Five Media Things: Oklahoma State Sports Nearly Over Until Fall 2018

With golf’s win in the national championship last week and baseball’s loss on Sunday evening to Stetson (which is apparently the 1927 Yankees reincarnate in the A-Sun), Oklahoma State’s sports calendar for the 2017-18 school year is almost closed. The only thing that stands between us and football fall camp as the next item on the calendar is men’s and women’s outdoor cross country NCAAs this week.

So we get a nice 60-day reprieve (and not even that if you count Big 12 media days) and it’s on to another season, another year. They slip by quickly, don’t they?

What I’m Excited About

Year 1 of our experiment with contributors on PFB is nearly complete, and I’m excited for our squad to go back into the lab and cook a little for 2018-19 and beyond. We have a lot to discuss and a lot of decisions to make this summer regarding the fall, and it’s a bit of a thrill to get to participate in that. So bear with us if coverage lapses from time to time as we bang out our new website and gear up for what should be a fascinating football season. We’ll simply be busy trying to make PFB better than it has ever been.

A Media Thing I Think I Believe

I heard from a lot of you after NCAAs last week and even saw some of you at Karsten Creek where Oklahoma State thumped Alabama for the national championship. It was a special week for me for a lot of reasons. My first OSU title to see in person. My first time to cover a NCAA Championship. My first time seeing future hall of famer and 7-time major winner Matthew Wolff.

Sometimes it feels like I live two or three different lives. My PFB life where I interview Spencer Sanders and break down Mike Gundy’s hair. My CBS life where I cover very rich and very famous human beings, mostly from behind a computer screen. And then my actual life, with my friends and my kids and my church and my books.

Last week was incredibly fun for me, and I hope it came out in the writing, to see all three of those lives converge for a few days. I got to see my parents and a few good friends in Stillwater, write about golf (which I’ve been working on for the last six years) and meld it with whatever institutional knowledge I have about Oklahoma State.

It was a blast. The golf is the golf on some level for me at this point. And the OSU news is the OSU news. I’ve warred against becoming the resident curmudgeon about how SPORTS IS MEANINGLESS, and I think I’ve mostly staved that off for the time being. But there was a purity about covering college golf that my buddy Sean Martin tried to explain to me going in. Nobody I know loves college golf more than Sean, and I saw up close exactly why that is.

How much cooler that one of the most dominant title runs in recent memory came at my alma mater, and I got to cover it for a blog I’ve been running for seven years now?

One thing I’ve tried to preach to myself is to continue to enjoy a work lots of people would do unspeakable things to get to produce. Gratitude. I try to preach it to my kids as well as our people here. Some times I’m bad at that. Sometimes I complain too much. Sometimes it’s just flat-out hard when you’re grinding on something at 1 a.m. because the machine must be fed or you don’t want to make a phone call or whatever it is that goes on behind the scenes in the sausage-making portion of the internet.

But weeks like last week are both a reinvigoration and a necessity if you want to do this for a long time. Without them, the job would become rote. I hope to continue to fight to fill in that rut and avoid it at all costs, and I guess I just wanted you guys to know that yes, I loved covering the NCAAs last week and it continues to be a joy to produce a website that people read and enjoy.

So thank you for making that possible.

What I’m Reading

I finished Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? It was fine. Not great. Just fine. Would probably not read another of hers, even though it made me laugh quite a bit. So now I’m only reading like seven books, and I just started this monster.

Also reading: Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour Body, Moonwalking With Einstein, Today Will Be Different, Parenting, On Writing by Stephen King.

I have issues.

If you have any recommendations hit me with them. Mrs. Pistols and I are taking five days in July, and I need to plow through some elite nonfiction.

Contribution And Site Updates

We are at 317 contributors. That’s +1 from last week.

Site Growth

Pageviews through June 4, 2018: 5.45M
Pageviews through June 4, 2017: 5.94M
Most popular post of June 2018: Brad Dalke is jawing about Karsten
Most popular post of June 2017: Bob Stoops retires
Most popular post of 2018: Spencer out as DC

Website Refresh Update

No new updates on this front.