GRIDIRON AFICIONADO

Football’s inner sanctum

KEPT

Sunday Letter · 4 October 2026

No. 004 · Vol. I

Four things. No noise.

01 / From the Desk

Tomorrow, we open Gridiron Aficionado subscriptions to the public. This morning, I wanted to open them to you first.

You have been reading Kept while the magazine takes shape. Before we ask a wider audience to join us, you should have the opportunity to claim Issue I. The details are below.

But I do not want to spend your Sunday morning talking only about a subscription. I want to show you why I believe there is a magazine worth making.

In Conversation 001, I sat down with Jason Phillips to get beyond the résumé and into the work. Later in this letter, a photograph of John Jenkins brings back a memory of play drawings going through a paper shredder. Different stories, but both get at something I want this publication to preserve: what football people know that never makes it into the box score.

That is what I want to put between covers. Not everything that happened this week. The things we will still want to read years from now.

For now, settle in. You get the first look.

02 / From The Show

Conversation 001 with Jason Phillips

Before You Can Develop Him

There is a difference between coaching a receiver and developing one. I asked Jason Phillips about that difference in our first Conversation.

His answer began with trust. Before the correction, before the route, before telling a player what he needs to become, find out who he is.

That is what makes his account of coaching Travis Hunter worth hearing. Jason describes a player who wanted the details corrected, who kept asking how he could improve. His first task was not to convince Hunter to care. It was to show him that his coach cared just as much.

The conversation also takes us back to Jason’s own education: learning to see defenses as a quarterback, learning Houston’s run-and-shoot through repetition, and competing against Deion Sanders in practice. The names are familiar. What Jason remembers about the work is the reason to listen.

One detail stays with me. As a child, Jason became ill during a T-ball season. His coach came to his house to visit. Decades later, he still remembers it.

That belongs in a conversation about developing receivers. The relationship is not something you attend to after the football. In Jason’s telling, it is how the teaching gets through.

03 / From the Workbench

Issue I: Your First Opportunity

Tomorrow, Monday, October 5, we open subscriptions to the public. But you are reading Kept, and I wanted you to have the first opportunity.

You can subscribe today.

Here is what I am building. Not a printed version of this email. Not a collection of material made to fill the time between games. A large-format football magazine, perfect-bound on heavyweight paper, made to sit on your shelf and reward another reading.

Publishing American Football Quarterly taught me what it takes to make a football magazine. Looking at Mountain Gazette made me think differently about its physical scale. Gridiron Aficionado is being built with that larger ambition: something you make room for, not something you finish and discard.

Issue I will be limited to 1,000 numbered copies. One printing. No reprint. The first edition is planned for delivery before Super Bowl 2027.

There are two ways to subscribe:

• Annual: $119 per year. Two collector-grade print issues per subscription year, delivered by mail (subscription details).
• Lifetime: $500. One payment for the twice-yearly print magazine for life.

Kept remains the Sunday letter. These subscriptions are for the magazine.

Today, the invitation goes to you. Tomorrow, we open it to everyone.

04 / The Keep

The Paper Shredder

Courtesy of Sports Illustrated

I remember John Jenkins in Sports Illustrated, surrounded by routes. Looking at that photograph now, I think about his paper shredder.

Whenever he finished drawing a play, he would shred the paper. As if the drawing were top secret. Run and Shoot Society only.

There was something wonderful about the seriousness of it. A football play on a sheet of paper, treated as something you did not leave lying around.

In our conversation this week, Jason Phillips remembers learning that offense through repetition: throwing the routes, making the adjustments, watching the cut-ups in Jenkins’s living room. He did not simply receive a diagram. He learned how to play what it meant.

That is the distinction I keep coming back to. A drawing can show you where a route begins. Understanding tells you what to do when the defense changes the picture.

The photograph and the shredder belong together in my memory. One showed the world the routes. The other made a ceremony of keeping them inside.

The paper could disappear. The teaching had to stay.

If this is your first Kept: one letter a week. Four things. No noise.

Thank you for being here at the beginning. I look forward to putting Issue I in your hands.

Manny Matsakis
Founder & Publisher
Gridiron Aficionado

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Kept · Sunday Letter · No. 004

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