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 Volunteering To Be Stupid On The InternetI got an email from a friend of mine today warning me about shopping advice on the internet. He says a lot of what you find is outdated. Then he went on a mini-rant about how there's a lot of crap on the internet that needs to be torn down. Sports fans contribute more than their share. I used to have a feature on the front page called "Site Of The Week". Having found a few good fan sites with original content, such as Jerry Palm's BCS site, I decided to highlight one per week on the front page. I then realized that I would have to visit about 50 sites to find one worth highlighting, so I jettisoned the feature. Still, there was no doubt that sites dedicated to Tennessee Volunteer football were the most frequently worthless. In preparing my Decade In Review feature, I had many occasions where I needed information about Tennessee, and thus had the troubling experience of scanning through braindead yokel site after site in my hopeless search. Prompted by my friend's rant, I checked in at The AJ Experience, an internet site dedicated to the once-starting quarterback of the Tennessee Volunteers, AJ Suggs. Suggs was replaced by Casey Claussen midseason. True to Volunteer form, the AJ diary was last updated after the Florida game, and the schedule was last updated not long after. Jerry Palm's site is on the College Football Webring, one of Yahoo's webrings. I did a search for "Tennessee", and I came up with 11 hits. One hit was for a Vanderbilt site, and while this site was nothing special, it was probably the best of the 11. Here, for your consideration of the thesis that Tennessee Fans are Volunteering to be stupid on the internet, are the results of my site visits:
That's right: a whole 0 for 10. Now, to be fair, most fan sites suck. But the search term "Gators" returned 4 sites, one of which at least had the scores filled in for the entire season, and the second of which has a "Pic of the Week" section that actually has a current picture (the same one I had on the front page of Gator players shaking hands with the fans after the SEC championship). That's 50% folks. I didn't do an exhaustive search of Florida State sites, but I know from past history that Seminole fans have among the very best fan sites on the internet. And I have always been proud of the fact that my pages debuted the year of Florida's national title, and have only gotten better since. Compare that to the graveyard of Volunteer sites frozen after the 1998 season (or in some cases after the Tennessee loss to Florida in 1999). Folks, this was a painful story to bring you. I looked at a lot of garish orange backgrounds and unmentionable animated .gif files to bring you this story. I'm just trying to make the world, and cyberspace, a little more palatable for the high-brow. It's not easy, but it is something that had to be done! |
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