After floundering for the better part of a year, struggling to find the time and motivation to keep our content flowing with any consistency, I was at a crossroads earlier this summer. I didn’t know what was happening with the direction of the site. The original founders of the site (myself (Tony), SYR (Jeremiah), sportsMonkey and Trevor) had more or less run our course. We had added some people in the past (Kade, YNBA and Jason N) but even with this skeleton crew, we struggled to get content out on a consistent basis. I decided to take a hiatus from the site, get my head straight and decide if I wanted to continue on. In all honesty, I was ready to shut things down.

But for a number of reasons, that’s not what happened. I’m too stubborn to stop and too obstinate to let anyone else pilot the ship, so I decided to soldier on. But I knew we’d need help. So we lit the Bat Signal and asked if anyone out there in Buckeye Land was interested in joining us. The response was overwhelming. We had a lot of talented people offer their services. We decided to add some of these great guys to our staff of writers.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce the newest members of the MotSaG writing crew:

Andrew (@bucknut22) – Andrew is a Buckeye fan from NJ. He will be a senior in high school next year. Andrew became a Buckeye fan as a young kid when he started watching their games, ever since he’s been a huge fan. Andrew follows the football and basketball teams. He’s also a former blogger at the now defunct The Silver Bullet (RIP).

Andrew will be covering a little bit of everything for us here.

Garth (@twuckeye) – Now entering a second career, Garth is a graduate of OSU and Harvard Law School. He has authored three books, identified in “America’s Best Lawyers” for over 20 years and taught law at the University of San Diego School of Law. From Westerville he was a Central Ohio wrestling champion and has been a Buckeye football season ticket holder since law school. He has written on sports quite frequently, most recently as a beat reporter covering the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors.

Garth will be contributing a number of topics to the site, and will be providing the first wrestling coverage we’ve ever had hear at MotSaG. Garth will also be contributing editorial content.

Shannon (@smsommers84) – Shannon is a U.S. Navy Veteran (Seabees), has had a love for the Buckeyes since a little lad, tortured by Cleveland Sports and his love for them. Enjoys Tech (mainly Android), enjoys cooking, grilling, and discovering new beers.

Shannon will be primarily acting as our New Editor, along with other content.

James (@UberGoober) – James is from Middletown, Ohio (about 30 minutes from Cincinnati) and have been there all my life. He’s been a fan of OSU football for over twenty years. He’s also tried his best to be a fan of the Bengals, but got tired of being disappointed year after year. He wanted to root for a winning team but there is no way on God’s green earth that he’d root for the Browns or the Steelers (Ravens, too) [Ed: we’ll let that part about the Browns slide].

He never attended OSU but drove through the campus just to say he went there.

James will be helping out with football content.

Josh (@SchottJosh) – Josh is a recent broadcasting graduate of Marietta College. He is always following and watching sports, especially college football. Josh is a loyal fan of the Indians, Cavaliers and of course the Buckeyes. When he’s not following sports he likes to spend time outdoors, play video games and spend time on Twitter and Google+.

Josh will be helping out with our Social Media outreach and will be a member of the writing staff.

Chris W (@CDubisms) – Chris is a Buckeyes fan who currently lives in the middle of the SEC (Huntsville, AL). He loves college football and a wide range of other sports that does not include NASCAR or hockey. He is glad that the BCS era is about end, but remains cautiously optimistic about the playoff system until he learns more about its selection process.

Chris will be joining as a staff writer, bringing content that will also include more of the college football picture at large.

Dylan (@dylanfreeman33) – Dylan is from Grand Ledge, Michigan, currently a sophomore at Michigan State University studying sports journalism. He has always been a die-hard Buckeye fan every since his parent took him to his first game when he was little. There is nothing like the ‘Shoe on a Saturday night. He plays golf and is trying out for the MSU team this year.

Dylan will be helping out with the recruiting side of our coverage.

Aaron (@avrnrgy) – Aaron will be helping out with basketball coverage

Chris K (@KuhnCeejDawg) – Chris K will be helping out with basketball recruiting.

Welcome to the newly redesigned site of the world’s oldest (active) Ohio State Blog in the universe, Men of the Scarlet and Gray, now Version 3.0.

It’s been almost five years since we’ve last refreshed anything cosmetic about the Men of the Scarlet and Gray website. Back when we did, it was because our hand had been forced — our original header image was that of the five Ohio State Heisman Trophy winners. Seeing as how this blog launched back in 2006 and we pretty much cataloged Troy Smith’s Heisman run, we were forced into adapting our iconic header to accomodate the newest member of that elite club. Hence, the new header we launched back in 2007.

Well, times have certainly changed since then. The team (both Ohio State’s and ours) have changed. The way content is consumed on the web has changed. And WordPress (our blogging software) has continued to change and evolve into what you see now. So we’ve updated a lot more than just the look and feel (big thanks to Morgan Paul for letting us use his great vintage shot of the Horseshoe for our site header). But that’s the start.

In addition to the new look, there have been some changes to how you can interact with us and your fellow Buckeye fans. Comments are the most prominent change that comes with our new theme. First and foremost, we have added threaded comments, so you can continue to have a conversation within the comments and have the different threads separated for easier reading. This has been possible to do in WordPress for a while now, but I’ll refer you back to paragraph one about that. You can now also comment with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You’ll have to authorize Facebook or Twitter to interact with WordPress.com but hopefully that isn’t too much of a nuisance. You can still, as always, leave comments with a name and email address.

Again, you’ve been able to do this for awhile now, but we haven’t advertised it too much. If you’d prefer to get our updates delivered hot off the press to your email, you can always subscribe to us by using the widget over to the right.

If something we’ve written strikes your fancy, those buttons at the bottom of every post give you a quick way to share a post with your Facebook Friends, Twitter followers or any of the other popular SocNets.

We have also added two bloggers to the stable, Chris Jason and Matt “Porter” Coffmann. We’ll let them introduce themselves in the very near futures.

Other than that, not much else will change here. Our irregular, irreverent content will continue for the foreseeable future.

(Please note that this is a work in progress. We are not web designers by any stretch of the imagination. Your feedback and criticism, constructive or not, is appreciated)

Update: I didn’t mention this initially, but I need to give the sportsMonkey a HUGE THANKS for the work he did pulling together the images and new logo for the site.