Welcome to The Read-Optional

Welcome to The Read-Optional.

Today feels like the first day of a new season. We’ve been working hard these past few months behind closed doors — like our own training camp — to get ready to bring you the best football coverage we possibly can across a variety of platforms.

The goal of our new adventure is simple; give the most in-depth, fresh coverage we can to football fans across the globe.

We want to bring new and unique perspectives to this great game and do away with the constant stream of hyperbole, hot-takes and the culture of #EmbraceDebate that has engulfed the realm of pro football.

I want us to enjoy living in the grey areas. In sports, like life, not everything is black and white.

I don’t know if it has always been this way, but it has certainly accelerated in the past few years.

One week, Aaron Rodgers is the most talented player playing the game; the next week he is a choke artist.

That style of coverage is nauseating to me.

The truth is so often in the grey area in between.

Rodgers is an interesting case study in footballing grey areas. He is probably the most talented quarterback in the league (although Mr. Newton is quickly catching up with him). He makes plays inside and outside the pocket that no one else in the league can make and, quite frankly, no one in my lifetime could have made either. Yet there’s a sense of disappointment around Rodgers this offseason.

For all his talent, all the narrative, all the super-hero like superlatives we laud upon him, he couldn’t overcome the loss of his number one wide receiver, change in play caller, his beat-up offensive line and overweight running back, to drag his team to a championship game or a championship. Indeed, Rodgers compiled the most disappointing statistical season of his incredible career.

In a football ecosystem that so often revolves solely around the quarterback, the most talented one in the league was one week compared to the great Michael Jordan, and the next week considered overrated.

The truth is neither and the truth is we don’t have the answer.

We believe the most important position in sports is the quarterback spot, because it is.

We believe Aaron Rodgers is the most talented quarterback in the league, because he is.

We believe he should be able to overcome all around him, but he cannot.

That’s what interesting to us and that’s where we want to be at The Read-Optional. In amongst the interesting, asking “why?” and trying to find the answers.

We won’t deal with hyperbole, we won’t break news and we won’t chase clicks.

In an era when the likes of Walter Cronkite have been replaced with a push notification, I have never understood the never-ending click chasing or re-printing of news articles across the internet. Never have we had so much access to resources when covering the league, and never has the coverage been so similar.

We will aim to be different.

We will try to enlighten our audience; explain why something happened rather than say what happened.

We will bring in-depth coverage of players, schemes, coaches and the draft, with second level analysis and breakdowns, across a variety of platforms.

We will be bold and try different things.

Above all, I want to foster a community of smart football thinkers; fans, writers, readers, podcasters and listeners. We won’t take our audience for granted. We want your input and feedback via email, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

I hope you will read, listen and enjoy.

I hope that you leave this site each day feeling informed, intrigued or entertained.

And I hope our new adventure achieves our goal of bringing fresh coverage to football fans around the world.

Oliver Connolly, Editor-In-Chief, The Read-Optional