Content Nausea No. 39: The More It Works
Say something without the words that they fed you / Find something they didn't tell you to hunt for
Welcome to the 39th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 38 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog. This is a dispatch from the work world. I tried to write this as a post last week, but I could not thread the needle between work voice, blog voice, Twitter voice and newsletter voice, so here we are.
PHILADELPHIA — The parking lots outside of the Wells Fargo Center are typically a sea of tailgaters on fall Sunday mornings. Flags rise above the vast expanse of asphalt packed with RVs, campers, buses and other vehicles. SEPTA’s Broad Street Line unloads car after car of fans in midnight green who flock to South Philly even if they won’t walk through the gates of Lincoln Financial Field to watch the Eagles.
It’s debaucherous, delightful and occasionally disgusting.
For the past two Sundays, it’s been dinosaurs.
Tailgating is part of the ritual of football season. And much like most other facets of American life in 2020, it has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic.
As part of the city’s moratorium on events larger than 50 people through February 2021, tailgating at the sports complex in South Philadelphia was prohibited, and the city closed various streets around Lincoln Financial Field.
And even if enterprising Eagles fans made their way to the parking lots, there wouldn’t have been much place to set up: The Jurassic Quest Drive-Thru, which is “the largest exhibition of lifesize, moving, museum-quality dinosaurs in North America.”
Lincoln Financial Field is regarded as one of the most raucous environments in the NFL, and entering Sunday, the Eagles held the fifth-best winning percentage in home games since the start of the 2016 season. During the 2017 season, the Eagles won seven of their eight home games during the regular season and then two more during the playoffs on their way to Super Bowl LII.
It’s made for rather surreal scenes in South Philly for the past two Sunday afternoons. There was no pounding bass emanating from car speakers in the parking lots, no “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants, no buzz of anticipation for the afternoon. There wasn’t even the drone of small airplanes pulling banners over the stadium, though that didn’t stop one group of fans from showing support via aircraft before the 37-19 loss to the Rams on Sept. 20.
In August, the Eagles announced there would be no fans at Lincoln Financial Field “until further notice” after discussing plans with the city to potentially allow fans at games. Owner Jeffrey Lurie expressed the hope that there would be fans in the stands sooner rather than later, but that might depend on a significant advance in testing capabilities.
So instead of 69,696 lubed-up fans filing into the stadium after a couple hours of tailgating in the parking lots, the Linc was empty. The seats closest to the stadium were tarped off with ads for team sponsors, including NovaCare, Lincoln Financial, Verizon and Pepsi.
The end zone sections, plus one other section at the 50-yard line, featured cutouts of fans that were available for purchase. In the suites behind the north end zone, the Eagles set up a “VIP section” of sorts, with a group of cutouts featuring Mike Trout, Jay Wright, the Phillie Phanatic, Carli Lloyd, Kevin Hart and Gritty, among other notable Eagles fans or Philadelphia personalities.
The overall game day and game play experience in the stadium did not change much. The team still played a pregame hype video on the Linc’s large video boards. The Eagles ran out together as a team with pomp and circumstance and a smoke machine. Then, the game happened.
The differences from the vantage point of a socially distanced press box were subtle. Even though the press box is mostly sound-proof, the crowd still provides the cues. During the season opener at the Washington Football Team, I was hunched over my laptop in the FedEx Field press box, which provides one of the most vantage points in the NFL. The Eagles were at the far end. I couldn’t really see, so I was watching out of the corner of my eye as Carson Wentz hit Zach Ertz over the middle for the first touchdown of the season.
But I wasn’t sure right away. Normally, the crowd would provide me with the answer of whether Ertz snagged Wentz’s pass. The roar of the crowd is a useful tool, too, to help prevent me from getting too wrapped into what’s happening on my computer screen or in my head. It pulls you back in.
The most jarring difference the press box — besides the absence of self-serve coffee — is the absence of scale. It’s easy to forget how large NFL stadiums are. When you’re sitting in the press box, the green seats all run together, and there’s no reference point. The Linc holds nearly 70,000 people. That’s a lot of people.
When it’s full, the people who are sitting up in the far reaches of the upper deck are so small. I’ve attempted to pick out friends who are sitting on the opposite side of the field from the press box with binoculars. The task is difficult. We typically see these stadiums from the highway or the air or television broadcasts. It can be difficult to comprehend how big they are.
So I no longer feel as small as I usually do from the press box. The players talk about needing to feed off the energy from the crowd in order to perform. There’s something similar for me in the press box, albeit not as drastic (or important). After the national anthem and before kickoff, the buzz in the stadium is too real, and I feel a part of it. I feel small. The stadium feels like it’s own contained universe where nothing is happening outside of it.
The feeling is still there during the pandemic. There’s still football happening. There are still 100 or so men on the field below who are capable of doing incomprehensible physical acts, and my job is to watch them and chronicle what is happening. That is not different.
But I’m wearing a mask. There are only three people sitting in a row that might normally have nine or even 12 people crammed in, depending on the game. In a double-whammy of security theater, my temperature was scanned before I put my backpack through an x-ray machine.
And there are dinosaurs in the parking lot. I left Lincoln Financial Field around 7:30 last Sunday. The Eagles tied the Bengals, 23-23, in one of the uglier games I’ve watched in my three years on the beat. As another colleague and I walked to the parking lot — we made sure to stand 6 feet apart in the elevator on the way down — the cars were still winding through the Wells Fargo Center parking lot. Jurassic Quest was on its final days in South Philly, with families checking out the velociraptor, the T-rex and other dinos I am unable to identify.
Later in the week, when I drove back down to the Eagles facility on the other side of Broad Street, Jurassic Quest had picked up left. The parking lots were once again empty.
Some content I wrote this week
Marie Kondo’ing Carson Wentz’s mind.
Some content I listened to this week
The 092k20 playlist is here:
“Wander” by Kevin Morby has That Energy:
The Night Shop is hitting different:
I think next week I’ll have some 2k20.75 music takes.
Some content I read this week
David Roth on The News Of The Day, which I found about when I woke up yesterday morning and saw a push alert from a prominent NFL insider. Kind of an anti-climactic way to learn about it, tbh.
9/11 was almost a month ago, but Howard Bryant wrote about how it changed things, and how that its into where we are now with the police and the pandemic.
Trevor Lawrence’s summer of discovery:
Star athletes -- star quarterbacks especially, and charismatic star quarterbacks most of all -- dazzle us. Baker Mayfield planted a flag and we loved to hate him. Johnny Manziel barnstormed Tuscaloosa and we hated to love him. Deshaun Watson vanquished the evil empire with a smile on his face and we couldn't help but smile too.
But Lawrence has captured us in a way that feels new and a little radical and more than a little paradigm-changing. He is the face of college football in this turbulent 2020 season; he is the face of all that is tectonically shifting in the sport this fall.
I have read Part 1 and Part 2 of Larry Fitzmaurice’s 2013: The Year That Everything Changed series, and I am curious to see where it goes. That year always felt like a shift to me, but I viewed it more on a personal level. In 2011 and 2012, I was visiting New York every other week in the summer and going to every show I could. That changed in 2013, but it was more on a personal level. I had more responsibilities. My professional focus changed. I wasn’t 18 or 19 or 20 anymore. (I was still just 21, but whatever). So I’m interested in following it. (Related: If anyone wants to go halvsies on a subscriptions, let me know beecause the series goes behind the paywall lol).
A D.C. prep school hoops star goes west.
The New York Times on the death of a college football player in Western Pa.
Letter writing during the pandemic. I told myself I was going to write more letters over the past few months, but I have not.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
Me and Emily literally drove through green aisles in New Jersey last weekend. Autumn is real, and it feels great.
Here’s another video from that Real Estate session because I rediscovered it when I was searching for “Green Aisles” on YouTube:
“Municipality” is really underrated, imo. 2011 was cool. Guess I need to spend some time driving around while listening to The Main Thing this fall.
Dinger, bat flip, go Padres:
I was devastated to learn that my pen of choice, the Mitsubishi No. 460 ballpoint pen, has been discontinued. I started using them in 2014 because one of the Pelly twins tweeted about it and I was in the market for a new pen, so I figured why not. I ordered some refills that are supposedly compatible with the pen, and I am going to take stock of how man I have left and what not. But I am still sad about it. Got another shipment of Field Notes earlier this week, though, and that made me feel a little better.
Thank you for reading the 39th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Be yourself and not the figure they mold
Look for something they've been trying to hide
Do something you were never told to
Don't keep it to yourself, don't keep it inside
—D.G.