In 1797, a Philadelphia socialite asked Benjamin Franklin, of the new American nation, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Reader, Off Tackle Empire makes no claim to be important; rather, it is a silly place on the internet. But I hope you’ll indulge me at least that introduction in the hopes of a payoff somehow, some way, down the line.
When this site began eighteen years ago, I was still in high school and had no idea it existed. The Big Ten had a logical eleven teams and a kick-ass logo.
When I began writing for this site, I was dating the woman I now call my wife. The Big Ten had twelve teams and had become the Bee One Gee that we have learned to love.
When I took over as manager, I was a simple grad student. The Big Ten still had just—just—fourteen teams. Our founder was still a Michigan fan.
Things change, is my point. And now it’s time to assess: what is this website?
Wily reader that you are, you’ve correctly deduced that this is my—if I may be so arrogant, our—farewell at Off Tackle Empire.
Management has informed us, as of August 4, that I will be let go as the site manager and they will reassess the Off Tackle Empre brand. “This is,” they told me, “just a strategic decision due to audience numbers and potential growth opportunities. I appreciate all your hard work and time with SB Nation.” They have informed me that both current staffers on payroll will be terminated as of August 31. The only surprise there was that beezer07—who, I say with all the love in my heart, has not written here in something like two and a half years and who I had told SBNation could be taken off payroll about six months ago—was still being paid.
That is…indicative…of something. What that is indicative of, I leave to you, dear reader.
Off Tackle Empire may continue on; that’s not for me to decide and, frankly, I have no interest in deciding it. SBNation is being spun off and sold to someone; I can’t say I care or remember who, and it doesn’t really matter.
As of this post, Off Tackle Empire has published 10,685 articles. I have published or been credited with 2,174 of those. This marks our and my 10,686th and 2,175th article, respectively, and my now final post, at least in the lineage of managers tapped from within our site.
There’s where I will begin my thanks, however brief they might be: to Graham Filler and Jonathan Franz, who started this blog as The Rivalry, Esq., on Blogspot some eighteen years ago, in April 2008. The budding Sports Blog Nation, its never-wavering eye for talent, snapped them up that August, inaugurated by Franz’s brief “Welcome to The Rivalry”. Within a week they had launched the Obligatory Predictions Competition and interviewed Brad Banks, that October they added BamaHawkeye to the roster, and the site grew from there: pissing matches over the Penn State abuse scandal, the Ohio State tattoo “scandal”, and everything else under the sun evolved from there.
I’ll pause here to note that isn’t a history article, though as an actual, card-carrying, professionally-compensated historian I feel it should probably be my obligation to trace some of the site’s history. Plus, who knows how much longer any of these articles will actually exist—goodness knows my older Don’t Watch This; Watch That articles have been rendered virtually unreadable thanks to SBNation’s switch to a WordPress publishing platform about a year ago. One of those pissing matches, begun by a joke post about Rutgers not actually inventing football, is lost to the ages, thanks to SBN’s deletion of the FanPosts feature.
Another note, just in the interest of clarity: I rewrote that last paragraph about five times. Not only is that perhaps the most editing I’ve ever put into this site, it’s also me attempting to be as diplomatic and grateful as I can on the way out the door.
Having mentioned both Graham and the FanPosts, I’ll pivot back there.
What made OTE a site that I was proud to manage was its emphasis on relationships—however flawed those relationships were. The FanPosts were actually my conduit to writing for OTE: as a new college graduate trying to stay sane as I applied for grad school and worked at a rural bank to make ends meet, I occupied some of my time by writing FanPosts called the Worst Big Ten Team of All Time (Since 1995), using What-If Sports to simulate the worst of the worst—the first years of Kirk Ferentz and Ron Turner, ultimately trumped by the absolute ineptitude of Tim Brewster’s 1-11 campaign in 2008.
After that, Graham messaged me, asking if I’d like to be a writer. I said yes.
My first official article, “Grading the B1G in the Non-Conference,” went live September 25, 2012.
Fourteen years later, here I am—alone at the bar. And, finally, I’ve been ordered to settle up.
The biggest thank-yous. First, Jesse Collins. As Graham moved on to bigger things and higher ambitions, Jesse took over as manager. Jesse answered my dumbest calls, gave me the freedom to write and explore whatever I wanted, and shared in more than a few complain sessions about life, this blog, SBNation, and everything else. Thank you, Jesse, for your then and continued friendship.
Thank you to all the bloggers and staffers—some of them, like me, even thrown a pittance by SBNation. In no particular order, thank-you to BigRedTwice, AlmaOtter, WhiteSpeedReceiver, Thumpasaurus, Green Akers, Brian Gillis, GoForThree, misdreavus79, Kind of…, every single BoilerBot I’ve ever worked with, LincolnParkWildcat, beezer, MC ClapYoHandz, DJ Carver, ZuzuRU, Coray Seifert, RockyMtnBlue, BuffKomodo, Candystripes, Stew, InsertName, ChadNUDJ, MaxSam, RU in VA, 87townie, and every other writer who’s tolerated my badgering—fuck wisconsin—them all these years. Forgive me for not listing you all, but I’m old and not getting compensated for this anymore, so what do I care?
Back to the FanPosts for my final thank-you: regardless of every pivot to video, podcast directive, YouTube tutorial, or any other directive from Corporate we received, what made Off Tackle Empire special was the community of commenters who “read” the “articles”.
Y’know what?
Thank-you to the community of commenters—you—who read the articles.
I don’t feel a need to put those in quotes: I have the evidence of fourteen years of you all engaging with our arguments, thoughtful and thoughtless, in those endless pissing matches. Reminding us of our terrible takes. Bringing us back down to earth. Lifting us up on those rare occasions we had good ideas.
We—and I’ll speak for Graham, Jonathan, and Jesse, since they’re not here to correct me—always envisioned OTE as a sports bar where you could sit with fans from every other Big Ten team, fractiously but non-violently coexisting around a shared love of Big Ten and college athletics. I loved the comment section, I hated the comment section, I hated how much I loved the comment section, and I loved how much I hated the comment section.
That, to me, is Big Ten football.
I have never been here to cheer for your team—I am in it for Northwestern, the school I attended. [Obligatory mention: check.] But I have always appreciated, even if through gritted teeth, the ways in which so many commenters here engaged in earnest, good- and bad-natured, and ultimately stimulating conversation. It worked, even though it shouldn’t have. It never felt, at least to me, that we were at the cool kids’ table of SBN blogs; perhaps I misread that, and perhaps I didn’t.
Either way, it was fine. We had our dumb, flawed, annoying, wonderful space.
That all started to change in the last couple years. Whether it was my heavy-handed moderation (nah) or the various pivots to formats that didn’t jive with a comment-based blog—a hyperfixation on SEO above all else, an insistence that we comport ourselves like actual journalists, the shift to Coral commenting and external moderation, the transition to WordPress, the death of the FanPosts and FanShots—the secret sauce that gave Off Tackle Empire a little too much spice for a Midwestern blog had begun to lose its flavor.
It felt all the more galling this year when SBNation informed us, this February, that “we’re going to kick off a new focus on conversation. Comments, community, recs, replies … conversation.”
At the risk of sounding arrogant, we’d done conversation—really goddamn well—for eighteen years.
Sorry: almost eighteen.
Rehashing those discussions, now, is pointless. I ran out of gas, and I apologize to those of you in our community who this affected or affects. I could have done more to reach out, to edit, to solicit writers. I accept responsibility for what I am responsible, and I apologize to those who felt this community slipping away as it did. Thank you again, to all those friends, colleagues, writers, and commenters who made this place special. As to the future, perhaps Franklin’s reply, some 229 years ago, might help us make sense of what comes next.
For now, though, the sun has—finally—set on this iteration of Off Tackle Empire.
Thank you.
