Goodbye, Hustle Belt. Thanks for representing authentic college football blogging and the best of the Midwest.
It’s been a rough 24 hours for college football in the Rust Belt.
Our friends at Hustle Belt
announced yesterday that SBNation will be shuttering their blog after 15 years of writing about MACtion and building a small but mighty community there.
That comes on top of the news, also coming down yesterday, that the 29-year run of bowl games in Detroit has come to an end—the GameAbove Sports Bowl, previously known as the Quick Lane Bowl and replacing the Motor City Bowl-turned-Little Caesars Bowl, will not be continued by Ford Field.
The reasons for Hustle Belt’s demise are pretty simple, per HB’s managing editors in their farewell address:
[T]he market has dictated advertiser-supported free blogs do not pull enough traffic to be supported at a large level. Combined with changes in search engine optimization and a general downturn in the economy of written media, it was ultimately a challenge too tall to overcome.
This sword of Damocles dangles over most of us, including at Off Tackle Empire. We’re grateful to you all for the community you continue to undergird; the problem is just that this is bigger than any one or ten or hundred of us.
I don’t begrudge the Detroit Bowl for shutting down. In the era of bowl game opt-outs, some justified and some Notre Dame temper tantrums, the Little Caesars Motor Lube-and-Tube Bowl just continues to tumble down the ladder, and the final game being a sparsely-attended tilt between Central Michigan and Northwestern says plenty. More lower-tier games for the Cowboys’ practice facility, fewer for the hulking NFL stadiums and far-flung, inaffordable destinations.
We were grateful to collaborate with Hustle Belt over the years: James and the whole team would eagerly respond to our Beyond the Empire series, and MAC previews understandably stretched into the thousands of words as we laid out all the reasons Ball State would, inevitably, beat Purdue or some nonsense, as well as, farther back, Jesse’s great initiatives with HB—the B1G-MAC Fantasy Football Challenge was just a few years ahead of its time, and the B1G-MAC Swap played out our favorite promotion-relegation fantasies.
And, of course, we’ll miss the PJ Fleck Memorial Pizza-and-Pickup Bowl—the Gophers’ triumphant wins over juggernauts like Central Michigan and Bowling Green, Joe Tiller’s final bowl triumph, and the only bowl game wins for Danny Hope and Kyle Flood.
The GameAbove-A-Motor Kitty Bowl was one of those weird, dumb, out-of-the-way bowl games that threw it back to the days of the Mighty MAC, and Hustle Belt tended that flame. Thanks to those terrible teams and great writers who made them happen. May you burn on in some new, more enjoyable formats.
