Note: Some of what follows is a little out of date. Here is some relevant context and what to expect around here through the end of 2024.
Welcome to The Barking Crow.
We are, primarily, a sports blog. We blog about sports. It takes a few different shapes, but that is most of what we do. Primarily, we blog about college basketball and college football.
The Barking Crow started in 2017 under the name All Things NIT. Emboldened by a National Invitation Tournament which saw Jim Boeheim feud with Greensboro, Indiana decline a home game, the rise of Josh Pastner, and the greatest game between UCF and Illinois State in the history of humankind, we thought we could run an NIT blog, and that we could amass such a following for that NIT blog that we would take over the sports media world. So far, one of those two things has happened.
I think the best way to explain what we do is to explain our two leading personalities, NIT Stu and Joe Stunardi. They’re the yin and the yang here.
NIT Stu’s goal in life is to lead an uprising, possibly definitely not armed, which reinstates the NIT atop the hierarchy of college basketball postseason tournaments. Joe Stunardi’s goal is to build predictive models which provide highly accurate college basketball and college football bracketology, honoring his namesake (with whom we have no association). More on these two figures:
Shortly after the 2018 NIT, NIT Stu came to believe Joe Kelly was the greatest relief pitcher in the world. He watches every one of Joe Kelly’s outings, generally live-tweeting them and providing a recap here on the blog the next day.
Joe Stunardi created a model in 2019 which predicts who will make the College Football Playoff. He maintains the model rigorously, publishing playoff probabilities the morning after games, forecasting the playoff field through weekly bracketology, and writing daily newsletters tracking the playoff race as well as the broader, more existential stakes accompanying America’s most American sport. (You can subscribe to those newsletters at our Substack. We’re trying out Substack this fall.)
NIT Stu lives in Austin and has some ties to the University of Texas. He publishes a blog post once or twice a week named Bevo’s Fake Nuts. It covers the Longhorns, in a way, but mostly it rails against the unfair treatment NIT champion Shaka Smart received in 2021 and accuses the Manning Family of perpetrating every hardship which befalls Quinn Ewers.
Joe Stunardi comes from an Iowa State family. He’s recently begun publishing a blog post once or twice a week named Cyclone State. It aims to cover the whole of Iowa State sports, tracking and analyzing what the Cyclones need to do to capture top billing in the state of Iowa.
NIT Stu decided in 2019 that it’d be funny to pick the most irrelevant team in the Premier League and become a fan of them. This led him to Burnley, and he enjoyed the experience so much that he did the same thing with the NHL a year later. The result, right now, is a joint Burnley/Ottawa Senators weekly-ish post named Disco Inferno. Why Disco Inferno? Because “Burn baby Burnley” has a good ring to it.
Joe Stunardi grew up outside of Chicago and loves the Cubs. He writes Off the Lake for us, analyzing the Cubs, Bears, Bulls, White Sox, and Blackhawks. A Theo Epstein devotee and a frequent visitor to FanGraphs, Joe’s posts tend to take the long view and focus on the big picture, answering questions like what Justin Steele’s projected fWAR in 2026 should mean for the Cubs’ 2024–25 offseason approach.
NIT Stu came to love NASCAR in the mid-2000’s, when ESPN the Magazine pushed it hard. (He was a suggestible middle schooler.) He came to love IndyCar in 2018 when he attended his first Indy 500. He came to develop a love/hate relationship with F1 when he started following the sport in 2021 on the recommendation of a friend. He writes Vroom Vroom for us, covering all three.
In addition to his college football model, Joe Stunardi’s built a college basketball bracketology model (NIT bracketology is of course included). As with the college football model, he analyzes this model in detail with in-depth posts throughout college basketball seasons exploring what we know different games mean and what we think they might mean based on different theories of the selection committee and what makes a good single-elimination team.
NIT Stu likes license plates. In the summer, he’ll sometimes rank them and run a bracket of all of them on our Instagram.
There is more—when you’ve been doing this for this long, there’s always more—but hopefully that gives you an idea. A few more things to cover:
Who am I? I’m Stuart McGrath. I’m the editor around here, but I do blog from time to time, sometimes publishing essays about things other than sports. Right now, I’m mostly blogging about my alma mater, Notre Dame.
What legalistics should we cover in here? Here are our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy. Also, Joe publishes his bets on the site, but you shouldn’t follow them. Not only does he have a losing all-time record (meticulously tracked and forthrightly addressed at the beginning of each post), but if you’re an amateur bettor, you should bet for fun and bet less than you can afford to lose. If you think you might have a gambling addiction, seek help.
Social media links? Yes, of course. Here are our Twitter accounts (NIT Stu, Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, The Barking Crow), our active Instagram accounts (The Barking Crow, NIT Stu), and our TikTok account. Again, we’re on Substack now, and if Joe’s college football daily newsletter goes well, we’ll begin moving more newsletters over there as the months progress.
How did we get our name? We’ll end with that story, and then we’ll have one more note at the bottom for those who think they can handle the full truth about NIT Stu, Joe Stunardi, and Stuart McGrath, a trio of Studonyms intentionally shrouded in mystery.
The story comes from a beat-up paperback in a bookshop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and it goes like this:
A family—two parents, one young son—went for a hike in the woods. It was a normal hike and an easy hike, a stroll between the trees. After a few minutes, they heard a bark beside them, behind some brush. It sounded like the bark of a terrier.
Worried about a lost dog, the family pushed through the branches, and after a few minutes found themselves in a clearing. There, in the center of the clearing, stood a crow.
The crow barked.
The couple glanced at one another, confused, but the boy took a few short, toddling steps toward the animal.
The crow stopped barking.
The boy stood, staring at the bird, mouth hanging a little bit, child eyes open wide.
The bird stood, staring at the boy, beak closed, head tilted.
After a minute, the boy asked the bird a question.
“Why are you barking?”
The crow looked towards the boy’s parents, then back at the boy, and then straight ahead, into the darkness of the forest.
“I like the sound.”
We hope you like the sound.
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Alright, that truth:
I am one person. My name’s Stuart Streit, and I blog under three different names because when I started this, one guy blogging about the NIT sounded sad and three guys blogging about the NIT sounded funny. A lot of people figure this out, and it’s kind of an open secret, but we sense that some of you enjoy being in on the joke, and at this point, the NIT Stu/Joe Stunardi split makes it easy to separate what’s supposed to be borderline lunacy from what’s supposed to be serious analysis.
For a while, I tried more actively to hide my identity, but sports media and the internet content world get a little different as you get older, and some of the goofier stuff makes more sense in your 20’s than it does later on down the line. As I write this, I’m about to turn 30. There is time for goofiness left, but I’m starting to use my real name more, as what made sense six years ago doesn’t make as much sense today. I never desired to hide anything about the blog or about myself, but I thought the bit was better when NIT Stu and Joe Stunardi were entirely separate characters.
I live in Austin and have ties to the University of Texas, namely that my wife got her master’s degree there. I grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois as the descendant of three generations of Iowa State grads (my dad was Cy). I went to Notre Dame. I’m a Cubs fan and a Bulls fan, but my family’s Iowa roots jumbled my geographic allegiances beyond that, leading to a very convenient Cubs/Packers MLB/NFL split. I’m a little ashamed of that luck. McGrath was my grandmother’s maiden name. I have a lot of fun running this blog, and I appreciate you all for helping make it such a good time. I do love the NIT.
If you’re new to the site and this is your first impression of my work, I’m not sure if this makes it all more confusing or less. Either way, I hope you have a good time. I hope you like the sound.
Bark.