Previously: The Story 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008. Podcast 11.0A, Podcast 11.0B, Podcast 11.0C.

Aesop Rock, Zero Dark Thirty

THEY DID NOT KNOW HOW LONG THEY HAD BEEN THERE

By my reckoning, the first college football blog was either Every Day Should Be Saturday or an unnamed pink thing on blogspot that I'm pretty sure was run by a girl in middle school. Her blog was probably the reason that my reaction to The Horror was to make a pink thing on blogspot and populate it with pets. It felt right. I miss her.

Those were the only two things that came up when I googled—or possibly Asked Jeeves for—"college football blog" in 2004. I'd just slipped on my girlfriend's icy driveway, called in sick, and spent the day tweaking a blogspot template for what would become the first incarnation of MGoBlog. Then I went looking for friends. Competitors? No, friends. To this day we are locked in a holy war against the clickbaiters. Friends.

It didn't take long for a legion of folks to join us. This was before social media; there was a brief moment when self-publishing on the internet was both easy and revolutionary. College football blogs run by who-damn-ever sprouted like so many mushrooms. It was incredibly fun!

[After THE JUMP: the dead are named]

T. Kyle King was a Georgia fan who posted on Xanga and called everyone "Senator" or "The Mayor." Ian Cohen was a Virginia fan who invented the College Football Programs As Other Things genre and got linked by College Humor, causing a Palpable Buzz in the zeitgeist. I'm still mad that the world didn't carve out a sinecure for Matt Hinton of Sunday Morning Quarterback. Poor goddamn John Saward ran Ron Bellamy's Underachieving All-Stars, took the brunt of… all that Michigan shit, and sort of died. He writes for VICE and other outlets now. His twitter handle is still @RBUAS. I miss him too.

I miss everyone. Joey Litman, the Wolverine Liberation Army, the Blogpoll people, Adam Jacobi and Patrick Vint at full wax, that one point in time when there was a Michigan State blogger who lasted for more than three months. Bill Simmons made an incredible website exist. It was a magical time.

I still have dozens and dozens of RSS feeds I subscribed to back in the day that I moved over from Google Reader when it died. On occasion I accidentally pop open the full list of hypothetical subscriptions in Feedly. This is always melancholy. So many dead blogs. Once I thought we'd win everything. I thought there'd be an MGoBlog for everything down to approximately Northwestern. Nope. Only a few schools had the combination of sheer numbers and sexy disposable income demographics to sustain independent blogs, and those that did all saw their candidates sucked up by networks or degenerate into the clickbait they once swore to never become.

DOWN FROM A HUNTABLE SURPLUS TO ONE

Orson—they call him Spencer now but in my mind he is Orson Swindle—was an obvious choice for SB Nation when they expanded into college football. They wanted to be exuberant sports enthusiasts. But Orson got dragged ever higher in the organization and his output faded, as it always does with blogs, and now Every Day Should Be Saturday is part of the past. It went out with a post titled FREE BIRD.

I didn’t know what I was doing here. I still don’t, really. There was a spot on the screen. Type words into it and they appeared on the internet. It just kept going. No one had to use their real names, even. That worked for me just fine. I didn’t want to be me anyway.

Being someone else and talking about this sport all day, put me somewhat at home and closer to all these things: to writing, to a sport I never played, to places that meant everything to me that would never reciprocate the same feeling. I could laugh about it and nothing hurt, because it wasn’t me sending or receiving.

It became a hobby, then an obsession, and then a job. Sometimes it could be all three at once. On the worst days, there was a freedom in that, too. It could be pure distraction: A game played in the weird in-between parts of the country, sincere and crooked and sincerely crooked, an earnest scam bought into and perpetuated by the need to keep some piece of home, youth, family, or a friend alive, or to simply belong. To see something loud and spectacular and fleeting that went on too long, and that never really ended, just fading out into a pause until the season returned.

For the longest time, it was the best way to be free I knew.

It's hard to remember now that Twitter and a bunch of shit I'm too old to bother with exist, but the experience of finding out there were legions of other people who could talk endlessly about college football was revelatory. There was a day in the college football blogosphere when we all simultaneously discovered Youtube. It had the Charles Woodson punt return. This is a thing that happened not only in my lifetime but my life post-college: before, you could only tell people lies about the things you thought happened. After, it was there. Always.

We didn't know it then but that was kind of the end. A gentle mass extinction followed, no meteor, just, like, lots of lava and bad gas for a zillion years. Twitter popped up, etc. This isn't a complaint. Everyone hates Twitter but it's a joy on college football Saturday. But once it was a joy, a lot of the vitality of the blogosphere was sapped.

To me and not many others this is a tragedy. There is only one genuine aughts football blog left now. It is Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat. It is a Northwestern football blog run by an anonymous genius who I am furious at all of you for not making famous. Its name is perfect; its name comes from an early Northwestern fight song that was also perfect. Like many things about college football, it was perfect and is now discarded.

Usually about half of what it writes is about the cruel and unusual history of the Tour De France or a comprehensive survey of European defenestrations in the 19th century. BYCTOM, as it is known to its aging cadre of football-blog-having enthusiasts, gives zero fucks about SEO, popularity, comprehensibility, clicks, baits, or anything else other than its author's strange compulsion to put words on the internet for the entertainment of a few dozen strangers. That was me, and it was pure.

Some day I will realize that it has been a year since a BYCTOM post, and I will cry.

ANYTHING LESS WOULD BE RE-GODDAMN-DICULOUS

The churn is part of the charm of college football. Possibly most of it. Last year a 5'9" wide receiver from Louisville who was a pretty decent recruit but nothing world-shaking decided to go to Purdue because Jeff Brohm seemed cool. 114 receptions later Rondale Moore was the best receiver in college football and the primary architect of a 49-20 hamblasting of Ohio State witnessed by a terminally ill Tyler Trent.

College football is finding out about Rondale Moore. College football is nothing if not an endless opportunity to say "who the hell is that guy?"

And as soon as you know who that guy is, well, he's gone. Barry Sanders is spat into the NFL. Someone else must step into the void. And there's always another.

Tyler Trent is dead and Denard isn't allowed to play college football any more, so who am I to complain? Yeah, I thought we might beat Ohio State ever outside of the Fickell year. This was not correct.

But here are things that are going to happen this year: unsigned hype is going to assassinate a power. Pitt is going to ruin someone. A 5'9" kid from nowhere is going to dodge 60 guys. Someone's going to commit 20 penalties and win. Someone's going to get hurt, real bad. This isn't free, for anyone. It's less free than anything for the actual players. A streamer's shoes will make national news. Goliath will implode.

I'll get over it. I don't think it's been any easier for people who don't write on the internet but also care in a deep, unfixable way. It's been brutal. But fuck it, right? Great Satan's culture finally caught up with them, again, and this time they hired nobody. Let's go.

Here I am; here I remain. Let's play some fucking football.