Request Admin

I would like to report this thread.  He's spamming the board.  Boil him in oil.  I think he does it a fair bit.  I wonder why he hasn't been banned.

I've created controversy

When this blog first started, I posted a few links to it on Tigerdroppings. I thought it was harmless and that LSU fans would want to know about the existence of a new LSU-themed blog. Instead, the management of Tigerdroppings took umbrage at my actions and sent me a nasty cease-and-desist private message. I then put the address of this site in my signature, and they went into my profile and edited it out.

I still didn't see what the big deal was, but I more or less followed the rules for a while. Eventually, another frequent poster on Tigerdroppings started his own college football blog, which he discussed on the board. I warned him that management did not take kindly to people posting links to their own blogs on the board. He responded, "It does involve LSU to an extent." To which I replied, "Mine is strictly LSU content." He must have been shot down by management because the conversation is now heavily edited by him. This happened only a few days ago.

Last night, I saw a post expressing some interest in incoming recruit John Williams. I replied to it with a link to this post. Even though it was perfectly on topic, I knew I was probably breaking the unwritten rule. I got some positive feedback.

This morning, I get up and log onto Tigerdroppings, and I see a Private Message from the management of Tigerdroppings sternly warning me about posting links to the blog and further (and I think appallingly) asking me not to mention on the board that I am not allowed to post links to the blog. I took offense to this, because it means that not only am I not allowed to post the blog, but I am not allowed to post about the fact that I am not allowed to post the blog. I am supposed to pretend that this rule and this blog do not exist, and that all is cool with me and Tigerdroppings management.

I took action. I made a post to the Help board, which has since been deleted, saying that I wouldn't follow that directive. I think some of my exact words were, "The only reason not to allow me to discuss it is because you're embarrassed you're doing it. I won't go for it."

A few minutes later, my posting privileges were taken away with a note to send them an email if I want to post again. I'm not sending that email. I can't in good conscience agree to abide by their latest directive. It's too Orwellian. I am supposed to follow certain rules, but not mention that the rules exist or discuss their impact on me and others.

So, I'm off of Tigerdroppings, which will probably greatly enhance my productivity. I honestly do not understand their position about this. This blog does not in any way compete with Tigerdroppings. Not one bit. In fact, I consider this blog to be something of an offshoot of Tigerdroppings, like a sitcom that spins off from another sitcom. This blog is "Facts of Life" to Tigerdroppings' "Diff'rent Strokes".

If Tigerdroppings was concerned about some kind of a rash of people posting links to their blogs, it's just not a legitimate concern. There aren't enough fans out there with their own sports blogs to worry about it. It won't clutter the board in the least.

And if they were worried about cluttering the board, they certainly don't show it. It's widely acknowledged that the Tiger Rant is filled with idiots, malcontents, and assorted people who post the same topics over and over again. The OT Lounge is admitted, even by its denizens, as a wasteland for attention whores, pictures of half-naked women, sexual obsessions, and bathroom humor. Links to well-thought-out blogs would actually increase the quality of discussion.

So anyway, this is my first banning from Tigerdroppings. It's entirely possible I'll never be back. I doubt they'll miss me that much.

Who am I? What am I doing here?

Last night, I almost went to see LSU vs. Bama in gymnastics. Gymnastics here is a big deal. The meets are better attended than the men's basketball games, in part because the tickets are cheaper than a movie ticket, and in part because a lot of young girls here do gymnastics. My wife has season tickets and she goes with a friend. The friend had to leave town, and I was going to take her ticket because it was LSU and because my wife needed someone to go with her. I've been before, and I have to say it was a lot of fun, and I don't even particularly like gymnastics. I did not make it last night, however, because I took my wife to the hospital. We thought we were having out baby, but it turns out we weren't.

Anyway, since I don't have gymnastics to talk about, I'll just do a postmortem on my first week of keeping a blog. I'll also tell you a little more about why I'm doing this.

I've been a poster at TigerDroppings for a long time. In my time at TigerDroppings, it has evolved from a fairly small community of posters to a huge, bawdy festival of LSU-ness. It is undoubtedly (though I have no statistics to back this up) the single largest and most heavily trafficked LSU-related site on the web.

I respect what Chicken has managed to accomplish. I'm sure Droppings has surpassed his expectations many times over. My problem with Droppings is that, at its size, it has kind of left me behind a little bit. Though there is still great content from many of the posters there, the signal-to-noise ratio has gone way down since 2003. There are so many posters there, and so much activity, that there is little sense of any permanence in any of the writing there. If you start a new topic at a high traffic time, chances are decent that it will fall off of the first page and into oblivion within an hour or so, unless you say something inflammatory or excessively optimistic. The result, I think, is that it discourages in-depth analysis, and the culture has gotten increasingly combative and negative.

Why spend 20 minutes writing out carefully crafted thoughts at TigerDroppings? Most responses will be along the lines of, "I don't come here to read novels," or "That's 2 minutes of my life I'll never have back", and the post will slowly sink to the bottom of the page and into oblivion, never to be seen again. You get a lot more permanence and a lot better response if you say something like, "Check out the [boobs] on Tim Tebow's girlfriend," or "John Brady is teh suck," or make some kind of disparaging remark about DandyDon. I'm not trying to be elitist or anything, but that just isn't my style.

That's why I decided to start this. Well, that and plain old vanity. This is my place for writing about football in more depth, in a place that has more permanence, even if the traffic is a lot lighter. So, place me alongside the Dandy Dons of the world, writing an LSU blog, though I think if you stick around, you'll see that my style is a lot different from ol' Dandy's.

Don't get me wrong, I also respect what he has done. He has kept an LSU blog since long before anyone used the word "blog". At the time he started, I was living in Delaware. The Advocate was just starting to get an online presence, and Dandy was probably my single best source of LSU news. His style is to a little more scattershot than mine, however. He tries to tell you a little bit about everything going on, while I will try to take one topic at a time and give you a lot of depth of analysis. He gets a lot of criticism, but I bet his track record on "scoops" is as good as you'll find at the other sites.

As for what you can expect in the near future, I'm thinking about eventually inviting some guest posters. I have some people in mind who can add a very helpful and interesting perspective, if they're interested in bringing it here. I also have a lot of posts already in the hopper, just waiting to go. Right now, a lot of thoughts are going through my head, and I'm writing them down to turn into posts. Some of them are completed or almost completed, but I'm holding off on them because I will need to have SOMETHING available to post when my baby comes and time becomes a bigger problem.

Among the expected topics in the future:

• Why it's not a bad thing when a player leaves the program.
• Why people look at the 40 yard dash to evaluate players, and why they shouldn't.
• What the heck is a quarterback rating, anyway?
• Richard Murphy, the most highly anticipated redshirt freshman running back in my memory.
• My completely useless March Madness coverage, which may necessitate bringing in a guest writer.
• Why I don't like Tubby Smith's coaching style
  

So stick with me.