In a few minutes, we’re going to post Joe’s bets for today and tomorrow, and then we’re going to go dark for eight days. Not entirely dark. We’re going to have a post up every day. But we won’t be very active on Twitter, we won’t be commentating on current events, and we’ll be continuing our quietness on Instagram (actually, we might post a few NIT-related stories, so go follow @thebarkingcrow on the ‘gram).
If you want the mythological explanation, in the semi-fictional spirit of things, Stuart’s getting married and Joe and Stu need to go help Disco Stu with something they had plenty of advance warning about and will only take eight days.
If you want the real explanation, it’s below, but as a forewarning, this will crack the mythology, so if you don’t want to know the full story behind this blog, stop reading at the asterisks.
Before we crack it, though, here’s what to expect while we’re gone:
Bets: Joe will not be posting any college football bets next week, and he won’t be posting any MLB bets unless the futures portfolio’s taken a turn that puts the average ROI number in jeopardy of going negative, in which case he may pop up to hedge in an attempt to lock into continued profitability. Hopefully the Rays beat the Yankees tonight and this weekend’s college football bets go well so this doesn’t become an issue, but we’ll see.
Joe Kelly: No posts unless something really dramatic happens and the fates also align in a way that the post can be posted. There will be a Joe Kelly NLCS Preview, but that’s it. Stu will try to be on Twitter for any appearances against Atlanta, but no promises, and if he is, it probably won’t be with the usual vigor.
MLB at large: No posts from Joe about the ALCS or NLCS starting.
College Football: No post from Joe recapping this week, no post previewing next week, but we should have a recap of next week for you all next Sunday. We’re hoping to have the first output of the model up the week following (the week leading up to the Big Ten opener) with more features to follow, but we can’t promise that, and it depends in part on how clear of guidance we get on what the situation is with bowls and covid reschedulements and such.
Burnley: No preview for next Saturday’s match, but we should have a recap that Sunday.
NASCAR: No recap of Sunday’s race, but we should have a preview for next Sunday, so we’ll get you back on track.
What we will post: We realized accidentally that people google “License Plate Rankings” a lot, so we’re going to put up similar posts for State Flags and State Nicknames in an attempt to drive some long-term traffic. And then we’ll rank a few other things we hold dear, like The Killers’ albums and NIT’s of recent years.
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Now, what’s going on here.
The Barking Crow is one person, named Stu or Stuart, depending who you ask. Joe is the most semi-fictional of all three of the characters, but the three are really all just different parts of one guy who lives in Austin and used to live in Minneapolis back when this was All Things NIT. That guy is me. And I’m getting married tomorrow.
As you might imagine, “work-life balance” is a little odd in the sports media game. On one hand, you’re always getting to follow sports, which is what you’d normally do. On the other, you have to tell your girlfriend-then-fiancée-and-tomorrow-wife that you’re going to get up at six in the morning every time you’re on vacation together so you can get things done for the blog before she wakes up (and often for a while after she wakes up). That can grate on a girlfriend-then-fiancée-and-tomorrow-wife, no matter how wonderful and supportive she is. It also probably wears me down, though I want to be clear I’m not complaining about it. I just could probably benefit from some rest.
We originally scheduled the wedding for November 14th, planning to honeymoon in Hawaii the week between then and the 21st. I thought that while our college football coverage wouldn’t be great that week, we at least would miss any consequential college basketball and the entirety of Joe Kelly Season. Then, a pandemic happened.
Around the beginning of July, we made the call to move our wedding entirely outdoors, to cut the guestlist down below 50 people, and to basically start over. We had to find a new venue, and that venue had different availability. October 10th was the best day we could find, and since it was unclear if Major League Baseball would happen and it was unclear if college football would happen, we decided we should just go for it, especially considering that there’s never really a great time to go dark on a growing blog. We’re going to honeymoon in the Smokies (we’re getting married in North Georgia—she’s from East Cobb) from Sunday through next Saturday, when we’ll head back to Texas and resume life, now married. Out of respect for Emma, and in some sort of spirit of self-care (Sunday will be my first full day off since March, I think, which was the day we frantically rented a U-Haul, not knowing what a stay-at-home order fully meant, and moved all my stuff out of the old apartment and into the new duplex, so it wasn’t really a day off), I’m taking the week off of work.
Thanks for all your well-wishes. I think I speak for all three of me when I say that we love you guys, and we’ll miss being away, even if it’s for the best possible of reasons and we’re really excited about that reason. We’ll be back, hopefully in time for some great Joe Kelly content, hopefully with a positive average ROI on our bets, and hopefully with the high-level numbers from our college football model for a very strange year.
Love you all.
Stu/Stuart/Joe Stunardi
