Let me explain.
Running this blog is a lot of work, insane degrees of automation notwithstanding. Banging out trivia posts, top 25 musings, a preview of interesting games, and a recap of said games takes a lot of time and effort. It's basically like having an essay due a few times each week; for a pair of computer geeks, that's hardly a fun task. The underlying stats and the times where we either buck or support conventional wisdom because the numbers tell us something interesting? That's where the real fun is.
Eddie and I each work 10-hour days, five days a week, and each have a wife at home who occasionally would like to spend time with us (craziness!). Between family, Eddie's band(s), and work, there's unfortunately not much time left over, and we were really starting to feel the squeeze this year.
So what's next?
We discussed the matter today, and think we've found a middle ground. We're going to be scaling back on the free-form writing part that you could find on any number of sports sites, because honestly that's the part that chews up most of our time and doesn't really add much to the discussion. What's going to stay are the parts we can automate and/or don't chew up much time. So in short:
Stays
- top 25 and full rankings;
- conference projections;
- predictions of each and every game; and
- live in-game odds of each and every game (both here and on our new Twitter feed).
Goes
- Sunday recaps; and (sadly)
- no regular Tuesday trivia.
Changes
- no more "Unstoppable Force/Immovable Object" or "Shootout of the Week" matchups (but the "Game of the Week" and "Coin Toss" stay);
- no more per-team discussions of the undefeated teams (but the numbers stay); and
- one of our three pick'ems goes (sorry, Redditors).
Hopefully this will let us walk the line between delivering informative content and actually staying sane. We'll see how it goes.
