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11/16 2010

DL477: Brian Cook of MGoBlog on New Media, Blogs & BCS Chaos

Posted by Dan Levy.

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Brian Cook sent me an email last week and said he listened to the episode with Will Carroll and he had a different perspective on this whole independent media world. Cook, after all, built MGoBlog on his own and made it his career. Could MGoBlog work now? Could the site start now and thrive like it has, or was he the beneficiary of timing, having built his audience far before the playing field got so full?

The show is a lot of that — inside bloggy stuff — but it’s pretty interesting to get Cook’s take on the situation a lot of us find ourselves in. Cook has a very very very very very (very) specific niche in covering one school and basically one team. Can his success work on a national level? Are there just too many voices and not enough people listening? Has he convinced me to give it all up and start doing family portraits at the mall?

Look, if you write for a blog — be it recreational or for your career — you’ve faced a similar situation to what Cook and I discuss. I clearly don’t assert to have any answers and spend most of the show asking the questions. Cook has some good insights, but again, we aren’t sure that his situation translates to people with wider-scoping blogs and/or people who are starting up now.

We talk about traffic patterns for MGoBlog and if he gets more visitors when the team is bad or more when the team is good? We talk a little about this season at Michigan and in the Big Ten and how that translates to the potential chaos in the BCS.

Cook gives his idea for a playoff system — a six-team set up — and we debate the merits of a system that would have the Big 12 (and other “power” conferences) on the outside. We talk about this year’s Big East and wonder if it’s worse than when the league sent a terrible Pitt team to get waxed by Utah. (for full disclosure, I think I said Pitt was 7-5 that season, but they were actually 8-3. We also may have said it was Boise State but meant Utah. I’m not sure if that hurt or helps the argument).

We talk about the Cam Newton situation and wonder if Auburn does get to the national title game, what happens if more tangible evidence comes out that the school was somehow involved in illegal (per NCAA rules) activity? Will they reshuffle the deck and put another team in the game? What happens to LSU, whose only loss was to Auburn? Technically that would make LSU undefeated, even though they didn’t play in the SEC title game. Does that move them up to the top of this list?

How do we ensure this happens? Chaos is all we can root for at this point.

Thanks to Brian, and you for listening. Make sure to listen to our other show today as well.

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Posted on November 16, 2010 at 12:04PM

 

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  1. Hank
    11/16 2010

    Very nice discussion, Dan and Brian. In regards to clickthroughs, it’s a shame that the data – while exposing how hit-or-miss a mass media ad can be in an newspaper or radio – also has raised expectations to somewhere they have never been before for advertisers. The answer lies in two things: coupons that are easily quantifiable and Web sites you would like to click-through to. Unfortunately, many of those ideas come from an ad rep working with a client, and that’s not always something in the blogger tool kit.

    As for the discussion on schedules, and Boise St.’s in particular, the Big Ten does a decent job of using the MAC in recent years to add nonconference home games and limit the FCS contests. Unfortunately, there are only so many MAC and Sun Belt conference teams to go around. Other conferences, already inclined to take easy FCS home wins and fill the stadium regardless, are then limited by the scheduling options available. That, combined with the abject fear of appearing on the blue turf, has limited the options of smaller conference powerhouses (though Utah was able to get Pitt and Notre Dame this season). I think it was implied that Boise should forego nonconference home games if it means playing theoretical teams of substance, but that doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever.