This column isn’t supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. For over a decade, I wrote this column for Deadspin, and I figured it would just always live there. That’s the naïve pact you sometimes make with yourself when you take a full-time job. You take it and you believe that you’ll keep that job—and perhaps get promoted to better and more lucrative iterations of that job within your company—so long as you’re good at what you do. And I’m good at what I do. My immediate bosses at Deadspin had the numbers to prove it.

I told my Deadspin bosses the offer was coming. Upper management made a “token” (their words!) effort to retain me by offering a meager raise that was nowhere close to what SI had offered. As far as I was concerned, I was gone. I had a goodbye post written and ready to fire. All I needed was SI’s formal offer in writing, which I was assured was imminent. Chris Stone, the man who initially offered me the job as then-EIC of SI, told me it was coming. He even whipped out his phone at lunch one time and SHOWED me the offer he was going to send.

As a rule, I believe you shouldn’t quit a job unless you already have another one lined up. Strangely, I did have one lined up back in July, when I was informally offered a job at Sports Illustrated. I was gonna be able to do all my usual Deadspin shit there, uncensored. I was gonna be part of an influx of name brand sportswriters they were gonna bring in, as Yahoo college football writer Pat Forde had been, to show both the world and then-current SI staffers that their new owners were eager to invest in both good people and in good work.

None of that ultimately mattered. Getting older means understanding that your job is not yours to control. Last week I quit Deadspin, along with the rest of my co-workers. This was not planned. We didn’t hatch some zany scheme to all walk out, middle fingers raised, right around Halloween. But my boss and friend Megan Greenwell quit the site this summer, and her temp replacement Barry Petchesky—another boss and friend—was fired last week in a huff by a shitheel CEO who long ago determined that he knew more about how to run a collection of websites than the people who had been running them effectively, despite endless distractions, for years and years. Whatever protections existed between our work and upper management interfering with that work had now been effectively destroyed, for me and for everyone else at the site.

But I did. After Barry was fired, a couple more of my colleagues resigned. Two became eight. Eight became a dozen. A dozen became everyone. None of us wanted to write for whatever that site was going to become, and none of us wanted to do it without each other. That’s how I ended up quitting and losing two jobs in the same number of months, at two places that now serve as prominent harbingers of the Great Media Apocalypse . I wasn’t supposed to be at Deadspin when it burst into flames. But, in an extremely odd way, I’m glad I was. I’m glad I was there to quit with my friends and draw a firm line of demarcation between Deadspin As It Was and New Coke Deadspin.

That’s how I ended up losing a job I never had to begin with. I was something of a phantom layoff. Thank god I still have my Deadspin job, I thought to myself. But then Megan left. The walls were quickly closing in there and, once Barry was given the axe, they finally smashed into one another. I have three kids and am still recovering from a near-death experience caused by a traumatic brain injury. I needed insurance and I needed money and I needed Deadspin as it was. So it wasn’t easy for me to accept the idea of quitting my job on the spot.

Weeks passed. Then months. Eventually I asked Stone if this was all some clumsy prank. The next day, Stone was pushed out. Later that week, nearly half of SI’s staff was cut loose, instantly rendering the brand radioactive and its owners untrustworthy. When I asked the new CEO if SI would still honor my deal (provided I still wanted it), he told me that my situation needed a “pause” and that maybe we could have coffee to discuss it. I was not interested in coffee.

That meant I gleefully accepted multiple gigs at once, and on weekends, and over holidays. I can’t speak for other freelancers out there, but a kind of PTSD sets in if you do this long enough, where you always fear the faucet will be shut off with a cursory email from a temp boss or, worse, no emails of any sort. There’s such a short distance between “I freelance” and “I’m unemployed” that the two statements often feel indistinguishable.

But this is the first time I haven’t had a full-time job in seven years. And believe me, it’s not a comfort to know that. I freelanced in advertising for several years. I freelanced at Deadspin for five years before they took me on full-time. All those freelancer feelings are coming back to me once more, if they ever left at all. When you freelance, you know that every job is temporary. You might get paid well, but you can’t assume that will always be the case. I remember being pathologically incapable of turning down work when I freelanced. Every assignment I didn’t do was money lost. I felt as if I already HAD the money and was giving it away by not doing the work.

It’s all very romantic, but that romance quickly fades away. As I write this, I am unemployed. VICE is paying me for this column but not as a full-time staffer. Like everyone else, I gotta call around and sniff out leads and take freelance gigs here and there and hope that those gigs blossom into a salaried job down the road. Perhaps that happens here. Perhaps elsewhere. I am fortunate in that I already have contract work in place over at GEN magazine to help pay the bills. Plus I have money stashed away, ostensibly to help with the kids’ college, but also in the event of a professional emergency, like this one. I could, at a basic level, afford to quit my job when I did.

But it’s hard to prepare for that when you’re not experiencing it in real time. And I reckon it’s even harder when you’re suffering from catastrophic brain damage from your playing days. I also have brain damage, but I got enough of my noggin still left to remember all of my professional traumas and to fear them recurring. The NFL loves treating its own players as expendable and frankly, the rest of American industry shares that predilection. You are their pieces to move around on the board, and that’s often true no matter what state of employment you happen to be in. That knowledge sticks with you forever, especially when you’re a freelancer, constantly on the hustle. I won’t be naïve about whatever job I get next, if I get one. But really, what difference does it make?

There are NFL games this weekend. Playing in the NFL is a full-time job, and it can be a pretty cushy one if you happen to be Aaron Rodgers or some other superstar. But the median NFL pay is down in the six figures. That’s a lot to you and me, but that money goes fast when you have people to support, taxes to pay, and you’re not gonna make that dough for very long. Playing in the NFL is its own temp gig. The players know their careers will end, and they know they’re going to have to adjust to a much longer and less well-paying professional afterlife. The NFL warns players about this at rookie symposiums. The union does likewise. They want players prepared for life in the normal world.

This is supposed to be a column about the NFL, although I don’t always abide by that self-imposed edict up at the top of it. In fact, the G/O Media folks publicly bitched about the LAST edition of this column not being sportsy enough . Escaping their dreaded clutches has left me with the ironic aftereffect of actually WANTING to talk and write about sports (Deadspin was still primarily a sports blog, because we all LIKED sports), and so I’m gonna link this column up to sports right now for my sake and only my own.

Seahawks at Niners: It’s not as insidious as the old NFL Shop family ad that featured repulsive relationships between Bengals fans and Eagles fans and Bowling Green fans, but I have spent the entirety of this week hearing THE CHAMP IS HERE from the new NFL Shop ads playing on a loop in my fucking head. I own NFL Shop merchandise. I do NOT look like a champ in it, okay? I look like I overpaid for a hoodie that was generously sized to help boost my self-esteem. Everyone in these ads looks like they’re about to dance into a Corona ad. They aren’t real NFL fans. I’ve seen real NFL fans and I’ve seen the real vomit stains they carry on them like a badge of honor. Can’t believe an ad would LIE to me.

Four Throwgasms

Panthers at Packers: Cam Newton is out for the year and Christian McCaffrey is a legitimate MVP contender, so please do stay away from any white Panthers fan in your immediate vicinity. Right now they’re hornier than Jerry Richardson when he interviews a prospective female intern.

Three Throwgasms

Chargers at Raiders: This entire season has been a series of mixed signals from Jon Gruden. The Raiders are much better than they were supposed to be, and Derek Carr has the best passer rating of his career! Right now! That’s a thing that’s actually transpiring! I watched Gruden give his postgame locker room speech after a victory in London and I was ready to run through a fucking herd of bulls for that man. But then I get shit like this…

Turns out Jon Gruden has his heart in the right place, he’s just really stupid sometimes. If only I had had two decades of ample evidence to illustrate this before I went assuming the worst about him.

In other news, the Chargers triumphantly denied reports that they were considering moving to London:

First of all, leave it to the Chargers to tweet out a supportive audience from a movie because they can’t find a real one in Los Angeles. Secondly, they SHOULD move to fucking London. London wants a team and L.A. doesn’t want them. They’re a vagabond franchise that consistently plays its home games in front of hostile fans at a local skate park. Dean Spanos is either operating under the delusion that anyone in California gives a shit about him, or he thinks that playing up his defiance will somehow get London to build Wembley Stadium 2 for him for free. Or both those things. It’s probably both those things.