Every Football Season Deserves To Be Remembered
Welcome to The Football Corner, a new home for the stories, moments and memories that make college football, the NFL and soccer worth caring about.
Do you love football?
Do you spend your Saturday mornings watching the Premier League with College GameDay on the second screen?
Do those mornings turn into afternoons spent bouncing between college football games — before doing it all over again with the NFL on Sunday?
Maybe you’re here for Champions League nights. Maybe it’s Saturday afternoons in a college town. Maybe it’s the chaos of an NFL Sunday.
Or maybe, like me, you just love all of it.
Whatever football means to you, you’re in the right place.
This is The Football Corner.
For as long as I can remember, sports have been one of the most important parts of my life. Some of my earliest memories involve sitting in front of a television playing sports video games while I crafted imaginary worlds in my head involving the players on the screen. I have fond memories of going to baseball games with my family and spending way too much time thinking about what might happen the next time my favorite team took the field. As I’ve gotten older, the teams have changed, the sports I follow have expanded and the way I consume them has certainly evolved, but that feeling has never really gone away.
If anything, I’ve only become more fascinated by why we care about these things so much.
Because, when you really think about it, sports are kind of ridiculous. We allow something we have absolutely no control over to dictate our moods. We spend absurd amounts of money to travel across the country — and sometimes the world (I’m looking at you, FreddyLA7) — to watch people we’ve never met play a game. We form lifelong relationships with teams simply because our parents liked them, because we went to a certain school or because we happened to turn on the television at the right time when we were 12 years old.
And yet, I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.
That’s ultimately why I wanted to create The Football Corner.
Football — in all its forms — is the world’s greatest storytelling machine. Every single season, we are introduced to people, teams and stories that we had no idea we were going to care about a few months earlier. Some of them end in championships. Others end in absolute heartbreak. Some disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. Others become stories we’ll tell for the rest of our lives.
Just look at what we’ve seen recently. The Indiana Hoosiers, the longtime laughingstock of college football, have risen from the ashes and become a lightning rod capable of not only winning national championships but also dominating in the process. The NFL is filled to the brim with intriguing tales of glory and wonder, from dynasties that inevitably become villains to players like Sam Darnold, who was cast aside after a disappointing start to his career before eventually finding his way to Seattle and the top of the football mountain top.
And then don’t get me started on soccer.
Or football. Whatever you want to call it. I’ll probably use both around here. It is The Football Corner, after all.
Soccer might be the best example of what I’m talking about because so much of my enjoyment of the sport has absolutely nothing to do with understanding every tactical detail of what I’m watching. I appreciate that side of the game, and we’ll certainly talk about it when it’s important, but I don’t watch soccer because I want to spend 90 minutes studying formations. Instead, I consume it because of how it makes me feel.
That’s true of college football and the NFL, too. It’s why certain moments and times become memories that will last a lifetime.
I’ll never forget Oct. 15, 2022, the day TCU beat Oklahoma State 43-40 in double overtime and Tennessee finally took down its hated rival Alabama for the first time in what seemed like a millennium. Or Nov. 19, 2018, when the Los Angeles Rams and Kansas City Chiefs went toe-to-toe in what many people — myself included — believe to be the greatest Monday Night Football game in NFL history. Or May 2, 2016, when Leicester City, a club that entered the season with 5,000-to-1 odds to win the Premier League, completed the impossible and became legends in the process.
I remember those games, but more than anything, I remember how they made me feel. That feeling is ingrained in my brain forever, and every time a new season begins, part of the fun is knowing that I might get to experience it all over again. I just don’t know when, where or what game will provide it.
Those are the moments I want The Football Corner to capture.
Every football season deserves to be remembered.
That’s the idea behind this entire thing. I want The Football Corner to document, discuss and celebrate football while we’re living through it. I don’t want to get to 2036 and only remember who won the Super Bowl, the national championship, the Premier League and the Champions League in 2026. I want to remember all the weird stuff that happened along the way, the teams we randomly fell in love with for three months, the players who seemingly came out of nowhere and the games that had absolutely nothing to do with deciding a championship but somehow became the most entertaining thing we watched all season.
That, my friends, is the good stuff.
There are already plenty of places to get football news. There are plenty of places to get incredibly detailed analysis of what happened on the field. There are certainly plenty of places to find someone yelling about why your favorite team is terrible.
To be honest, I’m not interested in recreating any of that.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be news here. There will be. It doesn’t mean there won’t be analysis or strong opinions, either. Anyone who knows me is well aware that would be an impossible promise for me to make. The important thing is that I don’t want to manufacture any of it. More importantly, my desire is to talk about why everything that occurs matters.
So, what does that actually mean for this website and publication?
Honestly, we’re going to find out together.
I have a pretty good idea of what I want The Football Corner to look like, but part of the fun of starting something new is figuring out what works. There will be articles throughout the week about college football, the NFL and soccer. Some will be reactions to whatever everyone is talking about that day, while others will be longer stories about a team, player, coach, game or moment that I think deserves more attention.
There will also be plenty of podcasts and videos.
After Saturday will be our college football show, giving us a place to work through everything that just happened across the country after another Saturday of complete nonsense.
After Sunday will do the same for the NFL.
And The Matchbook will be our home for soccer, whether we’re talking about the Premier League, Champions League or whatever else is happening around the world that deserves our attention.
There will be lots of polls and rankings, too. Lots of polls and rankings.
In the end, I want this to become a place you check throughout the football week. My desire is that The Football Corner is your one-stop shop if something incredible happens on a random Tuesday night in the Champions League, or if a completely meaningless college football game becomes the best game of the year, or if an NFL player gives us a story that deserves our full attention. If The Football Corner becomes somewhere for people who genuinely enjoy this stuff, not just the championships or the biggest games or the things an algorithm tells us we’re supposed to care about, then we’ve done our job well.
And if you only care about one of those things right now, that’s fine, too. Maybe you find this place because you love college football and eventually find yourself watching the Premier League on Saturday mornings. Maybe you’re a lifelong soccer fan who decides to figure out why people in the American South care so deeply about a bunch of 20-year-olds playing football for their state university.
On paper, these sports and the cultures surrounding them look incredibly different. But the reasons people care about them really aren’t.
Joy. Heartbreak. Hope. Community. Memories.
That’s what this is about.
I don’t know what stories the next year is going to give us. That’s kind of the point. Right now, we know about as much of what’s in front of us as a blind man attempting to blaze a trail to Oregon. Which games we’ll still be talking about a decade from now, which teams we’re going to absolutely adore with every fiber of our souls and which players will become heroes — all of that is completely unknown at the moment.
But they’re coming.
And when they do, I want The Football Corner to be a place where we experience them together. Where we talk about them, argue about them, celebrate them and, eventually, make sure we don’t forget them.
Because every football season deserves to be remembered.