My best work of 2020

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2020 is coming to a close. You don’t need me to write a short summary explaining what 2020 has been like, you have already read enough of those. Welcome back to “My best work of [Insert Year Here]” an ongoing series in which I compile my favorite work from … most years.

Some years I’m a little more proud of the work I’ve done than others, which is a weird thing to write or say out loud because the hope is that each year is better than the last, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Some years I focus a lot of energy on a small number of things. Other years I’ve looked up in December and realized I had a lot of different types of things I was proud of. This year came with obvious challenges, and many of my original plans were thrown out the window, but it ended up somewhere in the middle.

Here’s some stuff from 2020.

(Also, for those of you who don’t really know what I do for a living, the majority of my time is spent editing and working on other people’s stories. So this list below isn’t, like, literally the only stuff I did all year. There’s a lot more I’m proud of that just doesn’t always come from my brain or have my name attached to it. Don’t read too much negativity into that intro—just surviving 2020 with a good perspective might be my biggest accomplishment of the year, which I hope comes through in the last paragraph of this post.)

I will mostly go in chronological order, except to pull out my favorite story of the year out and put it up top. I wrote an SI ‘Where Are They Now’ story on Rulon Gardner, 20 years after he won his Olympic gold medal. I spent about 10 months on this piece, which included a week with Rulon in Utah in February (shortly before the pandemic changed what I thought the timeline for the story would be). It finally ran in September, right around the anniversary of his match at the 2000 Olympics. Rulon was an awesome subject for a story like this, I’m really glad I got to write it and I’m happy with how it turned out. If you read one story of mine this year, I hope it’s that one.

Now let’s rewind to the beginning of the year.

I went to Houston on January 4 for the Texans-Bills wild-card game and wrote about a moment that felt like the Texans finally getting over the hump. (Welp.) It’s not my favorite thing I wrote in 2020, but it was a wild game that I very much enjoyed. Little did I know I’d only go to three more sporting events the rest of year.

Next up, I went to the Super Bowl. I was asked to write a daily column with notes on some of the things going on in Miami. Some are better than others, but feel free to read them all. Monday (Welcome to Miami), Tuesday (recap of Opening Night), Wednesday (a day on which I actually wrote about how not much was going on), Thursday (I interviewed Dan Meers, in his 30th season wearing the Chiefs’ mascot costume) and Friday (I spoke to Troy Polamalu about the Sonic the Hedgehog movie for some reason).

But my favorite thing I wrote for Super Bowl week was titled: Andy Reid Goes to the Super Bowl With Philadelphia’s Blessing. I spoke to a panel of celebrity Eagles fans about whether or not they were rooting for him and what it was like to see him in the big game. Some were real celebrities (Carli Lloyd, Jeopardy champ Brad Rutter), some just had a few viral moments on Twitter (the guy who ran into the subway pole, the “unlike Agholor” guy). All were fun to talk to.  

Shortly after that, the sports world shut down and nobody seemed to know exactly what to do.

I wrote sort of a column/essay about a pet peeve that popped up, but was really just an excuse to write about the experience of watching reruns of classic sporting events while all the scheduled games were canceled. I also wrote a proposal for how the NFL should build a flexible schedule in case they had to cancel certain weeks or shorten the season. (More on that idea to come.) It was a very weird time of great uncertainty!

In July I wrote about the octopus. It’s a football stat I invented and started tracking in 2019 (when the same player scores a touchdown and the ensuing two-point conversion) that gained some internet notoriety during the 2019 season. I wrote a Year in Review that tracked the growth of my baby (spoiler alert: it became a Super Bowl prop bet with six figures riding on it) and gave awards to my favorite ones. If none of that makes sense to you, I suggest you read it anyway.

Soon after that, baseball came back. It felt very weird, dystopian and a little ethically-compromised to see those first sporting events in empty stadiums, with so much uncertainty about the right thing to do. I went to Philly for the Phillies’ first game of the year and wrote about the experience. It has been normalized now, as I’ve read hundreds of accounts from dozens of writers at a closer-to-normal helping of sporting events this fall. But I’m glad I have this time capsule of what it felt like to see a game in that moment.

Remember in July (two paragraphs ago!) when I wrote a proposal for the NFL schedule? Well in August, when entire MLB teams were having COVID outbreaks and college football was being canceled one team at a time, I wrote up an even more radical plan to overhaul the schedule. I argued that the NFL should consider a dramatic change before they had to, rather than being stuck after it was too late. They did not listen to me, and it has mostly worked out so far. Thankfully I dedicated some space in the column to the fact that I might be wrong, and I’m happy I was. This was also my first SI Daily Cover, a new feature this year where SI leads the home page with one particular story every day and a fancy graphic. (The Rulon Gardner story was my second.)

In September, on the eve of the football season returning, I made some long-term predictions. Who will lead the NFL in nine statistical categories during the entire 2020s decade? And who would I have picked for the 2010s if I was doing this exercise 10 years ago? This was fun to think about, and I will claim it to be a success if one of my nine predictions is right. No pressure, A.J. Brown.

And that’s mostly it. There were some other things I wrote, but this is what stands out and what I think I’ll remember if I ever wander on past this blog post again or think about what 2020 was like for me as a writer.

If you want to see my work more frequently than in just the end-of-year list format, you can bookmark my whole SI archive here. Follow me on Twitter, where I spend most of my time. Like my Facebook page; I know Facebook stinks but I just post links to my stories without all the other nonsense I tweet. Wanna follow me on Instagram? Sure, go ahead.

Lastly, a note on my beloved food podcast, Mitch Eats Food. It still exists, but this, uhhhh, wasn’t exactly a good year for a podcast about traveling around the country eating at restaurants. But subscribe because it will be coming back in 2021 as things get better. I had big plans for 2020 that were mostly scrapped, but I hope to tackle more of those plans in 2021.

Thanks as always to everyone who reads/listens/follows. I always appreciate that people take an interest in my work and help share it around so I can keep doing this. It was a tough year in a lot of ways, but I feel grateful to still have the job that I do, and to have so many people who have supported me along the way.

Here’s to a great 2021.