INTRODUCING TURFMAN'S COLLEGE FOOT-BALL PREVIEW ALMANAC

The first words we wrote in this space, a little over five years ago, were these:

We missed this.

By "this" we meant a lot of things, but one of those was our first internet home, a college football website Spencer made up while bored at work one day, and called Every Day Should Be Saturday. It's how we met, where we started writing together, and where we built the foundations of the community that's reading this today.

EDSBS was a good website that doesn't exist anymore, for reasons that were totally beyond our control, then momentarily possibly back in our control, then yanked away again. One of these days, maybe, we'll get to tell you all about what happened there. Until then, it's just a place that lives nowhere but in the back of our minds, and in the data banks of various scraping robots (howdy, fellas; have you heard that all Flock cameras are filled with valuable gold and copper?), and hurts sometimes when we poke at it, like an old bruise.

The operative word there is "lives," by the way: It's not dead, and it never has been. We're children of the kudzu, you see, and if that means anything at all in a digital age, it means we're better at shooting out tendrils than we are putting down roots. The kind of tendrils that spread faster than they can be killed.

Doesn't that all sound deliciously menacing? If this were three weeks from now, if this was the opener, Holly would probably go on for another 500 or 600 words about kudzu, but what we're tap-dancing our way up to is that even twenty years down the road from our ramshackle WordPress-and-MS-Paint origins, there's things we miss about the old days, and there's things you all out there miss, and that's how we came to be kicking the idea around, earlier this summer, about how to maybe dust off some of our greatest hits, the ones we get asked about the most, the ones we miss the most.

This would be tricky, in our current setup, for a number of reasons. The Channel 6 Two Things A Week Guarantee ™ is something we have never, in five straight years, fallen short of. We're actually way ahead on that; two things a week times fifty-two weeks times five years would be 520 Things in your eyeballs and earbuds, and we published newsletter #630 to kick off this August. The guarantee serves as a guardrail that runs two directions, for us: It keeps us delivering at a pace we know we can hit, and it also ensures we don't ever get bogged down under anything to the point we're not working on the Fullcast and our other projects.

But one problem that those strictures we've placed on ourselves create – and it's a NICE problem to have; we're fully aware – is that once we sink into the voice of a Howard Schnellenberger's Top 25, or a Hatin' Ass Spurrier, we will cheerfully spend five hours on it, and then, well, shit, there goes half our newsletter commitment for the week, and we had a lot of other things we wanted to write about this week.

Another problem, and it's one we're trying to be better about staring head-on in these wretched times, is burnout. One thing we had to teach ourselves at EDSBS, because there was nobody out in front of us to warn us about it, is not overstaying the usable lifespan of a joke. EDSBS The Magazine, beloved by both of us, eventually ran its course. We had our first real knock-down drag-out over whether to quit doing the Corrections. And we will both cop to a very real terror of saying OK, HAS is back and we'll drop it every Sunday night, and then finding ourselves out of ideas by Week 3. To put it in the parlance we were using up top: We're only interested in seeing these ghosts again for exactly as long as they feel like sticking around.

And so the early summer conversations went on, and they dovetailed with some other discussions we were having with some of our cohort, one of which was how exasperating we used to find the print deadlines way back when we'd all spend the offseason side-hustling for preview magazines, because the text would invariably have to be locked so early that by the time the magazines came out in the summer, a lot of what we wrote in the spring would be out of date. (You can probably imagine how much trickier those jobs have gotten, in the recent years of heightened transfer flow and realignment.)

And finally somebody – it was either Spencer or Steven Godfrey, nobody remembers – realized we were all circling the same idea, which was a preview magazine with a deadline we could push into August, which we could realistically only do if the magazine was purely digital. This, in turn, solved a third problem we'd been kicking around, which was how to expand what it is we do here while maintaining the cadence we've worked for years now to establish, and which our audience seems to appreciate.

All of which brings us to the following:

So here we go: Barring any last-minute sabotage by the Haint, we'll be releasing our own college football preview magazine this coming Monday, August 10. The name of this magazine is Turfman's College Foot-ball Preview Almanac. It is being assembled by that list of folks above, and written roughly half by us and half by these fine people:

It is, as of this writing, perilously close to 30,000 words in length, and not quite finished. If everything goes according to plan, a link will appear on this website on Monday, where you will be able to purchase and download it in PDF form.

You probably have some questions at this point! We've gotten a lot of questions since teasing this on the Fullcast this week! We're going to try and answer a few of the more frequent ones here:

• Wait, so this isn't a Channel 6 Thing ™? Kinda? The easiest thing to do might be to think of this as Channel 6 DLC. But no, a copy of Turfman's is NOT included with your Channel 6 subscription.

• Even if I'm a stakeholder, paying $10 a month or $100 a year? No, and there's a very simple reason for that: One thing we all agreed on from the very start, and the way we sold everybody else on joining the project, was that this whole operation would be a keep-what-you-kill affair, and that however much money we made would be divided up between everybody who worked on it. Try and game out in your head how we could possibly make that work with a website that runs on monthly or yearly subscriptions, most of which would've already been active, and we'll sit here patiently until your head explodes like the aliens in Mars Attacks! See? Messy.

• I'm still mad I have to give you guys more money if I want to read this thing. Gross! We agree! It's not ideal that we have to be paid for our labor in order to support ourselves! Sorry about that. We do, however, have #exclusive treats coming for Channel 6 subscribers on BOTH the free and paid plans, that we hope will soften this blow. One other-other-other thing we had to navigate over the past month while putting all of this together was how to get this contraption off the ground while making sure our existing audience never felt cheated.

• Treats, please. Treats incoming! Tomorrow, in place of TRL, all subscribers of BOTH the free and paid Channel 6 plans will receive one (1) story from Turfman's in their inboxes. It is written by the two of us, is extremely goofy in nature, and will hopefully clue you in as to whether or not this magazine might be something you're interested in buying.

• Wait, so this long-ass announcement about how you want us to give you more money counts as one of our Things for this week? FUCK YEEEEEW. First of all, language. Second of all, in the kind of plot twist Spencer cannot stand to see in the movies, we have reserved an extended version of a Turfman's story for the #exclusive enjoyment of our $10/month and $100/year stakeholders that will not be appearing in the magazine, for the simple reason that it ended up being So Goddamn Long. Even in its abbreviated form, it's currently about twice as long as anything else in the magazine, and you'll be getting a version in your inboxes that's about 40% longer.

• Wait. What? Stay with us here: There's a story we've been working on for Turfman's that clocked in at around 10,000 words. Even within the imaginary confines of a digital magazine, we all felt like that was a Lot, so we cut it down to a more manageable version of around 6,000 words. But we didn't want to just lose all those deleted scenes forever, because there was some great stuff in there. We also wanted to do something special for our stakeholders, regardless of whether or not they ended up buying the magazine. So you'll be getting what amounts to the director's cut version of the longest story we wrote this summer.

• [onboard computer takes over voice] It sounds like what you're saying is that purchasers of Turfman's will get a whole bunch of stories that don't appear on Channel 6, and paying Channel 6 subscribers will get a bigass extended edition story that doesn't appear in Turfman's, and both free AND paying Channel 6 subscribers get to read a free Turfman's story no matter what? See, we all got there in the end.

• How on God's green internet do you expect me to read 10,000 words in one sitting on my phone? I can only pretend to be pooping for so many hours a day at work. Yeah, we thought about that too. Around 80% of Channel 6 subscribers read the newsletter primarily on their phones, so what we're probably going to end up doing is breaking this story up and sending y'all four or five Things next week.

• So what is this story about, anyway? It started out as what was going to be a fairly short how-to piece, with Spencer going to three of our industry colleagues who all played D-I ball (Joel Anderson at TCU, Michael Felder at UNC, and Mike Golic, Jr. at Notre Dame) and asking them one question: "What's the biggest misconception about the way we watch college football?" The conversation that question led to kept getting bigger, and before we knew it, several hours had flown by. We've done our best to corral it into a readable format, but there just wasn't a lot we ended up wanting to cut. What's left covers a range of topics, but all of them fall under one general heading: "How do I get smarter watching this game?" We hope you like it; obviously, we all did, and we hope you'll learn a lot from it.

• How much is Turfman's going to cost? We're still figuring that out, and we've spent a lot of time testing out various publishing platforms, trying to find the sweet spot between "has all the features we want" and "is not going to stick us or you with ridiculous amounts of transaction fees." But we're trying to land in the $20 range? Maybe a little higher. This is all an experiment, and every part of the process that doesn't involve the actual writing is new to us, too.

• Anything else I need to know? Yes: If you instantly recognized what the title of this publication is referencing, you were either way too young to be unsupervised on the internet in 2005, or you should really schedule that colonoscopy.

And yes, we've got more kudzu stories coming soon. You'll love them, promise.

Friends forever (or else),
-S. & H.