It's been asked why we cover certain topics and not others, certain issues and not others, and so forth. And it dawned on us that we've never laid out our blog philosophy.
So, here it is.
1. Our primary interest is always the games themselves. In the sports we cover, we're always going to be more invested in the actual game on Saturday (or Wednesday or...) than the six days of non-game conversation about the stuff we'll talk about in a few seconds.
2. The sports we're most interested in are Australian Footy, FBS college football, and NFL football. We're also covering lower division colleges as they interest us (FCS mostly), Canadian football in season, high school games if something exciting or unusual happens, and we're starting to reach out into the "relatives" - rugby, maybe gaelic football, etc. But there's only so much we can cover with a limited staff, and we want to be able to know what we're talking about!
3. Just because we enjoy other sports whose ball isn't ellipsoid doesn't mean we're going to cover them here. We're huge basketball fans, we golf, we bowl, and there's an entire planet filled with futbol fans that we're not serving. Tough beans. Sorry. We're sticking to our field.
4. We are much more interested in teams than players. This is more "controversial", we suppose, but there's a reason for it. We firmly believe in the sanctity of the actual games - and stand firmly against the "fantasy football" concept that individual statistics have any value at all except towards the success of their team. Frankly, it disturbs us to watch people abandon their favorite team because an opponent's QB is on their fantasy team, and they're busier rooting for a fourth TD pass to care whether their own team wins. That's why we rarely bring up individual player statistics and never deal with the "fantasy" focus.
5. Since our focus is on the games, we rarely cover the business side of football. Finances, ownership issues, player contracts, drug use or suspensions, salary caps, draft day, high school recruiting classes and the like don't interest us much. We understand they're important. Just...not to us. We'd like to pretend there's a little more purity in the game than there really is, to be frank. Realistic? Not really.Too bad. It's our blog, and we'll live in our little world of rainbows and unicorns...
6. There are a few topics off the field we'll touch on. We've talked about injuries and concussions, we certainly cover rankings and the like, we'll cover human interest stories if we're the humans they interest, we'll link interesting football writers, and if it's really important, we'll discuss something like the Ray Rice spousal abuse case or the Incognito/Martin debacle in Miami last year, if we have something worthwhile to say. But mostly, we leave that to others wiser than us.
7. Finally, the most important principle we have is the Golden Rule: we don't say anything about anyone that we wouldn't accept being said to us, or that we wouldn't say to their face. Too many writers hide behind their keyboard, thinking they have impunity to insult or degrade. They don't. And neither do we. Our character is the most important thing we have; we will not sacrifice it for sensationalism, or anything else. We happen to be Christians, and while that won't be noticeable very often in our writing, it pervades everything we do: living up to the moral and ethical standards set for us by the Lord.
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