Hello. First, let’s get to the important news: This website is now three years old. By reaching that mark, it has now outlived the full run of Blue Mountain State, the lifespan of The People’s Republic of Zanzibar, and two different Willie Taggart head coaching stints (Oregon and FSU.)
It’s now past the toddler stage, which means it can get on the cabinets and ask for the iPad clearly and with a terrifyingly determined look in its eye. We’re still a year away from the little website demanding the purchase of new and exciting cryptocurrencies for the funding of very important Roblox adventures, but that’s coming and we’re dreading it anyway.
We owe you, the subscriber, a debt of gratitude for that. If life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, then your work at its best has to be the rolling train you build while laying down the tracks in front of it. This started as a hey-let's-see side gig post-COVID while we learned how to navigate life outside the corporate newsroom. Fortunately for us, things beat us to the punch, figured us out, and saved us the trouble of all that planning.
Three entire years in, and it turns out we still love writing about stuff for you and ourselves. I'm just going to list a few favorites here; Holly surely has her own:
- The three part Every SEC Game Previewed series, which remains fun because you kind of have to start hallucinating somewhere around the 3000 word mark.
- The Top Whatever, where we still only write weekly in-season about the coolest shit that happens every week in college football, rankings and ratings be damned.
- Writing about how every NFL quarterback is now, by necessity, a reckless college QB at heart
- Talked with private equity people about how your football team should absolutely not get into bed with private equity
- Confirmed with real pilots and a flight simulator test that no, you probably aren’t landing a plane as a total amateur from 30,000 feet up in the sky
- Reviewed Mike Gundy’s mansion with McMansion Hell’s own Kate Wagner
- Capped off Nick Saban’s career by suggesting we think of him less as a coach, and more of a “climate-altering meteor.”
- Reminded you AGAIN to stop tweeting at recruits
- The openers: One about trying to be good, and the other about being there even when you can’t.
- Went to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, wrote about it, and became enthralled by the idea of the snack baguette.
That last one might be most relevant here. The greatest thing about being independently funded by subscribers is freedom. If we want to go somewhere, we can. We will, time and tide permitting, because the most fun I have doing this is putting this thing on the road and seeing how fast these tires will go before exploding.
I went back and reread last year’s thank you letter. It mentioned a lot of the things we continue to do — the Top Whatevers, the occasional manifesto about tiny coffees and Jack Reacher’s slab-brained magnificence — but also wanting to do more audio and more Grand Tour stories, the ones where we go to the best sporting events in the world and write about why and how people do this in the first place.
We knocked out Le Mans this year. Right now, I’m sitting as close as I've ever been to nowhere, in the upper reaches of outer Mongolia. I hope you've been enjoying the audio diaries whenever I can get them to you, because believe it or not, the Altai Mountains and far western steppes of inner Asia do not have 5G service yet.
That’s the part I love the most: Actually being able to follow up and execute an insane idea we had a year ago, and then write about it. At heart, I think the only way I can understand people is by watching them play games: How they play them, who they play them with, what they bring with them and surround themselves with when they do.
I know the game we play with you has been going strong for three years. A lot of you bought in at least to the idea: There are over 16,000 subscribers at this point, with a minority fraction of you making this thing work via your $10 a month or $100 a year. It's a number that continues to trend stubbornly upward, even through the long college football offseason. It’s a committed game for many, so much so that a whopping 61% of our total paid subscribers are annual subscribers.
It’s a game that, thanks to you, can go anywhere. Right now I feel that sentence on a very literal level. I’m about to go to sleep in a tent alongside the Mongolian side of a massive glacier that touches three countries. I’ll get to tell you all about it when I get back, because that’s my job, and one y’all make possible. We can’t thank you enough. Please take the incoming photos of horses and men throwing each other to the ground in coats and elaborate underwear as proof of my gratitude.
P.S. If you've read this far, you've unlocked our annual pricing adjustment announcement, which for the third year in a row will be repeated like so: There is no pricing adjustment announcement. $10 a month or $100 a year seems to be suiting everybody just fine. If you'd like to show additional gratitude in some way, bully a friend into subscribing with you.
Oh, and one more thing: Anything that hits three years old isn't just stumbling around clinging to couch arms anymore. This is the age when they start to try and run.
