The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, March 14th. It is the 35th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Yesterday, the Day We Brought Home Fargo
I’ve alluded to this (or outright discussed it) before in these essays, but there are a number of dates within the calendar which prompt me to reflect. There’s my birthday. There’s New Years. There’s Ash Wednesday, and Christmas Eve, and the firsts of months at times, and other days that come and go.
This year, Selection Sunday is catching my eye, and it’s bringing to mind The Barking Crow.
For four years now, Selection Sunday has been at the center of The Barking Crow’s traffic, which places it at the center of The Barking Crow’s business plan, which places it near the center of my own life. The blog started as a joke. It grew out of a desperate realization that I did not like what was then my job, and that if I didn’t like my job I might not like my life. It’s grown since then through the encouragement of results—results that are just hints of what could come, of course, but results nonetheless. Trends in growth. Trends in growth that center around Selection Sunday.
Selection Sunday 2018 was this entity’s first. The site was still All Things NIT, having been born just less than a year earlier after running an NIT pool and finding it hilarious. Emma and I were still doing long-distance, and she was in town for the weekend, as I still didn’t really know what the site was or what it would be, and I didn’t prepare myself for spending a few hours every morning the week of the bracket announcement comparing travel distances for mediocre basketball teams as I pieced together a predicted bracket. She worked on a jigsaw puzzle. The bracketology turned out to be pretty accurate. It also got a lot of clicks. A few days later, I went to Reno, and a few weeks after that, I went to New York, and after an up-and-down year of content, the decision was made to try—to seriously try—to make this joke a business. The Barking Crow was chosen as the new name. A still eclectic, still farcical, less off-putting brand was designed. In large part because of that success on Selection Sunday.
On Selection Sunday 2019, I was sick and overwhelmed. I’d just moved to Austin that January. The new site, with the new brand and everything, had only launched in February. It was a grueling winter—I was lost, personally, at times feeling incapable of doing anything but play online chess for the entirety of a day (that day was a Wednesday, if I remember correctly). It was a time full of mistakes—the transition took too long, the bracketology had gone dead for something like six weeks in the middle of the season, the model was too clunky and therefore took forever to run. Selection Sunday came at the tail end of South by Southwest, and I’d watched the festival through my window, sick all week. On one night, I’d struggled to sleep at all, and I went a few days straight at one point without leaving the block. The bracketology performed terribly, and I think I even posted it a little late, after the selection show had begun. There were some clicks. There weren’t many more than the year prior. An attempt to redirect traffic from All Things NIT, which Google knew as a source of NIT Bracketology, failed miserably, taking All Things NIT off the front page of search results.
But the year that followed saw growth, mostly in the form of consistent content production. The site stopped going dead for days or weeks or months at a time. I made an accurate model for the College Football Playoff. I lost my grip at times, but even times of slippage were more fruitful than the prior year. Heading into March, the site was rocking, dramatically outpacing the prior two years and hanging around the top of Google results in this small, strange niche.
Then, last March happened.
It’s funny to compare those three years—the first, feeling so overwhelmed but simultaneously having so much space from it all; the second, completely reeling and just trying to throw something up online that worked; the third, sitting like the rest of the world, wondering what had just happened, what was happening, and what was to come.
I’d zapped myself fairly thoroughly in the close of February and the opening of March, and I’d been feeling some trepidation about what was to come as the NIT itself progressed. Would I be able to get enough sleep to keep my brain and body healthy? What would a trip to New York do to my bank account? Would the model perform well enough to be taken seriously? Would I have enough willpower left in my reserves to follow through another loaded three weeks?
When everything shut down, there were emotions aplenty, but beside the fear and the grief and the anxiety, for me, was a sense of relief. My life had been hurtling along, out of control, and the pandemic pulled the emergency brake. Of course, of course, of course, I would prefer the pandemic to not have pulled that brake. I would prefer the pandemic to never have happened. But in that first weekend, when Selection Sunday was absent, I walked the empty streets of my neighborhood, and I checked Target every few hours for Clorox wipes, and I sat for hours at home, alone, resting, and I released from the stress. The stress would, of course, return, and ebb and flow and all the other things, but one of the primary emotions, alongside the fear and the grief and the anxiety, was relief.
The relief came from another source too, though, and I’m a bit ashamed of this, but it’s honest. At the time the pandemic hit the United States, I had been scrambling, day after day, for upwards of three years. For upwards of three years I’d been trying to piece together the entirety of my life. I’d been struggling to figure out work. I’d been struggling to figure out money, which for someone trying to make two longshot business plans work (the blog and the Christmas ornaments, which I think I’ve alluded to elsewhere in these), is separate from work. I’d been struggling to figure out the relationship, which at that point was in the engagement phase, and how much I could and should give in terms of time without taking away from us in some other area. There were 24 hours in each day, and I needed 36. At least.
Enter: the pandemic.
One thing the pandemic did was bring a lot of others down to my level. I don’t remember whether I said this aloud or not, but I think in one of the first therapy sessions of lockdown I may have, when asked if I was struggling to figure out this new way of life, said something along the lines of, “Honestly, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Now, everyone else is just here with me.” I’d long felt a stigma associated with what I was doing: It was reckless, it was a longshot, it made a normal social life impossible and added significant stress to even simple aspects of my relationship. Suddenly, the stigma was gone. As others feared losing their jobs, I pivoted from driving rideshare to delivering food, and my income jumped. As others sat and waited, the blog continued to grow, with the discovery of the silly summer brackets a breakthrough for the brand on the heels of what had still, even cut short, been a successful college basketball season for pageviews. I feel guilty saying this, but the pandemic gave me a cushion in my day-to-day life to figure a lot of things out, and it gave me a cushion psychologically to feel more secure in where my career was. So what if I didn’t have a perfect plan? Nobody did.
As I keep mentioning, there’s an element of guilt to this, because no matter how forcefully I say and feel that the pandemic was and is terrible and that the loss of all this life—both from death and from moments lost—is horrifically tragic, there were elements of the pandemic from which I benefited. I’d guess I’m not alone in this, but it feels strange nonetheless. And there’s the element of this in which I shouldn’t have cared about the stigma, and there’s the element of this in which I probably would have made progress on the other things even without the world turning so catastrophically upside down. But the world did turn catastrophically upside down, and today, here we are.
It’s Selection Sunday again, and like the rest of them, it isn’t an easy day. There’s a puppy at my feet—a puppy who needed emergency medical care to get through her first week at home, and so is struggling even more than a normal puppy might with housetraining, separation anxiety, and all the rest. The trip to get her was grueling physically, requiring about 21 hours of driving in a two-day span, with just three hours of sleep in the middle because of the need to work. The weeks leading up to the trip were grueling, too: running the bracketology model overnight often requires either staying up late or getting up at two or three in the morning once the west coast games are done, entering the information, and going back to bed. And the weeks before those weeks were likewise grueling, centered around an historic winter storm that devastated Texas and turned our lives in this house on end for a bit.
Thankfully, Emma and I are married now, and when you’re married, it seems things are easier because your spouse can fill your gaps and hold you up when you need those things to be done. I suspect Selection Sunday will never be an easy day for the blog. But it’s easier this year than at least it was two years ago, and two years ago there was not an only-semi-domesticated animal in my home, let alone one recovering from a life-threatening illness.
As far as business goes, the pandemic has caught The Barking Crow on the second trip around, inhibiting pageviews by driving down certainty about the NIT, driving down the number of teams in the NIT, and possibly driving down general interest in college basketball. The pageviews were never what they were last year, with the site not yet past last March’s final total despite being four significant days further into the bracketology season than that March ever really got. To hit the growth target at which it makes sense to continue to treat this like a nearly-fulltime job, I’ll need to get the growth later in the year than I got it last year. This could cause the blog to close, or to shrink its scope into just a hobby. It could also force the blog to beef up, and to hit next year—when hopefully the sports calendar is back to its pre-pandemic norms—with wind in the sails.
More than anything, looking back at those other Selection Sundays, and looking at where The Barking Crow has come, from a joke to a Hail Mary to a floundering mess to a tiny-but-surging brand to a weary, flawed, but growing entity, it strikes me how the site has burrowed so forcefully into the center of my life. The core of my life has become my family and my blog, in some order.
I suppose this should be expected, considering the site is just me, in so many ways. Given an internet canvas into which to extend myself, of course the ensuing self-manifestation is a vital organ, carrying its own proportional portion of my soul.
I don’t think I’ll make it up to Dallas-Ft. Worth for any NIT games this year. The puppy is too much, the exhaustion is too major, the best friend’s wedding is on too specific a day. But for the fourth straight NIT, I’ll be involved. Five if you count the virtual one. For the second or third straight, it’ll be under the name of The Barking Crow. The NIT will happen. Fun will be had. The numbers will come in. And when the numbers are in and we’re on to the rest of the year, I’ll figure out what those rest-of-year numbers need to be, and I’ll take some shots at hitting them, and it will be seen whether I hit them or not.
And next Selection Sunday, I’ll look back at this year, and I’ll look back at the other years, and I’ll look ahead at all that may be to come in the next half-decade or so. And we’ll do it all again.
Bona NIT.
Next week’s essay: On America’s Roman Forum
