DTs go up tonight, Friday mid-morning at the latest. In the meantime, here is some B/R goodness:
I break down the 8 best one-on-one matchups of Super Bowl XLVI.
I explain what the experts got wrong about the Giants and Patriots.
The point of the Watchtower posts was to forecast the performance of the Detroit Lions against their weekly opponents. From the start, I’ve used historical performance data of the Lions coordinators against their opposition’s. By controlling for the relative talent of the players, I tried to isolate systemic advantages at the X-and-O level. I then tried to apply those advantages to the teams’ current skill levels, and project a result.
The Watchtower is one of my most popular features; people really dig it. It’s fun to write, especially researching every coordinator’s coaching tree, and picking the picture. However, after three years, I’m no longer satisfied with The Watchtower an alternative “game preview,” or as a predictive tool.
Watchtower Problem #1: heavy reliance on per-game team averages.
When I use average yards per attempt and average yards per carry, it gives a pretty accurate picture of those players’ performance levels. Whether a quarterback has 25 or 50 attempts, or 200 or 400 yards, dividing one by the other tells you at what rate the quarterback is generating offense, every time. But dividing “points scored in a season” by “games in a season” doesn’t work. A “game” is not a fixed unit of measure; there’s a wide variance in the number of possessions and plays in a “game.”
In every pass attempt, there is exactly one pass attempt, one bite at the apple. In every game, there’s a wide variance in possessions, time of possession, and plays. Example: when the Lions hosted the Vikings, they scored 34 points. When they hosted the Chargers, they scored 38. On the face of it (and in terms of the “points per game” numbers I’ve been using), the offense was very effective in both games.
However, in that Minnesota game the offense netted just 280 yards and 20 points from ten possessions. Against San Diego, the offense netted 440 yards and 31 points from eight possessions. This is a massive difference in effectiveness and it’s almost completely uncaptured by the current Watchtower methodology.
Dropping the "per game" team averages would allow me "tell the story" more effectively; I thought there was a very high chance that the first Packers game would be shockingly conservative—and the rematch a track meet. But using season average against season average, there’s no way to project either of those outcomes.
Finally, that "track meet" effect means something: there is a tendency for points to follow points, and that speaks to a very real offense/defense interaction effect that isn’t accounted for, either in traditional analysis or in The Watchtower. When one offense puts the pedal to the metal, the other one follows—and both defenses, apparently, just let it happen. Why? What’s going on here?
Watchtower Problem #2: No real accounting for turnovers or special teams.
This is one that’s bothered several readers from the get-go. The Watchtower is a study of offense-defense interaction: what happens when offensive scheme A meets defensive scheme B. But special teams and turnovers play a huge role in the final score.
In the Thanksgiving Day game, when the Lions and Packers played to a stalemate for most of the first half, a tipped pass fell into enemy hands and the Packers’ offense got to start deep in the heart of Lions territory. That was the game-changing play both teams desperately needed. Despite incredible down-to-down play by the defense, the offense was really the unit that put the Packers in position to score.
On special teams, the Lions’ coverage units struggled mightily throughout the first two thirds of the season, and it regularly hung the defense out to dry. Moreover, the iffy upfield blocking for Stefan Logan (and his own iffy fair catch decisions on kickoffs) failed to make the field shorter for the offense.
Watchtower Problem #3: The Human Element.
I project ranges for points, passing effectiveness, and running effectiveness for each side—then basically use the “Mitigating/Aggravating Factors” and “Conclusions” section to winnow those down to the final score I deem “most likely,” usually via talking-out-loud thought experiment.
There are several layers of my own bias involved here—and even though I work hard to follow where the data leads me, a little bias on top of a little bias on top of a little bias makes a big difference. I can definitely lead the statistical horse to water if I want to—and sometimes I do even when I’m trying not to.
What I’d love to be able to do is project a range of possible outcomes and their probabilities, so when I say “The most likely outcome is . . .” my a hand won’t be moving the data’s mouth.
Thoughts?
Read more...So why haven’t I posted in a couple days? A) I came down with a nasty cold on Monday, and it put me almost completely out of commission Tuesday and Wednesday. 2) My laptop power cord died, and after six hours of uselessly wrestling with it Wednesday night and Thursday morning, I broke down and got a new one.
So. First crucial link: my exclusive interview with Justin Durant, over at Bleacher Report.
Second crucial link: Detroit OnLion’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Black Hole.
Thirdly, I’m going on a lyrical rampage tonight. There should be some legit content here and Bleacher Report tomorrow. Many thanks for your patience.
Read more...Six months after founding this blog—over two years ago—I received an e-mail from a Bleacher Report editor (long since gone). Said editor shared a link to a B/R article about Calvin Johnson, and suggested I write a post highlighting its awesomeness.
It wasn’t awesome.
I asked the editor about its lack of awesomeness, and indeed if he’d edited it. Further, I noted that with a few exceptions (like Greg Eno’s work), very little of the writing on B/R seemed to be awesome. He said the editorial staff was working ‘round the clock to buff out the scratches, and maybe if I was so keen on improving the quality of Lions coverage on B/R I should sign up and start writing—after all, anyone could.
I asked many of my bloggy friends (and bloggy role models) about Bleacher Report. I was vaguely aware that B/R had a less-than-stellar reputation, but didn’t know the particulars. I got an earful of the particulars. I decided not to start writing at Bleacher Report, but created a writer profile there . . . just in case.
Somewhere amidst all the Lions-y areas of the Internet, I befriended (e-friended?) Michael Schottey. Schottey was (and is) a card-carrying member of the PFWA, and as such had real pro writing and radio experience under his belt. He wrote about the Lions at B/R (and elsewhere) with both insight and skill, and pretty much was the antithesis of everything all the sports blog cool kids thought about Bleacher Report.
I found myself playing both sides of the fence: decrying B/R’s oceans of subpar content and lucrative syndication deals, while fiercely defending the quality of the work their best writers were doing. While the battle for blogger street cred raged on comment sections and Twitter accounts everywhere, B/R continually raised the bar for themselves.
Bleacher Report instituted an application process—no longer could anyone sign up for a free email, sign up for a B/R account, and see whatever they wrote syndicated to major websites within hours. As B/R became increasingly selective in adding writers, they also instituted policies against plagiarism, and instituted content and style standards—taking down substandard posts and banning the worst offenders. As the bottom rungs of the quality ladder were eliminated, Bleacher Report hired King Kaufman away from Salon.com to add a bunch of new rungs on top.
More and more excellent writers were coming to do great work on Bleacher Report, and the rest were being aggressively developed with amazing tools and training. Finally, this week kicked off with what newly-minted SI College Football blogger Holly Anderson called “Get That Paper Internet Monday”: Bleacher Report hired four of the very coolest Sports Blog Cool Kids, as well as their own Matt Miller, to be their national Lead Writers.
It’s a Murderer’s Row of OG sports bloggers: Bethlehem Shoals, best known for Free Darko; Josh Zerkle, best known for Kissing Suzy Kolber, Dan Rubenstein, best known for The Solid Verbal, and Dan Levy, best known for On The DL with Dan Levy. The sharper-eyed of you might recall that Dan kindly allowed me to guest-post on his blog, Press Coverage sometimes; I was (and am) a huge fan of his work. Dan’s intro post put it best:
In two months' time I went from feeling like I was doing Bleacher Report a favor by spending 30 minutes on the phone talking about their new program to sitting in their offices wondering how in the world I'm going to keep up my end of the bargain for a company I genuinely believe is going to be the next place everyone in our industry is going to want to work.
The only real problem with the way Bleacher Report has built their brand—something that has always been my point of contention—was that the back-end genius was always leaps and bounds ahead of the front-end product. To become the fourth-largest sports site in the country with no high-profile names writing for you, all while fighting a less-than-favorable (and perhaps a bit unfair) perception from certain media types, is beyond incredible.
The thing is, that back-end genius? It really is genius. And that commitment to improve? They went all-out to hire their harshest, smartest critics. They also promoted their own best and brightest; besides making Matt Miller a Lead Writer, they also bumped Michael Schottey up to NFL Associate Editor. He reached out to me—and in short order, I was trying to remember my old Bleacher Report password.
I shouted it out on Twitter already, but here it is, all dusted-off, updated, and officially official: my Bleacher Report Sportswriter Profile. You can check out my first post, there, too: “Jim Schwartz’s Detroit Lions Look to Stun Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots.”
Now this is the part I'm sure you're wondering about: the impact this will have on The Lions in Winter. I’m glad to say there won’t be one. TLiW was and is my very own; I write it because I need it. I didn’t chop wood and brew cider for three years just to let the little blue flame fade to embers.
B/R serves a different audience differently. It will still be me writing over there; you’ll see similar opinions expressed in both places. Occasionally, you might see differently-edited versions of the same article in both places. But, I’ll be writing about more than the Lions on Bleacher Report; I’ll also be covering the NFL as a whole. There will be lots of pieces there that wouldn’t fit here, and there will be lots of pieces here that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
I've said and thought many critical things about Bleacher Report over the years, but today I sit blown away. These folks’ commitment to quality is remarkable, and the resources they put at writers’ fingertips are just as impressive. They are dead serious about doing what they do as well as they can do it, and I’m proud to do whatever I can to help them get there.
Read more...Blogs with Balls, the premier (and, I think, only) national sports blogging conference, is putting together the first, soon-to-be-annual, sports media awards show. It goes by the delightfully meta name “Untitled Sports Media Awards Project,” or #USMAP for short. Take a few minutes to nominate your favorite sports writers, bloggers, talkers, and Tweeters at the BWB site. If you put in a good word for ol’ Ty, I’d appreciate it.
Read more...Some of you may have noticed a familiar byline on MLive.com yesterday: mine. I’m thrilled to announce that MLive.com has asked me to help contribute to the daily Lions Links posts. Just as with my soccer blog, The Wild Turkeys, and my MSU blog, A Beautiful Day for Football, this won’t take away from my writing here at TLiW. I scour the wild Internet frontier for Lions news as it is; serving up links to them in a digest format is easily done. Moreover, that’s never been TLiW’s mission.
I tried to do a links post for a little while, and you all told me loud and clear that sites like MLive and Roar Report already do that well, so there’s no need to replicate the effort. So, go to MLive.com and get the links, and here (or to Roar Report) for my deep thoughts and analysis, and everything will be cool.
"Now wait," some of you are saying. "He keeps starting all these side projects, and promising they won't slow down his posting rate, but his posting rate has definitely slowed down!" It’s true: the past couple of weeks, my usual 4-to-5 posts a week have dropped to more like 2-to-3. It’s not because of anything writing-related, though—it’s because of Flaming Idiots. It’s a play at Lansing’s Riverwalk Theatre, and I’ve been deep in rehearsal for it. It opened last night, and will run this weekend and next. I’m desperately trying to keep the posts here going at the usual rate, and once it’s over I’ll be buckling down for training camp and the preseason.
So. If you’re in or around Lansing, come see the show—it’s hilarious. If you’re not, and grumpy at my posting/commenting rate, please be patient, TLiW will be stoking the fire at full speed very, very soon.
Read more...While the battle of Courtroom Football rages on, something’s happening: fans are losing interest in the NFL. NFL bloggers are figuring this out by their dwindling traffic, and their quiet commentariats—that includes little ol’ single-team fan blogs like this one, all the way up to the Grandaddy of Us All, Pro Football Talk.
Here's a graphical demonstration:
This is the worldwide Google search interest level for the NFL, from 2004 to today. It’s a nice snapshot of How Interested The Internet Is In Something. I’m sorry I couldn’t make this look any nicer, the Javascript embedding tool didn’t play nicely with Blogger. Anyway, you see an immediate, definite pattern: traffic builds to a peak the first week of the season, dips for a few weeks, then, starts building towards the playoffs. The peak week is always the last week of the regular season, or thereabouts; as most teams’ seasons end then, traffic starts a precipitous decline to a mid-March trough. Then, interest builds back up to a second, lower peak come Draft time, before hitting the long doldrums of summer.
The last cycle on the graph (2010) is remarkable for a number of reasons. The April peak was much, much higher—about twice as high as the usual draft spike. The regular season interest started building earlier, climbed to 20% above usual levels, and stayed there. However, there’s a problem: after the Super Bowl, interest dipped lower than it’s ever been before the draft, and it’s not building back up to a second peak right now.
The four weeks before, and week of, the 2010 draft pulled search interest levels of 17, 18, 19, 23, and 78 last year. This year’s predraft month, it’s been 14, 14, 17, and 24—meaning, unless interest goes from 24 to 100 this week (unlikely), the draft simply isn’t moving the needle like it always does. Coming off of a record-smashing year for interest in the NFL, this looks scary—especially to bloggers like me.
My traffic for April so far has been just a quarter of it was for last April, and comments have all but disappeared. This is partly due to the Lions’ pick being later in the draft (and therefore less sexy). However, even national blogs like Pro Football Talk are feeling the pinch, too:
That said, we think it’s fair and appropriate at this point to disclose our stake in the situation. Because our overall interests are driven by site traffic (Charlie Sheen says, “duh”), we want our traffic to be higher. Right now, our traffic is lower than it would be if a lockout hadn’t happened . . .
. . . Thus, we acknowledge our bias in this regard — we want the lockout to end, quickly. Since we’d feel the same way if we were merely fans and not financially invested in the process, it won’t be affecting our opinions or our coverage in any way.
The day of the schedule release saw a flicker of interest, though, which Florio discussed with Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com. Tellingly, Florio Tweeted out:
Even with no end in sight for the lockout, the release of the schedule has made me very happy, at least for one night.
Throughout this labor negotiation, lockout, and litigation process, I’ve been warning both sides that they’re doing real, permanent damage to the NFL’s fandom. They’ve presumed not only that the NFL will maintain their unheard-of dominance over the American sports landscape, but that their stratospheric growth rate will continue unchecked—accelerate, even. Like King Midas, though, the NFL’s ability to turn everything it touches into gold may be threatening to starve it.
The lockout has taken away everything fun about the offseason, and replaced it with endless legal wrangling and PR spin. So far, most fans have responded by tuning out. Will they tune back in for the second primetime draft? Or, will the NFL not get its groove back until there is a new collective bargaining agreement? Or, will the NFL finally wane, settling back into its position as the nation’s number one sport—instead of the nation’s only sport that matters?
One of the many poorly-fitting hats I wear in my eclectic life is “Musician.” As a teenager, I played bass in a high school rock band that tried to evolve into a college rock band. Ever the information addict, I read books and magazines for pro musicians, talked to local pro musicians, and participated in musician Usenet groups and email listservs [youngsters, I’ll explain later], all with an eye on pocketing beer and ramen money by rocking through college with my closest friends.
Of course, there was no shortage of how-to info available; the record label-FM radio complex had been in place and unchanged for decades. Countless bands had played in bars, recorded demos, tried to get signed, gone on tour, and so on. Countless musicians had been chewed up and spit out by the system, with nothing to show for it but memories. The music business, I learned, was horribly corrupt, unfair, and exploitative. This article, “The Problem With Music” by producer Steve Albini was typed in, linked to, and emailed around countless times by older musicians trying to put The Fear into starry-eyed kids like me.
Yet, there was a sense of resigned understanding about it all. The system is horribly unfair, yes, and many talented acts never see a dime, even if they’re one of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% who cuts a hit record—but it’s unfair in ways everyone understands. If you play a bar gig, and you make people feel like dancing and drinking, you get more if gigs. You don’t, you don’t. Your recordings sell, you get to record more music. They don’t, you don’t. The correlation between what pulls in money and what’s artistically great is shaky at best, but for every dozen Ke$has, there’s a case like The Arcade Fire winning the Grammy for the Record Of The Year.
The upshot is that it’s practically impossible to set yourself up for life as a pop/rock musician. Getting lucky like that is more about being in the right place at the right time, and being what the market’s ready to consume, than it is about artistic or creative merit. In order to be a professional musician, you have to start on the bottom rung, look up the miles-high ladder with your eyes wide open, and choose to step on anyway. TOOL drummer Danny Carey gave the most honest, worthwhile advice about this I’ve ever read:
Q: How did tool get signed? Any ideas? How would you recommend getting signed?
A: If you are playing music to get signed, please do me, yourself, and the whole world a favor and quit right now. The last thing this world needs is more shit to filter through when we are looking for sincerity and inspiration in art forms. If you are playing in a band in your local scene and not developing a following, then you don't have a voice or a message that needs to be heard. That's not to say you should quit. You should just quit trying to please other people and play for yourself. Tool only played 7 gigs before the sharks were circling, looking for fresh meat to rob and exploit. The reason for this was every time we played, our friends went home and told their friends about the next gig, who told their friends about the next gig etc. until by the time we had done 5 shows, the clubs we were playing in were packed. You either have a chemistry that taps into the current or you don't. There is nothing wrong with playing heart felt music that is not trendy or popular but there is nothing worse than someone bastardizing or compromising their art for the sake of popularity and money.
This week, three of the biggest names in the sports blog world are stepping away from their primary projects. Dan Levy’s On the DL Podcast is sunsetting at show #555, Josh Zerkle won’t be running With Leather anymore, and Bethlehem Shoals is not just leaving seminal basketball blog/Socratic sports philosophy collective FreeDarko—he’s shutting the whole thing down. Yesterday’s On the DL Podcast featured both Zerkle and Shoals, and the discussions they have with Levy on the future of the industry is an hour’s worth of must-listen (if you care about that kind of stuff).
The sports blog world is in the midst of a huge transition. Just a few years ago, demand for online sports content was growing like crazy. Readers of the local paper’s sports section were going online, and finding a new world of opinion, analysis, and advanced statistics. Eyeballs swarmed around anything worth reading; the communities of popular blogs and forums served as a powerful social search engine for cool new blogs and forums. The result was something close to a meritocracy; the best writers kept the best blogs, and the best blogs drew the most traffic, and bloggers pretty much got paid by the traffic.
I started this blog right at the end of that happy, fertile period. I’ve written before about the “billionization” of the NFL, well, the millionization of sports blogs started shortly after I did. Blog networks started consolidating from the grass roots up; I joined what is now Big Lead Sports about six months in. Existing media powerhouses started acquiring from the top down. Recently, they started meeting in the middle, as when Fox Sports acquired Yardbarker. It’s no longer “media” and “online media,” it’s all the same thing—and, just as in music, creatives pulling the biggest total audience numbers are the creatives getting paid. As Spencer Hall said in FreeDarko’s goodbye post, “every successful revolution has to make the transition to governance,” and that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Levy and Shoals both cited their need to provide for their families as a primary factor for stepping away. They couldn’t continue to blog full-time unless it was providing a full-time income—and neither was attracting enough raw traffic to make that a reality. Unfortunately, people looking for awesome sports content are the ones who lose, just as music listeners everywhere lose when that cool indie bands’ members turn thirty-two and realize they’d like to have kids and own cars someday.
Even if none of these folks ever write or speak about sports again, there’s no doubt their current body of work will be remembered fondly for a long time, and their influences will continue to show in the way sports is written and talked about online. Having said that, each is already in the process of reinventing themselves, and I’m sure they’ll find a new, more sustainable role—either one that brings home the bacon, or one that can be played in free time and stolen moments.
As for me, don’t worry. This blog began when I already had a day job, a wife, and three kids. I explicitly set out to convert the time I always spent uselessly checking out football stuff on the Internet into creatively and productively checking out football stuff on the Internet. For that reason, I’ll never write as well or as frequently as I (or you) would like, and the site may never pull in big-money numbers. But I’ve been handsomely paid in new friends, great discussions, and incredible opportunities. It’s powerfully rewarding, and I don’t see it ending any time soon.
What happened to the musician thing? Well, our little band played a few open houses and talent shows, but after we moved out of our parents’ houses, we never found a rehearsal space. We’re all still incredibly close friends (the lead singer was even kind enough to marry me), but we stopped playing together . . . for the most part, stopped playing completely.
Then, a few years ago, our church’s praise band had need of a bass player. My old bass was just gathering dust, so why not? One thing led to another, and now I lead that band. Every week I get to play for the friendliest, most supportive audience any musician could ask for—and my kids think I’m the greatest bass player alive. Fame? No. Fortune? Definitely not. But satisfying? Absolutely.
Read more...Offseason is upon us, and I’m working like the dickens on a very big piece of debatable topicality. I was derailed last night by unexpected car trouble, but it should be up late tonight, or early tomorrow.
In Lions news, NFC North blogger Kevin Siefert announced his All-NFCN team, and five Lions made it. Thanks to input from mutual reader/commenter/Twitter follower @JohnWayne506th, Jeff Backus got a well-deserved nod at left tackle.
Also, Pride of Detroit is grading Martin Mayhew’s performance with a poll . . . go give the man top marks.
Read more...Last month, I asked you all to punch a chad for TLiW in the BallHyped.com Blog of the Year award. This blog finished fifth, not too shabby of a showing—many thanks to all who voted. You all have been rewarded for your time by the BallHyped folks; they’re serving up 200+ pages of delicious sports blog content, free for the taking. The BallHyped Best Sports Blogs of 2010 eBook is out, and one of the posts I’m most proud of made the editorial cut. There’s lots more meat on that chicken wing—so if you’re starved for sportswriting, tuck in.
Now, there’s another web awards thing going down: the About.com Reader’s Choice awards. Fellow Big Lead Sports site TheHuddle.com is making a big (deserved) push for the Best Fantasy Football Site category. I’ve been a regular there for something like thirteen years, and the head dude kindly suggested to Huddlers that they throw TLiW on the ballot for Best NFL Team Blog, as well. Since they’re scratching my back, I’ll asking y’all to scratch his.
That link takes you right to the voting form for the Football category of the About.com Reader’s Choice awards. If you don’t mind hooking The Huddle (and TLiW) up, I’d really appreciate it.
Read more...My reaction to the Zack Follett incident is up on Press Coverage; I suggest you go check it out there. Amazingly, the story is still developing, as Killer and Sean reacted to Zack’s reaction to the media reaction on WDFN this afternoon. It’s incredible to see how meta this is getting . . .
Speaking of going meta, I’ll again pray forgiveness for the lack of content yesterday. My “tweaking” of the site has scope-creeped all the way up into a full-on platform change and redesign; what I have in the works ought to knock your socks off (but it’s killing all my writing time)! Tomorrow will feature a nice fat offseason post I hope you’ll all enjoy. In the meantime, check out Press Coverage.
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It kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? The Lions went 1-3 against these two teams—but had one win taken away from them by the referees, and the other two were heartbreaking fourth-quarter losses. Now, we see that they’re two of the NFL’s “Final Four.” It’s hard to put into words just how much better these Lions were this year than last, and than the squad from two years ago. Just imagine if the Lions were as lucky with injuries as the Bears—on whose roster not a single player was listed as hurt . . . maybe the Lions would be playing this week, instead of the Packers or Bears.
. . . on a meta note: we’re rounding the corner into full offseason mode here, which DOESN’T mean less output, but output of a different sort. CBA stuff is going a mile a minute right now; I’m writing as fast as I can stay on top of it. There’ll be an important post later today about what the NFLPA is up to. For year-end stuff, I’m trying to chop up tape for a new, improved, Old Mother Hubbard.
What I’m getting at here is that there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pipe, so stay tuned to this space. Also, stay tuned over at Press Coverage, for non-Lions writing of mine.
A couple quick housekeeping items:
"I want to be involved, period," he said. "Whether that's here or somewhere else, the next few months will decide that."
Back in the preseason, I did a Gameday Preview post with The Steelers N'At, and answered one of their questions like so:
4. Any sleeper players that might be surprises in the game?
Third-year FB Jerome Felton has been a very impressive athlete through his first two years, but is developing into a dangerous two-way threat. Lions fans haven't seen a dynamic, multi-faceted fullback in a long time--but rumor has it Felton's quietly blossoming into the kind of Kleinsassery weapon that Scott Linehan has had so much success with.
Indeed, Felton got two carries and a reception in that game, and if memory serves they were all consecutive. The Lions seemed to have a “Felton drive” in each of the first three preseason games, where they’d just feed him and feed him until he stopped moving the chains. He also got a lot of looks early in the season, but his problems with fumbles made the coaching staff shy to deploy him down the stretch. Further, the effectiveness of the 2-TE set limited the number of snaps that Felton could be out there. Even further, the evolution of Will Heller into an H-back-type-thing made Felton almost completely redundant.
This is exactly the kind of thing you’ll see throughout this offseason: good players, who have contributed to the Lions’ success, who can still contribute elsewhere, getting squeezed out by the better players the Lions are acquiring. Nothing against Jerome Felton, but the Lions’ starting lineup is going to be a tough one to crack in 2011—and if he is looking for 40+ carries a season, he’ll likely have to look elsewhere. He deserves a chance to play somwhere, though; best of luck to him.
The good folks behind BallHyped.com, a new sports-blog promotion community (kind of a sports-specific Digg, Reddit, etc.), put out a call for nominations for the best sports blog of 2010. Amazingly, TLiW was one of the sixty most-nominated sites, and is therefore a finalist for their Blog of the Year award.
This isn’t an unbiased quality-based scientific thing, here—all the nominations came from BallHyped members, and votes may be cast by any Internet user. That having been said, I’m deeply honored that my fellow sports bloggers threw my name in the ring. So if you have a second, and don’t mind doing me a favor, click on the widget above (or in the sidebar), and vote for The Lions in Winter for BallHyped’s 2010 Blog of the Year. If you need to round out your three-blog ballot, but aren’t sure how, I also endorse my friend Zac at SideLion Report, and my ad network’s flagship site, The Big Lead.
Sorry to hijack the blog with a self-serving meta post. SOON: Three Cups Deep!
As we approach the annual Michigan – Michigan State game—with the most at stake since my freshman year at State—I’m finding my thoughts circling back towards MSU football, and words tickling at the tips of my fingers. I have no place to put them, though, and every pro-MSU or anti-U-M statement (here or on Twitter) brings all the Wolverine fans to the yard. Since many Lions fans root either blue or green, I’ve created a new home for all my MSU writing, to keep it separate.
Please, check out my new Michigan State Football blog: “A Beautiful Day For Football”. Jim, a regular reader and commenter here, will be collaborating with me on the project. All the relevant details are in the first post (SPOILER ALERT: I will not be slowing down on TLiW at all). I’ll be keeping people appraised of new posts on my Twitter account, @lionsinwinter—and if' it’s something really cool, I may specifically link it from here. Otherwise, I’ll be keeping the college stuff mostly over there. If you’ve got any feedback, postive, negative, or noncommittal—please leave a comment over there.
Those who have been following me on Twitter, @lionsinwinter, know that I have jury duty this week. Those of you who’ve been reading know that I take justice very seriously. however, those of you who’ve served your civic duty before (I have not) know what I’ve discovered: a lot of jury duty is waiting. So, either I’m going to get no writing done at all, or I might get a lot of writing done. Either way, my update schedule will be affected. I either appreciate your patience, or encourage you to check back often, respectively.
Read more...In case you were wondering what happened to this site, laying fallow and unposted-upon, and you don’t follow @lionsinwinter on Twitter where I spent all day panicking, here is your explanation: Blogger took it upon themselves to go completely offline, work late hours to ensure that it came back up, then catch a nice long victory sleep while posting and commenting was still broken for everyone living in a landlocked state, plus Michigan and Canada (I know Michigan doesn’t touch an ocean, but a landmass with 3,200 miles of beaches can’t possibly be “landlocked”).
Anyway, during this time, I couldn’t post, write drafts, comment, moderate comments, or anything to even explain what was happening. Even now, I have to use the Web editor instead of my weapons of choice, Windows Live Writer and Blogo. If I had enabled email posting pre-glitch, I could have done that, but I hadn’t, so I couldn’t. Again, my apologies. I’ve got lots of stuff planned for this week, so please keep an eye on this space—and keep a couple fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen again!
Nearly Blog of Note I've ever viewed's most recent entry has been a screencap of their browser, viewing blogsofnote.blogspot.com, with some sort of message like,
Whoa! I'm a blog of note!
Well, the time has finally come, and I would be remiss if I didn't do my duty.
WHOA! I’M A BLOG OF NOTE!
Seriously, it's a really cool honor; huge ups to Brett Wiltshire, who hooked me up. More thanks to the whole Blogger team. They were there for me when I had a lot to say, and needed a way to say it. Their free, but excellent, publishing platform has grown right with my blog, enabling me to do everything I’ve envisioned. With the Blogger platform, I’m able to focus on the writing, the art, and the look and feel—without relentlessly slaving over the nitty gritty, or paying through the nose for enterprise-class hosting.
For folks walking in the door, I invite you to check out the “About” page (courtesy of Blogger Pages!), and you’ll know exactly what I’m this blog is all about. For returning visitors, check out Blogs of Note regularly and be amazed at what people are doing out there.
For those checking out the site on Lynx, I've just updated the look and feel of the site. Over the past year or so, I'd been wrestling with the layout. It looked like what I pictured in my head, but did so at the expense of load time, readability, and usability.
The new layout fixes a lot of these issues. It also gives the important part--the text--a lot more elbow room, puts the most useful site tools in more prominent positions, and more organically integrates the ads into the page. Perhaps most importantly, the new layout looks approximately 14.7 quadrillion times better on mobile browsers.
Please note: the new layout isn't done, or perfect. I'm still tweaking some of the color/layout graphic stuff, especially as regards the sidebars and widgets. I've been checking things in Opera, Chrome, Safari, and IE8, on both Windows and Mac where possible. If things are broken for you, please let me know right away via email or Twitter (or, of course, just comment on this post).
In the meantime, I hope the new look makes the site load much more quickly, read much more cleanly, and be a generally more awesome place to hang out and talk Lions football.
EDITED TO ADD: the new template was sourced from Our Blog Templates, and though I've customized it quite a bit, I started with the Simple N’ Sweet template.
Read more...When watching Matthew Stafford's AXE Hair Action Challenge videos, I suspected the existence of an outtake reel—a reel which, if it existed, the world deserved to see. I was glad to discover I my suspicions were well-founded, and the good people at AXE fulfilled their duty to the global populace.
I like blogging the way I blog: solo instead of team, independent instead of part of a network, as a hobby instead of full-time. There’s a purity of purpose, and of content, that I think is rare and special. There is, however, a downside: any time not spent writing is time I'm not writing. Answering email is not writing. Tweeting is not writing. Reading other blogs, and commenting on them, are not writing. Finally, working on my site’s appearance is most definitely not writing.
Most of those things still connect with you all, still involve share my thoughts, and are satisfying to me and to you. However, working on the site itself is isolated, solitary work that bears no fruit until the work is done. Meanwhile, TLIW withers on the vine while everyone patiently waits for me to, you know, write.
So.
The current layout is far from perfect. It roughly matches the vision in my head, but does so at the expense of being excruciatingly slow to load, kind of glitchy, and not particularly professional. According to Google Analytics, an embarrassingly high percentage of people come here, go “BLEH”, and leave without reading or clicking on anything.
I'm trying to find a balance between "clean" and "my vision". Fortunately, my vision is pretty clean, so it's just a matter of execution. I'm trying to maintain the overall impression of the site, but make it much quicker and user-friendly. If you want to track the evolution of the changes, poke your head in at http://tliwindraft.blogspot.com. BE FOREWARNED:
That having been said . . . have at it! Meanwhile, I'm going to be writing.
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