Hey everyone,
It's not exactly a secret that football related posts here have been sporadic at best for a while now. The reasons are both personal and professional. For the latter, as my career has advanced, I have less and less leisure time to devote to working on this site. There was a period where I was burning the candle at both ends and literally forgoing sleep to work on posts, but that has long since passed. This is unfortunate in one sense, because I really like (in the present tense) writing, and I really like writing about Rutgers athletics in particular, but it's good in that the qualities that work here are applicable to other endeavors as well. A Rutgers degree is supposed to lead to a reasonably successful career - that is textbook how everything is supposed to work on paper, and it has.
At the same time, everyone can agree that the period of instability and existential threat for Rutgers athletics has passed. Whatever wins and losses may happen on the field, however a program's fortunes may ebb or flow, Rutgers has ultimately secured its place at the table for the foreseeable future. It was a decade of stress, hardship, and sacrifice, but the hard part is over. That doesn't mean resting on your laurels, but gone finally is the uncertainty of whether you will wake up in the morning and learn that everything that the Rutgers athletics community had worked so hard to build would be crushed in an instant.
None of us really thought it would happen; indeed, who here was not confident that things would work out, even if the plans kept getting reshuffled at the last minute. Still, there was still an unknown quality that remained out of the Rutgers athletic department's control, and that was always a very frightening thought. Now the primary goal has been accomplished. Without that impetus, you come to the realization that maybe the world isn't going to end if you decide to write today instead about any other of wide array of topics that the internet is so wonderful at quenching our insatiable thirst for knowledge about. My interest on any of these really hasn't waned; I'll just be keeping more of my thoughts to myself, at least for the time being.
This site really came to the forefront in 2008, when the Star-Ledger published a series of editorials criticizing Rutgers athletics that got the majority of their core facts wrong, slandering the university and the athletic department in the process. Similar criticism, both valid and not, has been fodder for commentary here over the past few years. Now that's pretty much a non-issue, settled in stone, beyond the pale of reasonable debate. There was an argument and debate, and matters of fact determined the winners and losers. Then, as always, the Rutgers community did a great job of coming together and rebutting the baseless attacks. At other times, there were uncomfortable subjects that didn't put the athletic department in the greatest light, and proportionally needed more of a spotlight.
It could have been done by anyone, and indeed, very often it was, with this site just following the lead of the work of countless others. Yeah, there were plenty of out there editorials and oddball research projects too, and those really were a lot of fun and my favorite part of everything. That message board fan culture is the primordial ooze where everything started, and where I'll slink bank to, at least for now. It's time for someone else to have their say; in fact, nothing would be better than having an even more vibrant online discussion about Rutgers athletics spring up. I will still write, still write here even (sticking mainly to long form, research-driven pieces), but at least for the foreseeable future cannot commit to the regular schedule of coverage that the topic deserves.
Maybe at some point things will change, but for now it's not really serving anyone to have me go through the motions. SBN's Rutgers coverage deserves someone who can commit more to it with a fresher take. For that matter, with whoever SBN decides to go with (I don't have the faintest idea), the last thing that person needs is someone looking over their shoulder and micromanaging. Whenever the new management comes in, there is a decent chance that the content here will be significantly different, but at least give them a chance.
To anyone who liked the site, thanks a lot, and I hope to be able to write other things that you enjoy reading in the future. If you didn't, then sorry, I wished I could have done a better job. Sometimes things got a little heated, and points were argued to death, and rarely it was fun to poke a little fun at someone else's expense. It's not like that wasn't anything Rutgers hasn't seen tenfold in spades. No, the posts weren't always as good as they could have been. I beat myself up over that more than anyone else possibly could have, but I truly did do my best to put out substantive content with the quality that I thought that the subject matter deserved. That's it; there aren't really anything more to it and genuinely nothing else is in the works, so I don't really have any interest in discussing this any further, especially something so meaningless compared to what actually happens on the field. So long, and here's to a much better 2013 football season.