A couple of things: first, our pal Mike Pegram, aka Peegs, asked us to
mention his new site (like Kurt O' Neill he maintains about a dozen), Sports
Midwest. Peegs does an excellent job of covering the Midwest, and he also
says that he'll have several forums open for fans of various schools, most of
whom used to read sites until they moved to Rivalnet. Peegs says those readers
are unhappy about that move, which leads us to another issue, namely, Rivalnet.
We've heard other people say the same thing, that they don't like Rivalnet's
look or approach. We feel bad about that because we know several people there,
including of course our pal Kurt O' Neill, and also David Eckoff, who went from
Inside Carolina (though he is still involved) to a plum job in Seattle with
Rivalnet. Despite the fact that we've made fun of Dave, made fun of his site,
parodied the Fly On The Wall, and so forth and so on, he has always been very
nice to us, so we say this to him in the spirit of friendship and constructive
criticism (and also fully cognizant of our own limitations): Dave, the sites a)
look too much alike, and b) are hard to navigate.
We understand the usefulness of templates, and we bow down before every 10
year old with Photoshop when to design and such, but we think those are fair
criticisms. It's an interesting approach, and certainly they've rounded up
the prime recruiting commentators, with a couple of exceptions, including Brick
Oettinger - they have Gibbons now, having swept him away from ACCToday.com,
Mike Sullivan, and Kurt O'Neill, and that's all cool and well and should make
life simpler. But the navigation is a problem. We hope Rivalnet revisits
that issue, and we hope you visit Sports
Midwest..
On another, more comic note, after we ran the comments about www.newsoftheweird.comÂ
and the Durham stories, we got this from Michael in Maryland. Anyone else
remember this?
"I grew up in Durham, went to Duke (from 89 to 93, great time to be there,
made up for 78 for some of us...), and LOVED the news of the weird comments.
But you can't forget the two drunk dudes from Chapel Hill (this is the way I
recall it) who were fishing out on the Banks or maybe Emerald Isle and reeled in
a (no way) sidewinder missile. Must have fallen off a plane practicing manuevers
or some such thing.
Not knowing what to do with it, they threw it on their camp fire."