About
Hi, and welcome to The Barking Crow. My name is Stu Streit, and currently, everything you read on this website is my work.
What is The Barking Crow?
If you want the short version, this is a sports blog. The Barking Crow is a sports blog written by three personas: NIT Stu, Joe Stunardi, and Stuart McGrath. We mostly engage with college basketball and college football. Sometimes we engage with more sports. Sometimes we engage with things that aren’t sports. Some of what we do is intended to be funny, some is serious, and some is sentimental. Lines blur between what’s what, so I won’t spell out who’s responsible for which of those elements, but if you feel a little whiplash between serious takes and dumb jokes, you’re not missing anything. Welcome, and as we say around here: Bark.
If you want the full story, read on.
In March 2017, fresh out of college, comfortable in a long-distance relationship, and not especially taxed by my job, I thought it would be funny to run an NIT bracket pool. It was. The 2017 NIT was special, piled with extra helpings of optimism, beleaguerment, and unintentional comedy. I fell in love. I could not get enough. In April 2017, I launched All Things NIT, an intentionally amateurish WordPress blog dedicated to the National Invitation Tournament. I wrote two long posts, intended to write a third, never did, and returned in January when I realized I really did want to give the sports media thing a shot.
I’d realized rather quickly that an NIT blog could not be a one-person affair. You might raise your eyebrows at this. You might think NIT media should be exactly a one-person affair, if not a zero-person affair. But it’s true. You need at least two voices if you’re going to give the NIT the coverage it deserves. Two reasons for this:
First, one person blogging about the NIT could come across as sad, especially in the post-blog age of The Internet. If this was the 2000’s, when there were blogs for everything, then maybe there could be a one-man blog about the NIT. But this was not the 2000’s. This was 2017. Literacy and attention spans were on their way out. Instagram Stories were on their way in. One man blogging about the NIT, in that environment? Tragic. Lonely. Concerning, as plenty of my relatives made sure to let me know. Two or more voices blogging about the NIT? There was an idea. That could come across as an inside joke. Clearly, I thought to myself, visitors would come to All Things NIT, see a handful of different names floating around, and think, “These guys are having fun together. Good for them.”
Second, if you’re going to blog about the NIT, you need to know who might make the NIT, and that means you need to perform NIT Bracketology. The first pillar of NIT blogging is celebrating the NIT. This requires some degree of nuttiness and an instinct for chaos. The second pillar of NIT blogging is accurately forecasting who will make the NIT. This requires dutiful, responsible research. Basically, I needed a way to separate what was a joke from what was information a discouraged Nebraska fan could trust. I needed a Nate Silver or a Joe Lunardi, but for the NIT. A friend suggested using the name Joe Stunardi.
Thanks to the NIT Bracketology, All Things NIT did well enough that I felt justified in attempting a career in sports media. In January 2019, I moved to Austin and started The Barking Crow. I decided the site would have three voices: NIT Stu, the NIT fan; Joe Stunardi, the erstwhile NIT bracketologist; and Stuart McGrath, who was originally intended to be the site’s straight man. (The comedy term. None of us are gay. All of us are supportive of those who are.) I took the name McGrath because it was my grandmother’s maiden name and my brother had already used our other grandmother’s maiden name on a fake ID back in college.
Over time, NIT Stu and Joe Stunardi and Stuart McGrath all evolved.
A lot of this evolution involved parts of me leaking into the three characters. NIT Stu inherited my day job as a Lyft and Uber Eats driver, my very loose ties to the University of Texas, and my adoration of fast casual chain restaurants. Joe Stunardi inherited my family’s Iowa State roots, my Chicago Cubs fandom, and my sports opinions and analysis. Stuart McGrath inherited my Notre Dame education and many of the more personal aspects of who I am.
At the same time, I evolved to become more like the Studonyms I’d created. As NIT Stu, I came to love the NIT, unironically and without compulsion. As Joe Stunardi, I learned how to build Monte Carlo simulation models, using them to generate College Football Playoff probabilities and things of that nature. I didn’t really become more like Stuart McGrath. We’re still figuring out what Stuart McGrath does around here.
Having played this little game for nearly a decade now (good God), a lot of canon has built up. Some things it might be helpful to know, then, with “I” meaning me, literally me, Stu Streit:
- I grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois. I graduated from Notre Dame. I live in Austin, Texas. I’m married, I have a dog, my wife gave birth to our first child this November, and I still drive a little Lyft and Uber Eats to help make this work.
- Im a fan of Notre Dame, Iowa State, the Cubs, the Bulls, and the Packers (inherited that one from my dad—yes, I am very lucky to not be a Bears fan).
- NIT Stu is an Ottawa Senators fan and also a fan of Burnley FC, a soccer team in England with a proclivity for producing 0–0 final scores. These allegiances have rubbed off on me as well.
- NIT Stu almost always wears a bucket hat. Here’s the story there.
- Joe Stunardi is a Chicago Blackhawks fan, and he pays attention to all Chicago sports.
- The NIT is the best, a divine gift to the sporting world. The NCAA T*urnament is the worst, a blasphemy which through no coincidence arose the same year Hitler invaded Poland.
- Joe Kelly rocks. Here’s the story there.
- Shaka Smart was nice to me one time (and, as we like to say, mean to me zero times).
- I use the word “we” a lot when talking about the blog. Old habit. I pretended we were separate people for a long time. Apologies if you’re someone I led astray with that. My intention was not to trick. It was to amuse. Anyway, I do think we’ll probably employ more folks than just me in the next year or two. I am me. The Barking Crow is we.
If you’ve read this far and you’re ready to join the movement, here are some helpful resources:
- Our daily-ish email newsletter, keeping you up to date on whatever it is we’re up to.
- Our homepage, with easy access to NIT Stu’s latest blog posts.
- Our Substack, currently used for Joe Stunardi’s college football writing. Through that, you’ll find his college football modeling as well—the playoff probabilities and Movelor, his power rating system.
- Our NIT Bracketology, which will start being updated again soon. (Apologies for the delay on that: The baby really threw us off track.)
- Our Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts. In addition to those, we have individual accounts on Twitter and Instagram for NIT Stu, Joe Stunardi, and Stuart McGrath. We’re fairly active on Twitter. Less so on Instagram and TikTok. We made the individual Instagram accounts because it briefly looked like Twitter was going down, so we were preparing for a Threads-centric sports internet landscape. Now, we have them and we’re still figuring out a good way to use them.
We’ve got more on the way, always: More on the Substack, new essay series from Stuart McGrath (that’s something Stuart McGrath does—he writes essays), a little college basketball podcast to take us through the end of the season, updated college basketball bracketology, and even some legitimate journalism—a rarity for us. Please follow. Please subscribe. Please make The Barking Crow part of your sports media diet. We will be eternally grateful, and you might even like some of the things we create.
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People ask us where we got the name “The Barking Crow.” Here’s the story there, which I like to say I found in a bar/bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the one across the corner from the Unitarian church. I’m seeing, as I confirm that the church is Unitarian, that the bar/bookstore closed in January 2024. Dammit. Anyway, the story:
There was a couple and they had a son, and they took that son on a hike in some woods. It was an easy hike on an easy trail. A stroll between some trees.
During their walk, the family heard a bark from the woods beside the trail. The bark sounded like that of a terrier.
Worried there was a stuck dog in the woods beside them, the family pushed through the brush, pulling back branches and stepping over roots and brushing against burrs, which clung to their pantlegs. The parents kept an eye on the trail. The son wiggled ahead of them. After a few minutes, all three found themselves in a little clearing. In the center of the clearing, there stood a crow.
The crow stared at them and barked.
As you would imagine, this confused the couple, and it even confused the little boy, who took a few short, toddling steps in the bird’s direction.
The crow stopped barking.
The boy stood, vision locked upon the bird. His mouth hung plump and innocent, the center of a breathy, wide-eyed smile.
The bird stood, vision locked upon the boy. Its beak held firmly closed, tilted to the left as its black eyes peered into the child.
“Why are you barking?” asked the boy.
The crow turned its head towards the boy’s parents. The crow turned its head back at the boy. The crow leveled its head and stared straight ahead, into the dark forest around it.
“I like the sound.”
I hope you like the sound.
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