Tuesday, June 13, 2006
HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY, SMQ!
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Yes, friends, it seems like only yesterday Sunday Morning Quarterback was making its entry into the blogosphere cold, lonely, ignorant even of the existence of college football finery already on display across the wide virtual swatches of the fruited plain, typing in complete anonymity - in third person, even! - and offering up after some hemming and hawing and place-setting his first legitimate post, a humble call to abolish coaches' votes from official polls, exactly one year ago from today.
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Woooo! SMQ breaks out the virtual bubbly!
Since, the story of SMQ has been one of moderate highs (links! nice comments) and embarassing lows (omnipresent typos and erratic predictions), and above all inconsistency, both self-inflicted and at the heed of the primal violence of the earth itself. Two prolonged absences have been most notable: in late August, Hurricane Katrina completely destroyed so much, the least of which was access to post on this space. Most of that wreckage remains visible, barely cleaned, not even begun to be restored to anything resembling the bustling civilization that it wiped away in a matter of hours, but it was only a few weeks, mid-September, before very fortunate SMQ regained electricity and internet and was posting again. Though his home, and his childhood home two hours away, where he lived in limbo for more than a month afterwards, in the storm zone were mercifully spared serious damage, it would be mid-October before a new job and home a few hours to the north offered the stability to consider Sunday Morning Quarterback a (more or less) daily proposition.
The other hiatus was one of mere ennui on the part of the host. From mid-January, following the Rose Bowl and some formatting problems, through the start of April, the only sign of life was a couple of half-hearted stabs at projecting the success of Eric Crouch in Canadian "football" and of various early draft entrants in the NFL. It wasn't until the introduction of his "Absurdly Premature" preview series and weekly regulation of "The Rap Sheet " that SMQ was able to get back into a regular rhythm amidst the droll offseason comings and goings that are handled with so much enthusiasm and creativity elsewhere.
So: one year! Kind of! If you don't count missing a couple months at a time!
SMQ normally tries to avoid self-referentiality, but it's only appropriate on this occassion to present the following, which represents in his estimation the best of this inaugural annum:
SMQ spent the entire month of July 2005 counting down his preseason top 25, a list that was right about Penn State's resurgence (if not about its virtually unprecedented extent) and virtually nothing else: like everyone, he had Tennessee and Purdue vastly overrated and, unlike everyone else, Texas severely underrated amid his insistence the the 'Horns would lose, again, to Oklahoma. Er, moving on...
In August, SMQ responded to ESPN's Pat Forde by issuing his own list predicting what was hot and what was not for the 2005 season.
Returning from the hurricane-induced leave of absence in September, SMQ took conventional wisdom and, more specifically, Bob Davie to task following LSU's home loss to Tennessee by refuting his pre-game claim that Tiger Stadium was the toughest place to play in the nation, as LSU had only the fifth-best in-conference home record in the SEC over the past five seasons at the time.
In early October, now-unemployed SMQ used his abundance of spare time to produce a "Thursday Morning Quarterback" preview column that shoehorned Wile E. Coyote, a for real physics equation, Ric Flair and the most ill-fated prediction in the name of pride in online prognostication history.
Later in the month, SMQ took on racist imagery at a certain institution in his home state.
Following the lead of SI's John Walters, SMQ defended Fisher DeBerry from the PC police following the coach's unfortunate decision following his team's loss to TCU to state publicly what everyone associated with the sport at all levels has said without hesitation in private for decades.
In December, SMQ broke down Oregon's case for a big money New Year's Day bid, and found the Ducks lacking compared to their competition for the slots.
Later in the month, he crunched the numbers in a three-part series to determine that the best defensive teams, and teams that were better on defense than offense, generally fared slightly better than their more high octane competition in the win column.
This April, SMQ found himself more than a little skeptical about West Virginia's prospects for living up to their Spring hype this fall.
After the Reggie Bush housing mini-scandal broke, SMQ responded to a radio host's question: Why do we care about this?
In May, SMQ went back to the economics well against much better brains than his - the "most interesting mind in America," in fact - to punch holes in the alleged freakiness of the latest "Freakonomic" theory of talent vs. work, and how the combination relates to real-world success.
Most recently, earlier this month, SMQ took a few hits at the CFB blogosphere's favorite virtual punching bag, Heisman Pundit, not for his assertion that the PAC Ten was the king of the conference hill in a season which is months away from beginning, but because of his quack methods for making such a determination.
Thanks for everybody who stopped by, and keep on coming for the next year. SMQ promises he won't go away again! Unless, well, you know...
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Permalink
6:33 AM
Query: what happened to that soccer post this morning? I was halfway through my rebuttal when it disappeared. Perhaps you were rethinking some of the arguments made within? (Perhaps making my rebuttal irrelevant...)
Don't feel bad about the missing months.
I don't remember entire years in the 90's but I still count them in my age.