone else, while they take the power for themselves. Something like gender is told to be super important and something even worth committing suicide over, but then the lady who made up queer theory says that gender is performative, meaning that it doesn’t matter. Feminism is told to be super important because this is how we can help women become equal, and then we’re told by the person who made current feminist theory that “you’re not born a woman, you become one, even if you were born a male.”
This “equality of power” that the critical theorists said they wanted quickly turned into an “equality of babbling”. Nothing under wokeness makes any sense, and neither does the origin of the term woke. It is meant to mean a person is awake, that they were sleepwalking through life and now they are aware that bad things are happening in society. What are these bad things? Well, whatever you can make up and convince others is bad, since it’s all subjective. If someone steals a VCR and they are black, you can say the police who arrested the thief are evil because they are oppressing a desperate black man who “wouldn’t have stolen if society just treated him better.”
Of course, this implies that rapists only rape because they weren’t treated well enough by society, but only of that rapist is a particular skin color. The woke quickly tie the “need to rape” with skin color, and then call others racists. Actually, now that I’m on the race topic, let’s lay out CRT and how they view race from their supposed “law related origins”.
CRT determines that race doesn’t actually exist, that white people created race to then create racism. I’ll say that again to make sure if you caught that. CRT, a belief about how race works, claims that race doesn’t exist. But then it blames a particular race because… it’s not racist. Did I mention that this belief is anti-evidence and anti-reason? Yes, they do not want reason or evidence to be used for laws, because these things are biased. Instead they want storytelling from the marginalized person, who is called black, even though they don’t believe black as a race exists. This storytelling can be something like “I was walking down the street and I saw a police officer and I felt fear. I should not feel fear. That means the police officer is racist because I’m black and they made me fear.”
To make it even worse, they determine that color blindness from laws causes racist laws to form, because discrimination can occur from certain laws like murder rates, drug use, and theft. Something like being on time to work is considered racist, because a clock is a construction by white people to keep black people down. There’s always something designed by the white man to “keep black people down” because they believe white people only have power because they can keep others down. This is why they advocate to pull all of the non-whites up by forcing white people to hire non-white people into roles in movies or something like a job or using affirmative action to force black people into college classes by reducing their requirements.
Apparently, when you go to the military, the goal is not to have a good soldier but to allow more women to get in by reducing the standard for them. The goal of getting black people into college is to reduce the requirements for them so that they can get in, while increasing the requirements for Asians because there are too many Asians in college. But if we look at media, and only the US media, we can see there is a lack of Asians, so Asians are forced into film sets. Yes, there are plenty of Asians in, you know, Asian countries, soaking up all of the film time, but they don’t count.
In fact, they don’t count because white people don’t watch them as much, so now we have to have an enforcement of Asians being translated into English for western audiences to indulge in Asian culture, which is why Netflix transfers money from the west to the east and tries to get a bunch of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai content out. A lot of this Asian content is also LGBT, because even though these Asian countries don’t care for such content, the west must believe that the east is super open about it. There will be something like a comedy about a pregnant male that comes from Korea, and the west will take that and say it’s empowering because it fights against gender norms.
Meanwhile, the story is just a postmodernist joke about how it would be funny if men felt pregnancy pain. And it’s because there was a postmodernist comedy called Junior which had the joke “wouldn’t it be funny if a big buff Austrian dude was pregnant?”
My point is that wokeness is just appropriation, through and through. If it’s ancient bigotry, they will say it’s woke. If it’s modernist liberalism, they’ll say it’s woke. If it’s postmodernism making fun of wokeness, they’ll say it’s woke. No matter what, they will spin something to call it woke, just so that they can say liberalism is evil and equality is evil. Their goal is to have an equal outcome, which is their excuse to give certain groups more money and fame, all while ignoring merit. The very idea of rejecting merit as a qualifier is the reason woke media is designed to lose money, and is also a way to tie woke to postmodernism.
I think this is enough explanation of the jargon for now. Not sure if I missed anything, but I think enough of a point is made on that part to have anyone understand how wokeness works. The metaphysics is the same as postmodernist, it’s all subjective. The epistemology is through lived experience because of the storytelling that’s deemed as superior to reason. The ethics is social justice, because they demand equity, aka equal outcome. The politics are marxist, meaning their goal is to remove capitalism because capitalism is an evil product of liberalism. And finally the aesthetic is what I would call anti-art.
I guess I might be able to explain the aesthetics, but it’s rather loose. The problem is that art to the woke is just propaganda. The don’t really give a story or plot with woke media, instead they just take something generic and roll with it, assuming they even give it a plot. For example, there is a woke comic from Marvel(since every comic from them is woke now) where a superhero gets stopped by a cop for being native american. This female, possibly lesbian, native american uses her powers to have the cop realize he’s racist by mind controlling him into thinking he’s racist.
Work with me here…
So the cop is at his house later and decides that he can’t live with himself as a racist person, so he shoots himself in the head. The native american woman watches him from afar and goes “my work here is done” and considers herself a hero for the day. Comic book issue over. So the plot of that story was “super hero uses powers to make a random cop kill himself because racism.”
There is nothing in the story we can call true, nothing we can call interesting, nothing can be called entertaining, nothing can be called useful, nothing can be called anything other than utterly pointless. But the point was to say “racism exists. Stay woke.” That’s the message. That’s the reason an artist spent a month working on a comic and that’s why a company invested money into it to sell it to people who decided to pay money for it and read it. I have no idea who paid money to read that, but I can safely say it wasn’t that many people.
The goal is not to have people buy the product, it’s to simply say the product exists and point to it and go “see, a company put money into that group.” This is kind of like an updated version of “everyone gets a trophy” but instead of everyone, it’s the non-whites, non-cis, non-straights, and non-males. And instead of a trophy you get a product people don’t want to buy.
This is why I consider any answer as woke in my test as an indication of a person being woke. You really do need to jump through a bunch of hurdles to get stuck into this kind of mentality and the only question that people got woke was the one where lived experience is the answer. I think a better term might be anecdotal evidence, because like I said, the woke will reject reason and evidence and instead focus on storytelling, with storytelling here meaning you’re saying what you thought happened through your subjective opinion, and this can be anything you want it to be.
Hell, I can say something like “I felt like a unicorn” and that is considered a lived experience, because somehow I know what a unicorn feels like and somehow you now need to believe I did. So maybe anecdotal is the proper term to use, but then the woke will avoid that one since they know it looks like a fallacy and they can’t socially bring themselves to be stigmatized like that when they think it’s not acceptable. So it’s one of those things where I can either have one wording that causes a false positive or the other wording that will cause a false negative. But, then again, if someone is woke already, they would fail other questions anyway, so maybe I can put that one as not really important to worry about.
So there you have it, definitions and grave detail into all 4 types. I’m sure someone will conjure up more questions and I’m sure a postmodernist will say I’m wrong about everything, but at that point, I did my part so it’s not my problem.
Onto the next section that follows the next question: How do you justify reducing things to something like woke?
Reductionism is when you take something that is complex, like a story, and reduce it to particular fundamentals to provide a sufficient explanation. This is something like when a story gets reduced to a genre when you label it with a genre, because the genre is fundamental. This can also be something like calling yourself a Christian when you believe in the teachings of Christ. Sure, you have other qualities about yourself, but this can be an explanation into something that explains very quickly because it broadens the scope. But the question is HOW do I do this with something like woke, or modernism.
Simple: you look at the definition and go “ah, I see, that’s what it’s doing.”
Pre-modernism and modernism are objective, postmodernism and woke are subjective. Already these two groups are split by a single key factor. I can instantly say woke is a terrible storytelling way of thinking because the goal is to treat merit and superior quality as oppressive, so there is no possible way of making a good story that’s woke. It’s, by design, unable to be good. If we take postmodernism, we can say that it instantly rejects telling the truth, so it must make something up with exploitation and it’s going to be like fast food for the brain. It is, by design, unable to stand the test of time.
But then if we take something like modernism, we can see a truth is there, even if it tries to be individual, because then a guide based on personalities can be seen, and a way might be unlocked. This is why a modernist story is considered classic, and we look up to it as inspiration. Pre-modernism is as primitive and societally significant as you can get, to the point where it’s part of history books as a mythology. We base entire cultures around this type of media and we follow through with our daily life by using this type of media as a guide. In fact, pre-modernism is found IN postmodernism by accident when a postmodernist tries to appropriate, which is why we can find something like alchemy and Gnosticism in a postmodernist movie like The Matrix. There are modernist concepts like The Rabbit Hole in The Matrix, despite The Matrix trying to subvert it and reject it.
So like a genre, the direction of your modernist variant is reliant on both intention and focus, rather than if something is there. I can have a cockroach crawl into my cake when I’m baking it, that doesn’t mean cockroach is part of the recipe. So the goal of the test is to see what kind of recipe people are following and we can determine what kind of cook they are in how they view recipes. There is no danger of reductionism because reductionism is used to prevent dangers. In fact, in the most ironic way possible, to claim reductionism is dangerous here is to use dangerous reductionism to make such a claim, because it reduces the entire process to the idea of dangerous.
Now for the last question: How do you prevent people from rejecting pre-modernism?
Page has determined that if you claim form = function = truth, then you have caused pre-modernism to be the same as woke. As I’ve explained, they aren’t the same thing. Yes both are based on religions, with wokeness being based on Gnosticism, which is to self worship and deem yourself as the true god that is imprisoned in your body by the demiurge, but that isn’t the same thing as “telling an actual truth”.
Gnosticism is sophistry mixed with satanism. I always forget the term and can never find it, but it’s the belief that you’re alone and you’re talking to yourself even when you talk to others. This is how people get trapped in an echo chamber, because all the can do is hear themselves talk and tackle their own ideas of what could be wrong, which requires them accepting they could be wrong, and if they don’t accept that possibility, then everything goes in one ear and out the other. They start to follow a script, become an NPC, and all they can do is become violent once the script runs dry.
Can the pre-modernist become the same thing? Absolutely not. The benefit of a pre-modernist is that we don’t believe we rule the world. We understand that the world is in control, the supernatural controls the world, and we are below all of that as measly humans. We are the cameraman, not the director. Better yet, we are the audience watching a live feed with a cameraman controlling what we get to see, and we’re not involved in any of the production. This acceptance of humility allows the pre-modernist to seek truth, which is how a mythology is born in the first place. The only valid criticism is that the subjects become so grand and universal that they are basic and unable to really tackle the more personal and social issues that modernism tackles.
This basic and broadness is what Page considered “unentertaining”. But during a later exchange, during the making of this response, I found something fascinating. Page’s definition of entertaining is contradictory, because she believes it is objective in the fact that entertainment exists, but WHAT WE SEE as entertaining is subjective. So the complaint that something could be unentertaining isn’t valid, because it doesn’t mean anything if it’s subjective. It’s like saying a traditional dish doesn’t taste good and that’s why that traditional dish is bad to limit people to it.
Well, what if every good dish becomes traditional because people see it as tasty? I am not limited to my own personal tradition, I can enjoy another person’s tradition. I can eat sushi as a German who loves bratwurst and sauerkraut. I can eat pad thai and I can eat sweet and sour pork. I can eat baba ghanoush and shepherd’s pie.
Do you know why I can eat these? Because they are all food that is made of nutrients that people ate since the dawn of time. My human body needs stuff that humans eat for nutrients and there is a select number of nutrients that I need per day because it’s the stuff my body uses. Same goes for storytelling and the specific things my brain will use to gain wisdom and intelligence. The pre-modernist believes that there are these end points that we can address and say “this is the form, this is the end point, can’t go past that.”
The modernist claims “this is scientifically why we can’t go past a certain point, but we might get more information later that will allow us to pass that point.”
Then the postmodernist says “that point is a made up line, the limitation is made up, and the idea you’re in a particular position is also made up, so just mess with things and call them different things.”
Then the woke say “That point doesn’t exist but it’s oppressing me.”
As you can see, the pre-modernist is the most coherent because it’s the most accepting of how things are. I think what Page misunderstood is that some people think a form is what humans determine the form to be, and the form is left as that. Wrong. Form is to reach an endpoint and we cannot physically reach this endpoint, meaning the form will only be in our mental state through symbolism when we’re trying to think of such. Thus, symbolism is the key factor, and all you have to do is make the symbol more clear.
What really struck me as odd is that Page also declared the Bible as entertaining, meaning a pre-modernist work is the prime example of entertaining while her rejection of pre-modernism is because it is not entertaining. I cannot make any sense of that contradiction other than maybe Page believing that media being full of lies is entertainment and that’s not allowed under pre-modernism, which doesn’t mean anything to me.
That’s like going “well, your philosophy doesn’t allow contradictions and uses only logic, so it’s not a good philosophy.”
At that point, we simply have to call such a person postmodernist, because only a postmodernist would demand such a thing.
What am I going to do now that the test was tested? Well, I am sure I am going to make 5 sets of 4 questions for sure, with the 2 overarching questions added in the beginning and end. I will also try to use that google forms thing so that it can be a real test. When I get a website up for my company, I will have the test as part of the entrance exam to join the club. Pre-modernists are preferred, modernists are welcomed, postmodernists are tolerated, and woke are excluded. Sorry, we don’t allow such hateful people into the club. We like to work with normal functional people, and the woke do not meet either requirement.
And I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I am working on the test to have writers see what they KNOW about writing. That one is going to be a bit harder to put together, since I was thinking of getting written answers rather than multiple choice. I think the hardest part with that one will be figuring out how to work in creativity, since that one is tricky to sense if it’s intentional or accidental. But, like always, if I need help, I’ll ask.
Till next time.

S10E1 ; S10E2 ; Scores (provided by my shero bumblebutter123)
Yesterday I got a comment that I shouldn’t be calling George (barf) ugly, so I will now be referring to him as George (-187 points to the stinky producers). The point system will now wrap his scores into production scores because I Said So. Google is your friend. Hopefully he’ll be booted off the island before I have to type all of that out a couple hundred times
Onwards and Upwards my dudes:
The episode starts with the tail end of the first Bombshell Steal of the Season. CATHERINE all caps has just been freed from the grasp of Andre who is 21 and a business owner. Zachariah (not Zach) made the only correct decision and coupled up with her +23 points to Zachariah for appeasing the fanbase ! Zachariah gets a text- him and CATHERINE all caps have been pulled away from the grieving Andre because the stinky producers set them up on a date (Terrace Fruit Plate). +3 points to stinky producers! It’s your job but I appreciate it.
Andre looks shaken AND stirred because he really liked CATHERINE all caps! sad ! He’s with the boys and they’re #mensmentalhealth and supporting him which I Love! + 5 points to all the MEN except not George (-187 points to the stinky producers). The girlies chatter about CATHERINE all caps being picked, Molly (who owns a chicken) said she thought Zachariah (not Zach) would have picked Ella Rose Depp, but he didn’t! -1 point to Molly for being wrong, +3 points to ERD for the ponytail.
On the date (Terrace Fruit Plate), CATHERINE all caps and Zachariah do a little cheers cheers to the first date of the villa. +3 points for being deserving of that title. Also Zachariah pops the bottle in a very smooth way I swear the boy OOZES calm charm. They bond because they're both close with their moms.
CATHERINE all caps asks Zachariah (not Zach) if he knew who he was going to pick before he went up to pick her and he says yes! Very emphatically! +2 points for self assuredness - 2 points to balance my personal pro C&Z bias. They both talk about how “natural” it is when they’re together! cute! CATHERINE all caps is telling him that she’s moving closer to him but doesn’t want Andre to know??? -10 points for guarding her heart +2 points to Zachariah for being comfortable that she’ll come back to him.
Downstairs, Andre is laying in Ruchee's lap, the man is practically in FETAL POSITION and she is patting him on the head and back. They're not exactly cuddling but they're not NOT cuddling. Open your EYES Andre this girl is INTERESTED! Ruchee GET YOUR MAN !!
Back to the terrace: Zachariah is the happiest he’s been, but doesn’t mention if it’s the happiest he’s been all day all year or his entire life. - 2 points for vagueness. They are so cute I’m melting. CATHERINE all caps made Zachariah giggle !!!! She fed him a chocolate covered strawberry and then she ate the rest !! Incredible
George (-187 points to the stinky producers) corners Ruchee on an L couch in a desperate attempt to connect to literally anyone! He tells Ruchee that they vibe and she’s like ??? Where??? -23 points for lying in the pursuit of one more week +12 points to Ruchee for calling him out on it! Ruchee says “I didn’t realize I was like, your type” and George (-187 points to the stinky producers) stutters and tries to come up with any string of words to deny that his type is BHBE (Blonde Hair Blue Eyes) !!! George (-187 points to the stinky producers) accepts his reality and confirms the BHBE theory BUT says he has to be open - also that Ruchee looks very fit. Lame compliment? Ruchee says she is open to it therefore no points in either direction.
CATHERINE all caps and Zachariah (not Zach) come back from their date and everyone in the villa looks exhausted. Zachariah pulls Andre just to check in with him, and I hope this vibe lasts !! Drama is fun but I love a good bromance +20 points to both
Girlies pile onto the daybeds to debrief and discuss the date (Terrace Fruit Plate). CATHERINE all caps was both surprised AND not surprised? Switzerland neutrality we love it. They had a good chat and he reassured her. Allegedly she and Zachariah had good eye contact (I find this hard to believe). All the ladies gasp when they find out there were fruit platters ! I love that they’re genuinely impressed +7 points to the girls. Ella Rose Depp says that CATHERINE all caps looks so happy and she’s right! +1 point for being right. CATHERINE all caps says that she’s happy that she finds herself getting happy to talk about it !! AHHH
Tyrique and Ella Rose Depp are in the kitchen and we get the second cheese toasty of the season. Tyrique tells ERD that he would feel a type of way if Zachariah had picked her. Tyrique says that he’s “not in love” with her but seeds have been planted and the leaves are budding! +11 to both for a new connection.
Andre pulls CATHERINE all caps and they both have sleepy voices!! - 200 to the stinky producers for keeping them up past their bedtimes. He’s avoiding looking into her eyes until the end of their conversation. Very strange and unusual behavior from this man. He is SO 21 and a business owner. +2 points for meeting expectations. CATHERINE all caps is recounting this story to the girls in the dressing room, and she’s right when she says that he didn’t take it very well. The boys are in the bedroom and encouraging Andre to chat with Ruchee. I hope he does because CATHERINE all caps has left the lineup. Blah Blah why do girls take so long to get ready - 22 points to Tyrique !! Let them live !! Skincare takes time !!
Mitchell Red Bottoms doesn’t sing his Time for Bed song - 8 points for inconsistency. No bedtime footage but that’s probably for the best! Thank you stinky producers +2 points
Snoring accusations fly far and wide and YES it’s 6ft5 Zachariah - but CATHERINE all caps finds it cute - 1 point for lying. Andre tries to act chill but I’m not sure it worked. Gender Isolationism continues and they split up into smaller groups for the morning discussion, I appreciate this - bring on the secrets bring on the drama
Molly (who owns a chicken) calls the morning debrief a chin wag +4 points ! Ella Rose Depp, Molly (who owns a chicken), and CATHERINE all caps are on the balcony doing a quick recap of last night with CATHERINE all caps saying she wants to get to know both Zachariah AND also Andre. -9 points for lies and delusion. Also she won’t feel better until Andre moves on ? -20 points for communication style and strategy
Andre and Red Bottoms are on the covered couch outside. Red Bottoms tells Andre that he took last night really well, and checks in on his game plan. Andre is 21 and a business owner, which means he’s not giving up without a fight. Zachariah (not Zach) and Tyrique are on the day beds and Zachariah, once again, reiterates his interest in CATHERINE all caps. But he’s also saying he doesn’t want to close himself off. I think he’s smitten but MEN lie so who knows.
Molly (who has a chicken) speaks with CATHERINE all caps and Ella Rose Depp and confesses that she’s not as married off as she seems. -4 points for delusion. Molly (who owns a chicken) understands that her and Red Bottoms are moving quickly but isn’t opposed to speaking to other guys. Does Red Bottoms know this? Confusing!
Jess (Assistant Director of the Villa Bureau of Investigation) sits with Ruchee on the U couch. Jess (VBI) thinks that Tyrique and Red Bottoms are fit. Ruchee hypes her up and encourages her to switch it up because right now the boys can't tell the difference between intentional flirting and harmless banter. +3 points for Good Advice. Tyrique comes over and flops down next to Jess (VBI). RUCHEE TAKE A HINT! LEAVE THEM ALONE! - 22 points to Ruchee for not reading the room. Spoiler alert- Jess (VBI) does NOT switch it up and immediately falls back into the banter flirting that could be perceived as friends having a LAFF !! She is very witty though, I’ll give her +2 points. Jess (VBI) and Tyrique are legitimately cuddling with Ruchee right there. She’s got her arm around the back if his neck and his hand is on her THIGH!!!! HAND TO THIGH ALERT !!! Ella Rose Depp babes you better watch OUT. Ruchee leaves thank god.
Tyrique says that Ella is cool but he’s not closed off. Then he tells Jess (VBI) that she looks sexy this morning. EXCUSE ME - last night he told ERD that he would feel some type of way if she got chosen and now he’s calling Jess (VBI) sexy to her face !! Bring on the prophecy of the semi-professional footballer !! OMG he told her she’s a good kisser, this escalated quickly, what are the producers not showing us !?!! Jess (VBI) is a little bashful which is cute and fun! +8 to Jess (VBI) for opening her heart <3 Tyrique is in the beach hut saying she’s pretty and easy to talk to, I support this
As the unusually long morning pre-bikini segment of this episode continues, Red Bottoms announces that George (-187 points to the stinky producers) doesn’t miss a beat and he’s right. George (-187 points to the stinky producers) has once again cornered Ruchee, this time in the morning and on the daybeds. The girl is still in her PJs let her rest!! George (-187 points to the stinky producers) is showing interest again, looking for feelers. He tells Ruchee that he’s looking for something a bit serious, and when Ruchee mentions being feisty, George (-187 points to the stinky producers) latches on to that idea and runs with it! Ruchee compares herself to a Chihuahua. Strange ! Ruchee asks him if he’s ever been in love before. Again - everyone is STILL in PJs!! Why are we trying to have a Deep & Meaningful? George (-187 points to the stinky producers) says he is a “good man, I am”. -500 points for not being a "good man, I am". Ruchee decides to give him the benefit of the doubt. Sigh.
They’re in their bikinis now thank GOD. TEXT ALERT - Andre is heading out on a date (beach blanket) with the new bombshell, Whitney. Red Bottoms does a brief daily affirmation with Andres who is 21 and owns a business. We love to see it! +2 points Red Bottoms for #mensmentalhealth. The boys have a little huddle where they hype him up and boost his confidence for the date. +15 points to the boys for being supportive <3
We're introduced to Whitney, 25, a wig seller, which tracks because SHE'S WEARING AT LEAST 40 INCHES & THAT LENGTH DOES NOT COME CHEAP. It looks very good and very heavy. +4 points for bravery and valor. She hits us with the usual Bombshell pre-entry courage and delivers a very convincing "If your man can be stolen then was he really your man?" !!! I BELIEVE HER !! stinky producers you are SPOILING US with this cast + 10 points
At the date (beach blanket), Whitney is looking cute lounging at the bottom of the beach stairs and tells Andre who is 21 and owns a business that he better come down and give her a hug. She is NOT getting up for him. +10 points for MILF behavior. Jess (VBI) watch your back because I have a feeling Whitney is either gonna be your absolute Bestie or absolute Worstie !! She compliments his eyelashes and he calls her a very pretty lady and pronounces his name 3 different ways to remind us, once again, that he's Portuguese. He's into older women (respectfully). Blah Blah blah what's your type, Whitney says she's into chocolate, vanilla etc etc, "if they're giving they're giving" !!
Ella Rose Depp and CATHERINE all caps discuss Andre, CATHERINE all caps is NOT jealous that he's on a date but she's intrigued, because if Andre is Whitney's type then Zachariah might also be her type. Tyrique decides to pull Molly (who owns a chicken) for a chat on the L couch. The two of them realize they haven't spoken one-on-one at all. Molly (who owns a chicken) gets DTB (down to business) and asks him what he's up to/who he's feeling. SHOCKER the semi-pro athlete has lots of girls crushing on him. -10 points for being a semi-pro athlete. He proclaims that he's a flirty character and isn't closed off. Molly brings up Jess (VBI) but Tyrique is Not Into Her - just into the LAFFS.
Mehdi (world class muncher) and George (-187 points to the stinky producers) are on the day beds chit chatting about Whitney the bombshell. They are both excited for fresh girls !!
Back to the date (beach blanket). Whitney is exceeding expectations by roasting Andre and asking him why CATHERINE all caps dumped him LMAO. + 5 points for exceeding expectations. He laughs on the outside (but cries on the inside). Whitney gets the recap and finds out that she's the second bombshell and the first one (Zachariah) stole CATHERINE all caps from Andre who is 21 and a business owner. Whitney can smell the salt coming off of Andres hurt feelings which he denies. Won't dock him this time but sir you are on NOTICE!! Andre tells Whitney that he's feeling her & it looks reciprocated. She is NOT impressed by his age. Whitney is a fire cracker +80 points for being a firecracker.
Meanwhile at the villa- CATHERINE all caps walks over to Zachariah who is laying on a daybed. He greets her with "How ya doing beautiful" +5 points for saying the right thing. He then says that he's definitely happy with the way this is going. Zachariah tells CATHERINE all caps that he's not scared of bugs (he is) and they banter about who's in charge of killing large spiders. -4 points to each for killing spiders.
Molly (who owns a chicken) and Red Bottoms are on the beanbags and she tells him that she choked on a jawbreaker one time. +11 points to the producers for slipping in random moments of connection !! It's your job but I appreciate it. Andre and Whitney return from their date and Molly is immediately obsessed with Whitney! We love to see it !! The girls seem to genuinely compliment her and the vibes look good (not weird or territorial) +12 points to the girls
Andre goes off with the boys and Whitney goes off with the girls. Andre is a STORYTELLER, he is acting out the walk, the way she was laying down, doing a full one man solo performance +16 points for creative writing. The boys eat it up it's very cute. Andre confirms that he's into her bubbly personality and the energy was reciprocal & they had chemistry. Andre says that Whitney is his new favorite which seems like a lie but OK
Whitney with the girls on the U couch- " it was giving beach, it was giving views" CATHERINE all caps is silent but not in a rude way. Blah Blah what's your type Blah blah personality Blah blah funny tall nice smile and then hits them with the "no belly" +5 points for radical honesty.
The Islanders are getting ready and chit chatting. Molly (who owns a chicken) tries to take a bubble bath but can't find any bubble bath so she uses body wash +7 points for making it work. Andre decides to live in reality and confesses that CATHERINE all caps is still his #1. +4 points to Tyrique for getting Andre out of his delusions. Zachariah encourages Andre to chat to CATHERINE all caps "as soon as possible" and YES Tyrique +1 point for being right, it IS because Zachariah wants her to himself for the rest of the night!! Andre & Tyrique pillow fight very fun vibes !!
Girls are getting ready and they all seem to really like Whitney. Mehdi Muncher and Andre are manifesting a good night and Jess (VBI) is yelling again. Andre and Ruchee are sitting on the covered couch talking about manicures, Ruchee is a nail tech and is IMPRESSED with MEN who take care of their cuticles. +6 points to Andre for self care. Ruchee is so funny joking about putting her initials on his ring finger nail +30 points girlie GET YOUR MAN. Unfortunately she is not being as clear as she thinks she is. Either that or Andre isn't interested
Whitney walks over and steals Andre from Ruchee. Queen ! She brings up the fact that he hasn't complimented her yet (banter) and Andre is picking up what she's putting down. "You know that I know that You know that I know that You look nice" This may just be one of the first times in recorded history where an interaction like this LANDS and doesn't FLOP. +4 points to each. Her only minor issue is his age but she's interested in him. Whitney and Andre are vibing but Whitney is NOT in a rush and very open about his age being a speedbump. +10 points to Whitney for radical honesty
Tyrique and Jess are kicking it on a couch and Tyrique mentions that he likes big personalities. Jess has a big personality but Tyrique only sees her as a friend. This man is going to break my poor Jess (VBI)'s heart in TWO. Jess (VBI) is doing what she does best (investigating). She opens up to him that he's the only guy she's interested in, and he's like what are you TALKING about you told me that your type was Joey Essex !! Spoiler alert: Tyrique is NOT Joey Essex. + 7 points for not being Joey Essex. She's like OK then we can be friends but I don't flirt w my friends the way that we flirt +15 points for setting boundaries and he looks a little sad and mopey. He apologizes for leading her on and looks genuinely concerned that he hurt her feelings ...... It's only episode three and he's worming his way into my anti-semi pro athlete bias... + 2 points for exceeding expectations.
Jess (VBI) and CATHERINE all caps sit on the couch and Jess (VBI) confirms that Tyrique friend zoned her. Very impressed that people genuinely like each other this season?? Loving it. Ella Rose Depp and Tyrique chat about Jess (VBI) and Tyrique tells ERD that he ended it w her and shockingly isn't lying? +1 point for not lying. ERD is glad that he made it clear to her and then they kissed. +12 points to both for PDA
CATHERINE all caps and Ruchee are very happy for them AND SO AM I!!! Mehdi Muncher and Whitney sit around the fire pit and they are laughing so hard. She asks Mehdi about Ruchee and gets the whole "she's great but we're not into each other" convo. Blah blah what are you looking for blah blah Mehdi loves a funny strong personality brunette with dark eyes and confidence. Whitney makes a joke about her wig and Mehdi's like "you can have it on you can have it off idgaf" and Whitney cackles. Then she asks him what her best feature is, and says "What's your favorite feature about me", he loves her eyes and smile. She also likes his eyes. In the Beach Hut Mehdi calls Whitney a Boss Lady +1 point for being right
Mitchell Red Bottoms and Molly (who owns a chicken) head to the terrace for a chat. Red Bottoms proposes (ew) in a joking but not joking way. -27 points for being weird and icky. However, Molly (who owns a chicken) is lapping up the attention! Red Bottoms kisses Molly (who owns a chicken) and she is (understandably) a little shocked at how fast he's moving but going with the flow. She is going to BREAK HIS HEART!!!
I refuse to recap the preview for tomorrow because they're BAITING US and STRESSING ME OUT
Thanks for sticking around xoxo cloud_mom

Hi everyone,
Thanks for all the amazing questions you’ve submitted for our Q&A with Assistant Game Director, Adam Whiting. We’re delighted to have received so many. So many, in fact, that we couldn’t possibly have taken so much of Adam’s time to answer them all – maybe we’ll have to do a part two one day soon.
We sat down with Adam this week and got some answers for you. We’re sure you’ll be happy with what Adam did manage to answer; he’s really gone above and beyond for this one.
Here’s a few words from Adam:

“I really appreciate all the kind words for the studio, we’ll be sure to share them with the rest of the team. It was also nice to see some familiar faces from over the years – thank you for remembering me and saying hello! It’s always a pleasure interacting with our wonderful community, and we look forward to doing more things like this in the future.”

And with that, we’ll dive into the Q&A. Enjoy!
/EVERYWHERE Community Team

Life as an Assistant Game Director at Build A Rocket Boy

Q: Hi Adam! Thank you for participating in this, it's so great to see the relationship Build A Rocket Boy has established with the community!

• What are your daily tasks as Assistant Game Director, and what would you say is the aspect of game development that you give the most importance to? (Game mechanics, narrative, visuals...)
• What are your favourite games and how do you think they influenced you when working on EVERYWHERE oand MindsEye?

Keep being awesome! – From u/NestorSite
A: Well, thanks to you as well NestorSite, it’s exciting for me to get to talk to you all about what we have been working on (finally!) and we really care about our community and are delighted to get to share more info.
As Assistant Game Director my day can vary greatly, and each day presents new challenges and opportunities to help progress the project. Primarily in Game Direction we are ensuring that all the teams are aligned on the bigger picture and goals of the project. Historically, this has been working mostly with Design on the core game mechanics and systems, but now we are at a point where a lot of the design work is complete, its more about checking progress, playing the game every day, and making sure everything is trending correctly.
It's hard to pick an area that is most important as what makes games development special is how it’s a convergence point for most of the artistic and engineering disciplines we know of, and all of them contribute to the whole, so they are all equally important (plus I would hate for any of our teams to feel like I had any favourites 😉). That being said, games are primarily meant to be fun, so I am particularly passionate about the core mechanics. We want our players to have a great time in EVERYWHERE and MindsEye – though each of these have their own specific requirements that present interesting challenges and drive all our departments to push the boundaries of their respective areas of expertise.
I’ve given a lengthy answer about my favourite games elsewhere so I’ll try and keep this short and point you in the direction of that, what I would say though is that generally we don’t look at other games in particular when working on the design of EVERYWHERE though it’s impossible not to be influenced by the things you have enjoyed (such is the nature of art).
Q: Hey Adam! Could you tell us what is the most challenging task you had to face in the last few years? – u/Gab1024
A: Hey Gab, thanks for your question!
One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced throughout the project has been building the team – building an exciting, ambitious, and new type of project is a huge challenge but building the company in tandem has been very tough as we’ve always aimed to bring the quality talent that the project requires. That can be tough when you are trying to attract talented devs, who, in many cases, can choose where they work. They are often choosing between established studios and established projects which can be very tempting. However, we’ve been very fortunate and have built a team of very talented and experienced devs (with a healthy dose of people fresh to the industry) who are really delivering on the ambitions of the project, and we are all excited for you all to see and play the game as soon as possible.
Personally, one big challenge for me was the whole Gamescom experience – I never thought I’d find myself on stage with Geoff and talking in front of so many people, especially having grown up watching countless game announcements and reveals, it was both terrifying and extremely exciting though pretty far from my natural environment behind a PC in a studio 😊
Q: Hiya, I’m curious if you started out in another role in the gaming industry that led to being a Director? - Thanks, u/voodoolady94 xx
A: Hey voodoolady – unsure if your name is a Ween or Hendrix reference but either way, I like the handle!
I started in the industry, as many people did, in Quality Assurance. QA is a fantastic starting point for two reasons; Firstly, it isn’t a role that requires a lot of specialised experience to get started. In fact, one of the key things we are always looking for with new QA roles is a passion for gaming, strong attention to detail and good communication skills – don’t get me wrong it can be very intense and challenging working in QA but if you have a genuine passion for making games it can be highly enjoyable and rewarding working in part of a team that is so intrinsic to releasing any quality project. Secondly, everything in every game needs some form of QA support – meaning that you are exposed to every department/facet of games development which can be really useful for finding what you like and what you are good at. Often you can naturally progress into a more specialised role that can lead to moving to another team entirely (or becoming a stalwart experienced QA that will always be in demand within the industry) – there are countless examples I can think of from across my career where people have gone from QA into writing, AI coding, concept art, audio design – pretty much every department has someone within it that started in QA.
My personal journey was rising through the ranks of QA to a QA Supervisor and then moving towards Production before eventually moving to Game Direction – and I’m honestly still learning and growing every day as I get to interact with truly exceptional and talented people who are each extremely knowledgeable and experienced in their own areas. Each interaction is an opportunity to learn and grow, and if you approach the industry with that spirit, you will definitely do well.
Q: How hard is it to turn your game ideas into reality with the help of developers, how do you explain to them what's on your head in terms of game direction? – Thanks, u/vassirbl. From Morocco.
A: Hey vassirbl, thanks for taking part!
This is a really interesting question and one that is hard to answer directly as it depends on the idea – some things can require just a few lines of code, some can require multiple teams working in tandem to bring it to life – and that is part of the challenge with games development, something that seems quite straight forward might be really challenging to manifest. On the flipside, sometimes something that may seem to be really complicated and taxing can actually be done very quickly and efficiently.
The thing I’d say about this is that having ideas is one thing, everyone has ideas and I believe everyone is creative, but in a position like games direction it isn’t always about throwing around big ideas – you need to have a vision for what you are wanting to make and achieve and you need to ensure that your ideas are in service of that vision and are supplementing/augmenting/enhancing the direction of the game. You aren’t always making a game for yourself and your own niche interests, you are in service of the vision and trying to ensure that there is congruence between what is going into the game and what the game is trying to achieve.
In terms of explaining things that can often be more straight forward than it might seem, you are interacting with people who aren’t just gamers, they have made gaming their passion/vocation so you are speaking about the game in a similar way to when speaking to a friend about a game you are both playing together – and generally if the idea is good then it's going to generate some excitement. Then you are in an ideation process where the person you are talking to, often someone who is passionate about an areas of games development (their discipline), will then have some suggestions for flourishes and tweaks that can help improve the idea. This is really important because you want the game to be as good as it can be, and there is no silver bullet that magically makes a game feel special, fun or unique, normally its countless little tweaks and adjustments and suggestions from everywhere within the studio that create the end result which hopefully is something that feels like it has been made with love, care and attention. You can’t fake that or even articulate what it is that makes a game feel like that, but you feel it when you play a great game and that is what we are always striving to achieve.
Q: I was waiting for this because I'm on the mailing list. I appreciate this. Hello Adam. I guess my question is what is one of your favourite things about being an Assistant Gaming Director at Build A Rocket Boy? – u/EducationalCook9570
A: Thanks for signing up, EducationalCook, really pleased to get to answer your question so thanks for taking part.
It’s really hard to pick one particular thing but over the years I’ve been asked some variation of this question and my answer generally is the same – it's getting to work with such an amazing team of wonderful and talented people who are giving their all in service of the same common goal – making EVERYWHERE and MindsEye the best possible game(s) they can be.
When I was growing up gaming was still a bit of a niche hobby so anyone I met that was a gamer was instantly a friend, someone I could share my passion with, and now I get to spend most of my time with people like that – it's truly a blessing and I feel fortunate every day I get to interact with all of my wonderful colleagues.
Q: Howdy Adam! Most people will ask about the game, but for a Q&A it's really about the person. So here are my questions.

• Were there moments where the development struggled? If so, how did this affect you?
• Now the last ones might be too personal buuuut, is pineapple on pizza justifiable?

Thx in advance for answering these questions. I really hope you do. – u/MikaStr0L
A: Hey MikaStr0L, thanks for your question(s)!
I wouldn’t say there were any parts where development struggled but along the way there are always challenges to overcome, the main one for us was building a company at the same time of building a brand new and exciting project.
Generally speaking though, if things aren’t going quite as planned I try not to let it bother me – though that can of course be hard when you feel very personally invested in something – but I’ve found that it doesn’t help to let the negative feeling linger and instead try and push on, games development – like life in general – doesn’t always go according to plan but you just have to focus on solutions and moving forward and not let things hold you back. If you can do something about an issue, then deal with it and fix it, if you can’t do anything about it then move on and try not to let the negatives/setbacks hold back progress in other areas.
Now the truly important question… I must admit that I am not a fan of pineapple on pizza, although I do like pineapple generally, I’m more of a pepperoni kind of guy 😊
Q: Hey Adam, first, let me say I admire the work you all do a lot. Not only you guys at BARB, but also in the whole industry. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on MindsEye and EVERYWHERE.

• Working within the QA part for many years, was it difficult the transition to a different role? Would you say it was a positive change?
• Do you think EVERYWHERE and other games/experiences with a similar concept are the future of gaming?

Thank you and I hope you keep succeeding at your career, can't wait to play both projects’ you guys have been working on. 💙 – u/Fabry06
A: Hi Fabry, thanks for taking part and for your kind words and sentiments. I’ll start by saying that I also admire the work that takes place industry wide – the games industry is full of amazing and talented people who are all helping to further this artform we all whole dear forward, and I believe we are only just now realising the potential that video games can achieve.
I would say that transitioning from QA to another role felt very natural, even in my current position I’m still playing the game all the time and entering bugs, they might not be as well written as they once were but once you’ve cultivated a QA mindset it is not easy to turn off (this can make me a very boring person to watch play in my spare time as I’m always poking and prodding games to see what might happen…). I would say it was also a positive change for me personally but everyone's path in the industry is different and you kind of move with the tides and get swept up in a project and who knows where you end up within it – I always took the approach of wanting to be helpful/productive/useful in furthering the ambitions of the studio and the project and have always been happy to do that regardless of what that entails (in the very early days I was building PCs and writing design docs as well as doing QA work, whatever was required).
I do think that EVERYWHERE is a new type of project, but one that isn’t entirely unfamiliar, there are probably aspects that you recognise and some that are a bit different, I think the way everything ‘fits together’ is quite elegant and hasn’t been done before. The industry in general though is continuously evolving and I think that’s what makes it an exciting thing to be a part of. I do feel that the way people are consuming entertainment has fundamentally changed within the past decade and I believe that EVERYWHERE is a reflection of that – perhaps games in general are a bit to beholden to established paradigms and ways of doing things in ways that I think we aren’t.

About EVERYWHERE and MindsEye

Q: What is the inspiration to create EVERYWHERE and MindsEye, and why did you decide to make them two different games? – u/Zgangstas
A: Hi Zgangstas, thanks for your question.
This is a really interesting question and I think this is part of the magic of games development, when you are ideating/experimenting in the early stages of a project you can happen upon some magic that can alter the way you approach things, even if the vision has remained the same throughout perhaps the way to achieve it evolves.
I think that one of the main things we always wanted to do was create a space where players were in control, where they could be who they want to be and have the experiences that they wanted to have – but then as experienced game devs there is a natural inclination towards curating an immersive experience that captivates and enthrals players – this was a tricky thing to balance and trade off and I think ultimately it lead us to our current path.
EVERYWHERE is a space where players are in control, where they can build, share, compete, and explore in numerous different ways – and MindsEye is where we can construct an immersive and cinematic experience – with shared DNA between the two so we aren’t reinventing the wheel constantly, and we are at the place where we are now where work on one project is benefitting the other and vice versa.
So, I guess the true answer is that they both demanded to be different game organically through the course of development and we pay attention to what the game is telling us and let that guide us.
Q: Hi Adam, there’s the audience that fantasize on stylized and cartoonish games and the ones that are focused on realistic, story-driven experiences. How challenging is it to deliver the best game as possible to both audiences, and how confident do you feel about the shape those two games are in? – u/Treyboss2001
A: Thanks for your question Treyboss.
I think as you say there are probably distinct audiences for both, some that prefer or only enjoy one style or the other, but there are others (like me!) who enjoy both stylised and realistic games – often depending on my mood.
It may seem challenging to be constantly shifting gears between them both but ultimately, it’s more natural than it may seem. They have very distinctive and different requirements and demands that make decisions intuitive – though careful thought and consideration is required for each.
However, the way we think about it internally is that we get to have our cake and eat it, we aren’t locked in to one style or gameplay type, which can be fun and refreshing – perhaps you hit a creative roadblock with one and you can move on to the other and come back with a fresh perspective to the original issue you were having. Projects of this scale can often take many years to make so not being too locked in to just one thing is a blessing.
In terms of the progress we are making, I have to say that I am constantly delighted – either one project is delivering something new and wonderful or the other one is (often both at the same time!). Now we are getting to show people them both for the first time I’m truly humbled by the very positive reactions we are receiving.
Q: Hello Adam from the Build A Rocket Boy team. What was the original plan when EVERYWHERE was being developed in lumberyard engine and back when yah were using the lumberyard engine what were the challenges and roadblocks?
Keep being awesome Adam. - u/Lonelyfades
A: Thank you Lonelyfades, I will do my best!
I think back when we first started with this project the industry was quite different, the game engine landscape in particular was very different. We always had lofty ambitions for this project and at the time Lumberyard seemed to be the only engine that could deliver what we needed to even scratch the surface of what we wanted to accomplish. Since then, things have progressed somewhat and now we are in UE5. I believe UE5 is clearly the cutting-edge technology that we need in order to deliver the best possible results.
That is the strange thing with life and games development, sometimes an old decision was the correct one at the time even if it is not correct for right now, and even things as disruptive as engine swapping is ultimately worth it if it unlocks the creative potential you are aspiring towards.
I think this is ultimately a tribute to our core strength as a developer which is our unwillingness to compromise, we are eager to undertake difficult or even painful changes if it helps move the needle closer to where we want it to be.
Q: Hi Adam, so something I was confused about, is EVERYWHERE and MindsEye the same game? Or is it a game within a game? – u/Jozza141
A: Jozza thanks for asking your question and I am happy to try and relieve your confusion.
EVERYWHERE and MindsEye are distinctly different, but also inextricably linked. One way to think about it is that EVERYWHERE is ultimately a platform for games, entertainment, and different types of fun – and MindsEye is a story-driven, action-adventure game that could reasonably exist on its own but is enriched and elevated by its connection to a larger social space. A connection that I believe is deep and meaningful. The possibilities are endless and there’s so much to share, but we will reveal more when we are ready.
Q: Both u/iPeluche and u/Bobby_Boy301 had some questions about PC vs Console release. Why has BARB opted for the separate release between PC and Console. And does this mean Console won’t get the same treatment as PC after release?
A: I don’t think we are completely locked into this type of approach; we want to do that which makes the most sense for both projects whilst also working within the constraints of their paradigms.
PC is certainly a very open and creatively liberating space in which to operate, sometimes key innovations in gaming take place on PC because of its open nature and I think this is an example of that.
Rest assured we are passionate about both PC and Console development, and we would always aim to ensure parity between both releases of either project – platform holders permitting.
With all that being said, I would look forward to future announcements as we are very pragmatic as a company and always move forward in a direction that makes sense both for us and for our players.

Advice for aspiring Game Developers

Q: Ok, ok, here goes:
What advice do you have for those aspiring to pursue a career in game development?
What excites you the most in terms of future game development and where do you think the industry is headed? – u/RazorDarkness
A: Thanks for your question RazorDarkness.
My biggest advice for anyone trying to pursue a career in games development is to always remain humble, this is the cross section for all the artistic and engineering disciplines we have in media, as such it is impossible to be an expert at all things. You are always going to be working in a team and you are always going to be relying on your peers to achieve whatever it is you set out to achieve. So always keep your eyes and ears open and try to absorb as much knowledge and information as you can so you never stop learning. The moment you think you know it all is the moment you become a dinosaur and you will be immediately surpassed.
My second big piece of advice is to never lose sight of why you are making games in the first place – I often keep some mementos on my desk from favourite games and things that inspired me as a child to keep me grounded, as even on the hardest of days I can take a step back and realise that I’m getting to do something that I’ve loved my entire life and despite its difficulties my overriding feeling is always gratitude that I’m even able to earn a living doing something I love.
Q: Hello Adam!
First, I really hope you and your team are getting enough sleep after all the hard work you guys put into these projects. I just want to say on behalf of the EVERYWHERE & MindsEye Community, we really appreciate all of you that are involved with these two major projects, and also sending much support to every single one of you on this journey!
But my question is ... Where do you see yourself, the team, and everyone over at BARB in the next 10 years after both games are officially out? – u/TheRealRocketBoy
A: Well thank you TheRealRocketBoy – your support and encouragement means a lot, excited for you to get to enjoy the fruits of our labours!
This is a great question – I see us still working on this project, both aspects of what we are doing have far reaching plans and if all they all work out, we’ll still be working on both – and we aim that this will be in tandem with our community and players.
What things will look like at that point though I have no idea, EVERYWHERE in particular isn’t the kind of game we want to prescribe to people, it's something we want to further improve and refine in collaboration with our players – indeed the launch of EVERYWHERE will truly just be the beginning and I know that the creativity of gamers will always thrill and surprise so I think we are going to go on a wild ride together and I can’t wait to see where we end up.
MindsEye on the other hand… well who knows where in space or time we may be with that story by that point… I could write down on a piece of paper now a phrase for where MindsEye will be in year 10 and whilst it would almost certainly hold true, how we get there, and the specifics would surprise even me, I’m sure!
Q: Hey Adam, appreciate you taking the time to do this Q&A!
You have a great name! I may have a bias though as I'm also an Adam. In my spare time I've been creating a game design document for a game I'd love to create. This document has been growing and expanding over the past couple years. Ideally, I have aspirations of becoming a creative director for a development studio but have no experience working in the gaming industry (I'm a project manager in the residential construction industry).
Given your experience in the industry and your current position as BARB's Assistant Game Director, what advice would you give someone such as myself about how I may go about potentially pitching my design documentation to a studio and ultimately becoming a creative director? Do you personally feel as though people aspiring to become involved in the gaming industry need to start in an entry level position? Or perhaps there are alternative pathways to achieving such goals?
Thank you! Well wishes to you and everyone at BARB! – u/EndgameEmporium
A: Hey EndgameEmporium!
I admire your enthusiasm and you clearly have a passion for games which is something you want to hold on to as it will always keep you right and steer you correctly.
That being said I think there are two ways to head in if you want to be a creative director – firstly you can go down the studio route – however keep in mind that games are big expensive things to make, and it would be pretty remarkable for someone to have an idea so strong that a studio would trust in and fund it. Generally speaking I think going down this path would require you joining a studio and working your way up, and in particular showing a willingness to work towards someone else’s vision and showing that you can see the big picture when it comes to games development, then you will get creative opportunities with an established project or studio to show what you can do and from there more and more creative freedom until you are able to pitch your idea. With that path you may very well find that working with other creative brief’s and visions can be both challenging and rewarding, as essentially they are ‘creative restraints’ you are operating within and learning to work within these restraints will teach you how to be economical and efficient with your designs and ideas (sometimes a good idea can cost millions of dollars and sometimes a great idea can be brought to life with existing resources, the latter is where the magic really is, and will make you very popular to work with!).
The second path to take would be to try and build out a vertical slice or gameplay prototype or concept yourself, with that I would try and refine your idea to its core components, understand what things fundamentally you need for another person to be able to experience or understand your idea, and go from there. If anything, EVERYWHERE might be the perfect thing for you as empowering the great creative minds of the next generation is something we are very passionate about and you may be able to bring your idea to life with ARC-ADIA.

Emerging Technologies in Gaming

Q: u/Main-Department9806 and u/Dirty_Worka had some interesting questions about AI. Adam, as AI learning and functionality accelerates, what’s your read on the level of disruption we should expect with regards to game development? And do you think we can leverage AI such as ChatGPT into games, for example, so that NPC’s dialogue could be vast and ever changing?
A: I think that AI is going to fundamentally change the way in which we interact with the world and each other, it's going to be a transformative technology over the coming years and every industry and sector will feel it.
In terms of game development, we can see how this might play out already, things like ChatGPT etc. will streamline and accelerate the game development process exponentially – this should hopefully lower the costs and requirements for making larger projects. This could mean many more larger and ambitious games that are taking more risks emerge as they won’t be as expensive and time consuming to create – instead of a lot of talent being funnelled in to a few large studios and creators it will allow us to go back to an older style of games development where a small team with a big idea has some chance of bringing it to fruition without having to compromise on the scope/scale.
From the consumer perspective yes, I think we will soon have realistic interactions with NPCs where we can really build deeper and more personal connections with the characters we interact with in these virtual worlds, possibly even allowing us to alter how events and stories may play out, maybe in the future the way I play a story driven game may yield entirely different results and a different ending to how your story may finish – and maybe these aren’t just branching paths but completely different forks in the road we are creating dynamically – maybe then watching each other player story games has value beyond the personality/skill of the person playing.
I think this something that games developers have always wanted to have access to, a future where we can create entire worlds that feel unique to the individual because the way you are experiencing it is unique to you, in the same way that each of our journeys through life are unique and different even though we all inhabit the same world within the same physical universe.

Off-Topic

Q: Hey Adam, first I would like to thank you and the team for the great effort on EVERYWHERE and we can't wait to play what you're working on.
Second, my question is what's your favourite game (or games) of all time (excluding games you worked on). - u/Punisher_27
A: Firstly, thank you for your kind words, Punisher!
Secondly, what a fun question! I’m going to end up kicking myself later when I realise I missed something but here are a few of my faves from a lifetime spent playing video games:
Mario 64 – it is tough picking one Mario game as he’s the reason I got in to games (playing on my parents imported NES at the age of 3 changed my life!) but something about Mario 64 is just so magical and wonderful, the first time effortlessly moving through a 3D world, the joyous nature of the gameplay and the level design, I just adored this so much and despite later entries (e.g. Galaxy) being more refined and objectively better this is just such a special game I don’t think it's possible to calculate the impact it had on the industry and on entertainment when it first came out.
Quake 3 – I have probably played this more than any other game (with the possible exception of World of Warcraft) but this was my first foray in to the world of online games and that was a life-changing moment, realising that no matter how good I got there was always someone out there better… well that was a challenge I duly accepted and I have met many wonderful friends I hold very dear to me along the way across many different online games but this was the one that really blew me away
Bloodborne – I do adore the whole Soulsborne franchise(s) and as a game dev I really admire how FromSoft do things their own way and stay true to their artistic vision. I can’t think of a game that is more harmonious and congruent than Bloodborne, every pixel/sound is working in perfect harmony with each other, and the end result is something truly staggering. If I could wipe my memory and play one game over and over again and recapture the same feeling I had when I first played it, it would be Bloodborne.
Final Fantasy VII – I was queueing outside Electronics Boutique the day this came out, the first FF game to get released in Europe and I’m so glad we didn’t miss out on this one (though 6 was great and we had to import that…) – I can’t put into words what it was like encountering Sephiroth for the first time thinking I was at the Shinra HQ to complete the game and then the world map opens up and my mind was so utterly blown I couldn’t believe my eyes. As for Aerith/Aeris – well… aside from the fact she was the group healer… I was just floored; I didn’t realise how potent games were at eliciting an emotional response until that scene and I doubt any game could ever have that impact again.
Street Fighter 2 – when this first came out it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before – encountering at an arcade machine it's what the “cool older kids” were playing and its always retained that allure, this was a game that was cool and badass. The way you compete against others in fighting games has a certain purity to it that I just love, and I sorely miss having arcades to go to as they were a staple in my life growing up and there was always a great fighting game a community would build around. Getting to have the SNES version that was as close to arcade perfect as we could fathom at the time was a real joy as well and I guess this is widely regarded as the beat ‘em up that started it all and with good reason, because it did!
Q: Hey Adam and the community team, hope you're all doing well!

• Are you a cat or a dog person? xD
• When the game was announced in 2017, Everywhere was only the working title of the game. Why did you keep the name? What were some of the suggestions?

Thanks in advance! – u/thewhitewolf35
A: Hey thewhitewolf! Thanks for your fun questions 😊
I am definitely a dog person, I’ve grown up with dogs my entire life and despite being fond of cats I just adore dogs – quite a few people in the office have them and I am always happy to meet them, and due to my lifestyle I am not really able to be a good and responsible dog owner right now so I am very grateful when I get to interact with any of the BARB doggos. 😊
EVERYWHERE has always been called such and I think we liked the title straight away, I think it speaks to the potentially unlimited nature of what we are trying to achieve and we want this to be a game that anyone can play, wherever they are as I think we see games as more than just ways to spend your time, they are ways to connect and socialise and learn from each other – but even more than that they are a way to share experiences and that spirit of creativity has always been our guiding star with the project.
Q: u/MightyMax_1988 would like to know more about what you do in your free time. Do you like retro consoles such as Sega Master System, Sega Genesis (mega drive), Super Nintendo (snes)? And do you like the movie Ready Player One?
A: Hey MightyMax! I am always happy to talk about my hobbies 😊my friends often wish I would shut up about them!
In my free time I do enjoy watching team sports, specifically football (lifelong Nottingham Forest fan) and I adore the NBA (big Lakers fan) and live sports are a good way to stay connected to my friends and are something I always try and make time for. I also try and stay on top of the latest greatest TV Shows, Movies and Anime (just finished Ted Lasso which I thought was such wholesome fun and I also recently finished an anime called Chainsaw Man that was just… exhilarating!).
In terms of games I’m a lifelong gamer so I’ve had every console (apart from the NeoGeo…) over the years (even a VirtualBoy), though I would say that I don’t really do much retro gaming these days as I struggle to keep up with all the modern games coming out, and I think I prioritise online gaming as it helps me stay connected to my friends so I’m always playing something with them and then trying my best to play the cream of the crop of single player games (currently trying to finish off Octopath Traveller 2 so I can move on to the new Zelda!).
And yeah, I liked both the book and the movie Ready Player One – I love a good mashup of different IPs and art-styles, I really enjoyed Wreck It Ralph for the same reason, and anything with lots of pop culture references makes me happy (even stuff like Scott Pilgrim etc.).
Q: How bad were you at Quake? – u/tyj
A: I was so terrible I had to go to tournaments and captain the UK RA3 team… it was a tough time 😊 but back then when I told people I thought Esports would be played in stadiums for millions of dollars people thought I was an idiot… I’m so delighted to see how things have ended up and really excited that future generations can actually become pro gamers as a viable path in life – how far we’ve come!
Q: Also, what’s your favourite colour? – u/voodoolady94
A: Another question from the voodoolady…. Well, this one is an easy one and I can be uncharacteristically succinct.
Pink, my favourite colour is pink 😊

In 1992 Carl Pickens won the Offensive Rookie of the Year with a mere 326 yards. While it's not uncommon for award winners to have relatively average seasons, Pickens' win raises the question: has there ever been a less impressive award-winning performance?
Typically, even the winners who don't have outstanding years still manage to achieve something notable or overcome significant challenges, like the comeback player of the year. However, Pickens' win with such minimal production appears unprecedented, at least to the best of my knowledge. Can you think of any worse award-winning seasons?
In fairness, he was probably a deserving winner. That's how bad the rookie class was. Look at the voting results. In second place was Vaughn Dunbar with 565 yard rushing on 3.7 ypc. Jason Hanson, a kicker who doesn't even play offense, finished third in the voting. David Klingler, who only started four games, managed to secure the fifth spot. This begs the question: was the offensive rookie class of '92 one of the least impressive on one side of the ball?
Check out the voting details pro-football-reference.com/awards/awards_1992.htm

OK, kickoff isn’t for 3 months, but the NFL is the only sport I bet on. I’m liking the Cardinals’ money line week 1 against Commanders. It’s at +195 on DraftKings. That seems off to me.
My thinking:
The public is on Washington.
Not hard to see this. Washington has been in a miserable drought since Dan Snyder bought the team 20+ years ago. Dan Snyder has to be the most unlikeable man in the NFL, and maybe all of sports. Now that he’s gone, the Commanders are ready to be the Chicago Cubs of the NFL… win-starved underdogs with a huge fanbase with a lovable comeback story. In general, if the ESPN crowd is on one side, I want to be on the other. How much of the +195 number is inflated by the much larger WAS fanbase?
​
AZ expectations are LOW
AZ is widely expected to tank this year. Kyler is injured and unlikely to play week 1. They just released their star WR1. And not only that, when Hopkins was released the Cards opted to take all of the salary cap hit in 2023. They could have spread that hit out over 2 years. That said to me and others, that AZ are going to tank hard this year, going for high draft value in 2024. With that perception comes over-confidence, and odds inflation… especially at the beginning of the season… the AZ players are still going to play hard…
​
Sam Howell is an unknown.
That’s being generous. One game sample size, but look at his stats from the ONE game he played last year. In week 18 against a Dallas team resting its starters. I keep looking at that thinking, “THIS is the guy who’s starting for the Commanders? A 5th round pick with one NFL game to his name? THIS is your starting QB after an entire offseason? THIS is the best you can do?”
​
WAS losing culture.
Bienemy was a great hire for OC, but he is not going to turn that ship around in a day. And remember, he had Patrick Mahomes as his QB with his success in KC. There’s a severe drop off in QB quality going from Mahomes to Howell, and their first game is a likely time for that to be exposed to the public.
​
Colt McCoy revenge game.
OK, this one’s thin. Colt is the QB I’d want to bet on out of the two though.
​
My numbers have the Cards wining the game outright 52-ish% of the time.
So, my simulations are raw (just wrote the program this offseason), but after 1000+ sims, I’m seeing the Cards winning 52% of the time. With implied odds of a 33.9% win rate for the Cards and near double-your-money payout, I’m willing to bet on the Cards winning the game outright. (Against the spread isn't bad either, and FWIW, I have a bet on that too.)
​
Alright. Here’s where you tell me I’m crazy. Commander-Stans, bring on the personal insults. Let’s lock up some money in the books for 3 months.

If I had to pick an embarrassing moment which will haunt me until I die—it has to be the time I tried out for The Sunbeam cheer squad last year. I was a freshman, and I wanted community. Friends.
I heard the cheer squad were just an extra-curricular group rather than an actual majoring level class, so I figured I’d give them a shot. It’s not like I could ignore them.
On my first day when I was moving into my dorm room, I must have walked into the same girl three times. I am in strict belief that it is not possible for a human being to be permanently happy.
And yet that was her. She wandered around like the sun shone right out of her ass, and it was both endearing and terrifying.
The girl resembled the sun herself, a halo of golden curls held in a scrunchie and a flaunting sundress, matching ribbons wrapped around her. The Sunbeam Squad were easy to spot because they were all wearing insanely bright yellow—waving around gold streamers, ribbons tangled in their hair. They all spoke in insanely high pitched voices like they inhaled helium for a living, but that must have been their shtick, right? It was kind of cute. I wasn’t expecting such a welcome in the shape of guy’s and girl’s looking like they had just stepped off of ABC Kids. The girl who handed me a flyer and yelled in my face about school spirit was practically hopping up and down, a bright grin splitting her lips apart.
I nodded and smiled politely, stuffing the flyer in my bag and heading into my room to finish moving my stuff in. When I looked out of my window a few hours later, the Sunbeam squad was still threaded through the crowd, each of them wrapped in glittering fairy lights illuminated in the late evening sunset glow. Sunbeam. Yeah, I got it, but it was still kinda overkill. They were starting to remind me of a cult.
That, however, didn’t stop me trying out. I’m fairly athletic, and they were exactly what I wanted. I’ve never had a group of people I could call friends.
Though it’s not like I could blame anyone but myself. I was a shut-in for most of high school. I either worked or preferred my own company in my room. One of my biggest regrets is pushing people away, friends I wanted to get even closer to. Because now they had built these lifelong friendships and relationships, and I was stuck at 18 years old with nobody but childhood friends I spoke to once a year when we sent mutual holiday greetings to each other. But college could change that.
At least, that’s what I hoped. I spoke to as many people as possible on my first day—and in my head I was making them. Slowly but surely I was actually making friends in my classes I wanted to hang out with.
Sunbeam were my attempt to go even further and join a club. Through word of mouth in my first few weeks of classes, I learned they were more of an extra-curricular group for fun.
They didn’t cheer competitively and had been formed in the mid-90’s by some kids who wanted to make a community out of positivity and school spirit. Sunbeam had a reputation for being Watson State student body’s beacons—and their team’s good luck charm. It was well known across campus that the squad was the reason behind the college’s fortune.
It had been like that since they formed 30 years ago, with members through the generations carrying out that pledge to spread as much pep as possible. While I say that they seemed nice judging from what I heard from others, they weren’t exactly the easiest clique to get into. Unless you were on the squad.
I saw them around campus between classes. They always moved as a group, the six of them with their arms wrapped around each other, brandishing the school colours. The guy’s in loose fitting varsity jackets, while the girl’s flaunted cheer skirts.
The way they acted was a little too close, like they were more than friends—and community and friendship had bled into something else. Like they had just walked out of an early 2000’s teen movie. Not that I was complaining. Their style was intriguing. They were like this untouchable group of god’s who had been placed on the highest pedestals. They ruled over campus, which made me want to get to know them even more. So, I tried out. Which was my first mistake of many in my freshman year.
It didn’t hit me that I was in way over my head until I was in the college gymnasium, standing in front of a four person panel like I was auditioning for a Hollywood movie. Sunbeam took their try-outs incredibly seriously. Which was weird considering they were known to be the complete opposite.
There were maybe fifty or so applicants, and we had to stand near the back wall and watch others try out one by one. Which was already setting off my anxiety. Weren’t they supposed to be closed try-outs? Initially, I was excited.
I had my routine in my head. What I had learned from watching the squad at my old school. High V, Low V, followed by a Touchdown, and then a backflip. I was confident. I mean, it ticked most cheer moves off, and even had a flip to complete the routine. My high school were a multi-sex quad, so I learned a lot from watching the guy’s moves during pep rallies.
I wasn’t really worried about the quality of the moves since they were known not to take everything too seriously. But watching the others try-out, impossible flips without crash mats and twisting their bodies in ways I didn’t know was possible, I quickly realised I was screwed. My competitors were acting like they were auditioning for an Olympic level team. My gut was dancing when I took centre stage.
The panel were made up of four members of the squad. Two boys and two girl’s, including the blonde who handed me the flyer on my first day. I was surprised when her eyes lit up with recognition.
"Oh, I know you!" She squeaked. Leaning forward, her smile seemed to brighten, illuminating her features. All four of them seemed to emanate a warm glow.
I felt myself relax slightly, the knot in my stomach loosening. Maybe their heightened positivity thing wasn’t a shtick, after all. The girl, as well as the other members of the team seemed genuinely happy to see me trying out. “What’s your name?” Her voice reverberated off of the walls, and I was suddenly aware of a dozen other students watching me.
“Alex.” I said, offering a shy wave. “Hey.”
Still grinning, she nudged a redhead next to her playfully. The guy was like no other I’d seen before. He was a god damn traffic light. He was easy to spot in a crowd and was usually one of the low-key members who kept his head down. All of those colours painting him, and yet somehow he wasn’t blinding people.
Though admittedly, he suited them; bright red hair clashing with the blue and gold of his football jersey, pasty skin and dark eyes drinking me in while the blonde girl pulled at his sleeve. “See, I told you annoying freshmen would work!”
In response, he chuckled, rolling his eyes. “Whatever you say, Evie.” The guy straightened up, leaning his chin on his fist, a curious spark in his eyes. “Alright.” Twisting around in his chair, he signalled for music. When it started, the beat slammed into me, rumbling under my feet. “Let’s see what you’ve got!”
I’m not going to describe my routine because I don’t have time to describe how fucking bad I was. In my head, I was doing okay. I was ready to finish with my back flip, but the music abruptly cut off and I found myself struggling to find my breath with my hands in the air, panting like an idiot. The blonde maintained her smile, but it was slightly strained. I could tell she was struggling to keep the façade of a Sunbeam member while also retaining critical thinking.
The redhead looked like he was in pain. He was first to speak, and I could tell by his sympathy smile I’d screwed up. The others who I hadn’t fully taken in until that moment, an asian American guy, and a girl with pigtails, were laughing like pre-schoolers. And they didn’t stop until the redhead shot them the warning eyes.
Weirdly enough, the crowd of onlookers didn’t join in. I expected the redhead to politely tell me I sucked, but instead he cocked his head, chewing on his pen. “You’re good.” He said. “You’re a good dancer, and I liked your moves…”
He trailed off. “But it’s positivity we’re looking for. And you didn’t smile once through your whole routine which made you look stiff. Like you weren’t even enjoying it.” He shrugged helplessly. “I like you, and I like your dancing. And I’m sure you could be better if you worked on it. There are countless dancing clubs here, so maybe you might be better fitted there.” After exchanging a look with the blonde, he sighed. “Unfortunately, you’re not the type of person we’re looking for.”
Evie nodded. “I agree. We pride ourselves on staying positive and smiling. I didn’t see that on you, Alex.”
“Same here.” Pigtails, still giggling, joined in. “I don’t think you’ve got enough school spirit.”
The other guy scoffed. He looked to be of Korean descent. Unlike the redhead, he was always at the centre of their group, always joking around and laughing. Just looking at him told me he was the leader. “Bullshit!” He slapped the table with one hand, running his hands through thick dark hair with the other. “I liked it. Fuck pep, amirite?” He threw his pen at the blonde, who retaliated in a squeak, lobbing hers at him. “Ignore these clowns. I think you’ve got what it takes. We just gotta work on you, y’know? All you’re missing is a cheesy grin.”
He pointed to himself, stretching his lips into the widest smile he could muster. “See? Like this.”
“Clowns?” Evie shook her head. “I didn’t see one smile. Sunbeam is all about smiling!”
“You make us sound like a cult.” The Korean-American caught my eye. “Which we’re not, by the way. These guys are just scared of change.”
“Okay, that’s too far.” Pigtails shot him a scowl. Are you seriously disrespecting the alumni who created us? Who birthed us?
“Well, yeah!” He threw his paper at her. “Sunbeam is a pep cult. We get high off of happiness. I thought we distinguished that.”
“Take that back!”
“Never! Why do you think I joined? To get high! Do you really think I joined for the cheering?”
They were joking around. I could tell by the smiles on their faces—a smile I knew I would never be able to mimic.
“Quiet.” The redhead shushed them. The guy had been sitting silently. Studying me. He leaned back, folding his arms.
“See, even now—even when I’m considering giving you a chance, there’s no hope in your eyes. Not even a glitter of excitement. You’re still not smiling and that’s what we want, Alex. We want people who will embody what Sunbeam is all about. Even if I give you a second chance to brighten up your routine your smile will be fake. And that’s not what we want. We want people who are willing to shed their humanity and become beacons.”
Beacons, huh?
And they were seriously saying they weren’t a cult?
The redhead stabbed at his sheet of paper with the end of his pen. “Can’t you just give us one smile? It won’t kill you.”
It was then when the others watching started to laugh—and I wanted to punch the asshole in the face.
“Dude, chill.” The Korean-American played with his pen, twirling it between two fingers. “He’s right, as much as I hate saying it. We do need smilers, unfortunately. But hey, you can try out next year! Just remember to smile, alright?” He threw something at me. A squashed candy bar.
Which made me look even more pathetic.
I found myself nodding, even when I knew it was all bullshit. Still though, what each member had told me hit me harder than it should have. They were just words, what could they do? It turned out, words were far more powerful than I realised—I just didn’t know it yet. I didn’t wait for the others to speak and made a quick getaway, my gut twisting and turning.
They were a cult. That is what I decided. These guys were a cult who needed members willing to throw away their souls. Probably for ritualistic sacrifice.
They needed weak people, I thought. Even when part of me knew they were right. I wasn't a smiler. Every photo I'm in, I'm either frowning or look constipated. Still though, I didn't dwell on the try-outs for too long. By the time a week had gone by, I had mostly forgotten about it and threw myself into my studies and college life.
Though something was wrong with me. It was as if the world had slowed down, had stopped making sense completely. Every day felt like a dream, and I myself felt like I was a ghost, like I was disassociating from my own body. Conversations with people felt fake. Like I was making them up.
I remember waking up day after day in a daze I couldn’t get myself out of. It was only several weeks later did the thick mind fog which had been blanketing my brain finally lift—only for me to hear the news that all six members of the Sunbeam squad had disappeared. I don’t know how I didn’t notice, how I didn’t see the police investigation, or hear rumours being spread around like wildfire.
According to the college, it wasn't technically considered a disappearance since the members were all over eighteen, no longer minors. However, an investigation was conducted, with a statement being released that they were due to be performing at Knoxville College, cheering on our football team. But they never turned up. And what made it worse, was their bus was found abandoned on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Sounds bad, right?
Well, that's what we all thought. Vigils were already being held, and bodies weren't even found yet. Every time I walked back to my dorm after classes, the night would be lit up in warm golden light, candles flickering in the breeze. I'm not sure how many days had gone by-- they all seemed to blur into one-- when our college made another statement. The members of the Sunbeam squad were alive and healthy and had been sent to a training academy for professionals.
When the student body responded with confusion and scepticism, the college reassured us they were coming back once they were finished training. And while my classmates were relieved, I found myself confused. Sunbeam didn't cheer competitively. Their whole thing was that all they wanted to do was spread cheer and pep, regardless of how good they were. I had seen them perform, and they were good, sure. They were better than average. But definitely not good enough to be trained into pro’s. Their moves were too clumsy, too half assed—which I was convinced they thought overwhelming amounts of positivity could fix. So it didn’t make sense that they had been sent to some training academy. I kept up my scepticism until I saw them for myself.
The college were right. Sunbeam returned a week later like nothing had happened.
I did see a change in them. I think that was a universal opinion though. Sunbeam were well known for their pep and cheer, their constant smiling faces which drove me crazy—and it’s not like that stopped. They still smiled. They still walked around campus laughing together, in their own little world. That was when people were watching. When they had an audience. I caught them when they didn’t have an audience. Without eyes on them, they detached from each other, their eyes darkening, expressions twisting, like each of them could smell something rotten in the air. I started noticing they were getting progressively clumsier at keeping up that Sunbeam façade they must have pledged when they joined the group. I figured it was just tiredness. They must have been through some pretty intense training.
Anyway, months went by. I started to feel less distant, and the fog which had been choking me faded, thankfully. I started my junior year moving into a shared house with my roommate, and the only talk I’d heard about Sunbeam was that one of their ex members was rumoured to be pregnant. As for the rest of the squad, they were still popular, still talked about—but their disappearance had definitely made people wary of them. I even heard someone say they were considered bad luck. I guess people thought they had sold themselves out for a chance to get into the big leagues. And it wouldn’t surprise me.
Forced positivity can get you a long way, sure—but recognition can get you further.
It was just a few weeks ago when I was invited to a game. Our first of the season, thanks to delays due to cuts in the sports department. I’m not much of a sports fan, though I needed a distraction from the copious amounts of assignments I’d let pile on my desk.
When I sat down with a chilli dog and Coke, I wasn’t expecting to get so invested in a game where I had no idea what was happening. It was loud and obnoxious and I was choking on the stink of fried food, but it was fun. It was fun until Sunbeam walked out onto the side-lines. I glimpsed them in a blur of blue and gold, and a dull pain crawled across the back of my head. “You okay?” My housemate’s voice was barely distinguishable in my ears, when I found myself transfixed by the way they moved in erratic jumps, quickly taking position. They had gotten better. Everything which was Sunbeam had been stripped away. Their smiles were forced. Wrong.
I remembered they used to push and shove each other, making the crowd laugh. Now though, they were in almost perfect sync in the way they moved, no longer shakily, sometimes stumbling into each other. Their routine was longer than it usually was—and when the Korean-American guy perfected a triple flip, the crowd went crazy. I expected him to smile when he landed, grinning into the audience to generate what Sunbeam was made for. But his expression stayed stoic. Robotic. They were stiff. Heads up, backs straight, staring ahead of them. I was told when I tried out that fake smiles weren’t allowed, and yet that was all I was seeing. I was seeing egotistical grins and curled lips, quick glances between each member.
I expected looks of reassurances, and in jokes only they found funny. Instead, it looked like a mutual agreement.
They were planning something. From the looks on their faces, it wasn’t a firework show.
Sunbeam used to generate happiness. Their smiles, even under a façade, had always been real.
These guys emanated power. The way they stood. The guy’s at the front, readying what I guessed was a lift, and the girl’s on top of them.
Their routine ended with the music reaching a climax, and the two main girl’s being lifted into the air while performing High V’s.
But they didn’t stop there.
When the crowd exploded with applause, one of the girl’s slowly raised her arms and shot into the crowd with finger guns.
She shot twice—and with every time she pulled that imaginary trigger, her painted lips stretched into a maniacal grin.Until her gaze was on me. And then behind me. I could see it in her glittering eyes I could no longer call human. I met Evie at the start of my freshman year, and then at the disastrous try-outs.
I knew her wide smile, and the glint of passion twisting her expression—a love for the group and the members she couldn’t put into words. Right then I wasn’t seeing Evie, a Sunbeam cheerleader. I was seeing something else entirely, a being scanning faces in the crowd for a victim.
Her expression seemed to melt, from a gleeful grin, to something twisted and putrid, someone who craved the exact opposite of what Sunbeam preached. I watched her lips. I watched the words pop into existence, drowned into nothing by the crowds cheering. But I saw them in perfect clarity. “Drop.” She said, before pulling the imaginary trigger again.
No sooner had the words left her mouth before someone screamed behind me. I twisted around to see a guy had collapsed. He was pronounced dead five minutes later by his sobbing girlfriend who had attempted CPR. When I twisted back to look out onto the field, the Sunbeam Squad were gone. It didn’t make sense that they were the ones to cause the guy’s death—but it couldn’t have been a coincidence, right? Evie had shot into the crowd at the exact same time the guy had dropped dead. Finger guns weren’t a weapon of course, but the timing was too coincidental. I already knew there was something wrong with Sunbeam. And this just strengthened my claims.
Obviously, when I tried to tell people this, I was called crazy. Delusional. I reported it to the student information building and just got a blank stare.
The woman wasn’t even attempting to hear my story. She just heard “murder” and “Sunbeam” and her lips curved into an amused smirk. “You know, you are quite fascinating,” leaning back against her chair, the woman frowned at me through wonky glasses. "First you unexpectedly quit, and then you accuse them of murder. Which I can tell you is false.”
She flipped through a notebook in front of her. “According to the autopsy report released a few days ago, the young man died of a brain haemorrhage, not the result of being pretend shot at by a cheerleader miming finger-guns.” The woman cleared her throat.
“Tell me, what exactly do you have against the Sunbeam squad?"
“What?”
“You quit the squad at the end of your freshman year,” she said, “And now you’re trying to accuse them of murder? Fascinating.”
Her words struck me, a shiver sliding down my spine. The office was cosy, and when I sunk into the rich leather of the couch in front of a roaring fire I recognised the book on her desk. It was a dog eared copy of Harry Potter. I’d seen it before. But that was impossible. I had never been in her office. “Quit?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t…” I trailed off, stumbling over my words. “I’ve never been part of Sunbeam.”
“Were you not?” She shook her head, a crease forming between her brows. “Ah, I must be getting you mixed up with someone else.”
I nodded. “Just… can you just listen to me? That Evie girl was fucking—”
She cut me off. “Language.”
“Sorry. Evie. She was… I don’t know what she was doing... she was doing like... like magic?”
“Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Yes!"
“Mmm hmm.” The woman cleared her throat, dismissing my protests. “I’m not a doctor, but If you’re experiencing memory loss and confusion, I suggest you go to the hospital. As for your ludicrous claims, you should keep them to yourself. That poor young man died due to a brain haemorrhage. Terrible and tragic, yes. But it was accidental, and not the work of… I’m sorry, what were you claiming it to be?”
“Magic.” I said, again.
When she raised her brow, I couldn’t resist a groan. “I saw her! She shot into the crowd and mouthed something!”
“She… mouthed something?”
“Yes! But—"
Again, her words sliced into mine. “Okay, let’s say you were right,” she said. “If you are saying this girl shot into the crowd with her imaginary gun, wouldn’t it be a gun shot which would have killed him? You said it yourself—, it was some kind of witchy magic to kill him. So, where was the bullet wound?” When I tried to speak, she raised her arm to shut me up.
“Exactly. There was none. Because the man suffered a haemorrhagic stroke, and nothing could be done to save him. Your claims a group of young people carried this out as a murder is not only blatant defamation, but also disrespectful to the young man and his family. Now, please leave my office. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” The woman nodded for me to stand up. “I think you have been watching too much TV. Might I suggest focusing on your studies?”
I left her office, slamming the door.
My housemate wasn’t helpful when I told him. He told me I was maybe a little too obsessed with Sunbeam. He headed to work, and I ended up in the lounge trying to focus on an episode of Criminal Minds. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Evie.
I saw what she said.
Drop.
But it wasn’t the force of her imaginary finger-guns ricocheting back. It was the word. Drop.
It had been alive on her lips like it was a sentient thing bleeding into existence. I managed to fall asleep, twisted like a pretzel in my housemate’s favourite chair, when three loud knocks on the door tore me from slumber. I was on my feet, blinking, disoriented. It was rare when we got a visitor. Stumbling over to the door, I had a moment of hesitation. I imagined Evie on the other side.
I imagined her raising her hand and shooting her pretend finger-guns directly into my head.
When I opened the door, I was surprised to see three little kids. The youngest must have been maybe nine years old. To my surprise, they were dressed in Halloween costumes. There was a little witch, a ghost, and a scarecrow all carrying pumpkin shaped holders It took me a moment to realise I was staring at a group of Trick or Treaters. It wasn’t even mid-October yet.
“Hey there,” I said, “Uh, you guys are a little early.”
The little girl’s eyes were wide and unblinking. “We want candy.” She held out her candy holder. “Now.”
I decided to be firm with them. “It’s not Halloween.” I said, taking a small step back. I was grasping the handle, ready to slam it in their faces. These little shits were freaking me out. Not just their tone, but their expressions were vacant. There were no lights on and that terrified me. “Sorry kids, I don’t have any candy. But like I said, come back when it’s actually Halloween, and I’ll have candy bars for all of you. "
What I wasn’t expecting was for the Scarecrow to pull a knife out of his pumpkin shaped candy holder. He didn’t hold it like a kid should, clumsily, confused. There was a strategic way the way his fingers were wrapped around the handle—like he’d brandished one before. The kid held the knife up to his own neck and made a slicing motion. Like the little girl, his eyes were blank. Unblinking. There was something wrong in the way he was standing. Stiff, like a puppet on strings. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He squeaked out a laugh. I didn’t see him lunge forward, I was already moving back, stumbling, losing my footing.
The kid moved with impossible speed—and before I knew what was happening, the hilt of the knife was buried in my lower leg. I didn’t even feel pain. My body was being driven by adrenaline, pushing me to get away from him. I remember falling back. I remember my own trembling hands grasping hold of the handle and pulling out the knife. Red was pooling down my jeans and onto our hardwood floor. The little kids turned around and ran back down the steps into the night, and I watched them in a sort of daze.
They didn’t move like normal.
They stalked down the sidewalk like video game characters. The witch shoved a passing old man before pulling out a gun and pointing it at his head. But she didn’t shoot. The three of them ran off—and it was only when I was watching the top of the girl’s witch hat disappear into the night, when I glimpsed something—or someone—at the corner of my eye.
Before I heard laughter. The tree in front of me moved. At first I thought they were shadow’s. Before the shadows bled into figures. Four of them. I glimpsed the school colours. Blue and Gold. I saw twin ponytails, velvet and blonde-- as well as the tell-tale Sunbeam varsity jacket. The group were laughing, whispering to each other. Not exactly doing a good job of hiding. When they slipped from their hiding place, I recognised Evie. Her fingers gingerly on her nose while intense red pooled down her chin.
The others were the same, swiping at their faces with jacket sleeves. They didn’t seem fazed. The redhead’s gaze was latched onto the retreating children, his lips curling. I could sense he was still tethered to them. He was still commanding them to act out grand theft auto. They had caused the man’s death at the game and had controlled those children.
I wasn’t crazy or delusional. Evie had killed someone by simply shooting imaginary finger guns, and somehow the others were able to bleed into children’s heads, taking them over.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I heaved out a breath. The pain was starting to hit in waves I had to grit through. I couldn’t move. I was stuck, curled up on my floor. While they laughed.
I was halfway through stabbing 911 into my phone when one of them came over. It was the Korean-American. The one who had been the nicest to me out of all of them. The real smile I remembered was gone, replaced by something inhuman. Something I didn’t want to question.
With his hands stuffed in his varsity jacket pockets, he approached me with mocking eyes, almost an attempt at trying to mimic his old self.
The guy knelt in front of me with a chuckle. “Kids these days, right? They’re animals.”
His voice, no, his words, were hurting me. I felt each one penetrate me like gunshots.
My wound wasn’t bad. That’s what I estimated, anyway. I don’t think the kid had hit anything vital. But I needed the emergency room. I still had one hand grasping at my side, drenched in red.
I managed a hiss, grasping for my phone when he pulled it out of my grasp and waved it in the air. “Fuck off. What did you do to those little kids?” I gritted out, trying to reach for my damn phone. I was starting to feel the pain in my side and it hurt like a mother fucker—dizzying bolts of electricity which felt like waves of boiling hot water slamming into me one by one. I tried to get onto my knees, but he pushed me back down again. The guy cocked his head to the side, confusion creasing his expression.
“Ouch. That must hurt.”
"What did you... what did you do?" I hissed out.
His presence was hurting me. Every time he opened his mouth, it was agony. Somehow, it was worse than the stab-wound. This kind of pain was no other I’d felt before. The type I’d rather die than feel. A cry was clawing at my throat, fight or flight taking over. Again, I tried to move, I tried to get away from him. But he was holding down my arms and prodding at my side before sticking his finger in the cut and twisting. "I didn't do anything, Alex.”
His voice barely hit me when my vision blurred and I screamed. Like a fucking animal, I screamed. But not because his fingers were digging around in my insides.
Because my brain was suddenly boiling, a metal rod piercing my skull and stirring it into a soupy mess. His voice was inside me. It was bleeding into me, taking over me. But not just his voice. The world blurred around me and I was no longer in my doorway, bleeding out against the wall.
Instead, I was moving. I was… I was walking. No, I was being dragged. Except these weren’t my memories. This wasn’t my mind. I could see bare feet beneath me delicately slapping on white tiles. When I looked up, I saw an expanse of white like I was being led straight into the clouds. This was a building. There were glass doors and electronic panels, people in black guarding each one. It took a while for me to gain my senses—or him to gain his.
We could smell something like chlorine and taste rusty coins at the back of our throat. Feel the ice cold tiles against our bare toes. A strange feeling at the back of our head. We kept wanting to run our fingers through our hair, but every time we did, our fingers only touched bare skin. Scuffed and rigged skin. Tight fingers were wrapped around our arm, dragging us further and further into a white oblivion. Until a glass door seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
From now on, I am going to describe his memories very vaguely. I’m just going to tell you what I saw.
The room we walked into reminded me of a classroom—but there were no desks. In front of me were the other members of Sunbeam pressed against the back wall. They faced forwards, their gazes penetrating nothing. But I saw they were trembling. Terrified. The squad were dressed in pale white shorts and t-shirt, ugly red spattering the front. There were still traces of blue and glitter on their faces, ribbons hanging from bedraggled curls.
Their feet were bare and filthy like ours. When we were shoved forwards, we took our place next to Evie who had half of her hair shaved off. Her arms were folded across her cheer uniform, her bare feet tapping a beat against the floor. When a woman with dark red hair held in a strict ponytail entered and asked if either of us wanted to show her what we had learned, Evie eagerly raised her hand. “Okay, Evie.” The woman’s voice was too sweet. Sickly sweet. She gestured for the girl forward. “Show us what you’ve got.”
The door opened, and a man stepped through. His hands were tied in front of him, his eyes blank.
Evie nodded, her eyes set in determination. She cleared her throat. “Shatter.”
Nothing happened.
“Intent, Evie.” The woman said. “It doesn’t matter how you say the word unless you use proper intent. Try again.”
The girl did, growling in frustration.
"Shatter.”
The man’s head flew from his torso suddenly in a river of red, and the girl squeaked in excitement.
While we watched in horror, the rest of the squad gave in to their own despair.
Different days bled into one—and we watched faces change. Heads were shaved. Hair grew back. Fear turned to joy.
A blonde girl exploded into bloody chunks, splattering against the walls.
“Yes!” The redhead high-fived pigtails, the two of them locked into some bizarre handshake. “That’s what I’m TALKING about!”
“Bang!” One of the girls used finger guns, and with each “shot” innocents dropped against the wall one by one, their heads blown through.
She jumped up and down in glee. “Bang, bang, bang!”
“Keep going,” the voice of the woman crackled through the speaker. “You’ve almost got it.”
“Divide.” Pigtails used her pointer finger at an old man who was skewed by an invisible force sending bloody chunks of him to the floor.
"Show off.” The redhead said in a sing-song voice. He was slumped against the back wall using his jersey to wipe blood from his face while the others painted the room scarlet. With simple words of intent and a hand gesture, they were able to take people apart piece by piece.
Pigtails snorted when another “test subject” was brought in. "Oh, you think you can do better?”
“Think I can? I know I can.”
This time he plunged two fingers into his temples. He was centre stage, the others against the back wall with their arms folded.
“Rip it out.”
The test subject’s eyes widened, her trembling hands clawing at her own head, fingernails digging into flesh. “Rip…rip it out?”
His lip curved. “That’s what I said.”
We didn’t see the test subject rip her own brain from her skull. We were already burying our head into our knees and screeching into the floor. Another flash. Like watching a movie.
This time we’re cutting into our wrist with shards of glass. Pulling back fleshy flaps of our flesh, there are two wires entangled with muscle and bone. One red and one blue. “Why won’t you submit?” A sharp growl, and I can feel our body pressed against metal. Our arms are restrained. “Out of all of them, you refuse it.” A hand slaps our face. “You don’t want it!”
He started to laugh.
“You don’t want… control?”
He leaned his face closer. “Tell me to mutilate myself. Tell me to… to tear out my brain stem! That’s the beauty of it! No matter how impossible the order is, it will be completed! Control, my boy. Use it. Do you even understand how much you are going to shape the world? Words! Do you know how powerful they are? When said from the right mouth, with the right intent, they can cause bloodshed, pain and misery-- a despair drowning our already shattered earth. And you will be the centre of it. You will bring this world to its knees, Jason."
"Now, do it. We call it cutting, but you will find familiarity in referring to it as erasure. You can make up your own words if you would like. What matters is the intent.” I feel something slicing into our arm. It’s nothing medical. It’s torture. He plunges something sharp into the same spot and twists the blade until we throw our head back and scream at the ceiling.
“You’re the last one.” The man hissed. “Do it.”
“No.” I heard his—our—voice. “I… I can’t!”
“Do it!”
He’s dragging us again, forcing us down a long winding corridor until we reach another door.
"Drown." The boy - - Jason's-- voice was suddenly in my head. I could sense it was trying to hold back, attempting to peel back whatever power his own words had. But the word came again and again until it was suffocating his mouth. “Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown.” We were standing in the doorway of a smaller room. In the corner there was a figure curled up with their head pressed against the wall.
It was a guy.
I recognised our school colours, a bloodied varsity jacket over shorts and t-shirt. When he lifted his head and twisted to face the boy whose mind I was in, I noticed he had an uncanny resemblance to me. His eyes wide, frightened. They were my mother's.
This guy looked exactly like me.
No, it WAS me.
My eyes were shadowed and haunted.
Like I had been drained of everything I was.
As quickly as the memories came crashing into me, they were yanked away when the guy must have pulled back.
I blinked rapidly, and Jason looked as confused as me. Slowly, he pulled his finger from my cut. The man's voice was in my skull, and it was agonising. I felt the command in my head, my body instantly reacting to... to nothing. I had my hands out, ready to do.... do something.
"That was… just a trick,” He said. “Yeah! Just a trick!”
I found myself nodding, echoing his words. Something warm ran from my nose.
"Just... a trick..." I whispered, the words forced from my lips.
Blood spattered down my chin.
“Louder.” He said.
"JUST A TRICK!" I yelled, the force of the wail sending me my knees, panting. The guy was frowning, seemingly unsure what to do with me.
He wrapped up my wound and told me it wasn’t bad—and it wasn’t. I watched in disbelief as my skin stitched itself back together.
"Go into your kitchen." Jason said, and I felt the power of his words ripping through me like bullets. My body moved on its own, and I got to my feet and stepped into my kitchen. He followed me, grabbing a scarf off of the table.
"Get on your knees." I did, dropping to my knees, my breath in my throat, my mouth sealed shut. I could sense the others in the doorway as he wrapped the scarf around my eyes, the heel of his shoe slamming into my neck forcing me onto my stomach.
"I want you to wait for me to kill you."
His words pierced into me. I did. Even when I knew he was gone, the door slamming shut-- I waited. I waited until the next morning, until I regained control over my own body and pulled the scarf from my eyes. I'm still waiting, my brain in constant panic, twisting around when I'm alone, looking into every corner.
I was roped into going to Friday's game against Harrington. During Sunbeam’s routine, they did it again. They had the crowd's attention, and Evie was mouthing something. I felt her words, sharp like needles cutting into me. But they didn't penetrate. They have done something to the student body. Ever since, I’ve been catching looks around me. Those whose heads they have crawled into. Mindless eyes. Every so often an arm will touch mine, fingers will wrap around my neck. I can hear their feet pitter pattering after me. Those little kids from that night. I keep seeing the little witch girl in the corner of my eye. They’re creating an army who are coming for me once he decides to kill me.
If only I knew what happened to the Sunbeam squad. Maybe I can help them somehow.
But something tells me they’re way past help.
And so am I.
I wonder if one day, I might be allowed a glimpse of my memories. What really happened to me during my freshman year.
And why, ever since going into his mind, I dream of a white room.

Section 1: Is SCJerk finally becoming self-aware?
In previous posts I've detailed how SCJerk has become one of the most toxic spaces on Reddit, with users consistently pumping out conspiracy theories and misinformation, whilst also engaging in bigotry and exhibiting almost-psychotic vendettas towards certain individuals. It finally appears, however, that some users have realised how far down the rabbit hole the subreddit has gone. Let's start with an SCJerker attempting to call out other users for making fun of Mercedes Mone's recent injury;
People jerking Mercedes Mone getting hurt is a direct shot at the majority of SCJerk pretending they’re not just as big of marks as SC.
The thread gets so heated that a mod has to lock it, but not without leaving this pinned message;
This thread is a shit show, and we're locking the comments before it gets worse. OPs point stands, so the thread is staying up. If you are going to post about an injury, at least find a way to spin it to a jerk, such as the Forbidden Door post.
The user who made the thread then makes this post a few days later explaining the harassment he received;
What the fuck happened to this subreddit? Earlier this week, I wrote up a thread about people using Sasha Banks’ injury as justification for openly shitting on her. I got called a mark. I got called a Sasha Twitter stan. I got downvoted relentlessly, even when I reiterated what other people said that were upvoted. It got so out of hand that the mods locked the thread but left it up because they agreed with me. It was this subreddit acting more like squaredcircle than I have ever seen in my, like, ten years on Reddit. This subreddit has gotten so fucking nasty with its jerks that’s it’s not even fun anymore. I don’t watch STARDOM and I don’t even like Sasha, but the shit that got sent to me, the shit I got inboxed to me, and the RedditCares messages I got from it, for having the audacity to say “if you’re using her injuring her ankle as a justification for your own dislike of her or her being bad, you’re a fucking Basement dwelling asshole” is fucking sickening.
In the same vein, an SCJerk user comments on others having a fixation with hating ex-WWE female wrestlers;
SCJ is more upset that Sasha and Toni Storm left the Fed than the Fed themselves

I take the "Toni Storm is a druggie" thing personally. A lot of people think I'm a stoner because I "give off the vibe" and talk a little slowly when I'm tired, shit gets annoying fast
Like her being a druggie here irks me. It started out as a joke and turned to a full blown fact here. Like being an addict is a worst kept secret and she would've went to rehab by now. Sasha like damn. Tell us on the Lilly doll where Sasha hurt you to some pepes.
The Anti Sasha stans are as bad as Sasha stans.

One user notes how tribalistic the subreddit has become lately;
There are few things more frustrating when it comes to WWE things than the discourse on this subreddit about Bianca Belair. Every time someone criticizes her, it becomes a race to type out the “durrrr Gunther duhhhhh except black woman” comparison. There’s absolutely no middle ground with the majority of people here and that sort of mindset is becoming way too popular and way too Basement-lite for me. It’s getting ridiculous how tribalistic people on here are getting nowadays. That stupid ass post bitching about the mod team was a big indicator of it.
Another user remarks on the low-key racism he's seen;
As a black Kenyan man, this sub has a lot of benevolent racism towards minorities where we’re treated like kids who need protection. Last night Bianca got booed by a full stadium of Puerto Rican fans and that was okay but online when she’s booed it’s because of racism from white people. What kind of hypocrisy is that? Not everything is racist when it involves black wrestlers because it is very patronizing.
Over on /Wreddit (which we'll come back to later), users talk about the amount of conspiracy theories being pushed on SCJerk;
The amount of stupid conspiratorial thinking that goes on within some Anti-AEW people, esp in SCJerk, is frustrating as hell. AEW will probably sell out Wembley and it'll be a big deal, stop acting like there's some sort of con afoot. I know these guys want AEW to fail but it gets old criticizing them for stuff that isn't even real.
Section 2: The discontent continues
Throughout the month SCJerk users continue to show their discontent at how SCJerk is being modded (i.e. mods are now actually removing edgelord material instead of letting anything and everything stay up). One user complains about a post being removed by the auto-mod, prompting other users to comment;

We should vote on what kind of content should be allowed in here. Every post having to be a parody of a basement post is pretty constricting.
Jannies shouldnt have this much power. No wonder this site is dogshit echochamber. Cowards dont even use their username.

Just a few days before this, another user had complained about one of his posts being removed by the auto-mod;

Waiting for this post to get removed. The jerks have come full circle.
The overcorrections with modding are pretty inconsistent now
That’s why this sub is dead now

One user sums up their feelings simply by saying;
Can you even post anything in here anymore without it being deleted by mods
As an added note, the auto-mod account SCJerk-ModTeam is not only still stuck on -100 comment karma (the lowest a Reddit account can reach) but new comments made by the account are still being heavily downvoted by salty SCJerk users very much unhappy with its continued existence.
Section 3: Does SCJerk actually like wrestling?
Earlier in the month, a thread about a Dax Hardwood tweet is made on SCJerk;
The amount of people that want wrestling to fail will never not blow my mind. LFG Wembley.
SCJerk users take this as an opportunity to calmly and rationally give their opinions on the state of the wrestling industry and AEW's place in it;
Not so much wanting wrestling to fail, just wanting your manchild boss to fail and fail harder than just about anyone ever in the history of pro wrestling.
I like how anytime someone criticizes/expresses dislike of AEW the fans/some of the talent/TK take it like theyre shitting on entire industry. I dont want AEW to fail because of some die hard WWE fanboyism, I want it to fail because fuck TK and all his dickriders
Nobody wants wrestling to fail. We want shit-head promoters like Tony Khan to stop showcasing ballet dancers, acrobats, and cosplayers as his feature attractions while actually good talent gets shelved or tossed onto a weekend show.
I want pro wrestling to succeed. I Iove pro wrestling. However, I want to see Tony Khan fail. I am so excited for the day AEW shuts down. Tony Khan has done serious damage to the US indie scene with his terminally online self, fan base, and the complete disregard for wrestler safety from both. Wrestlers are just toys to be played with and discarded when bored. There's a reason you don't see people making fun of Impact fans and NWA fans. Yes, there are less of them, but moreso they don't act like the petulant owner of AEW, and they don't have a post history from wrestlefap and they don't act like a shonen protag they so desperately think they are.
As has been the case for some time now, SCJerk would have you believe that they support the wrestling industry as a whole but that they simply don't like AEW. With that being said, let's look at how they react to other non-WWE wrestling promotions;
At least Sasha ended up in Japan. Naomi is in the dead zone that is Impact. I don’t care how good their women’s division is, it’s still a dead zone. I hope things are better there, compared to when their Knockouts Champion had to take a second job at a Sunglass Hut.
That Impact stream leading to Naomi's debut had less than a thousand live viewers. DAE she's so much happier making less money for less fans?
Speaking of irrelevant wrestling promotions...Does anyone have Naomi & Impact’s ratings? Did she increase them or no?
I don't know why the basement is rooting for MLW.

Rooting for the little guy. because none of them have watched the product and realize how bad the little guy is and how little he pays talent brutalizing themselves for nothing

This brings us nicely onto the next section;
Section 4: Wreddit is a Pro-Wrestling news and discussion sub, modelled after NBA to be open to all brands
The SCJerk affiliated subreddit which is described as 'the better balanced place to talk shop' surely has a better track record of positivity towards other wrestling companies, right? Here's a look at the diverse and wide-ranging discussions pertaining to non-WWE promotions this year;

• AEW - Whilst the weekly Dynamite threads are dominated by people who hate-watch the product, activity in the Rampage threads is almost non-existent. When the show is moved to Saturday the mods simply forget to make discussion threads and even in its normal timeslot, almost every post is downvoted to receive zero karma. One week a thread receives just one comment simply saying - 'Review: AEW is for nerds with no personality.'
  
• Impact Wrestling - The last weekly TV discussion thread was back on the 16th of February, garnening just one comment. The previous three weeks of 'discussion' threads received no comments at all. Up until last week there had been no threads for any of their PPV events until Under Siege, which received a lone comment of - 'Why is one half of the Quebeccers challenging for World Title?'
  
• New Japan - A discussion thread for Wrestle Kingdom 17 was only made after the event had already started. It garnered just 13 comments and barely received positive karma (53% upvoted). To date this is the only New Japan event (PPV or weekly TV) to have a discussion thread on Wreddit in 2023.
  
• Stardom - So far the only thread this year about Stardom is a short clip from a press conference with the most upvoted comment being - 'Every time I see something from Stardom I’m reminded why I don’t watch Stardom'.
  
• All other promotions - No discussion threads.
  

When it's announced that AEW will be getting two more hours of programming a week with Collision, the response from users is less than welcoming;
Too much fucking wrestling.
There's not much variety here though. AEW, Impact and ROH are just indie spotfest fucking wrestling and WWE is bland boring corporate wrestling. Like yeah it is better that it's not just WWE and Impact but there's not much variety here.
I'm talking on a generalized basis, week to week it's majority indie spotfest wrestling with a mix of bad garbage wrestling thrown in.
So. Trash
Another A&W show that will tank in the ratings. It’s one thing for RAW to compete with a single MNF (and occasionally two), but these idiots really want to compete with college football with a roster centered around over 40 reject has beens and some never weres? I’m curious to see how Shad Khan handles this on his taxes.
Why? Genuine question: is there a need for so much wrestling every week? What's the total weekly amount of hours of new material right now? More than 10 hours are more than daytime soap operas must churn out, and they're notorious for just stretching stories beyond the limit of pointless filler. Wrestling has also reached that point IMO. Can't be a coincidence if ratings have been tanking and nobody really cares outside the inner circle of addicted and obsessed serial watchers.
How odd that a subreddit based around wrestling fans discussing wrestling has such a negative attitude towards a wrestling promotion announcing a new wrestling show. It's almost like these people don't actually like wrestling.
Section 5: Edgelord behaviour, miscellaneous nonsense & users we lost
In reference to Naomi/Trinity;
Then maybe it's better she isn't around, she has a record of not doing her job 100%. Shama lama ding dong is still wrestling. (For the touchy ones, I'm kidding.) Edit: I knew someone would get butthurt. Hahaha
In reference to Brodie Lee's passing;
He died of Post-Fed Syndrome and you need to apologize to Amanda right now, you can find her on Tinder in the greater Jacksonville area
In reference to the Outcasts;
"Will show tits for cash" seems more appropriate for at least two of them.
SteveStogers69 - Long time SCJerk member becomes the latest prominent user to be suspended from Reddit.
Section 6: Help Wanted
As you can tell, these monthly posts have been getting longer and more detailed as time goes by. If anyone who reads these wants to help out (e.g. sending me posts which I should include) then please feel free to message me or drop some links in the comments section.

Jackie Jensen, "The Golden Boy", was a superstar athlete in the 1940s who seemed destined for greatness as the heir to Joe DiMaggio... only to be supplanted by a different golden boy, the great Mickey Mantle.
Jensen would eventually live up to the hype, but with the Red Sox -- but his career ended prematurely because, as baseball expanded to the west coast, his fear of flying made road games unbearable!
The Yankees between 1947 and 1964 were utterly dominant, winning 15 pennants and 10 World Series. And it wasn't just the major league team that was successful. The Yankees of this era were loaded up and down the system, from Rookie ball to their two Triple-A teams!
With such a loaded major league roster, the Yankees had many talented players stuck either on the end of the bench or in the minors who would eventually find an opportunity with other teams, including Bob Cerv, Vic Power, Gus Triandos, Lew Burdette, Jerry Lumpe, Bob Porterfield, and Bob Keegan, all named All-Stars with other teams after leaving the Yankees. Clint Courtney would be the 1952 A.L. Rookie of the Year runner-up after the Yankees traded him to the Browns, and Bill Virdon was the 1955 N.L. Rookie of the Year with the Cardinals (and then Yankee manager from 1974 to 1975!).
But the most talented player who just couldn't find the playing time in New York was Jack Eugene Jensen, born March 9, 1927, in San Francisco. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he grew up poor, his mother working six days a week, 12 hours a day. Jensen said the family moved 16 times between kindergarten and eighth grade -- "every time the rent came due."
After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Jensen went to the University of California in 1946 on the G.I. Bill. There he became one of the most famous college players in the country, leading Cal to the Rose Bowl. In 1947, he was the starting fullback as well as the team's top defensive back, and in 1948, he rushed for 1,000 yards and was an All-American.
He also was a tremendous two-way baseball player, pitching and hitting for the Golden Bears in 1947 as the won the very first College World Series, beating a Yale team that had George H.W. Bush playing first base. In 1949, he was an All-American in baseball, too.
His blond hair, good looks, and athletic accomplishments earned him the nickname "The Golden Boy."
Halfway through his junior year, Jensen left Berkeley to turn pro. Jensen would later say he couldn't risk playing a career-ending injury playing for free while teams -- baseball and football -- were trying to sign him to big-money contracts.

"There was a money tree growing in my backyard. Why shouldn't I pluck off the dollars when I wanted to?"

Jensen considered a number of offers, including from the Yankees, before signing a three-year, $75,000 contract with the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Jensen said he thought he'd face better competition in the Pacific Coast League, the top minor league of the era, than he would at the bottom of the Yankee farm system. He was right about it being more of a challenge -- he hit an unimpressive .261/.317/.394 in 510 plate appearances with the Oaks.
At the end of the year, the Oaks sold his contract (and that of Billy Martin, another Northern California kid) to the Yankees.
That same year, Jensen married his high school sweetheart, Zoe Ann Olsen, an Olympic diver. (By age 18, she had won 14 national diving championships and a silver medal in the 1948 Olympics.) "Together they looked like a Nordic god and goddess," Sports Illustrated reported. Nicknamed "the sweethearts of sports," they were the Dansby Swanson and Mallory Pugh of their era. More than 1,000 people attended their wedding.
Jensen would start the 1950 season not in the minors but in the Bronx. He joined the Yankees in a time of flux. They though they'd won the 1949 World Series, the Yankees knew they had to make some changes, with 35-year-old Joe DiMaggio nearing the end of his career. And their heir apparent was not Mickey Mantle -- at the time an 18-year-old shortstop playing in the Class C league, the equivalent of A-ball today -- but the 23-year-old Jensen.
But Jensen disappointed, hitting just .171/.247/.300 in 70 at-bats, and only starting in 13 games. Watching from the bench most of the season, Jensen would later lament the lost year of development, saying he'd have been better off playing every day in the Pacific Coast League.
The Yankees won the pennant for a second straight year, and in the World Series he once again was left on the bench. His only action was as a pinch runner in Game 3 as the Yankees swept the Phillies. That "Moonlight Graham" appearance would be his only taste of the post-season in an 11-year career.
The following year would be DiMaggio's last, and Mantle's first. Jensen began the year as the Yankees' starting left fielder and proved he belonged, hitting .296/.371/.509 through the end of July... and then, shockingly, was demoted to Triple-A and replaced with previously forgotten Yankee Bob Cerv.
I can see why they called up Cerv -- the University of Nebraska stand-out was tearing up Triple-A, leading the American Association in batting average (.349), home runs (26), triples (21), RBIs (101), and total bases (261) -- but why demote Jensen, who had a 140 OPS+ in the majors? Maybe the Yankees felt the brash 23-year-old needed to be taken down a peg. In any event, Cerv hit just .214/.333/.250 in August and was sent back to Triple-A, but Jensen also was left down there. He hit .263/.344/.469 and was recalled after the Triple-A season ended, only getting into three games (he went 3-for-9).
Mantle, too, had started the season with the Yankees, and after hitting .260/.341/.423 through the middle of July, was sent down to Triple-A. But he hit .361/.445/.651 in 166 at-bats, and unlike Jensen was back in the bigs by August 24. He would play pretty much every game the rest of the season, hitting .284/.370/.495 in 95 at-bats.
The torch had clearly been passed -- Jensen was no longer the heir apparent to DiMaggio. In the World Series that year, Mantle was the starting right fielder, and Jensen wasn't even on the post-season roster.
Jensen was so disappointed with how the Yankees had treated him in 1951 that he talked to the San Francisco 49ers about switching to pro football, but ultimately decided to stick with baseball.
Never shy about what he said to reporters, Jensen told The Sporting News on October 24, 1951:

"I felt so badly about the treatment that I received from the Yankees that, although I was in New York at the end of the season, I didn't feel like sticking around to even watch the club play in any of the World's Series games."
"I do not feel the Yankees were justified in sending me to the minor leagues. When I was shipped to Kansas City, I was doing as good a job as any Yankee outfielder and better than some of them. I was hitting .296, which was ten points better than Hank Bauer and 30 points better than Joe DiMaggio, Gene Woodling and Mickey Mantle. Yet Casey Stengel didn't give me the chance I felt I deserved."

Despite blasting his manager in the press, Jensen was still the property of the Yankees. That off-season, teams were circling, hoping to pry away the talented but disgruntled outfielder. There were newspaper reports of offers from the St. Louis Browns, the Detroit Tigers, the Philadelphia Athletics, the Washington Senators, the Cleveland Indians, and the Boston Red Sox -- with one rumor being Ted Williams to the Bronx in exchange for Jensen and several other players. (A Red Sox scout called the rumored deal "a lot of hogwash.")
Sportswriters spent the off-season speculating whether DiMaggio would retire, and if he did, whether Jensen or Mantle would take over as the center fielder, as there were still concerns that Mantle, who had hurt his knee in the 1951 World Series, wouldn't be fully recovered by the start of the season.
On Opening Day, April 16, 1952, it was Jackie Jensen in center and Mickey Mantle in right. Jensen went 0-for-5 with a GIDP; Mantle, 3-for-4 with a double, a walk, and a stolen base! Seven games into the season, Jensen was 2-for-17 (.118) and found himself on the bench. He'd never play for the Yankees again. On May 3, the Golden Boy was traded to the Washington Senators along with Spec Shea, Jerry Snyder, and Archie Wilson in exchange for Irv Noren and Tom Upton.
In two years with the Senators, Jensen hit an impressive .276/.359/.407 (112 OPS+), but the team was terrible, and Jensen wasn't happy. Still just 26 years old, he later said he had almost quit after the 1953 season... particularly after a harrowing flight to Japan for a series of exhibition games with a squad of All-Stars that included Yankees Yogi Berra, Eddie Lopat, and Billy Martin. That experience gave Jensen a lifelong fear of flying, a phobia that became so intense eventually he could only fly with the help of sleeping pills... and a hypnotist!
He might have quit if not for the trade on December 9, 1953, that sent him to the Boston Red Sox for pitcher Mickey McDermott and outfielder Tom Umphlett. He was homesick, he hated flying, and he now had two little kids at home. Red Sox general manager Joe Cronin convinced Jensen to come to the Red Sox, telling him that Fenway Park was tailor made for his swing. Cronin was right: Jensen was a career .279/.369/.460 hitter, but .298/.400/.514 at Fenway.
It was in Boston that Jensen finally lived up to the hype, becoming a two-time All-Star and winning the A.L. MVP Award in 1958 and a Gold Glove in 1959. During his seven seasons in Boston, he hit .282/.374/.478 in 4,519 plate appearances. In his MVP season, Jensen hit .286/.396/.535 (148 OPS+) with 31 doubles, 35 home runs, and a league-leading 122 RBIs. During his peak with the Red Sox, 1954 to 1959, Jensen's average season was .285/.378/.490 (127 OPS+) with 28 doubles, 26 home runs, 111 RBIs, 14 stolen bases, and 3.6 bWAR. During those six seasons, no one in the American League -- not Mickey Mantle, not Ted Williams, not Al Kaline -- had more runs batted in than Jackie Jensen.
Of course, Mantle was the far better player -- even in Jensen's MVP season, Mantle had more runs, hits, home runs, walks, and a 188 OPS+ -- but Jensen's 127 OPS+ between 1954 and 1959 would have been an upgrade over the aging Hank Bauer's 110 OPS+ in right or the left field merry-go-round of Norm Siebern (113 OPS+), Irv Noren (107 OPS+), Enos Slaughter (103 OPS+), and previously forgotten Yankee Hector Lopez (101 OPS+). Casey Stengel would later say the Jensen trade was the worst one the Yankees had made while he was manager.
Despite his success, Jensen was sometimes booed by the Boston fans, just as they sometimes booed Ted Williams. There even was an article in Sport magazine, "What Do They Want From Jackie Jensen?", taking Red Sox fans to task for their unreasonably high demands from the Golden Boy. In 1956, in a game at Fenway Park against the Yankees, the hometown fans were razzing Jensen so much that teammates had to restrain him from going into the stands after a fan. Later that same game, Williams misplayed a wind-blown fly ball from Mantle, and the fans booed lustily. The very next play, Williams made a leaping catch at the scoreboard to rob Yogi Berra of a double. But Williams, still furious, spit into the crowd. He was later fined $5,000.
And Jackie was unhappy to be away from home. He and Zoe Ann had bought a house near Lake Tahoe, where they could both ski and golf year-round, as well as hit the casinos. They also had a home in Oakland, and a restaurant there, and each year Jensen hosted a pro-am golf tournament. But the marriage was struggling. Zoe Ann, once nationally known for her Olympic exploits, was frustrated to be a stay-at-home mom in the shadow of her famous husband, and Jackie became angry if she engaged in her favorite outdoor hobbies, suspecting there were men around.
Jensen's fear of flying also had become even more intense. Sometimes he was so drugged up that he had to be carried on and off the plane, fueling rumors that he was a drunk. Other times he took trains or even drove while his teammates flew.
Once again Jensen was talking about retirement, and in Spring Training 1957, the Red Sox allowed him to train with the San Francisco Seals, Boston's Triple-A team, rather than having to go to Florida. But he was still miserable. That year, he told Sports Illustrated:

“In baseball you get to the point where you don’t think you have a family. It just looks like I’m not built for this life like some ballplayers. You are always away from home and you’re lonesome, and as soon as I can, I intend to get out.”

The 32-year-old Jensen announced his retirement after the 1959 season, and he spent 1960 home with Zoe Ann and their children and running his restaurant. But he returned in 1961. After hitting just .130 in April, Jensen took a train from Detroit home to Reno, determined to quit once again. After a week away, he rejoined the team and had six hits in his next 10 at-bats. By the end of the season he was at .263/.350/.392, and he quit again. This time for good.
After leaving baseball, Jensen invested in real estate and a golf course, but lost most of his money. He then got a job working for a Lake Tahoe casino, was a national spokesman for Camel cigarettes, Wonder Bread, and Gillette, and even tried selling cars. Ironically, Jackie found himself on the road almost as much as he had been as a ballplayer. In 1963, he and Zoe Ann divorced, remarried, and then divorced again.
In 1967, Jensen became a TV sportscaster, married his producer Katharine Cortesi, and eventually teamed up with Keith Jackson calling college football games for ABC, and was a college baseball coach, first at the University of Nevada-Reno and then at the University of California. He managed the Red Sox team in the New York Penn League in 1970. In 1977, Jackie and Katharine moved to Virginia and started a Christmas tree farm while he coached baseball at a military academy. About five years later, on July 14, 1982, he died of a heart attack at age 55.
You Don't Know Jack(ie):

• How good would Jackie Jensen have been as a Yankee? Maybe not great. He was a career .279/.369/.460 hitter, but just .238/.326/.398 at Yankee Stadium, which -- especially in that era -- was famously death on right-handed batters. Fenway Park was much more to his liking!
  
• Born in San Francisco in 1927, it's no surprise Jensen's favorite player as a kid was Joe DiMaggio, who made his debut with the San Francisco Seals when Jensen was a 5 years old. When Jensen made his major league debut, on April 18, 1950, DiMaggio went 3-for-6 with a triple in a 15-10 win over the Red Sox. Two weeks later, on May 3, Jensen made his first start, playing left field and batting second, and DiMaggio was in center and batting fourth.
  
• Jensen wore #36 at Cal. When he came up with the Yankees, he was first issued #40, then switched to #27, and finally to #25. (With the Senators, he wore #8, then #4; in Boston, he first wore #30 but primarily wore #4.) Currently, #40 is worn by Luis Severino. Other famous 40's include Chien-Ming Wang (2005-2009), Andy Hawkins (1989-1991), and Lindy McDaniel (1968-1973). #27 has been worn by Giancarlo Stanton since 2018; prior to him, it was worn by Austin Romine (2016-2017). It also was the number worn by Bob Wickman (1993-1996), Butch Wynegar (1982-1986), and Woodie Held (1954-1957). Gleyber Torres has worn #25 since 2018; it also was worn by Mark Teixeira (2009-2016), Jason Giambi (2002-2008), Joe Girardi (1996-1999), Jim Abbott (1993-1994), Tommy John (1979-1989), and Joe Pepitone (1962-1969).
  
• Jensen is one of six major leaguers to graduate from Oakland High School, but the only Yankee. Cal has sent 83 players to the majors, including twenty Yankees -- most notably, early 1990s pitcher Chuck Cary, 1930s infielder Lyn Lary, and 1990 A.L. ROY runner-up Kevin Maas.
  
• The Yankees during spring training in 1951 tinkered with the idea of using Jensen into a pitcher. Jensen had been a star pitcher at Cal, including pitching in the 1947 College World Series, and had pitched in a winter league that off-season. But he was bombed in a handful of spring training innings -- while crushing as a hitter -- and the Yankees decided to leave him in the outfield.
  
• College teammates said Jensen wasn't afraid of flying at Cal. His second wife Katharine said the phobia came from a near-miss experience on a flight early in his baseball career -- he looked out the window and saw another plane coming straight at him! The two planes managed to avoid each other, but he was never comfortable on a plane again.
  
• Billy Martin, who also had grown up in Northern California and was Jensen's teammate on both the Oakland Oaks and the Yankees, was merciless when it came to teasing Jensen about his fear of flying. In 1953, on a flight from Okinawa to Honshu to play a series of exhibition games in Japan, the plane ran into a bad storm and was bouncing pretty hard. Jensen, who wouldn't get on a plane without the help of tranquilizers, was blissfully sleeping through the turbulence. Martin found a lifejacket and put it on, then stood over Jensen and shouted "We're going down!"
  
• Arthur Ellen, a hypnotist that Jensen had used to try to cure his fear of flying, believed Jackie wasn't aerophobic at all. It was really a fear of losing his family. "Subconsciously, it developed as a good reason to leave the Red Sox and go home," the hypnotist said.
  
• Jensen is featured prominently in Norman Rockwell's famous 1957 painting, The Rookie. Jensen is the one seated on the bench tying his shoe in the middle of the painting. Standing behind him is Ted Williams, and sitting on the bench next to him is pitcher Frank Sullivan (#18). Wearing the catcher's mitt in the foreground is Sammy White, and the player with his hand over his mouth to the far right is Billy Goodman. Jensen, Sullivan, and White had gone to Rockwell's studio in Massachusetts to pose for the painting; the images of Williams and Goodman were based on photos. The shirtless player was one of Rockwell's assistants, and "the rookie" holding the suitcase was a local high school student!
  
• Boston sportswriters named Jensen the team's MVP in 1954, when he hit .276/.359/.472 with 25 home runs and 117 RBIs. I guess they were tired of giving the award to Ted Williams, who hit .345/.513/.635 that year, albeit in just 117 games as he had broken his collarbone in spring training. Williams didn't qualify for the batting title that year because he had only 386 at-bats... mostly due to his league-leading 136 walks. The rule was subsequently changed from at-bats to plate appearances.
  
• After Jensen was acquired by the Washington Senators, manager Bucky Harris -- who managed the Yankees when they won the 1947 World Series -- pulled him aside and told him he was the right fielder and he'd hit third. "No pep talk, no nothing, but he made it sound like I was the right fielder and third place hitter for a long time to come," Jensen later recalled. "It made me feel good." The 1950s Senators had a number of ex-Yankees and several of them told reporters that Harris was a much more low-key, hands-off manager than Casey Stengel, and Jensen agreed. "With Stengel it was always 'watch for that curve ball' or 'watch for that change up'," Jensen said. "Bucky leaves you on your own up there." But Jensen would later say Stengel was the smartest manager he'd ever had.
  
• Stengel obliquely mentioned Jensen in his famously long, rambling testimony before the Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee on July 8, 1958. Asked about legislation that would exempt baseball from federal anti-trust laws, Stengel said about 7,000 words without really saying anything. The hearing was held the day after the All-Star Game -- the Stengel-managed A.L. All-Stars won, 4-3 -- and in the American League starting lineup were Jensen and two other ex-Yankees, Bob Cerv and Gus Triandos. Stengel was asked if the Yankees were going to continue to "monopolize" the World Series, and his confusing answer: "Well, I will tell you. I got a little concerned yesterday in the first three innings when I saw the three players I had gotten rid of [Jensen, Cerv, and Triandos] and I said when I lost nine what am I going to do? And when I had a couple of my players I thought so great of that did not do so good up to the sixth inning I was more confused but I finally had to go and call on a young man in Baltimore that we don't own and the Yankees don't own him and he is doing pretty well and I would actually have to to tell you that we are more the Greta Garbo-type now from success. We are being hated. I mean from the ownership and all we are being hated. Every sport that gets too great or one individual -- but if we made twenty-seven cents and it pays to have a winner at home why would you have a good winner in your park if you were an owner? That is the result of baseball. An owner gets most of the money at home, and it is up to him and his staff to do better or they ought to be discharged." After befuddling the committee with answers like that for 45 minutes, Stengel was excused and Mickey Mantle called upon. His opening statement: "My views are just about the same as Casey's."
  
• Casey Stengel later said Jensen plus Spec Shea, Jerry Snyder, and Archie Wilson to the Senators for Irv Noren and Tom Upton was the worst trade the Yankees made during his tenure. But in reality it was pretty much a wash for the Yankees. Jensen, in two seasons, would be worth 4.9 bWAR for the Senators before being traded. Shea, a right-handed pitcher who had been an All-Star with the Yankees as a rookie, pitched four years in Washington and was worth 2.9 bWAR. Snyder was a good-glove, no-hit infielder worth -0.1 bWAR in seven seasons with the Senators. (You must have a really good glove to last seven seasons with a 55 OPS+!) Wilson, at one point seen as a good prospect but now a 28-year-old minor league journeyman, only played 26 games in Washington before being traded. In exchange, the Yankees received the 27-year-old Irv Noren, an outfieldefirst baseman who played five years in New York and was an All-Star in 1954; he was worth 7.9 bWAR, making the trade essentially even by bWAR. (The other player the Yankees received, minor league infielder Tom Upton, never made it back to the bigs.) Prior to the 1957 season, Noren was traded to the Kansas City Athletics as part of a monster 13-player trade that included Clete Boyer, third baseman of the early 1960s dynasty!
  
• The two players Washington got from Boston for Jensen, Mickey McDermott and Tom Umphlett, were both future Yankees. McDermott was a left-handed pitcher whose father, Maurice McDermott, had played in the minors with Lou Gehrig. Mickey was just 25 years old at the time of the trade but had been in the majors for six seasons, going 48-34 with a 3.80 ERA (114 ERA+). In two years with the Senators, McDermott went 17-25 (but with a 3.58 ERA), then prior to the 1957 season was traded to the Yankees as part of a seven-player deal; he went 2-6 with a 4.24 ERA as a swingman, and closed out the Game 2 win in the 1956 World Series. After that one season in New York, he was part of the trade with the A's that brought back Clete Boyer.
  
• Umphlett, a 22-year-old infielder, was traded back to the Red Sox in 1955, and then the Red Sox traded him to the Yankees in 1962 for infielder Billy Gardner. He would spend 1962 and 1963 in Triple-A for the Yankees, then ended his career in the minors with the Minnesota Twins -- the team that had been the Senators until 1961.
  
• In 1956, the anthology television show Cavalcade of America had an episode called The Jackie Jensen Story. Jackie had a cameo as the adult version of himself, but the 30-minute episode was focused on Jackie's teenage years and the influence of his middle high school coach, a man named Ralph Kerchum who became a father figure. The coach was played by Ross Elliott, a Bronx native whose most memorable role might have been as the director in the Vitameatavegamin episode of I Love Lucy.
  
• Jensen's MVP in 1958 broke a string of four straight MVP awards for Yankees -- Yogi Berra in 1954 and 1955 followed by Mickey Mantle in 1956 and 1957. Nellie Fox of the White Sox won it in 1959, and then the Yankees won it four years in a row again -- Roger Maris in 1960 and 1961, Mantle in 1962, and Elston Howard in 1963. Then a long drought -- the next Yankee to win it would be Thurman Munson in 1976.
  
• Going by bWAR, Mantle should have won it a third straight year in 1958 -- his 8.7 bWAR led the league, followed by Frank Lary at 6.7 and Al Kaline at 6.5. Jensen's 4.9 was 10th that year. Of course, they didn't have bWAR back then!
  
• Jackie won a Gold Glove in 1959; it was just the third year of the award's existence, or he might have won more. "Right field in Boston is a bitch, the sun field, and few play it well," Ted Williams said. "Jackie Jensen was the best I saw at it." Jensen was renowned for his throwing arm -- he twice led the league in assists, and twice led the league in double plays as an outfielder. One Yankee scout said he had the best arm he'd seen since previously forgotten Yankee Bob Meusel, usually said to have the best cannon in baseball history until Roberto Clemente came along.
  
• Jensen was well known for his brashness, especially compared to Mantle's aw shucks attitude. Mantle, asked if he thought he could beat out Jensen to replace DiMaggio in center field, humbly replied that there were three positions in the outfield and he hoped to win any one of them. Jensen, on the other hand, vowed he'd "out-run, out-hit, and out-throw" Mantle, an arrogant answer that didn't go over well with teammates. Joe DiMaggio, asked what he thought of the duel for his old job, quipped that Mantle was "out-quoting" Jensen.
  
• When Mantle was asked what he thought about Jensen's quote, he replied: "I don't know what to make of that guy." Jensen would later say he was misquoted, but reports of his cockiness would follow him throughout his Yankee years. Later in life, Jensen said people mistook his shyness and anxiety for arrogance and rudeness.
  
• According to Sports Illustrated, Jensen is the only player to have played in the East-West football game, the Rose Bowl, the World Series, and the Major League All-Star Game. I'll take their word for it!
  
• As a freshman at Cal, the first time Jensen touched the ball -- on a punt return -- he ran it back for a 56-yard touchdown. Cal quarterback Charles Erb said they'd never seen anything like it. "He was all over the field, dodging and leaping over guys. The rest of us just stood there on the sidelines with our mouths open. Finally somebody said, 'Who in the hell is that guy?' "
  
• Jensen is one of two "forgotten" Yankees in the College Football Hall of Fame -- the other is 1960s catcher Jake Gibbs. (Other Yankees in the College Football Hall of Fame include John Elway, who was in the Yankee minor league system before joining the Denver Broncos, and Deion Sanders, who was on the Yankees in 1989 and 1990.) Jensen also is a member of the Cal Hall of Fame, the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, and... ugh... the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame.
  
• Despite his speed -- Jensen led the league in triples in 1956 and in stolen bases in 1954, and was in the top five in stolen bases in six seasons -- Jackie also was prone to grounding into double plays, leading the league in 1954, 1956, and 1957. His 32 GIDPs in 1954 was the major league record until Boston's Jim Rice hit into 36 in 1984, which is still the single-season record. Rice also had 35 in 1985. Jensen's 32 is tied for third with four others. The most by a Yankee? Dave Winfield with 30 in 1983, which is tied for 14th.
  
• Jensen lost most of his baseball earnings through a series of bad investments. His ex-wife, former Olympian Zoe Ann, later became a blackjack dealer in Reno to pay the bills.
  
• Jensen had four appearances on the popular show Home Run Derby, and set a record for most home runs in one match when he defeated Ernie Banks, 14-11, in Episode 24. The 25 combined home runs also was a record. He took on Mickey Mantle in Episode 3, with Mantle winning, 9-2, then defeated Rocky Colavito, 3-2, in Episode 25. He rematched against Mantle in Episode 26, with Mantle winning again, 13-10. Jensen set another record in that contest when he became the only player to hit four home runs in a row, and then a fifth home run in a row. That episode was supposed to be the season one finale, but it turned out to be the last episode of the series: The show's host and producer, Mark Scott, died of a heart attack at age 45, shortly after the last episode aired, and two months later the show's 64-year-old director Benjamin Stoloff also died. Rather than replacing them, the show was cancelled.
  
• Jensen's last game came against the Yankees, on October 1st, 1961, at Yankee Stadium. He appeared as a pinch hitter and popped out to shortstop Tony Kubek. In the 4th inning of that game, Roger Maris hit his 61st home run, breaking Babe Ruth's single-season record!
  
• Jackie and Zoe Ann had two sons, Jon and Jay, and a daughter, Jan. Jay's son, Tucker Jensen, was a pitcher in the Blue Jays farm system in 2011 and 2012.
  

In 1958, Jensen told Sports Illustrated that the biggest thrill of his career wasn't being an All-American or an All-Star, it wasn't winning an MVP or a World Series. "The biggest is having played in the same outfield with both DiMaggio and Williams."

Learning some python data analysis and visualization and wanted to put those skills to use for a quick little project.
I know there’s not really any new info here but I thought it’d be interesting to see how he stacked up compared to other QBs.
I took the average of each group to get a single number and plotted them against Lamar’s numbers.
Disclaimer: I know the completion percentages are off a little bit. That’s my fault for getting an average of an average. And obviously these are just 3 basic passing stats. No rushing stats.
The numbers are from Pro Football Reference and I used pandas and matplotlib to create the charts.
PS I forgot how terrible his numbers were in 2021. Only 2 games with more than 1 TD pass and that 4 int game against Cleveland I believe.
If anyone has any suggestions I’m all for it! Still learning, I just wanted to put something together real quick.

I haven't been this excited about an upcoming football season since I was a kid. I felt compelled to share this article from a couple weeks ago that highlights how good this team can be (sorry to those that already saw it).
https://247sports.com/longformarticle/a-record-setting-2024-nfl-draft-class-breaking-down-more-than-15-209417836/#2163881
While I doubt we have any players drafted in the top 10 (except perhaps JJ if he balls out this year), we could have close to 20 players drafted from this year's team if they all decided to go pro. For reference, the most picks we have ever had in a draft was 11 in 2017. Even if/when several players invariably decide to come back (with still others going undrafted), this will almost certainly be our best draft class ever in terms of depth. What makes it even more insane is that this does not include Will Johnson, Mason Graham, or Kenneth Grant (too young to be drafted) who could wind up being our 3 best defensive players by the end of the season.
We have a deep, talented team with stars on both sides of the ball, an excellent coach, good team culture, elite assistants, and a favorable schedule. It is National Title or bust this year and I cannot wait. Go blue.

The Quarterback with the highest percentage of their total yards that came from running the ball (since the merger) is a Chicago Bear, but not the one you’re thinking of. In 1972 Bears starting QB, Bobby Douglass managed to scrap together 2,039 total yards with 48% of those yards coming from running the ball (1,071 yards passing, 968 yards rushing). Bobby Douglass remains the only quarterback since the merger with 2K total yards to have a rushing yard % above 40%.
The guy we were thinking of is Justin Fields, of course. It is widely known that he runs for a lot of yards, and he passes for relatively few yards. Fields was the player I had in mind when I researched this data. Last season, Fields regularly threw for less than 200 yards but put together many highlight plays with his legs. He even had two games where he ran for more yards than he threw for. His performances were polarizing and led to debates between people who enjoyed his athleticism and his potential vs those who think quarterbacks should be able to throw the ball on time and on target. His record-breaking season (most rushing yards in a regular-season game for a QB with 178, most rushing yards in a single-season for the Bears 1,143) led to 38% of his total yards coming from running the ball. This is the 2nd highest % and is 6 percentage points ahead of Michael Vick’s 2006 season.
There are 14 Quarterbacks who have had at least 20% of their total yards coming from running the ball. These 14 QBs had 22 seasons meeting this criterion led by Michael Vick and Lamar Jackson each with four seasons.
Criteria: since the merger, QBs with min of 2'000 total yards, Total yards = passing yards - sack yards + rushing yards)
https://preview.redd.it/767sv4i3l02b1.png?width=1332&format=png&auto=webp&s=b2b8575ccec4df85071619f492dd813d8c77c169
If you're wondering what the median % is, it is 3.6%. The average QB in the 3.6% group ran for 114 yards and passed for 3,081 yards. The medium group includes guys like Mac Jones, Trent Green, Danny White, Baker Mayfield, and oddly enough 35-year-old Randall Cunningham (27-year-old Randall Cunningham is in the 20%+ group in his 1990 season).
Who has the lowest % of total yards from rushing? In 1971, Bowns QB Bill Nelson threw for 2,097 yards and had 18 negative rushing yards, for a rushing contribution of -0.9%. Other QBs with at least -0.5% are Jim Miller-2001, Dan Fouts-1984, Peyton Manning-2014, Steve DeBerg-1991, Peyton Manning-2013, Dan Marino-1985, Nick Mullens-2018, Ken Stabler-1980.
Note this is not a post in support of or against QBs who run a lot. I'll leave it to you all to calculate how many Super Bowls were won from guys on this list (or not won from guys on this list) and form your narratives. This is just some research and a dataviz on interesting seasons where athleticism from QBs was disproportionate to their passing contributions.

This is part two of a post I made looking at every club that was relegated from the Primeira Liga once and never returned, part of a larger series on clubs who only had one stint in their country's top flight. Click here if you haven't read part one.

Every Team that was Relegated from the Primeira Liga Once and Never Came Back: Where Are They Now? (Part 2)

- - -

Caldas S.C.

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• Full Name: Caldas Sport Clube
• Founded: 1916
• Time in the Primeira Liga: 1955-1959 (Four seasons)
• Current Status: Liga 3 (3rd Tier)

In 1925, the Leiria District Sports Federation (FDDL) was founded as the main sports governing body of Portugal's Leiria District. The federation only lasted around eight months before it was dissolved as a result of the chaotic political and financial situation of the country nearing the end of the First Republic. A new federation, the Leiria Football Association (AF Leiria) was founded in 1929 to replace the FDDL, with one of its founding members being Caldas Sport Clube. Founded in 1916 in the city of Caldas da Rainha, Caldas had early success in the district championships, winning three back-to-back Leiria titles between 1930 and 1934. That last triumph was enough to qualify them for the 1934-35 Segunda Liga, and the club would have two more stints in the second tier between 1938-39 and 1941-44. The team wouldn't appear in the national leagues again until 1950, participating in the Terceira Divisão for two seasons before winning promotion back to the second tier as runners-up. After two mid-table finishes in their Segunda Divisão groups, the club qualified for the final phase of the 1954-55 edition after finishing runners-up in Zona Norte behind Torreense. While the Pelicanos would once again miss out on a division title, an emphatic 7-2 win over Estoril on the final matchday ensured the club finished ahead of Oriental Lisboa to finish second in the group. The task wasn't done, however, as now the club had to go to a promotion/relegation playoff against Boavista, who finished 13th in the Primeira Divisão. After drawing Os Axadrezados 3-3 over the two legs, a tiebreaker was played between the two sides in Coimbra, where Caldas would finally reign victorious with a decisive 4-1 win, earning them a spot in the top flight.
Though they only managed to win one of their first five games (that coming on matchday 2 against Atlético CP), Caldas would slowly ease accustom themselves to life in the Primeira in the 55/56 season. The club managed to climb as high as 7th during their debut campaign, with much of the games Caldas contended being closely fought affairs such as a 3-3 home draw against eventual champions Porto in March (of course, this comes with exceptions such as a 7-3 loss away to Lusitano de Évora in February). While the middle of the campaign went well, after a 3-1 win over Vitória Setúbal in December on matchday 14, Caldas would only go on to win one of their remaining 12 games, that being a 3-0 win over CUF on matchday 25. The club finished the season in 11th on 19 points, though thanks to SC Braga having a disaster season, they were never really threatened with relegation. The same could not be said of the 56/57 season, however. After a win and a draw against Oriental and Vitória Setúbal respectively, Caldas spent the majority of the season near the bottom of the table, even entering the relegation zone on matchdays 20 and 22. The club, which had already been struggling with a weak attack since the 55/56 campaign, became even more defensively unsound, conceding 13 more goals than they did the season prior, with the club suffering more frequent blowout defeats (like losing to Sporting by an aggreagte score of 13-1). The club only guaranteed safety on the final matchday, defeating relegation rivals Atlético 3-1 and finishing the season in 12th, once again on 19 points.
1957-58 would be the club's best season in the Primeira Divisão, though they did not start the campaign well, losing four from their first five and finding themselves bottom of the table. The club mostly remained in the lower part of the table, briefly going up to 7th on the penultimate matchday before ultimately finishing 10th. The season was notable, however, in that it saw the club achieve its first victory against one of the Big Three, defeating Benfica 3-2 at the Campo da Mata. The Pelicanos once again got off to a poor start in the 58/59 season, opening the campaign with a 6-3 loss to SC Covilhã, and even though they earned draws against Benfica and Belenenses, the club had already found themselves in the relegation zone. A win over Barreirense would pull them out of the drop for a time, but seven losses and a draw in their next eight games (including going goalless for four matches in a row) would see them crawl right back in. Following a 2-1 win over Académia, the club went on a torrid run, suffering 6-1 and 10-0 defeats to Belenenses and Porto respectively (despite only being 1-0 down at the half against the latter), and though the club would secure wins over Setúbal and CUF, by matchday 24 the club were sitting bottom of the table, needing to go on a perfect run and hope their relegation rivals falter to even have a chance at survival. Unfortunately, despite defeating fellow relegation candidates Torreense 2-1 in March, wins from the clubs above them confirmed Caldas' return to the Segunda Divisão. With nothing left to play for, Caldas lost their final game against Académica 11-0.
Caldas spent three seasons in the Segunda before being relegated to the Terceira Divisão in 1962, later falling down out of the national leagues and into the Leiria 1^a Divisão in 1966. It would take three seasons for the costal side to return to the Terceira as district champions, and since that title win the club would never drop out of the national divisions. For the next two decades Caldas would bounce between the second and third tiers, though after finishing 13th in the 1989-90 Segunda Divisão Zona Centro, the club failed to qualify for the newly established Segunda Honra and were demoted to the third tier Segunda B. Caldas nearly won promotion back to the second tier in the 1992-93 season, but missed out after losing to Académico Viseu on the final day of the regular season. Caldas would never return to the second tier, from this point on moving between the third and fourth tiers. The club's biggest highlight in the latter part of its history came not via the leagues, but rather in the Taça de Portugal. In the 2017-18 season, Caldas, who at the time were playing in the then third tier Campeonato de Portugal, went on an incredible cup run. Entering in the first round, the club made it all the way to the semi-finals, defeating upper tier sides Arouca and Académica (both playing in LigaPro, now Liga Portugal 2). As the only non-Primeira side in the final four, Caldas faced off against Desportivo das Aves. In the two-legged affair, Caldas lost the first leg 1-0, but brought the tie level in the reverse fixture thanks to an own goal from Aves defender Jorge Felipe. Unfortunately, a date with the final wouldn't be on the cards, as two goals from Portuguese midfielder Gomes saw Aves advance to the final, later winning the tournament. Caldas currently play in Liga 3, having recently secured a tenth consecutive season in the third tier after surviving the relegation playoffs.
​

Seixal F.C.

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• Full Name: Seixal Futebol Clube
• Founded: 1925
• Time in the Primeira Liga: 1963-1965 (Two seasons)
• Current Status: Extinct

Situated in the Setúbal District, Seixal Futebol Clube was founded in 1925 and in the early couple of decades of its existence established itself as one of the better clubs in the region. They competed in the 1933-34 edition of the Campeonato de Portugal, later going on to have multiple appearances in both the experimental Segunda Liga and the subsequent II Divisão. After the 1946-47 Segunda season, however, the club would have an extended absence from the national divisions, competing in the Setúbal First Division before winning promotion to the Terceira Divisão in 1952 after winning the district title. Barely surviving their first season back in the national leagues, the club began to establish itself, and eventually they would begin challenging for a return to the second tier. After nine seasons in the Terceira, Seixal won promotion back to the Segunda Divisão as league champions, beating Vila Real 3-1 in the final. The national triumph served as extra motivation in the 61/62 campaign, and soon enough the club would gain notoriety. That season the club finished 5th in Zona Sul, only one point away from qualifying to the championship phase. But in just their second season back in the second tier, Seixal went all the way. The club won the Zona Sul, and though they lost the league championship to Zona Norte winners Varzim, it was still enough for them to win promotion to the Primeira Divisão - their second promotion in just three seasons.
The 1963-64 Primeira season seemed to get off on the right track as Seixal eopened the campaign with a come-from-behind 2-1 win over Olhanense. As fate would have it, their next two games would be against Sporting and Benfica. Predictably, they lost to Sporting 3-0, but in the match against Benfica they nearly escaped with a draw before the capital side sealed a 3-2 victory thanks to their forward Yaúca. The rest of the season, however, would suggest that promotion to the top flight might've come too early for the Seixalenses. The losses to Sporting and Benfica would mark the start of a 12 match winless streak, including a 6-2 away loss to previous entrants CUF. Compounding this was their early Taça de Portugal exit, knocked out in the first round after losing to Vitória Guimarães 10-0 on aggregate. Their next win didn't come until mid-January, once again against Olhanense, but things would go from bad to worse when the club again on a poor run of form. Shortly after the win over Olhanense, Seixal lost 3-1 to Sporting before being completely embarrassed 10-0 by Benfica, showing none of the determination from the previous encounter. Two games later, Seixal were dispatched 7-1 by Académica de Coimbra, and the club were desperate to pick up any points they can in the remaining fixtures, earning subsequent draws against Barreirense and Leixões - the first time the club went two games without defeat. Come the end of March, however, Seixal would finally earn a win against a club not named Olhanense, defeating Varzim 2-1, and the club finally managed to earn consecutive wins after upsetting Belenenses 2-1. Despite losing the final two games of the season, those wins were just enough to pull Seixal out of the relegation zone, finishing 12th.
The second season was unfortunately far more unforgiving. Seixal began the 64/65 campaign with a loss to Varzim before getting thrashed 8-0 by Vitória Setúbal. A modest 1-0 win over bottom of the table Torreense was followed by a six match winless run which confoundingly saw the club both draw Sporting 0-0 and lose to the likes of Leixões and Académica Coimbra 6-0 and 5-0 respectively. A 3-0 win over Braga showed a rare sighting of scoring prowess from the club, but once again Seixal failed to build upon good performances; they lost their next five games, conceding four or more goals and failing to score themselves on four occasions each. Early February saw Seixal obtain their third and final win of the campaign, that being another win over fellow hopelesses Torreense, this time 2-1, but by this point it was ostensibly clear that this side had no chance of staying in the division. The Seixalenses lost all of their remaining ten fixtures, failing to find the back of the net in seven of them. It was one of the worst of those games - a 6-0 loss away to Braga on matchday 23 - that would finally confirm the inevitable. The absolute low point would come in the penultimate matchday when the club went away to Benfica, only for As Aguías to ship 11 past them, while Seixal could only respond with three goals of their own. A valiant effort against Porto that even saw the club take the lead before falling 2-1 would round out the season. In total, Seixal finished with just eight points (12 from safety) with only three wins, two draws, and 21 losses, scoring just 16 times while conceding 84. Shockingly, this was still good enough to avoid finishing bottom, as Torreense could only manage seven points.
After two seasons in the second tier, Seixal were relegated again to the Terceira Divisão in 1967. They returned to the Segunda after a season, but after a time the club declined so much that by 1984 Seixal found themselves back in the district championships for a season. From this point on Seixal would almost never have a presence in the higher levels of Portuguese football, last competing even as high as the second division during the 1989-90 season where they failed to qualify for the Segunda Honra after finishing 13th in Zona Sul. Seixal then immediately fell into the fourth tier after getting relegated in 1991, spending six more seasons in the Terceira before alternating between the third and fourth divisions for nearly a decade afterwards. In the meantime, the club's financial situation deteriorated rapidly following many years of financial mismanagement by the board of directors. After being subjected to an audit by Portugal's Tax and Customs Authority (or Finanças), the club had many of its assets seized including their home stadium, the Estádio do Bravo, which was sold to Benfica to be used by its B-team, later falling under control of the Seixal city council. The club fell back into the Terceira Divisão in 2003, and two years after that they fell again. After two seasons in the Setúbal 1^a Divisão, the financial burden was too much and the board decided to dissolve the senior team. Five years later, one of the club's former members, Maria Teresa de Andrade, in a move to carry on the legacy of Seixal, founded Seixal Clube 1925. Affectionately referred to its supporters as O Filho do Seixal FC "The son of Seixal FC", the new club for a time only focused on youth soccer, but in 2017 a senior team was reestablished after ten years, and today the team plays in the AF Setúbal Segunda Divisão, the sixth tier of Portugese Football.
​

G.D. Riopele

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• Full Name: Grupo Desportivo Riopele
• Founded: 1958
• Time in the Primeira Liga: 1977-1978 (One season)
• Current Status: Extinct

Clubs founded as the sporting branch of major companies is nothing unusual in Portuguese football. Already we've covered the story of GD Fabril, the most well-known of all the clubs born in this fashion, and here we will discuss another: Gruop Desportivo Riopele. The origins of the club date back to 1927, when businessman José Dias de Oliveira founded Riopele, one of the oldest textile manufacturers in the country, in the city of Famalicão. Over time, the company grew, and following the death of de Oliveira in 1953, his son José da Costa Oliveira took over, overseeing a further expansion to the point of setting up agent networks in other countries by 1958. It was in September of that year that Oliveira decided to establish a sports club for both Riopele's employees and people who lived in the Braga District, with a particular focus on football, that club being GD Riopele. By 1966, the club had reached the Terceira Divisão, and after four seasons in the third tier Riopele won promotion to the Segunda. In just their second season in the Segunda Divisão the club nearly won promotion to the Primeira, but after finishing second in Zona Norte the club had to go to the promotion/relegation playoffs to face off against fellow Segunda side Peniche and relegation-theatened Primeira sides Beira Mar and Leixões, losing all six games in the Liguilha. GD Riopele continued on in the second division with strong financial backing from the company, even despite the political and economic turmoil that arose during the PREC. The 1976-77 season would finally see the breakthrough. After seven seasons in the country's second tier, Riopele finally secured promotion to the Primeira Divisão after clinching top spot in the Zona Norte after defeating Paços de Ferreira in the penultimate game of the regular season.
Armed with the likes of Pinto Vieira and most notably Jorge Jesus (yes, that Jorge Jesus), Riopele had an excellent start to the 77/78 season, winning two and drawing two of their first four games, bringing the club up to top four in the standings. October 14th would see the club enter its first big test, a home game against Porto at the Parque de Jogos José Dias de Oliveira. Despite their efforts, Riopele lost 2-0. Of course there is no shame in losing to one of the Big Three as a newly promote side, but this loss began an awful run of form that lasted four months. Riopele won just once in 11 games (2-1 vs Varzim), including a run of seven defeats losses, with the only other points they earned in that stretch being from 0-0 draws against Boavista and Portimonense. These poor results dipped the club into the relegation zone, but while the club would still pick up a couple more wins in February and March (3-1 over Boavista and 1-0 against Estoril), they were few and far between, and heavy losses to the likes of Vitória Setúbal (4-0) and Porto (6-0) certainly weren't helping. However, Riopele managed a brief turn around in April, starting with a 2-1 win over Feirense and a 0-0 draw over Maritímo, and though they lost narrowly to Sporting 2-1, a massive 1-0 upset over 5th-placed Beleneses dragged them out of the drop. The club managed to stay in safety for two weeks before a 4-1 loss to Boavista sent them back to the brink, and following a draw with Espinho, Riopele went into matchday 29 in a six-pointer against Portimonense, where a loss would see Riopele return to the Segunda. Indeed, it was a loss that Riopele would suffer as the team from Portimão who came out of the game as 2-1 victors, confirming Riopele's relegation.
The story of GD Riopele would not last much longer following their relegation from the Primeira. The club failed to make a genuine push for a return to the top flight, finishing 6th in Zona Norte in the 78/79 season. Two seasons later, the club were relegated back to the Terceira Divisão, spending a single season in the third tier before returning to the Segunda. As time went on, however, the company Riopele no longer saw having a sports team profitable enough, and with the performances on the field continuing to be underwhelming, it was only a matter of time before the company would decide to call it quits. After two more seasons in the Segunda, Riopele were relegated back to the Terceira in 1984. However, the club would be no-shows for the 1984-85 season, and in 1985 the decision was finally made to fold the club. Just 23 years after its founding, Grupo Desportivo Riopele was no more. The company Riopele still exists today, now headed by José Alexandre Oliveira, the grandson of the company's founder, with a major focus being the promotion of environmental sustainability in the production of fabrics. When asked in 2014 about the possibility of GD Riopele ever returning, Oliveira didn't dismiss the idea, but said that if the club were to return in any capacity, it would only be in youth football.
​

Amora F.C.

https://preview.redd.it/d5626qhnie1b1.png?width=182&format=png&auto=webp&s=035ef9184a8d3cfa000057a0f65699719497c31a

• Full Name: Amora Futebol Clube
• Founded: 1921
• Time in the Primeira Liga: 1980-1983 (Three seasons)
• Current Status: Liga 3 (3rd Tier)

Amora Futebol Clube was founded in May 1921, originally as Amora Football Club, in the city of Amora located in the Setúbal District. It would be another five years before the club would begin participating in official competitions, however, as their home stadium (the Estádio de Medideira) wouldn't be built until 1926. Once the stadium was complete, the club started out playing in amateur competitions before qualifying for the AF Setúbal Second Division in 1936. Amora then won the Second Division at the first time of asking, winning promotion to the First Division, and between 1939 and 1947 the club had six appearances in the Segunda Divisão (not consecutively). From 1948 to 1969, the Amorense had sparse appearances in the Terceira Divisão, winning the Setúbal district championship four times in that timespan, before finally establishing a permanent foothold in the national divisions after a fifth promotion to the third tier in 1969. After eight seasons in the third tier, Amora managed to return to the Segunda Divisão after a 30 year absence. The club finished 6th in their group in the 77/78 season, which they improved to 4th the season after. Amora were clearly on an upward trajectory, but following the 78/79 season, the club would make a decision that would push them to further heights, hiring former Portuguese international Félix Mourinho as head coach. And in case you're wondering - yes, he is the father of two-time Champion's League winning manager José Mourinho. While Félix's managerial career wouldn't be anywhere near as impressive as his offspring's, he would make history in his own right with Amora. In just his first season with the club, he led Amora to top of the Zona Sul standings, and in the championship playoffs the club bested Académica de Coimbra and FC Penafiel to not only win Amora's first national title, but also earn promotion to the Primeira Divisão.
Amora's first top flight victory wouldn't come until matchday four (1-0 over Varzim), having drawn two and lost one of the prior three games. The club did dip into the relegation zone briefly following a few poor results, but back-to-back wins including a 6-0 thrashing of Académica would bring the club as high as 6th after nine games. For a time it seemed like Amora could be a dark horse for possibly qualifying for a UEFA Cup spot, despite alternating between winning and losing every other game, with one of those wins being a 2-1 victory at home against Belenenses, the club believed to have inspired the colors of Amora. Midway through the season, Mourinho would depart the club to manage Rio Ave. Amora were on a three-match losing streak at the time of Mourinho's departure, but their form would continue to suffer as the season went on, eventually finding themselves in a relegation battle. By the penultimate matchday, Amora were two points off of safety, needing to win their last two games to have a chance at survival. The club managed to stay up in dramatic fashion, giving a shock 3-0 defeat to Sporting CP and completing the double over Belenenses to finish the season 12th on 25 points, one point and two places above the drop. A player who proved to be critical in Amora's survival chances was Jorge Silva; the Lisbon-born striker was responsible for 14 of the Amorense's 38 goals, finishing as one of the best scorers in the league. At the end of the season, however, Silva would transfer to Boavista, and though his replacement - the Brazilian Caio Cambalhota - managed to fill his shoes nicely, goals from the rest of the squad would start to dry up. The club was embroiled in a relegation fight from the start, and even though they would have a few notable highlights such as a 1-0 upset over reigning league champions Benfica, Amora were stuck in the relegation zone for most of the season. Sitting in 14th come the final matchday, the Amorense needed to earn at least a better result than Penafiel and hope Estoril defeat Académico Viseu to have any chance of survival. Amora's prayers would be answered, defeating Braga in emphatic fashion with a 5-0 victory, and with Penafiel losing and Estoril defeating Académico, Amora once again completed the great escape finishing 11th, albeit one point and nine goals poorer compared to the 80/81 season.
For a very brief moment, it seemed that Amora had regrouped themselves at the start of the 1982-83 Primeira season. They had gotten off to their best top flight start with a draw and a win over Varzim and GC Alcobaça respectively, and while they did lose their next three games, two of those games were against Sporting and Braga. But following a 1-0 win over Espinho, the club's somewhat shaky form would tank, drawing three and losing four of their next seven fixtures, sliding them into the relegation zone by matchday 10. In what would appear to be a case of déjà vu, the relegation-threatened club would somehow pull off another upset against one of the Big Three, this time defeating Porto at the start of the new year 2-1 at home. Yet just like last time, this massive victory did practically nothing for the club going forward. Amora did pick up the full two points over both Portimonense and Braga in February, but after drawing Espinho in the reverse fixture, any hope of staying in the Primeira would be dashed. The club lost to Boavista on matchday 22, followed by a loss to Vitória Setúbal, and then another to Estoril, and then another to Boavista, before traveling away to Vitória Guimarães only to be battered 7-1. Thoroughly embarrased by Os Conquistadores, the Amorense were completely demoralized after having lost six games back-to-back. It was the seventh straight loss, however, that would finally confirm the club's fate. With a 2-1 loss to fellow basement dwellers Maritímo, Amora were officially relegated back to the Segunda Divisão. Another loss to Porto would follow before the club ended the season on a somewhat positive note, defeating Rio Ave 3-2, finishing 15th with just 18 points to their name.
The club couldn't have gotten relegated at a worse time. By the mid-1980s, Portugal's economy was not in the best shape, and the Setúbal District in particular was suffering a major depression and mass unemployment. This would have a big impact on clubs in the district, including Amora. After just two season, the club were relegated to the Terceira Divisão in 1985. Amora would have four cameo appearances in the second tier between 1987 and 1995, but would only last one season each time, eventually falling back to the Terceira in 1996 (at this point now the fourth tier). For over the next decade, the club would bounce between the third and fourth tiers, but throughout this whole time the club was dealing with severe financial difficulties after having accumulated a lot of debt, much of it owed to Portugal's Segurança Social. The problems behind the scenes would be reflected on the field, and in 2008 the club were relegated to the district championships for the first time in 40 years. Amora wouldn't return to the nationa leagues until 2012, but were relegated back to the district leagues in the Terceira's final season. It took another five years before Amora would return to the national divisions, this time doing so by going unbeaten in the AF Setúbal 1^a Divisão, playing in the Campeonato de Portugal for the 2018-19 season. The club hasn't been relegated since and currently plays in Liga 3, having missed out on promotion to the second tier after finishing bottom of their promotion group behind Sanjoanense, Länk Vilaverdense, and Belenenses.
​

G.C. Alcobaça

https://preview.redd.it/c6v3vl5oie1b1.jpg?width=182&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6007e2ae72149a36ebca4f05977167ccc6df3804

• Full Name: Ginásio Clube de Alcobaça
• Founded: 1946
• Time in the Primeira Liga: 1982-1983 (One season)
• Current Status: AF Leiria Divisão de Honra (5th tier)

Ginásio Clube de Alcobaça was founded in 1946 following a merger between Alcobaça Futebol Clube (est. 1918) and CD Comércio e Indústria de Alcobaça (est. 1932). At the time of the merger, Alcobaça FC was competing in the II Divisão, having first entered the division in 1943, so as such GC Alcobaça would assume the former's place. The new Alcobaça played in the second tier for seven seasons before being relegated to the Terceira Divisão in 1953. The club's slow decent would drag on for another decade before they were finally relegated to the district championships. After another decade in Leiria's first division, the Ginasistas won the Leiria district championship to return to the national divisions. It was from here that the long journey to the Primeira would truly begin. In 1979 Alcobaça won promotion to the Segunda after topping Série D of the Terceira, returning to the second tier after a 27 year absence. The first season back nearly saw the side relegated, but they ultimately finished 11th in Zona Centro just two points above the drop. The squad improved to sixth the following season, but in the 1981-82 campaign, Alcobaça would finally make a breakthrough, albeit it controversial fashion. After a slow start, the club would gain momentum. That momentum would also carry them through the Taça de Portugal. Entering in the second round, the Ginasistas made it all the way to the semi-finals, even defeating Primeira side Rio Ave before narrowly losing to eventual winners Sporting 2-1. Despite losing the final game of the first phase, they finished the regular season top of the standings, level on points with Académica de Coimbra. However, thanks to Alcobaça having a better head-to-head record over Académica (1W 1D), it was the Ginasistas who took top spot. A disgruntled Académica went to the Portugese Football Federation to complain about the draw against Alcobaça earlier in the season, requesting the match be replayed. Surprisingly, the FPF initially accepted Académica's request, despite the fact that the II Divisão championship playoffs were already underway. The supporters of Alcobaça were not going to accept this decision, and on June 10th they gathered the city streets to protest. Incidentally, the protest took place in the middle of the Porto-Lisboa cycling tourney, causing the competition to be interrupted. While the cyclists were confused at first, they understood the situation after the supporters explaned what was happening, and many even joined in on the protests. The FPF would soon reverse course and call off the replay, and while Alcobaça wouldn't end up winning the division title, at least their ascent to the top flight was finally secure.
Alcobaça's time in the Primeira would be brief. Their first opponent in the 82/83 season would be Rio Ave, the very side they upset in the Taça in just the season prior; the match ended 1-1. Unfortunately, wins would be too few and far between for the Leiria-based outfit. The club failed to register a single victory for the entire first half of the season, playing 16 straight games with a record of 0-7-9 and failing to score on seven occasions. That being said, one of the draws was quite a notable one. The Ginanistas hosted Benfica at the Estádio Municipal de Alcobaça on matchday 12. By this point, Benfica were on an 11 match winning streak, whereas Alcobaça were sitting in 15th. In what should have been a routine rout, Alcobaça managed to flip the script thanks to a late 88th minute equalizer from midfielder Nélito, making the minnows the first side to take points off of As Aguías en route to their 25th Primeira title. It wouldn't be until the end of January when the club would get their first win, defeating previously discussed Amora 2-1. That would be the first of just four victories that the club earned for the rest of the season, the others coming against Espinho, Setúbal, and Estoril, all of which occured at home. However, anytime the club didn't win, they lost. Their win over Estoril (which finished 3-1) came right before a rematch against Benfica, where the Lisbon giants showed no mercy. Alcobaça were demolished 8-1, but it was a 1-0 loss against Vitória Guimarães that guaranteed second division football. Come the end of the campaign, the club finished bottom of the table with just 15 points - 11 away from safety.
It was from here that GC Alcobaça would slide down the divisions and disappear into relative obscurity. In 1986 the club were relegated to the III Divisão, and though the club won promotion from the division in 1990, that was the year that the second division was restructured, meaning that while the club changed leagues, they still remained in the third tier. After back-to-back relegations, the Ginanistas found themselves back in the district championships in 1992. Their stint in the 5th tier lasted just a season, but thanks to mounting debts, it became increasingly clear that there was no pathway for the club to return to the upper levels of Portuguese soccer. For the next two decades, Alcobaça would move between the Terceira and the district leagues, wining four AF Leiria Divisão de Honra titles in that period. The club competed in the last two seasons of the Terceira Divisão in 2011-12 and 2012-13, but were relegated back to the district championships, not returning to the national divisions again until 2016 when they won promotion to the Campeonato de Portugal (then the 3rd tier). The 16/17 season was a difficult one, and the club were ultimately relegated after finishing bottom of their relegation playoff group. That would be the last time Alcobaça competed in the national divisions, having played every season since then in the Leiria district championship up until now.
- - -
This concludes part two. Part three is here.

Moss threw 2 TD's and Sean Mannion threw 1 TD
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/MossRa00.htm
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/MannSe00.htm
... it's the off-season y'all

Looking through all the posts about draft grades and classes and round value and I got to wondering about historical metrics and correlation. I was curious about draft classes not just at the top-heavy best 10 guys level, but also at the top 25 and overall draft level. I have also read a lot of comments about the "crapshoot" nature of draft picks, so wanted to get some numerical data to look at to see how strong correlation is at various draft positions. This has also just been a fun a data analysis project for me to become more familiar with historical draft classes and players.

Weighted Career Approximate Value

I use Pro Football Reference pretty much exclusively for stats and career lists, so for the purpose of this post, all data is based upon their weighted career approximate value (wAV) statistic. Here is a link that explains how it is calculated.
Is this the perfect statistic? Of course not. No single statistic is. It trends toward career length, and some people throw this metric in the trash because of a few questionable risers. The weighted aspect of it is meant to emphasize the strength of a player's peak years though. It should not be used to make arguments for how #42 is obviously a more valuable career than #45, for example, but as a general guideline to career value I like it and think it is as good as any single metric that I have seen. This is especially true in sample sizes that use large amounts of these numbers, where I think it averages out to solid estimates.
Some notable players and their wAV number for reference:

Player	wAV
Tom Brady (#1)	184
Jerry Rice (#5)	160
Lawrence Taylor (#12)	146
Deion Sanders (#31)	127
Champ Bailey (#48)	117
Terry Bradshaw (#91)	107
DeMarcus Ware (#146)	100
Antonio Brown (#240)	92
Jordy Nelson (unranked)	73
Albert Haynesworth (unranked)	55
Sam Bradford (unranked)	44
Vince Young (unranked)	33
Jamarcus Russell (unranked)	6
Akili Smith (unranked)	2

I am expecting to be railed in the comments for doing an analysis using this metric. But lists are always so absurdly biased towards recency and spotlight positions with names that everyone knows that I find them less compelling.
The value of a LB from 30 years ago, or a solid center that isn't top 5 all time at his position gets completely lost in the fray of a Reddit discussion about draft classes. And people generally lose sight of a draft class's value beyond the top 5 or 10 guys or so. Also, I am a stupid person that can't form his own opinion and I like working with cold hard numbers. So here goes.

AVERAGE VALUE BY DRAFT POSITION

You never truly know if you're going to get the next Peyton Manning or the next Jamarcus Russell with your pick. We all know the value of a draft pick increases the higher up in the draft you go, but I was surprised at how strong the correlation was throughout the years.
https://preview.redd.it/rwj72mbgst0b1.png?width=603&format=png&auto=webp&s=eadce6ec42ffa007c0fbabbd1702c7ec0a9599f9
By this metric, #36 has been a sneaky value spot, featuring the likes of: Shaq Leonard, Buddha Baker, Derek Carr, Darius Slay, Jordy Nelson, Ochocinco, Mike Peterson, Tiki Barber, Lawyer Milloy, Kevin Mawae, Jimmy Smith, and other less well known but still solid careers from the pre-90s eras.
There is a spike from #33 - #37 which could involve the start of the second round somehow, but most of these drafts had a second round that started earlier than that. The first draft that had 32 first round picks was 2001.
I expect this chart to become more and more strongly correlated towards an exponential decay line as the years go by. Both because that tends to happen as sample sizes increase, and because the nature of technology and experience may be slowly producing more consistent results.

GREATEST NFL DRAFTS

The limitation with any measure of player careers of course is, that, the players must have mostly completed their careers. So for these purposes you really can't put a number on drafts with players that are still accumulating meaningful value. The first draft where it's more or less all said and done is perhaps 2009, where only Matthew Stafford is still accumulating meaningful value. I think that 2018 has an opportunity to give some of these draft classes below a run for their money on total value, and 2020 has a compelling top 10 case, but for these purposes we obviously can't evaluate it yet.
The first thing I did was to calculate the total wAV for the top 10 players, top 25, and all players in each draft class. This includes only drafts since the official merger and does not include players who went undrafted. The results:

Greatest draft classes	Top 10 players	Top 25 players	All players
1st	1983 - 1104 wAV	1983 - 2175 wAV	1983 - 5513 wAV
2nd	1985 - 1070	1996 - 2160	2006 - 5033
3rd	1996 - 1069	2001 - 2140	1993 - 4987
4th	2001 - 1066	1998 - 2009	1976 - 4916
5th	1998 - 1035	1988 - 1992	1996 - 4899

Without a doubt, by this metric the 1983 draft class was the best ever. This is not necessarily surprising as it is the consensus by many estimates. I was surprised to see that it was so dominantly ahead in the measure of all players though, and not just the most well-known names. It was 3% ahead of 2nd in the top 10 list, 0.7% ahead in the top 25 list, but 9.5% ahead in the total list. So that is to say that it is even more dominant in the parts of the draft that people usually don't consider when coming up with these lists, the good but not memorable careers, the Jim Jeffcoats and Dan Fikes of the world. Just an OP draft class all around.
But I wanted to get a single list of the top drafts, rather than have these 3 different categories. So I ranked each draft 1-53 for each of these three categories and summed those numbers.
Here are the rankings. I included the top 10 players by wAV here as a reference, but bear in mind that these rankings include the entirety of every draft class. They are just weighted towards the top 10, and top 25 to a lesser extent:

Draft Class	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5
Year	1983	1996	2001	1988	1998
Top player	Dan Marino	Ray Lewis	Drew Brees	Randall McDaniel	Peyton Manning
Second	John Elway	Marvin Harrison	LaDanian Tomlinson	Thurman Thomas	Randy Moss
Third	Bruce Matthews	Terrell Owens	Reggie Wayne	Tim Brown	Charles Woodson
Fourth	Jim Kelly	Zach Thomas	Steve Smith Sr	Michael Irvin	Alan Faneca
Fifth	Darrell Green	Brian Dawkins	Justin Smith	Neil Smith	Fred Taylor
Sixth	Richard Dent	Jonathan Ogden	Steve Hutchinson	Eric Allen	Hines Ward
Seventh	Henry Ellard	Willie Anderson	Michael Vick	Dermontti Dawson	Matt Hasselbeck
Eighth	Roger Craig	La'Roi Glover	Richard Seymore	Michael Perry	Takeo Spikes
Ninth	Karl Mecklenburg	Mushin Muhammed	Matt Light	Bill Romanowski	Ahman Green
Tenth	Eric Dickerson	Donnie Edwards	Chad Johnson	Ken Norton Jr	Matt Birk

1996 gets a nod here from me as unlike 1983, 2001, and 1998, it did not get carried by a top heavy QB. The most successful QB in this class was the forgettable Tony Banks, at #44 by wAV that year.
Surprisingly, draft class value was relatively consistent throughout the years. But I suppose this is to be expected with most NFL careers not being extremely long. There will have to be players producing value at any given time relative to their peers, and that turnover will usually not be 20+ years at a time, which is where extreme variance would come in. Here is the graph of value by year:
https://preview.redd.it/hqhokq3hst0b1.png?width=744&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c89e37addca31714fbc20a4ff3a0c44d9a687b6
You can see the obvious drop off starting around 2014 or so, because those classes still have many players in the prime of their careers.

WORST NFL DRAFTS

What I found to be more surprising however, is that the previous year 1982 was the worst draft class ever. The similar limitation here is that you can't really evaluate a draft class where players are still accumulating value, but in this case you must choose to exclude the recent years that would otherwise win, and draw a line somewhere. So again here the line will be drawn at 2009, where only Matthew Stafford is still accumulating value.
Ultimately the worst class is obvious. It's 1982. This draft class has a lower total wAV than 2017 does currently. It's pathetic. However, it doesn't have the lowest top 10 and there are still 4 HOF players in the class: Marcus Allen, Mike Munchak, Andre Tippett, and Morten Andersen. Many draft classes don't have any HOF players, so it does still have redeeming value. Even with this fact though, it has the 6th worst top 10 score of all drafts prior to 2010.
I'm not listing the individual worst for top 10, top 25, and total because it is less interesting, so here are the 5 worst using the same method I did above (excluding anything since 2010).

	Year
Worst	1982 (3615 total, 1534 T25, 781 T10)
Second worst	2009 (3978 total, 1498 T25, 738 T10)
Third worst	1978 (3882 total, 1577 T25, 778 T10)
Fourth worst	1972 (3701 total, 1601 T25, 770 T10)
Fifth worst	1984 (4046 total, 1632 T25, 779 T10)

It is perhaps unfair to include 2009, but Matthew Stafford will need to play at a top 5 QB level for several more years to make a meaningful dent out of this position. If he doesn't have multiple MVP seasons to finish his career it may very well be the worst top 10 class ever. The only other remaining players who have not retired are Ryan Succop, Thomas Morestead, and Kevin Huber. They are highly unlikely to make a collective difference in value, maybe 3 points if we are being generous.
2015 also seems to have a trajectory that could land it near this list, but it is much too early to call it.

INTERESTING TIDBITS

• The #1 draft pick has the highest wAV in 5 of the 53 drafts. Terry Bradshaw (1970), Peyton Manning (1998), Matthew Stafford (2009), Cam Newton (2011), and Kyler Murray (2019). Murray's position is obviously a fluid situation, currently holding a 7 point lead over AJ Brown and a 10 point lead over Nick Bosa.
• The #1 draft pick has a top 10 wAV in 28 of 53 draft classes.
• In 28 of the 53 drafts, the #1 player was a top 10 draft pick. 36 of the 53 went in the first round. That means that the best player in a draft is usually a top ten pick, but is rarely the #1 overall. #1 overall usually has a great career though and is more likely to have the highest wAV than any other draft spot.
• The #1 player by wAV was a quarterback in 21 of the 53 drafts. It was a defensive player in 16 drafts. The #1 overall draft pick has been a QB 26 times.
• The highest rated HOF eligible player who is NOT in the HOF is Ken Anderson. He is #42 all time with a wAV of 120.
• The highest rated player whose name I was personally unfamiliar with is HOFer Merlin Olsen, a DT for the Rams in the 60s and 70s, at #51 with a wAV of 116.

TOM BRADY

• The lowest draft pick not named Tom Brady to produce the #1 wAV in a draft class is C Mike Webster, who was picked #125 overall in the 1974 draft class. His wAV score of 114 puts him at #60 all time. However, both Stefon Diggs (drafted #146 in 2015) and Tyreek Hill (drafted #165 in 2016) are currently #1 in their draft class and giving him a run for his money. Diggs has a commanding 15 point lead above Marcus Peters at #2, while Hill has a narrow 1 point lead over Prescott.
• Of the top 35 players all time, 17 were selected top 5 of their draft. Only Tom Brady was selected beyond the 3rd round.
• The first player on the all time list that was drafted later than Brady is Jeff Saturday at a wAV score of 118 (#46), who went undrafted in 1998. Had he been drafted he would rank third for that year, behind Peyton Manning and Randy Moss. He is also the second highest rated HOF eligible player that is not in the HOF, behind Ken Anderson.
• Any player who produced meaningful value in their 20th+ worst seasons has an undersold wAV. The way it is calculated, it takes 100% of a player's best season, then 95% of their second best season and so on. So it takes 0% of their 20th best season and beyond, with the reasonable assumption that players simply do not provide meaningful value for more seasons than that in the NFL. In his 20th and 21st worst seasons, Brady threw for 3,620 yds and 25 TDs, and 4,694 yards and 25 TDs while breaking the season completions and attempts records. He has the highest AV among all NFL players' 20th+ worst seasons.

This is the most hype I've been for the Ravens offense in a few years. Brand new offense, new weapons, new OC and a bunch of hungry men. We actually have a "pick your poison" offense this season where defensive coordinators will have to determine who they'll want to focus on offensively. Double team OBJ? Cool, Rashod Bateman and Zay Flowers are one-on-one...one maybe getting covered by a LB or something. Wanna double team Andrews? Good luck with that, OBJ and Bateman are wide open. This will be the closest to an unstoppable offense we've had since 2019.
When you look at Pro Football Reference, you see that Lamar's average passing attempts/game last season was 10-12 attempts lower than the league average. If Monken has Lamar passing at the league average...he'll have well over 550 pass attempts. At that point, it's a matter of determining where I think Lamar's TD% ends up. In 2019, Lamar had a crazy high 9% TD percentage. Even some of the best QBs in the game don't have a TD% that high. Lamar's career TD% sits at 6.1% which is definitely good, I'm hoping he can get it up to 6.5% - 7% this season. Assuming he has at least 550 pass attempts (which would be a career high), that would mean he'd have 35-38 TDs this season. I actually think Lamar surpasses both his career TDs, career passing yards, and career pass attempts this season.
I can see at least 2 WRs/TEs having 10 or more TDs this season. Some mixture of OBJ, Bateman, and Andrews. I don't think all 3 hit 10 TDs, but 2 of these guys definitely will if they stay healthy. I don't think it'll be Zay only because he's a rookie and I don't think he'll be the primary read on most plays. 7-8 TDs for Zay isn't out of the question though, especially if Lamar is pushing 40 TDs like I think he will be.

Hi y’all, chiefs fan coming in peace. I was perusing pro football reference and when I went to finnegan’s page it says he led the league in AV in ‘08 with 20.
That’s already extremely impressive as a corner but it’s extra weird since that was his only pro bowl season and according to pfr, he never even had a season half as good in terms of AV in any other year.
If anyone here remembers that season well I’d love to have some insight. Because it seems like he went super sayin for a year then became average for a while.