A Brief Guide To Ruining Your Free Time

Poor sleep, bad boundaries, and somehow still having too much shit to do.

Welp, football season is upon us. I had hoped to keep a journal about my time coaching again, with the idea of maybe turning it into a book. You know, before I get the one I’m actually working on off the ground - because I am nothing if not deluded about how long shit takes. I thought returning to football might give me something worth writing about. I did not realize returning to football would eliminate the time required to write about it.

So this newsletter will have to suffice.

Pre-season high school football camp has been taking up about eight hours of my day, between actually being there and prepping for it. That is certainly better than when it was my full-time job at the college level. Except for the fact that when I was doing that, the only other thing I was trying to be reasonably good at was not being a shitty husband and seeing my daughter while she was awake.

There were mixed results with that.

When I was younger, if a particular day or week involved some nights with four hours of sleep, so be it. That was not necessarily a healthy system, but it was technically a system. At fifty-one, four hours of sleep is no longer a sacrifice. It is a threat to the public.

A few days ago, while my daughter had her legs in an MRI machine¹, I sat in the waiting room watching practice film. The day after that, I was in Starbucks gameplanning because our power was out.

I was working in that waiting room, and in that Starbucks, because I cannot function on four hours of sleep anymore. If I do that now, I become a person who should not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle, answer an email, or speak to his family without legal representation.

When I was younger, four hours of sleep was sometimes just part of the job. So was occasionally being like the boss in The Bear (more on that later).

Back then, I could justify almost anything in the pursuit of winning a game. Maybe age has made me wiser. Mostly though, I think it has just made me less willing to use winning as permission to be an asshole.

My time crunch now is not caused by football. It is caused by me. When I see something that is wrong, or fixable, I want to help. I’ve never been very good at just punching a clock.

Except for the six months I spent loading trucks at UPS. I was perfectly content clocking the hell out of that place.

What I hadn’t anticipated before getting back into coaching was how difficult it is to do something casually when you know how to do it seriously.

At our scrimmage last week, my job consisted of sitting in the press box and helping. There was also a laptop in front of me streaming the game in real time. After each offensive series, we could watch each play from multiple angles to determine what had happened.

Back in my day (yup, just said that), we determined what happened by gathering four coaches with four separate and partial views of the game, and asking them to reconstruct it like Oliver Stone and the Zapruder Film.

Nobody saw the entire play. And if you did, it meant you were shirking your responsibilities. “Sorry Coach, I missed it,” was a somewhat common retort to the age-old question of, “What the fuck just happened!?!”

And as in life, sometimes guys were wrong. Particularly when it was their group that might have been responsible for an issue. The phrase “That wasn’t my guy” has probably been spoken on more football sidelines than “BLOCK SOMEBODY!” has been shouted from the stands. But when everyone was on the same page, eyes in the right spot, and unattached emotionally from the outcome…we usually got it right.

This was an objectively worse way to get information. It also may have been a better way to learn how to do it.

One of the abilities that I learned from doing it the old-fashioned way was to make adjustments mid-series. That is, before the iPad. Maybe the defense had lined up incorrectly to a formation, and we wanted to run it again before they could get to the sideline and correct it.

Football has changed. For better or for worse is up for debate.

My body has also changed. There is no debate about that…the replay is conclusive. It can no longer survive coaching the way I once coached. But my eyes can still see the game the way all those years taught them to see it.

The game is consuming, but so is competence. I mean, maybe not for everyone. But I’ve never figured out how to be good at something casually. I kinda have to be all in. I think, maybe, a lot of people are built that way.

That feeling is satisfying. But it is also dangerous. Being useful makes it harder to establish limits. Now that my football brain is awake again, it doesn’t understand that it’s supposed to operate only during designated part-time hours.

Last night, we won our first game. I got home past midnight, into bed at 2am, and was back up by 6:15am. Football may have instant replay, but it still has no respect for the duration or quality of my REM sleep.

🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈

Is it possible to love something without letting it own you? I don’t know the answer to that question.

I also still don’t know whether I am going to keep a journal this season. At the moment, life seems to be journaling me…mostly in the form of an overstuffed calendar, a laptop full of film, and a wife who occasionally needs to remind me that football is no longer helping pay our bills.

Perhaps this can count as my first entry.

And here’s that bit from The Bear I promised…

🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈

Speaking of football’s remarkable ability to make people certain about things they may not actually understand, earlier this week I also posted my conversation with Fred Segal, the creator of Freezing Cold Takes. We talked about sports, overconfidence, bad predictions, and why very smart people can become very sure of themselves in almost every part of life.

Nobody Gets Fired For Bad Predictions

DOGS

1. She’s fine by the way.