Who The Hell Do I Think I Am?

This is a little explainer: Who the Hell do I think I am?

I published this when I first joined Bluesky. A lot has happened since then, so I've revised the original as of September 2026.

Me & my wife Sally in Miami for my 50th

Hi, my name is Dan. I write under the pen name Danno E. Cabeza.

If you know me, it's probably as the Editor and Managing Partner of the world's greatest Army Football fansite, AsForFootball.Com. I love college sports, especially Army sports, and most especially my own personal college football team, the Army Black Knights. 

Shocker. I know.

I graduated from West Point in 1995, have been attending games regularly since 2013, and have been an Army Football Season Ticket Holder since 2015. That was the year the Black Knights went 2-10. I realized early in my fandom, however, that I didn't know nearly enough about who was on the team or why things were happening on the field to maximize my experience. So I did what I do and started writing about Army Football right here on this very blog.

My work here picked up a little following via Facebook and from various friends and acquaintances emailing it around until other folks started asking me to come write for them. 

I chose As For Football both because the AFF Crew offered to make me a full partner and because the guys who started the site were a lot better at social media memes than I am. I'm now the Managing Partner of what has become As For Football LLC after a near-total staff turnover, but I like where we are and what we do. We had a breakout year in 2025 and were invited to cover the Army-Navy Game as press from Radio Row. We're set to go back this year, and so far, the site and its readership have both continued growing pretty rapidly. We even have our own staff photographer!

As For Football is about the experience of being an Army Football fan. Our mission is to make YOU a better Army fan. That's going really well.

It's funny, though, because I didn't play football, and I don't think of myself really as any kind of football superfan. I'm more of a generalist writer who happens to be very good at trend analysis. I do a lot of technical analysis in my day job, and I think it's provided an interesting approach to watching sports as a whole. AFF covers Army Football the most because that's what folks mostly want to talk about. However, I also enjoy Army Lacrosse and Army Baseball, and I'll even watch Army Volleyball or Swimming if it's Army-Navy.

I swam all four years at West Point, specializing in the 100 and 200 Butterfly. I did okay. Never lost an individual race to a Navy swimmer, won the Patriot League Championship in the 100 Fly in 1994, and was Co-Champion in the 200 Fly in 1995. I was ranked something like 90th or maybe 95th in my event nationally by the NCAA in 1993-94.

This was before swim meets got shown on ESPN+, but I do have one highlight you can watch:

If you want a comparable, I'll liken my collegiate career to that of former Army Safety Rhyan England ('17). We're about the same size, we were both four-year starters, and if you ever saw either of us do our thing, you'd definitely think, "Holy shit, that guy is really good!" But neither of us was a team captain, nor did either of us possess the sheer physical tools to make it to the next level regardless of overall commitment. Nevertheless, I think each of us can point to some specific competitions and say, "Y'know what? Army won today at least partly because I personally played really well."

Alas, neither of us is ever making it into the Army Sports Hall of Fame.

Visit LinkTree for all my links!

The Academy grades everything on kind of a triune axis -- academics, physical, military -- but I was somehow well into my 30s before I realized that I'm happiest and most fulfilled when I'm leaning heaviest into my athletic side. That's where I'm the best version of myself. This is what keeps me training on a daily basis, and it's part of what keeps me writing about sports, too.

I like physical competition, and I especially like racing sports. That's just part of what makes me, well, me.

With that, my life kind of falls into three seasons: Ski Season, Swim Season, and Football Season. 

Snowboarding at Mt. Snow back in early 2023. We got 13" of fresh powder!

From late August through late March, I train to look good, stay on the slopes, and take the occasional fall. This involves a mix of mid-distancee swimming, weight lifting, and bike commuting. Truth to tell, I enjoy lifting weights more than swimming these days, but it's gotten so hard to come back from layoffs as I get older that I can't ever stop swimming no matter what time of year it is. 

From the start of April through mid-August, I transition to full-on swim training, slowly cutting weights and massively upping my yardage in preparation for the annual Swim Across the Sound. 

The Swim is 15-mile open water swim from Port Jefferson, Long Island, to Bridgeport, Connecticut. It's done as part of a big local charity drive in Connecticut that helps cancer victims hold their lives together in the midst of -- massively expensive and painful! -- cancer treatments. I started doing the Swim back in 2015, and started my own team, Team RBG, in 2018. 

The Swim is important to me. I work hard in the water and at fundraising, and for that, I won the Swim's "Dream of Life" Award in 2023. That's their highest award, basically a lifetime achievement award.

I've now done several radio and/or podcast interviews, talking about my life, AFF, or my various books. The most recent was with a show called Beers With Engineers. That one dropped on September 15, 2026.

Before that, I did the Lima Charlie Show out of Buffalo, NY. That show is about the veteran experience and about transitioning out of the military. They had me on as their featured guest for Veteran's Day, 2024. It's available any number of places. I've dropped it here via Spotify:

I was also on my good friend Rob Robinson's show back in August 2022. That one's called Philosophy From the Front Line, and it's also about being a veteran and transitioning out of the military. 

Beers with Engineers went about an hour. The others were both closer to twenty minutes. Give them a listen if you'd like to hear me tell my story.

If you're looking for more of my work, some maniac put me on MuckRack, an online database of actual journalists, at some point in the last few years. I have no idea why anyone needs a completist's RSS feed of everything I've ever written, but it's out there if you really want it.

* * *

My new book is called The Return of Dr. Necropolis. As of this writing, it's set to come out on December 29, 2026. The book is a sci fi crime-fiction noir set ten years after the government nationalizes all superheroes. That makes it a story about identity, governmental overreach, and reflecting on our mistakes in middle age. 

I'm pretty excited about it.

I also wrote a memoir about my swimming career and about my family a few years ago called "Swim, Bike, Run, Live, Love, Repeat". I've been told that's the most "Karen" title possible, and I've also been told that it's perfect. Opinions vary, I guess. Regardless, folks who've given the book a chance seem mostly to have liked it. As of this writing, it's got 17 reviews on Amazon with 14 write-ups, averaging 4.9 stars.

The book is never gonna be a bestseller, and that's okay. But it's available for the Kindle app, if you're interested.

Thanks for your time with all of this. If you're still curious, here are a few essential posts about me, my life, and my family:

• Memorial Day: Remembering My Father 
• Dixie
• 200 Butterfly at the Army-Navy Swim Meet, 1991
• A Bunch of Old Pictures
• Army Football Preview: What's the "So What?" 
• In Defense of Unrequited Love