Quick Facts
Biography
Dan Wetzel is an author, screenwriter, sports podcaster, and national columnist for Yahoo Sports and Yahoo.com.
Career
As a sports writer, he has worked as the national columnist for Yahoo Sports and Yahoo.com, covering events around the world, including the NFL, college football, the NBA, NASCAR, MLB, NHL, mixed martial arts, men's and women's World Cups and the Olympics.His columns appear In the sports section ofYahoo.com. He's appeared repeatedly in the Best American Sports Writing and been honored more than a dozen times by the Associated Press Sports Editors.
At Yahoo! Sports he has been part of major investigative stories on pro and college sports, including scandals at Miami, Ohio State, Connecticut, Oregon, USC, various sports agencies and with in the NCAA itself.
As a screenwriter he cowrote the 2014 movie Life of a King, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Dennis Haysbert.
He is an executive producer on the Netflix three part docu-series about the life, crimes and death of former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez. It is in conjunction with Blackfin Entertainment and Momentum Content, both in New York. He also appears in the series.
He cohosts a weekly radio show on Yahoo Sports Radio with Pat Forde. He was a fill-in host on The Sports Inferno in Detroit, Michigan on AM 1270. He anchors the twice-weekly Yahoo Sports College Podcast with Pat Forde and Pete Thamel.
New York Times best-selling author who has written several sports-related books, including the Epic Athletes series of biographies for children.
Wetzel is a native of Norwell, Massachusetts and a 1994 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was editor of the campus newspaper (The Daily Collegian) and majored in political science.
Views
Dan Wetzel is a passionate opponent of the BCS system for determining the NCAA Division I FBS National Football Championship.He regularly writes on the desirability of a playoff to determine the national champion, and has co-authored a book entitled Death to the BCS.
You’re here because you’re like us. You hate the Bowl Championship Series. Despise it. Loathe it. Want it to disappear tomorrow. It is a pox on college football, and you just wish someone would find the vaccine.
— Promotional website for Death to the BCS
On March 18, 2013, Wetzel authored a piece on the Steubenville High School rape verdict that quickly went viral. The article differed starkly in tone from other coverage of the case, eschewing sympathy for the rapists' "ruined lives" and instead emphasizing the pervasive rape culture that permitted the rape to go forward, including the potential culpability of witnesses to the rape.
Criticism
On February 22, 2014 Dan Wetzel posted an article on Yahoo entitled: "Deal with it, South Korea".The article was criticized in South Korea for affirming the result of the ladies' singles figure skating event at the XXII Olympic Winter Games, a result that the South Korean Olympic Committee formally protested.