Falcons vs. Dolphins Preview and Breakdown

I didn't catch it. Just going off the words on the screen, which isn't a very good way to tell admittedly, it sounds to me like he could mean his practice effort, but he could also just mean that he's performing better in practice.

 

Sigh. It's not exactly my choice. That's like the one part of the piece I do because it's expected of me.

I probably undersold him a little bit. He dropped back into coverage against the St. Louis Rams, intercepted a football, and returned it I believe like 70 yards for a touchdown. He's not getting the pressure he needs to get for the player he is and I still have NO CLUE why they ditched John Abraham for him (although perhaps that 70 yard TD gives us a nice hint), but he's still decent.

 

I wake up and go to my day job, get home about 6:30 or 7pm, spend time with my wife until she goes to bed usually around 10-11pm and then from that point until I go to sleep I'm writing. Usually I get done by about 1-2am. There have been a few that saw me working until closer to 4am.

I don't have any writing to do on Friday and Saturday though, so there's that.

I'm probably averaging about an incremental 50 to 70 hours a month on this. I would like to cut that down some but I need to get into a good rhythm.

 

Well as far as the subject matters go, the pattern is somewhat regular in that Sunday there's a Takeaways piece in addition to Live in-game blogging, Monday the Grades, Tuesday that ambiguously-titled "What You Need to Know" piece which actually has very specific requirements, and then Thursday the Preview.

The Wednesday "X's and O's" piece requires an idea I have to pitch to my editor on by Monday evening and the Friday piece is usually a completely discretionary piece that I have to pitch to the editor by Wednesday evening. We agreed before I took this job that at some point my Friday pieces could start to be about draft prospects that the Dolphins could incorporate into their team somehow. My editor has thus far shut down those ideas for Weeks 1, 2 and 3 obviously, and I don't know when we'll get on them. When I am able to move onto that, I think that will bring me into a little more of a comfort zone.

 

There are quite a few people that write about the Draft for them. The main guy they're pimping as their version of Mel Kiper/Todd McShay/Mike Mayock is Mike Miller. Everyone else gets these nuts-and-bolts assignments designed purely to get clicks first and foremost and not necessarily to get quality content.

I've written about the Draft for them before. I don't want that gig...at all. Every assignment is some kind of thing where you have to predict all 32 teams' needs or do a mock draft. The entire assignment lineup is designed so that by necessity everything you do is a mile wide and an inch deep. I hate it. I took the Dolphins job in very large part because I knew it would be infinitely more focused.

They made me come up with a 2013 Mock Draft like literally the day after the 2012 NFL Draft was done. A whole year of draft research I was supposed to can into like one night. I felt so ashamed of what I wrote, I'll never do anything like that for them again.

Sometimes I would get to do a slideshow on one guy. That was probably the best part, especially when they would give me a guy whom I actually liked and/or had done a lot of research on already. But I guess those assignments didn't really represent enough of the total weekly load to give me a positive impression of the job.

Too much, "hey why don't you predict how all 32 teams in the league will surprise us on draft day" and not enough, of the following:
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/...hs-and-weaknesses-of-nfl-draft-prospects-game