Keep your shoulders low and your expectatons lower.

This is a completely and totally half-assed and lazily written sports blog written and maintained by Chicago-area sports analyst and humorist David West. That's me. I watch sports, I consume media. I use the word humorist. I have things to say about all of these things. I live in Chicago, but I root for a lot of Indiana teams. You'll probably read about all of this, eventually, if you stick around long enough. Much like sports in Indiana, it probably wont be any good, but I promise it'll be interesting. Probably.

Before starting this site I was the audio editor of Hey Chicago: A Cubs Fan Podcast which probably would have turned into something more than an experiment with my friend Zach if it weren't for a global pandemic-and a baseball season that (at first) didn't even make it through spring training. In 2016, Sports Illustrated magazine re-published my opinion article tackling the national conversation on Bomani Jones' shirt in an online-only, but now defunct column known as The Cauldron under a pen name. Funny story about that website, by the way.

Some of my most recent work can be found over at Not a Sports Writer which hasn't been updated since before Andrew Luck retired. I probably wouldn't bother reading it. I wrote a longform piece about the return of the XFL while taking shots of Don Abraham. Four paragraphs in I forgot what point I was trying to make.

So why are you here? I don't know. Maybe if I can keep up some momentum and actually develop this site, we can find an answer together. I don't know a lot of things. I do know this:

I love sports.

Though not as much as I love our collective relationship with sports; when it satisfies our need for escapism from the mundane, or when it exceeds our highest expectations and strongly-held opinions about the limits of physical performance and athletic ability. Even when it disappoints us and fails to live up to the impossible standards that results in the otherwise rational sports fan yelling at his television to 'run the damn ball', or 'throw the damn ball'. I love it even when it compels those sports fans to write a tweet telling a player to 'shut up and dribble the damn ball'. You know the sports fan I'm talking about, you probably have a visual of them in your head reading that sentence. Let me guess: Goatee with fringes of gray, Oakley sunglasses and a hat with either an American flag on it or an American flag with a blue line through it where there's supposed to be a red one.

If that last sentence bothers you, good, it means I have your attention:

You, the fan who like the rest of us, are completely unaware of the overall strategy or underlying tactics, removed from the chaos and moment-to-moment delegation of "next man up" that comes from being on the sidelines or sitting in the dugouts-even you maniacs make it fun. Access to high-definition replays means the burden of hindsight only belongs to the guy who got beat; you would have checked down. You wouldn't have called the screen pass to begin with. And because you have access to all the stats  ever recorded, a spreadsheet formula that models every outcome of every time every coach ever called that exact play, you know the coach should be fired yesterday for not seeing the obvious blitz coming sooner. Even as you're relegated to being nothing more than spectator in the suburbs, a bum in the bleachers or patron at the pub, Dak Prescott is one of your twitter followers so it's "We 'dem Boys!" from now until the second coming.

And you know what? I get it. Mostly. Maybe that's part of why this blog exists.

The modernity of sports engagement means we can now reach out and feel the radioactive heat of the spectacle, press our hand against its exterior and sense what might be a pulse. We can tweet about it. We can tweet at it. It might tweet back. With an alarming speed. The modernity of sports means two amateur podcasters from Chicago can start a Zoom call with retired pitcher Kyle Farnsworth and ask him if he would bean José Altuve after a World Series cheating scandal (he would). It's watching LeBron James screaming "TACO TUESDAY" become an immediate meme

and watching the meme die once the boomers advertisers get their turn.

The modernity of sports means Twitter is the closest a lot of us will come to getting into an actual fist-fight with Aaron Donald or watching Urban Meyer grope someone's aunt.

These aren't things we aspire towards. But this is where we are. These writings are a montage of my useless attempts at making sense of all of this the best way a black kid from Naptown can.

I forgot what I was writing about again.

Welcome to the blog.