Welcome. Here’s what you need to know:
1. We started as All Things NIT back in 2017, and we still consider ourselves an NIT blog at our core. That doesn’t mean we only blog about the NIT. It just means that our content is generally of NIT quality (pretty good!) and of the sort of nature you’d expect from a blog that loves the NIT.
2. There are three contributors to this website. All of us (disclaimer alert) are semi-fictional.
NIT Stu (@nit_stu)
NIT Stu, as you might guess, likes the NIT. He likes Joe Kelly. He likes milk (he’s down with plant milks too, we’re not here to judge). He liked Tacko Fall before Tacko Fall was mainstream. (Why do you think he fell in love with the NIT in 2017?) He likes Reno and Fargo and Greensboro. He likes NASCAR. He likes Burnley, the most irrelevant Premier League team he could find. He likes forcing people to declare a preference between arbitrary things. He currently delivers food (and drives rideshare) to make a living.
Stuart McGrath (@stuartnmcgrath)
That’s me. I do our quote-unquote higher-brow stuff. Really, I just write about things I find interesting, or use this as an outlet for some more creative writing. I also edit. Editing is important.
Joe Stunardi (@joestunardi)
Joe Stunardi improbably answered the call when Stu asked him to do NIT Bracketology back in 2018. Now, Joe does a lot of work with numbers for us. He blogs a good bit, with special focuses on his loves—the Cubs and Iowa State—but his main contributions have been his statistical models used to determine College Football Playoff Probabilities, College Basketball Postseason Probabilities, and College Basketball Bracketology. He’s working on expanding his models both in quality (more detailed, team-specific information in an easy-to-access format) and quantity (the hope is to have models for twelve NCAA sports in the near future, as well as NASCAR, F1, IndyCar, and the NHL).
3. We are growing, and we need your help to grow. If you like us, tell everyone you know. If you don’t like us, you can still tell everyone. We will accept hate clicks.
4. We appreciate you being here, and we hope you’ll stick around. We’re on Twitter (@thebarkingcrow) and Instagram (@thebarkingcrow), and you can always email us at allthingsnit@gmail.com. We’re incorporated as Barnaby & Lake LLC, so don’t be surprised if you see that name around here too.
5. Links to our Terms & Conditions and our Privacy Policy can be found below.
6. The name. The name is, like many things around here, shrouded in its own little bit of mystery. Here’s what we’ll tell you, from a story from a little used bookstore in New Hampshire:
A couple and their young son went for a hike.
It was a normal hike. An easy hike. A day hike. Until they heard, in the woods beside them, the bark of a terrier.
Worried the poor dog might be stuck, they pushed through the branches, soon finding themselves in a clearing.
There, in the center of the clearing, stood a crow.
The crow barked.
The couple glanced, confused, at one another, while the boy took a few, short, toddling steps toward the animal.
The crow stopped barking.
The boy stood, staring at the bird, mouth open, eyes wide.
The bird stood, staring at the boy, beak closed, head tilted.
Finally, in his small, befuddled, still-learning-to-talk voice, the boy asked:
“Why are you barking?”
The crow looked toward the boy’s parents, looked to the boy, then looked straight ahead.
“I like the sound.”
We hope you like the sound.