In this week's P.O. Box:

My grandpa passed away earlier this week. He was 94 years-old:

He served in the Air Force for four years and then married my grandma, Marilyn, in 1955. He was very involved in the church and served as a missionary in Papua New Guinea with Wycliffe Bible Translators for two years.

They brought me back a kiwi doll from that trip when I was just a few years old. It’s April’s now:

One of my most vivid memories of my grandpa, who everyone in our family called “Deeds,” is him making sandwiches in our kitchen when he’d come to visit. These weren’t normal sandwiches, though. His go-to concoction was peanut butter + baloney. He reveled in watching my squirm in disgust as he took a bite. I still am not 100% sure if he really enjoyed that combo or if it was just a bit, but we somehow always had baloney on hand when he visited.

I’m headed out to Michigan tonight for the funeral and to spend time with family, which means I’ll miss our annual Ship Chasing Round 1 draft stream. You are in good hands with the fellas though—Pat, Davis, Jakob, and Gretch, plus a ton of guests. 8pm ET start.

I’ll be back on Saturday night for a special After Dark with Sackreligious where we will formulate a drafting plan for Best Ball Mania, which launches on Monday. Want access to DFS After Dark shows on Saturday & a private DFS Discord channel? Become a Best Ball Value Hounds member on Youtube.

Last call! Submissions for So You Think You Can Tout lock tonight at midnight. We are up to 108 total applicants as of this moment. Insane, really. If you want to jam an entry at the deadline, here’s the form link again. All I’ll say is make it damn good if you do, this is going to be extremely competitive and you are going to need a differentiator to stand out at this point.

New channel. After talking with Nick Ercolano on After Dark last week, he convinced me I needed a separate channel for the show. I would love if you could take 2 seconds to subscribe to it right now. In fact, I’m begging you. Starting from scratch always sucks, but it’s for the greater good.

An interview with an insider. Alex Piper is the YouTube exec who hired me for the NFL pre-game gig last September. What I didn’t realize until recently is that he previously worked on reality TV shows at Fox, including American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

Essentially, he was the perfect person for me to talk to as I get prepared to sort through all of these submissions. In this new video, I picked his brain for advice and he shared with me what ingredients I need to make a compelling reality show. The gems per minute in this one is absurd. Watch it here.

The rest of this week was devoted to prepping for the NFL Draft. I talked rookies with Dwain McFarland from Fantasy Life on Monday and compared his Super Model to ADP before drafting my final pre-Draft teams.

For Fantasy Life, I tried to stay on top of rumors, preached caution about ten backfields that could get blown up this weekend, and shared my dream wish list for landing spots tonight. I also put together a high level overview on how you should attack the best ball contests that drop right after the draft.

Btw, get 25% off FantasyLife+ right now with code EARLY25. Gets you full access to all of the tools, Utilization Reports, Super Models, and more. Sign-up here.

On OOTC, we did our NFL Draft predictions game during the second-half of the show (and talked World Cup Best Ball at the top).

And on the Swolecast, we did a Round 1 mock draft with guest Connor Allen. Toss your own mock draft in the free 10k Mock Draft Predictor challenge on Splash. $2500 to first. Promo code SWOLIE when you make an account, please.

🕷 Book #3 for April (20%): Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is really fun. As someone who was frustrated by the character chorus in Bardo, I’m thankful that Tchaikovsky uses a single name (like Portia) to describe an entire lineage as opposed to introducing a million different characters. This might be one of the rare instances where I find myself more compelled by the non-human storyline more than the exploits on Gilgamesh. The civilization and society building with the spiders is just super interesting.

💀 Book #2 for February (COMPLETED): Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
🧱 Book #1 for January (COMPLETED): The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami.

Got a question for me? Reply to this e-mail and I’ll get back to you…