Reality Catches Up Eventually

Everybody wants to be larger than life. Everybody aspires to be something unreasonably attainable. Everybody has a dream. And everybody can wake up.

Football is special. Not only special to me, but special in its own right. It is a game that teaches discipline; a game rooted in being both smarter and stronger than your opponent. There is not another sport that matches football. For whatever reason, I gravitated to the sport at a young age. I grew up near Tampa Bay, Florida, leaving me to be a lukewarm Buccaneers fan almost by default. In fact, the first football game I can ever recall was the 2003 Super Bowl. I was almost six at the time, and all I can remember are those red Bucs jerseys flying around and the medallion I got commemorating the win. From that point on, football was special to me.

As I grew older, I kept on loving the sport, finding any time and place to play it or talk about it. It was a part of me. I kept up as a casual, yet excited fan for nearly a decade because recreation was all I needed football to be. It just needed to be fun and it was. By the time I was 15, I was struggling finding solace in anything at home and felt myself drifting away. I needed something to keep me motivated. I turned to football.

The NFL Draft had always been a fascinating concept to me, but until I was 15, I didn’t know much about it at all. I knew how it worked, sure, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the players. To fill the void I had and further please my interest in the draft, I tried watching some of the ‘top’ prospects from the 2012 class. All I knew to do was watch highlights, so I did that and kept sloppy notes. It was worthless work, but it got me interested in doing more.

From then on, the NFL Draft became who I was. I wrote about it, I talked about it non-stop, I grinded film or whatever bullshit jargon we use to call ‘watching football’ now. I was the 90% and playing pretend scout was a dream come true to me. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world for a year or two. I really thought being a scout was what I wanted. Soon enough, reality started to set in. Watching players stopped being fun, writing reports on most players felt like a drag and the ‘draft twitter’ community I loved so dearly became cesspool of politicking and self-legitimization. The draft started to be work and it was never supposed to be.

Watching two, three, four hundred players went from being a crowning achievement to being a bullshit way to tell myself I was working hard and kicking ass. I thought grueling over scouting reports and working for a team was going to be so rewarding, but I grew to realize that the hours suck, there is a lot of travel, the pay isn’t good and you don’t get credit for your work. Where the hell is the fun in that? My dream of being a scout turned into a nightmare and I had to wake up.

After seeing that team work was a mess, I thought that the media route might be the way to go. I’d get better pay, the hours would be better and there would be more reward and accountability. It seemed like a wonderful alternative- until it wasn’t. Media work is all about politics. Who do you know, who didn’t you piss off and how many masks can you put on for the right people? That’s media. That isn’t me. I’ve got one mask- a handsome mask, at that- but I have just one. I can’t act like some people’s bullshit isn’t, well, bullshit. I can’t prop up someone’s work just so that I can have them pat my back in return. I can’t act like watching more players makes you better at what you do or a harder worker than the next guy. I can’t politic.

The senseless shoulder bumping, back patting life wasn’t for me. It took the authenticity out of the process, and the fun went with it. The 2015 Draft was the first year I truly felt that this was an issue. It began bearing down on me, pushing further and further away from the process. Now, with the 2016 Draft in its process, I’ve completely come to grips with the fact that I can’t stand being this close to the process. I have zero motivation to watch prospects or write about what they do and don’t do well like I used to. It’s mundane, it’s taxing and it’s just not fun.

Through all this, I have not come to love football any less. Football is as mesmerizing as ever. Though, I have come to realize my dream is not what I thought it was. I had to wake up. There is a lot more to life than pretending I’m an NFL scout because the truth of the matter is that I’m not and I won’t be- and that is the case for most anyone trying to use Twitter as their ticket to the big time. I had to ditch the fallacy that was being an internet scout and look for something more fulfilling. As young as I am, I think I have found that ‘something more fulfilling‘ and I can’t wait to embark on that adventure.

Now, I didn’t write this to say the draft is stupid or you shouldn’t chase your dreams. You should chase your dreams and it takes guts to truly chase them, but it takes just as much power to accept that a dream isn’t all it was supposed to be. Chase your dreams. At the same time, don’t be afraid to step away from that dream and figure out if it is what you really want. For me, the dream I once had turned out to be nothing of what I want now, and I am okay with that. Things change, people change and I sure changed over the years. I have risen from my dream state and accepted reality; a reality where the internet doesn’t matter, the internet won’t get me anywhere and that I can’t be anything but myself. I’ve come to know and love a reality where myself and the people around me are happy, and that is more than enough for me. There is nothing wrong with having a dream, but sometimes we already have all we could ever want when we open our eyes.

Think I fully internalized a lot of things tonight. It’s been a good night

— Derrik Klassen (@QBKlass) January 19, 2016

I would like to thank all of the other founders of Playmaker Mentality, as well as Seth Cox and Jeff Risdon, for helping me completely internalize all of this and be motivated to get this off my chest. Whether or not you all knew you were helping me, you did, and I am greatly appreciative of all of you.