There’s a story my parents like to tell. They were at this dinner party with three or four other couples — must’ve been around 25 years ago. There’s a commotion outside, so everyone runs to the deck to see what’s going on. They see five or six kids, butts planted in the grass, trying their hardest not to make eye contact with me, 6 or 7 years old, flapping my arms around like a panicked flamingo, screaming, “ENCROACHMENT! ENCROACHMENT!” at the tippy-top of my lungs.
“We don’t know what that is,” one of the kids sadly whimpered. But I was undeterred. A first grader had encroached, and I would not allow our very important game of backyard football to resume until that first grader had accepted his requisite punishment.
My truest, most sincere belief in this world is that choices matter. Sports fans aren’t sports fans by accident. Rooting for a team takes effort, patience, resolve, a little bit of delusion. It takes the kind of fortitude no rational person should enjoy enduring. But we do. We endure, and we endure because the journey is the payoff, and the payoff is the journey.
Don’t worry. I’m a little cooler now. Just a little.
My name is Nick Suss, and I’m the Titans beat writer at The Tennessean. I’m heading into my third season on the job after spending the previous nine years covering SEC sports in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s an honor of a lifetime to get to tell stories about this team for this city, whether it’s chasing down scoops on trades and free agent signings, spending months reporting profiles on figures like Will Levis, or falling down rabbit holes like the one I tumbled into last year when I poured days of my life into trying to track down the first person to ever call Derrick Henry “King Henry.”
I see it as my job to be your endurance guidepost. There is, indisputably, too much NFL news. Keeping up with this league is exhausting, and that’s not counting the gut-punching feelings that come from actually watching the games. That’s why I’m here, to help share some news, analysis and perspective about what you’re seeing and get to the bottom of the questions that burrow into your heads during games.
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Watching football is your choice. That’s a really rad choice.
Helping y’all understand it even better is my choice. Please reach out any time you think I can help you be a better, smarter, more level-headed, more engaged Titans fan. I’ll always do my best to make that happen, even if it takes channeling my inner encroachment-screaming passion to get it done.
Let’s enjoy this season, Titans fans.
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Publish date : 2024-09-10 23:00:00
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