Blog
Three Thousand
Sometime yesterday, while I was refreshing an injury report for the fourth time, this site quietly rolled past three thousand pageviews. I launched it on August 19th. That is twenty five days. By internet standards this is not a number. Nobody is writing a case study about three thousand of anything. I have been looking at it like a hospital photo.
Let me be honest about what that number is, because I built the analytics myself and I know exactly how the sausage gets made. Three thousand pageviews is not three thousand people. Some of it is Nicole, loyally clicking whatever I ask her to look at. Some of it is my dad, checking whether I fixed the thing he mentioned on the phone. Plenty of it is somebody who landed here once, went huh, and left forever, which is completely fair. But more than seventeen hundred of those came from somebody who had already been here before. That is the number I actually care about. That is not traffic. That is people coming back.
Twenty two countries now. I wrote about this six days ago and it was twenty one then. Somewhere there is a person in Morocco, and a person in Panama, and a person in Taiwan, who has read something I wrote about the Washington Commanders offensive line. I do not know who you are. I do not know how you found this. You are all invited to Thanksgiving.
Here is the stat I am quietly proudest of: four hundred and sixty six outbound clicks. Four hundred and sixty six times, somebody read a headline here and then went and read the real article at Hogs Haven or Riggo's Rag or The Athletic. That is the entire point of this place. I do not host anybody's writing and I do not rewrite anybody's reporting. I put it all on one page so you do not have to open eleven tabs before coffee. Every one of those clicks went to the people who actually did the work.
Thank you to the Warpath guys, who have been reading my nonsense for twenty years and were the first ones here. Thank you to the folks on r/Commanders, who have been unreasonably kind about a website some stranger built. Thank you to everybody who signed up for Hail Mail knowing full well it might just be me yelling. And thank you to my wife, who has watched me disappear into a laptop for a month to build a free website about a football team and has not once suggested I find a different hobby.
So here is the only way I know how to say it properly. These are the languages of the places you have all shown up from. I am guessing at a few of these, because a country is not a language and I know it, so if I got yours wrong, write in and correct me.
- Thank youUnited States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia
- GraciasSpain, Mexico, Panama
- MerciFrance, and the French speakers in Canada, Switzerland and Morocco
- DankeGermany, Switzerland
- GrazieItalian speaking Switzerland
- BedanktThe Netherlands
- Ευχαριστώ (efharistó)Greece
- TakkNorway
- TackSweden
- Спасибо (spasibo)Russia
- 谢谢 (xièxie)China
- 謝謝 (xièxie)Taiwan
- ありがとうございます (arigatō gozaimasu)Japan
- 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida)South Korea
- ขอบคุณครับ (khop khun khrap)Thailand
- شكرًا (shukran)Morocco, United Arab Emirates
And then there is today, which is not a small day. We open at Lincoln Financial Field this afternoon as six point road underdogs, over under 44.5, moneyline sitting at plus two hundred. Laremy Tunsil is on injured reserve with a torn triceps. D.J. Humphries got released four days before kickoff, having been signed specifically to help with that exact problem. Brandon Coleman is the left tackle now, Andrew Wylie is the swing option if that goes sideways, and Julian Good-Jones got elevated off the practice squad so there would be enough bodies to hold a huddle. Vegas has looked at all of that and made its feelings known.
The good news is real, though. Dan Quinn says all fifty three are medically cleared. Odafe Oweh, K'Lavon Chaisson, Daron Payne and Bill Croskey-Merritt were all limited in practice this week and all four are going. Philadelphia will be without Jonathan Greenard. And Tress Way, thirteen years and three Pro Bowls into this, said he is pretty sure this is his last season, which is the kind of quiet thing that turns an ordinary Week 1 road game into one you want to hold onto.
And that NFC Championship game still stings. Not in a dull, historical, well-that-happened way either. It was January 26th, 2025, at Lincoln Financial Field, which is the exact building we walk into this afternoon. Two seasons have come and gone since. They have won this division in both of them. Time was supposed to help with this. Time has done nothing.
So today, for the first and possibly only time on this website, I am suspending the usual manners: fuck the Eagles.
Here is my favorite part of all of it, though. I am watching this one at Högwaller Brewing here in Charlottesville, because it turns out Evan, who owns the place, already reads this site. We ran into each other a few comments deep in a Reddit thread, both of us realizing partway through that we were talking to somebody we sort of already knew. Small world, and getting smaller. He is turning his beer garden into a Commanders bar, projector and all, with a wacky waving inflatable arm tube man named Scary Terry presiding over the whole thing, and today I get to meet him in person for the first time. A website I built in my spare room turned into somewhere to actually go, with actual people. That was never the plan, and it is somehow the best thing that has come out of any of it. First of many, I hope.
Four twenty five, Philadelphia. The number going around this week is that this defense has not pitched a shutout in thirty four years, which would be the longest drought in the league, and I want it on the record that I looked that up voluntarily. Three thousand of you have shown up here. Let's go take something from them.
Hail.