Welcome to Go Long!

What's up, everyone? It's great to be back. This is my new publication and the mission is simple: Provide premium football journalism worth your time.

Hey, folks.

What in the heck is going on? Thank you so much for stopping by Go Long this fine afternoon.

If we’ve never met before, my name is Tyler Dunne. I’m a 33-year-old sportswriter, who lives here in Western New York with my beautiful wife and daughter and this, right here, is my new publication that I believe you will enjoy greatly.

Go Long is not just home now. This will be home for years to come and, damn, I could not be more psyched. Honestly, it feels like every step along the way has led to this opportunity — from covering the Packers at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to the Bills at the Buffalo News, to the whole NFL as a features writer the last four years at Bleacher Report.

The mission here is pretty simple: To bring you all as close as humanly possible to the NFL. To tell you a story you haven’t read before. To make your valuable time worth it. Go Long will have a vintage feel with longform football stories steeped in reporting that cuts through the minutia filling our timelines daily.

The voices that make this game go will fuel this publication. I am very fortunate to have cultivated many relationships around the league this past decade-plus that, I believe, help me cover the game in a unique way.

You can expect profiles on the human beings beyond the box score, like this on Stedman Bailey’s miracle recovery from getting shot in the head, this on Sammy Watkins surfing through other dimensions, this on what makes Texans star Deshaun Watson one of a kind, the darker days of ex-NFL battering ram Jamal Lewis, what Richard Sherman’s made of and, hey, we’ll kick it with greats like Brett Favre in Mississippi from time to time, too.

Expect Go Long to relentlessly search for the Why? to your burning questions, from what happened in Green Bay to the boom-or-bust pressure in San Francisco to how Mike Tomlin built a team of fighters in Pittsburgh. Expect Go Long to capture the spirit of this sport’s combatants, be it Nickell Robey-Coleman’s plans for Tom Brady the week before the Super Bowl or Josh Norman fighting for the game’s soul.

And, no doubt, expect a sense of community. This has always been the most rewarding aspect of the profession. I still cherish all those hearty Packers debates with new friends met over a Spotted Cow (or four) at Fox Harbor in downtown Green Bay just as I cherish my grandfather asking me back home, “Ty, what are you working on?” There is something special about the relationship between writer and reader.

It should be a real, intimate interaction. Not dictation. Never taken for granted.

And that is what I found so appealing about this format for Go Long.

Substack is committed to helping people take their brains back. Nobody writing here is beholden to advertisers or analytics or feels the need to pander on social media. This platform is fiercely independent which is needed in a democracy — sports included! Please feel free to bookmark and refresh our URL, golongtd.com, but also know that you’ll be getting everything you need right in your email inbox when you sign up.

I cannot wait to hear from you as much as possible via email (golongtd@gmail.com), in the comment section of stories, everywhere.

This job has never felt like a job because of you, the readers, who I’m incredibly grateful for.

Here is the cadence you can expect at Go Long when you subscribe:

Monday: “The Thread” will examine what we all saw on Sunday with fresh reporting, analysis and commentary to set the week off.

Wednesday: We’ll make this day a wild card of sorts. More often than not, you’ll read an exclusive profile and the goal is to always have conversations with players, more than interviews. But also, this day, be on the lookout for columns, news and analysis.

Thursday: The Go Long Q&A will have more of a free-flowing, conversational tone. I’ll chat with players past and present and my hope is for this to feel like you’re sitting at the bar with ‘em all.

Friday: The “Friday Feature” at Go Long will be our signature piece of the week.

In addition to this all, the Go Long Podcast will launch soon with a co-host to be announced at that time. Also, many of our features will include illustrations from the best artist in WNY, Brave Buffalo’s Jon Daly.

Alright, that’ll do for now. This is just the beginning and this is going to be a lot of fun.

I sincerely cannot thank you all enough for coming along for the ride. We will unlock stories here to start for a few weeks to give you a sense of what to expect but feel free to subscribe any time you’d like for $7/month and $70/year.

Thank you so much, all. Let’s do this.

Tyler

(Also, hey, if you’d like, tell your friends!)