When Marc Sessler, Dan Hanzus and I arrived at Wess and Kisha’s house for the 2020 NFL Kickoff game — the first time we were all together since the pandemic and his diagnosis turned life upside down — a transformation had already begun. Wess admitted he was tired, for the most Wess reason possible. He had stayed up deep into the night before, working on his Week 1 QB Index, a tome that took the basic assignment of ranking quarterbacks and wound up connecting the evolution of the position with the league as a whole, with football scripted and improvised, with sports and life as art.
He held on to that passion throughout the season. He insisted on writing QB Index, plugging in his computer to write while hooked up to chemotherapy machines. Tuesday was one of his best days of the week because he left the hospital full of steroids, feeling strong. He eventually gave up watching late night Game Pass in the bathtub because he ruined two iPads this way, a fact we’d laugh about a little too hard on the podcast without telling him what to do. You never told Wess what to do.
He eventually struggled to make deadlines and stopped writing around Thanksgiving. If it appeared like the work was taking too much out of him, I believe it also helped sustain him. It kept a part of life normal when the world around him was anything but.
This reflection is not some posthumous hagiography meant to imply that football will save us, a notion I can hear Wess calling out as phony. These were the facts as he lived them through the natural rhythms of the football calendar, one he lived for 12 straight seasons. It was an escape, another fascinating distraction in an endlessly fascinating world. Which brings us back to Herbert and those car rides.
Wess was convinced Herbert was the truth in the same way he was once convinced about Andrew Luck. I will miss so much about Wess, from eating his barbecue to hearing him argue with his brothers or marvel at his luck in love. But I will also miss the simple joys of hearing his weekly opinions on Herbert’s development, on this rookie QB class, on his beloved Aaron Rodgers‘ Tom Brady-like late-career peak.
This football conversation with Wess started over daylong AOL Instant Messenger threads from our laptops in Tybee Island, Georgia, and New York when we worked at Rotoworld more than a decade ago. It took us across the country to Los Angeles to meet our podcast family Marc and Dan and eventually the woman that made him whole. It will continue here in the column we’ve shared, as I hear Wess’ voice in my head, arguing with the silly rankings below.
