An Ohio State Sports Blog
If your a good little sports blog reader, then you’re already reading Fire Joe Morgan. If not, you should be. Sure, it’s mostly about baseball and making fun of Joe Morgan, but they chastise any journalist who needs chastisement, baseball or not. It’s one of my favorite sports blogs out there. This past week they recently roasted the weird Page 2 piece by Scoop Jackson listing the 25 reasons Tennis is better than College Football.
They dismantled it with élan. You need to read it.
Brian at MGoBlog is to college football blogging as water from a glacier, blessed by an Eskimo medicine man, is to Bobby Boucher.
I meant to link this earlier, but Brain’s Ohio State 2007 Preview is simply top-notch blogging. His whole Big Ten preview has been great but his Ohio State preview shines above the rest. He may rely a little too heavily on recruit rankings for my taste, but it doesn’t detract from the points he makes. Brian is at the top of the analysis game when it comes to college football blogging.
I’m already feeling sorry for him, though, because it is just going to kill him when the Buckeyes ruin Michigan’s season again.
With the season only a few days away (we’ve been counting them down, if you hadn’t noticed) I proposed a few preview-type questions to my fellow MotSaG’ers and over the next few days I’ll be posting their answers. This is just a teaser.
Instead of the traditional preview posts looking at positions and players in-depth, we’re taking a personal approach this year. (Besides, there are already excellent previews that we’ll be linking). We’ll be looking at the “3 Things” we’re looking forward to this season. This season starts again with unanswered questions, and we’re excited about getting some of those answers.
Here’s what we’ve been mulling over — you can start thinking about them as well.
#1 – What 3 Things are you looking forward to this season on Offense?
#2 – What 3 Things are you looking forward to this season on Defense?
#3 – Which 3 OSU games are you looking forward to most this season? Which 3 non-OSU games are you looking forward to his season?
Stay tuned!
We are preparing to roll out a new look for the Men of the Scarlet and Gray website. Since we are WordPress hacks, this is going to be a brute-force, work-in-progress mess. You might have noticed a different look to the site earlier this afternoon as the sportsMonkey and I were tinkering with different WP themes. Now that we’ve settled on one, we’re going to Buck-ize it. Hopefully everything will be running smoothly (and beautifully) soon. I’m also updating a few of the things behind-the-scenes, including how the RSS feed is served. Nothing should change on either end, but just wanted to let you know we’re working to make the MotSaG experience an enjoyable one.
Please let us know what you think, what ways we could improve things, and general praise. Mostly praise, if you don’t mind.
Update (8/16): We’ve just about wrapped up the renovations are the site. We hope you like it. Besides the new look, we’ve added a way to subscribe to comment threads so you can be notified of new comments. We’ve also souped up the RSS feed so we can do fun stuff with that in the future. We’ll probably make a few cosmetic changes to the site here and there, but this is the new, improved look for Men of the Scarlet and Gray.
As you may have noticed, we’ve added the Countdown to Kickoff on the side bar so we can all start counting down the days until that first beautiful day in September when we can bask once again in the glorious light that only college football can provide. The healing can finally begin.
We’re also going to start a little daily post of the countdown. It won’t be as elaborate as the one the guys over a Burnt Orange Nation are doing, but it will be fun nonetheless. That should start up in a day or two.
We also hope to ramp up the content as we begin to look at the 2007 football Buckeyes, similar to what we did last year. New faces and holes to be filled, so we’ll have a lot to talk about.
There’s also that NBA Draft thing going on, so we’ll be following that, wishing well for the former Buckeyes that will be doing their basketball thing at the highest level.
As you’ve probably noticed, things have slowed down here at Men of the Scarlet and Gray. While we’re still posting the occasional item, we really haven’t been blogging much at all. It’s not that there aren’t things going on, we’ve just hit a bit of a lull and lost a little momentum. Things always seem to get in the way.
That being said, we’re more than just Ohio State fans. Speaking for myself, I’m a huge Cleveland fan (which means I hate myself) and I’ve been carefully following the Cavs in the playoffs, the Indians and their current 5-game winning streak and I anxiously await the Browns screwing up yet another draft pick. There’s plenty of sports to blog about, and that’s just speaking for myself. I know the rest of the MotSaG crew are huge sports fans as well, so there’s a hundred different directions we could go with the site. We’re at a bit of a cross-roads.
So that’s where you, the reader, comes in. We here at Men of the Scarlet and Gray need some help. We’ve been discussing the topic of “what now?” for the site. We will be covering some of the NFL draft, but after that, there sure won’t be much to discuss, OSU-wise, for the next few months. So we’d like to know what kind of things you guys like to see. Would you like us to increase the coverage of pro sports in Ohio? What about covering more OSU-related news stories? We pass on a lot of the recruiting and off-the-field happenings because there’s a lot to follow. Would you like to see more open threads? Let us know what you guys would like to see.
We will still endeavor, of course, to bring you original, high-quality, Ohio State content. We’ve built up a loyal readership and we want to make sure you are happy at the same time we increase our readership. We’re all Buckeyes here, so comments, criticism and suggestions are all welcome. You can either leave a comment below or use the Contact form to email us directly.
A big, hearty congratulations to John (aka Buckeye in Texas) whose bracket won the MotSaG first annual Tournament Pick’em Contest.
I’ll have to admit that it’s tough to see a bracket that didn’t even have OSU in the Final Four win it all, but we’re hoping John went with his head and not his heart when he made his picks. John has won a $25 gift certificate to Buckeye Corner’s online store or Amazon.com
(Drop me a note, John, with your choice so I can send your prize along.)
Honorable mention goes to MotSaG’s own sportsMonkey, whose bracket netted him the most correct picks, at 51 out of 63. And as for Mr. Inconsequential, that dubious honor also belongs to fellow MotSaG’er, Sylvester-Yon Rambo, who was almost wrong as often as he was right on his way to the lowest score in the contest.
Thanks to everyone who participated, we hope you had fun. We’re hoping to be able to continue to do stuff like this in the future, so keep an eye out for contests down the road.
The Road to the Final Four has ended with Ohio State clashing with Georgetown, the team that sent the Buckeyes packing in last year’s tournament. While this Georgetown team looks similar to last year’s team, Ohio State definitely does not. There are many intriquing questions to be answered this Saturday in Atlanta:
Who will win the Battle of the Bigs?
Who will step up to be the hero?
Can OSU stop Jeff Green?
Can anyone stop Mike Conley Jr. from getting to the basket?
Consider this your open forum to discuss all things Final Four. We may not have a chance to live blog the actual game, but post your comments before and after the game here!
We’d like to thank RazorGator.com for their sponsoring Men of the Scarlet and Gray. They have provided us with the means to continue to bring you the best Ohio State blogging we can. We hope to continue to have great Ohio State content and we hope that you continue to enjoy our site.
Make sure you check out RazorGator.com for all your ticket needs!
With so much focus on the football Buckeyes year round, it’s weird to have a real contender for a basketball team as well. It makes you wonder if there’s room in Columbus for two elite teams (there is). It also makes you wonder what you’d sacrifice for one program to succeed over another. Here are a couple things I thought would be tough choices to make:
Would you give up Ron Lewis’ 3-pointer over Xavier for a victory over Florida in the BCS Championship Game?
Would you give up a 12-0 season for a Final Four spot?
Would you give up a Michigan victory (football) for a basketball National Championship?
Would you give up a chance at a BCS bowl for Oden and Conley to stick around?
(My answers? No, No, Yes, Abso-fricken-lutely)
