Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer
2009 Glens Falls grad Hans A. Hansen III, who lives now in the Albany area, is a diehard Buffalo Bills fan who went from previewing Bills games on the team’s subreddit to creating content for the Bills’ online Sports Illustrated page. “If I had told 10-year-old me I was writing for Sports Illustrated, I don’t think 10-year-would have believed it,” he said. “I hated writing. English was my least favorite subject in high school. I despised it. Writing essays was the worst.”
But over the years when the Bills “sucked,” Hansen said he developed a sort of coping mechanism, privately previewing games in his head — sometimes writing it down — trying to figure out reasons the Bills would lose “to prepare myself for them inevitably losing.”
“After a while I was like, why don’t I try to actually write these and publish them somewhere,” he said. So in 2019 he started publishing them on the Buffalo Bills subreddit on the popular Reddit app.
“The first one I put up got really good feedback, and somebody said you should do this every week,” said Hansen.
So he did. After a while he got in contact with a site called Buffalo Fanatics, writing for them for about a year.
Then Cover 1, a Bills-centric site focused on “taking the complexities of football and making them more accessible and understandable to fans,” asked him to write and podcast for them.
Hansen still co-hosts a podcast for Cover 1 every Monday at 7 p.m. called the Cover 1 Roundup, where during the season he’ll react to every Bills game.
When the Sports Illustrated opportunity arose, he jumped on it. So far he’s written team previews scouting each squad in the AFC East. He’ll write game previews for all the Bills’ matchups this season.
Hansen’s day job is as a product manager for the beer tech company Brewlogix.
He said he gets paid “a little bit of money” for his sports writing efforts, but that’s not why he does it.
“When I was writing for Reddit, I didn’t make a dime off it, and my thing was I really didn’t care,” he explains. “I just liked doing it. The money was not important to me. Now the little bit of money I do get helps pay for some analytical tools and some different subscriptions that let me dive into some more interesting stuff.”
Hansen has been a Bills fan for as long as he can remember. His first football memory was the Music City Miracle in 1999 when the Bills took a 16-15 lead with 16 seconds left in a playoff game only to lose when the Tennessee Titans scored on a 75-yard run after a cross-field lateral.
Hansen says, “When I was younger, the Bills sucked, there were no Bills fans. Now that I’m older and the Bills are slightly better, there’s Bills fans everywhere.”
This year, Hansen says of the Bills, “It seems like every national media person is saying that they look terrible and they’re not going to be very good, mainly because they moved on from their big-name wide receiver Stefon Diggs,” who was traded to the Houston Texans.
“But honestly, from the local guys who tend to follow this team much more in depth and have a greater understanding of the plans — I don’t think anyone will tell you with a straight face that they expect the Bills to win the Super Bowl — but they can. And the team’s still very, very good and is going to compete for their division, and hopefully if they’re lucky enough maybe a Super Bowl trophy.”
Asked who will win the Super Bowl this year, Hansen responded, “I’m not going to say the Chiefs, because I just can’t accept them winning the Super Bowl.”
So he’s picking the Detroit Lions. “They have a ridiculous run game and strength on their offensive line. And they’re basically good enough everywhere else, with a coach that will do what’s necessary to win games. They can beat the snot out of you, and there’s not really another team like them in the NFL right now.”
On top of all his other assignments, Hansen moderates the Bills subreddit, which has 265,000 members.
“My plan is to just keep writing,” he said. “It’s very time consuming, but it calms me down during the week when I’m just constantly thinking about football.”
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