Woooooooooooooooooooooooof.
What a week.
Alright, first of all, let’s address the elephant in the room, which is that our content this week has been sparse and there are about six or seven posts that were supposed to go up today that didn’t. What happened? Well, Joe’s working on the NHL model (and he’s actually close—I know he always says he’s close on these models but this time he’s actually close I think he’ll have it done very soon), and as for the Austin fellas, well…Fargo got sick again.
She’s ok. This is her, yesterday, playing with her neighbor’s toy…
…but she got sick. We went out of town last weekend, she was at the boarder, she goes to daycare there a few days a week and has a blast but something must have gone wrong, she tore off a strip of blanket, she ate the strip of blanket, we didn’t find out she’d eaten the strip of blanket until Tuesday, when we got a text from the daycare people saying she’d pooped out a piece of fabric (which we assume was the missing blanket strip, which we realized was missing once we got the text and looked at the blanket). She’s been acting more or less normal since then, but she’s gassy and her appetite’s a little off, so we took her to the vet this morning, which was a big trip but a good one (I got to swing through Buda—I love Buda). It sounds like her digestive tract’s just still reacting to having a few inches of soft pink cloth in it for 48 hours or more, which, you know, is reasonable. Mine does that too when I ingest foreign objects. Got her on the wet food for a few days, she can still play and all that, she’ll be back next week with her weekly column.
Anyway, between Joe working on the model and the Austin fellas dealing with the Fargs’s dietary indiscretion, we’ve been slow on posts, so…
- Bevo’s Fake Nuts is coming tomorrow.
- The Burnley preview’s coming tomorrow.
- The NASCAR weekend schedule’s coming tomorrow.
- Joe’s Iowa State preview’s coming tomorrow.
- A bunch of other content (milk, mostly) is coming next week.
- And Joe’s college football weekly preview is coming tomorrow, though he asked me to note that, believe it or not, Oregon beating Cal tonight would be good for Oregon’s playoff chances.
Now.
Since October’s a transition month for us, with more Joe Kelly off-days than normal but no NIT season just yet, we decided it’d be a good time for a State of the Blog kind of post. Here’s how everything’s going:
The Quest to Make the NIT College Basketball’s Preeminent Postseason Tournament Again
Ah, yes. The core of our mission. Going pretty great, I’d say. It’s a slow process, but we’re hitting our marks. We’re winning over converts. We’re chasing greatness (but not too much greatness, remember—it’s not the best teams, it’s the right teams). Where two or three are gathered, and whatnot.
The biggest thing for us this NIT season is convincing the Universe™ to let us have the full version again. Last year’s was great, but we need home courts, we need 32 teams, we need fewer opt-outs (Coach K chickening out again would be pretty fun, though), we need the Final Four to be back at Madison Square Garden. That’s key to the mission. You take the NIT away for one year, millions of people die worldwide from a pandemic. You take the NIT away for two years, people start fleeing the planet in their personal rocketships. You take the NIT away for three years, who knows what’ll happen. We need it back.
The Quest to Get Joe Kelly into the Hall of Fame
He’s doing this himself. Look at the guy. Nearly favored over the field to get his third ring in the last four years, something he’d share with Mookie Betts. Betts is a likely Hall of Famer. You tell us about Joe Kelly.
Do we have any responsibility for this? None at all. But man, it’s fun to educate people about his greatness.
The Quest to Make People Love Milk
We overpromise around here a lot, so I’m not going to promise anything on MilkTime except to say that we’re working on it. As the prophets foretell, keep your eyes on TikTok, then Instagram, then perhaps a podcast feed near you. But first, keep your eye out for a merch refresh. Much like the second coming, it’s all going to start with a merch refresh.
The Quest to…Burnley and the Senators
I don’t know what we’re going for here. We became fans of the most irrelevant EPL and NHL teams we could find, and it’s the most fun thing happening in my life right now. Sheer joy. Burnley’s always in danger of relegation. The Senators are playing in an arena miles and miles from their already small city and nearly failed to sign the centerpiece of their future plans. It’s an absolute blast. Either Burnley’s going to win the Europa League or the Senators are going to win a Stanley Cup in the next few years, and we’re going to look like geniuses.
The Quest to Do Whatever Stuart’s Doing
He seems like he’s enjoying himself over there as he slowly converts us into a Counting Crows blog (which would make the name make a lot more immediate sense).
The Quest to Provide Quality Analysis through a Vessel Named for the Most Lovable Bracketologist in the Land
God bless Joe Lunardi, and God bless our own Joe Stunardi, who’s been doing good work with the posts and is starting to figure out how to fit model work in (not modeling work, sadly). NHL model really is coming soon. Unclear about college football. I’d imagine the college basketball one will be fine but I really don’t know, and again, we’re working on the overpromising thing. Working specifically on not doing it.
Joe’s Cubs stuff really swelled this season with the game-by-game posts, and that was fun. Still figuring out our niche in the Cubs’ online ecosystem, which is also the case with Iowa State, but since Joe likes them both, he gets to blog about them.
The Quest to Make Everyone Know About Bevo’s Neuticles
Bevo’s Fake Nuts: Great name, questionable premise. This might eventually transition away from a love/hate Texas Longhorns column and into something different, but for now…it’s ok. We’re figuring it out.
The Quest to Vroom Vroom
The NASCAR coverage is fun, the IndyCar coverage was fun, the F1 coverage is a little fun. This is another area we’re hoping to get Joe into, but college football and college basketball (men’s and women’s both, ideally) are the priorities at the moment.
The Quest to Become TikTok Famous
We haven’t posted a TikTok in months. Went away shortly after we got Fargo, because evidently puppies are a lot of work? Much like NIT blogs, that way. This’ll come back eventually, I’m sure, but we’re just trying to hit baselines on posts and Instagram and Twitter content at the moment.
The Quest to Get Rich Gambling on Sports
Joe’s doing alright. The average ROI’s down from its late-2019 peak, but we have hope for these next few weeks with baseball (go Red Sox, I guess), and then nonconference college basketball’s usually kind. Might have to leave Texas if this ever gets big enough (or start commuting by airplane to somewhere we can legally bet on it onshore, which would be rad), but that’s not his problem.
The Quest to Bracket
The brackets were fun again this year, hoping to really keep the wind in the sails after the openers next year. Need a followup to the 90’s and 2000’s Bangers. Running out of recent but not too recent decades. 2010’s? Early 2010’s?
The Quest to Eat America
This is another one waiting in the wings. I want to eat this country so bad. Clearly not badly enough, though. Should also probably lose thirty pounds first, because if I start eating a ton of Denny’s from this weight, my arteries might kill me, and I mean that literally. Need to make some space. My resting heart rate is concerningly high.
The Quest for Fargo to Be Instagram Famous But Not in a Weird Way
We don’t want Fargo to have one of those dog accounts, but we do want her to be famous enough that we can do something like “take her on tour” and go to dog-friendly breweries around the country and hang out with maybe ten or twenty people at each while she just goes nuts getting pets and scritches and playing with other dogs, and have that somehow be profitable for us and also fun for the people involved. I don’t think the financials add up, but Fargo doesn’t need to know that.
The Quest to Be Close Personal Friends with Shaka Smart
You can’t be too aggressive on things like this. We’re supporting him from afar for the moment. Hope he dominates at Marquette (read: wins an NIT right away).
The Quest to Become an Austin Institution
The Fake Nuts focus might not help us here.
Other Quests?
There are probably others. Fargo, for example, would like to be best friends with her neighbor, whose ball she’s pictured with above. She’s been working hard on that. If we’ve missed one and you’d like to ask us about it, please, ask us about it.
Bark.
