It May Be A Little Biased, But At Least I Spelled Your Name Right

There's a podcast I sometimes listen to named "Here's The Thing," where Alec Baldwin talks to celebrities and public figures about what makes them tick. A few weeks ago he interviewed David Simon, creator of The Wire* and Treme. At the very end of the podcast, they got to talking about how even in show business, sometimes they have to do work they don't really enjoy. Simon's attitude (and I'm paraphrasing what he said) was:

"When you're doing work where you say either the same thing you've already said before, or you're saying the same thing with no purpose, like, 'Well, this is what they're paying me for today,'... that's the point where it's time to do something else."

I thought that summed things up perfectly for me. Spending most of the last 3 1/2 years writing about USF losing all the time and doing dumb things and having dumb things done to them and getting left for dead on the side of the conference realignment highway has been emotionally draining. I don't think I have anything new to say, or a whole lot of interest in finding any new things to say. But we have to come up with something, and I don't want to keep writing about the other things and getting worked up about them over and over again. Plus I'm trying to make some major life changes, and being that guy on the Internet when I'm not like that at all in person would make all of those changes harder to accomplish. For all of these reasons, I've decided to stop managing this blog.

Collin is going to take over as manager, and everyone else is sticking around, which means you're not going to see too many changes. Collin lives in Tampa, he's very well-connected with USF, and he knows what makes a successful athletic department. These are all good things for the site. Plus he won't have me around being a human Molotov cocktail and messing all that up. I wouldn't be surprised if Voodoo Five really took off on his watch. I'm rooting for that to happen. After all, I started this thing.

I'm not going away completely. I'm going to be listed as "Emeritus" on the masthead, I'll still take part in the behind-the-scenes discussions, and I might make a random appearance if I have a HOT SPORTS TAKE that I just have to get in print somewhere. I may also help out with special projects, like running the Protect Your Unit game or making funny Photoshops. And maybe there's another project I can take on someday, where I'm not so personally attached and I can sit back and find the fun and humor in everything. But since this isn't that project, I'm not going to write here very often.

Let me get my thank-yous in before I get played off. Thanks to Ken DeCelles and Sean Keeley for getting this site off a low-tech WordPress template and onto SB Nation. Thanks to Peter Bean and later Drew Dunlevie for letting us continue to exist, even though this is definitely a niche site compared to behemoths like Tomahawk Nation or Land-Grant Holy Land. Thanks to Greg Auman for giving us far more respect than we deserved. Thanks to everyone who linked to us, answered our questions, talked to us on Twitter, played in our dumb games, and came on our awful podcasts. Which reminds me, thanks to Nick Gryniewicz and Mike Nascarella for contributing as writers and eventually getting us on WBUL, where our podcasts became decidedly less awful. Thanks to Collin and Gary and Andrew and Ryan and Ken and Matt and Corinna and everyone else who's written something for this site.

And of course, thanks to all of you for being our readers. I hope you'll continue to do so.

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* - This is the second and probably last time I will ever reference The Wire here. For more information about this show, please read every Jason Whitlock column ever.