For the 25th anniversary of the launch of PFT, I wanted to do something for the folks who’ve been around since the beginning. Since there’s no way to limit it to the folks who’ve been around since the beginning, everyone gets it.
If anyone even wants it.
I know, I know. Nobody asked for it. And that’s fine. There’s a story behind the story that I’ll be posting here, one chapter at a time, starting on November 1.
Nobody asked for that, either. But here it is.
In early 1988, when I was a very young and very dumb 22, I was watching the annual Super Bowl highlights marathon on ESPN. I’d always been fascinated by Super Bowl III, and I started thinking while witnessing Joe Namath make good on his guarantee that the players looked sort of small and slow and it would be interesting to see how today’s players would fare against them.
That was the first tiny kernel of the idea that became Quarterback of the Future. I spent some time in the months before starting law school trying to flesh out a story — I still remember that one of the original subplots was going to have the modern-day player who ended up in 1968 becoming a suspect in the kidnapping of himself as a baby — but I quickly realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I accepted that reality and forgot all about it.
Five years later, after I’d finished law school and practiced law long enough to write hundreds if not thousands of pages of memos and briefs, the idea swung back around while I was driving to visit my parents on a weekend in October. The whole story came together in my head in less than two hours. I didn’t need to write it all down; it was tattooed onto my brain.
I got to work on writing it. The problem was that I lacked the ability or the discipline to flip the switch and generate the content on a regular basis. The whole thing became a slog. It took nearly three years to finish the first draft. At that point, I had no idea what to do with it. I forgot all about it again.
Three years later, in 1999, I dusted it off and decided to see if someone would publish it. After somewhere between 50 and 100 rejection letters from agents in New York, I found one. And then she wasn’t able to sell it.
I had a stupid idea (which ended up being not very stupid, for entirely different reasons) that if I was otherwise writing about sports on a semi-regular basis someone would maybe, possibly be interested in my stupid-ass sports/sci-fi novel. So when the now-defunct NFLTalk.com was looking for writers in June 2000, I saw an opening. They hired me, for a job that paid nothing.
Along the way, I decided to self-publish the original version of the book. It debuted in March 2001, in a revenue-sharing deal with the powers-that-were at NFLTalk.com.
Hardly anyone bought it, and for good reason. It sucked.
But I’d stumbled into this business, and things were clicking. I saw potential, even if I had no idea where it would lead. After NFLTalk.com died in April 2001 and I somehow landed with ESPN.com in May 2001 (I still don’t fully understand how that happened), I was far more focused on figuring out how to properly cover the NFL.
When PFT came along in November 2001, the only ad on the site (for months, if not years) was a link to the Amazon page for Quarterback of the Future. It still didn’t sell many copies. At that point, I didn’t care; there was a new horse to ride, and I was trying to get it pointed in the right direction.
As PFT grew and grew (and grew), I forgot about Quarterback of the Future. I had a lingering itch to write more fiction (I wrote a second novel at the time, and I’ve since lost the manuscript), but there was no time to even think about it. I was practicing law by day and working on PFT whenever I could find time for it. One thing led to another and we landed at NBC in 2009 and weeks became months became years.
Enter the pandemic. After the 2020 draft, the non-stop hydrant of NFL news slowed to a sprinkler with a kink in the hose. I got the idea for Father of Mine. I wrote it, finished it, and moved on to the next one. And the next one. And the next one.
I cycled through a few different agents while trying to find someone who shared my vision of what these stories I’ve been writing in my free time could become. I landed with Joe Veltre of Gersh, who immediately started opening doors to a variety of film and TV production companies.
In early 2025, we had what they call a “general meeting” with Skydance. While discussing some of the stuff I’d written since 2020, I mentioned in passing the premise of the long-lost Quarterback of the Future. The producer perked up. One thing led to another, and I adapted the book (which I barely consulted because it really did suck) into a script. (The script continues to linger in that vague multiverse of stuff that may eventually get made, one of these days, if the various planets in several different solar systems all properly align.)
Earlier this year, after I’d finished the first draft of Accessory After the Fact (which Crooked Lane will publish in 2027), I decided on a lark to re-write Quarterback of the Future based on the script, based on the original novel. In five weeks, it was done.
Next question: What the hell do I do with it? With the 25th anniversary of the PFT launch coming, I decided to post it here, one chapter per day. That starts on November 1, the official 25th anniversary of the moment we pressed the button that sent PFT out into the world for the first time.
I don’t know why I’m doing it. (I never really know why I do anything.) I just feel like doing it. If only one person reads all of it and enjoys it, it’ll be worth it.
So, if you’re inclined, check back on Sunday for the first chapter. If you like the first one, come back Monday for the second. And so on. If nothing else, it will join the ocean of blurbs we post every day in this tiny little corner of the internet that somehow has survived for a quarter of a century in the absence of any real plan to make it beyond any given day, especially the very first one.