Goodnight Vienna

OSU slugs Baylor, 55-28

Those were the first words I ever typed on this website. And these will be my last.

I started Pistols Firing on Nov. 10, 2010. It wouldn’t launch for another two months, but I toiled at it for those two months without telling anyone because I wanted to prove to myself that I could run a website covering Oklahoma State sports. Then I spent the next 10 years trying to prove that to everyone else.

Last week, just before Thanksgiving, a deal was finalized for Marshall Scott to purchase White Maple Media, which is the company that owns Pistols Firing. That means I no longer own this site, and I no longer work here. Like Mike Gundy on Chuba Hubbard: “It’s over … gone.”

This news will undoubtedly delight a small percentage of you just as it will be legitimately sad for a different small subset of you. But for the majority of you, the reaction to this news will be ambivalence, which is always the point when building a business. Whatever you leave behind should be a lot bigger than the single person who started it, so I am glad for how many of you are ambivalent about this news.

Of course I couldn’t leave without spilling I don’t know 2,000 or 3,000 words about what it meant to build this site, what it means to leave it behind and some of my favorite memories from a decade of giving myself to it for so many hours, days, weeks and months.

For the last time, here we go.

1. A Decade

Was it Bob Stoops who said being any place for 10 years is a long time? I think it was him. Mike Gundy experienced that in 2014 when Daxx was on his back every other play and the postseason started getting dark.

I’ve written 9,000 posts for Pistols Firing. I’ve thought about this website every day for the last 10 years. Every day. Of the 3,600 available days, I probably wrote something on 3,200 of them. Maybe more. The passage of time.

I’m incredibly proud to have started Pistols Firing (see No. 10), but I also want to do other things in life. In theory, I never wanted to be 50 years old, grinding over four-star kids from Nacogdoches. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it was never my desire. In reality, though, there was no reason to stop.

So when this unique and bizarre year presented an opportunity for me to receive what I felt like was something fair for the work I’d put in and to get both time and mental space back to give elsewhere in my life, I took it. And something — an ending — that once felt so far off and so improbable is now here. That, as you can imagine, is a very bittersweet thing.

2. Learning to Write

One of the things I will miss the most is when you know you have the goods after a big game or a big event and you get to hit publish and then you know tens of thousands of folks are going to laugh at something you said or nod along in agreement. Damn, I wanted the ball after big games. I wanted to write really great stuff both because it’s a rush to know you’re performing at the highest level you’re capable of performing at and also because you know others will feel the same.

But boy was I terrible when I started. The problem was that in 2011, I actually thought I was good at writing. It’s toughhhhhhhhhhhh to look back on some of those posts and wonder what exactly I was thinking as I typed.

I am about a quarter of the writer I someday hope to be, but that’s about 20 times better than I was. All that to say I am grateful for a training ground upon which I could develop and learn and figure out how to string words together in coherent and hopefully enjoyable ways. Doing something in obscurity — which is what this place was for the first 3-4 years — is always the best way to experiment. Doing something every day — which is always the advice I give younger writers — is the best way to develop a skill. I got to do both with something I loved.

3. Was it Fun? Was it Informative?

Mike Holder infamously (?) came on our podcast a few years ago and said … well, a lot of things. But one of my biggest takeaways was when he said that he reads PFB for information, to find stuff out. That was staggering to me, even though eight years into the thing I guess it shouldn’t have been.

My goal was always two-fold, from the very beginning. Inform and entertain, and it’s OK to do both at the same time. When we failed, it was often because we strayed from this. We either took ourselves too seriously or were not as vigilant as we should have been with our information.

I remain as fascinated in 2020 as I was in 2010 about how information — and specifically the news — is presented. It’s both an intoxicating and dangerous thing that anyone can become a content creator, and we tried to always hold that new reality with sobriety and integrity, even if this was just a sports website.

The part that I was reminded of along the way when I got emails from parents or family members is that you aren’t discussing the way chess pieces move around a board. These are not inanimate objects. They’re humans who have fears and joys, anger and sadness just like we do.

I once sent a message to Mike Yurcich’s wife apologizing for being unkind about her husband’s performance early in his career. Objectively, it wasn’t good, but there was a way to frame it (even a humorous way) that wasn’t mean. She was very gracious about that, which I always appreciated.

4. A Craving for Objectivity

Somebody on Twitter once said to me something like, “When are you going to pick a side here? You’re on different sides of topics more than anyone I know.”

This is legitimately one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received from a reader.

While the broader world is becoming more polarized and every subject becomes unequivocally binary (you either love 100 percent of the things person or organization X does or you love 0 percent of them), I always hungered to remain objective, or as close to it as possible.

As it turns out, this is not the greatest business model for running a college sports site that is specifically catered to devoted fans, but I’m proud of the fact that I rarely pandered and did work that, while it was maybe not as lucrative as it could have been, I can look back on and still believe in. Again, I could have picked a better industry than the semi-obsessive, frenetic world of college athletics, but c’est la vie.

5. Favorite Athletes, Favorite Games, Favorite Pieces

The best thing I ever wrote for this site was probably this Baker-Mason piece ahead of Bedlam 2017. I don’t know, it’s all subjective. But that’s one I think about a lot. Baker is so easy to sports hate, which makes him such a great backdrop upon which to write Mason or OSU. It just sort of flows.

Coincidentally, that 2017 Bedlam game is probably my favorite I covered for PFB. More draft picks than a Kentucky locker room. The entire night was a roller coaster ride, and Gundy finally let go of his demons. Tyron destroyed (there needs to be something stronger than italics to emphasize how good Tyron was that night). Justice was the best player on the field. It was the clash of so many micro and macro Bedlam storylines, and the characters were compelling.

BPS was elite that night, too. It’s always a special place, but that night it legitimately felt like the home of a top-10 program (not team, but program) in the nation.

There were other great games to cover. The Marcus Smart game in Lawrence, beating Trae Young in GIA was immense, the Fiesta Bowl, the TCU game in 2015, the Baylor game in 2013, the OU game in 2018 (!). I lament that OSU hoops was never consistently at the level that any of us want it to be at while I ran PFB, but football mostly made up for that.

The most we ever freaked out behind the scenes was probably the night Cade Cunningham committed (pick a worse time of the day, Cade!). We were scrambling to get something going because there had been so many false starts and so much hearsay.

I’ll surely forget some guys, but off the top of my head my favorite guys to cover were Tyron Johnson, Markel Brown, Matthew Wolff (who was 11 when PFB started), Justin Blackmon, Justice Hill, Tylan Wallace, Brandon Weeden (the pod guest king), Justin Gilbert and Jawun Evans.

6. I Love Mike Gundy

I wrote Gundy a note this week thanking him for letting us cover his program for the period of time he allowed us to cover his program. It’s not an automatic right to get to do that, and he was generous to allow it for several years. I’m bummed that it’s no longer allowed, but that doesn’t really change the way I view Mike Gundy.

His view of us is more emblematic of how I imagine many 50-70 year-olds view the crossroads of the internet, media companies and journalism entities in 2020. His shortcoming here, if there is one, is that he hasn’t surrounded himself with people he trusts enough to believe them when they tell him no. That doesn’t make him a bad person or a terrible leader.

After my daughter died in 2015, I got a hand-written note from him, which was a tremendous kindness and a nice symbol of the type of family-friendly world he runs.

Gundy was one of the best things that ever happened to Pistols Firing. I’ve written this before, but imagine a site like this in the 1990s (if the internet existed). It would have been fine, but it wouldn’t have thumped like it did for the last decade. Gundy has been so much fun to cover, such a tremendous ambassador for Oklahoma State, and someone whose management style and program-building I learned a lot from. I’m both indebted to him and thankful that he was the head coach at OSU while I ran this business.

7. The People You’ll Meet

I always laugh when folks are like, “You know, all of this is really just about the people” as if they just discovered an antidote for polio. Like, very brave of you to care about other human beings like a normal human being does. However, cliches are cliches because they are true.

We don’t have the time or space for me to dive deep on everybody who poured themselves out just to help me build a product that was 1 percent better or 2 percent smoother, and I’ll undoubtedly leave several folks out anyway. So instead, I chose five that I want to address quickly.

Marshall Scott: I’ll never forget Marshall coming up to me at the 2018 NCAAs at Karsten Creek and us making small talk and him somehow ending up with a media business at the age of 25. I’m so glad for him, though. Nobody works harder, is more prepared or cares more about doing a great job than he does. And he’s a better reporter at 25 than I’ve ever been.

Matt Quade: Not many of you know Matty, but he’s been a dear friend for a long time and somebody who has always encouraged me professionally in ways that will never pay dividends for him. I’m grateful for it and both a better person and leader because of it.

Carson Cunningham: The very best thing about podcasts — and the thing nobody really talks about — is that it gives you this open-ended forum to talk about anything you want to in ways that are not uncomfortable. That is, we ostensibly had a podcast about OSU football, but the reality is that it led to conversations about much more important things that we otherwise might not have had.

Kyle Boone: PFB would not have become what it became without KB coming aboard. Facts only. He was the bridge between one guy in his mom’s basement (I never wrote from a basement and my mom has never had a basement) to this business with up to 10 folks contributing content and building something special. He’s also become an immense confidante and friend.

Jen: It seems unfair that so often we choose a partner for the rest of our lives at such tender ages when we are not yet who we will become. I am lucky to have chosen well despite myself and for her to not have run the other way. None of this happens without her encouragement, care and one-on-one nightly counseling sessions in which I would inevitably rant about any number of ridiculous circumstances involving recruiting violations, third-down conversions or why our forum was broken that happened in an online environment with which she has very little familiarity. The absolute best.

8. The Places You’ll Go

Memphis on New Year’s Eve, I-35 at 2 a.m. after Bedlam to get back to Dallas, the Stillwater Best Buy to write 10 thoughts on the KU game in 2011. On the field after the Texas game in 2018.

There have been so many unintended benefits to starting what I thought would always be a one-man blog about sports. One of the things I most looked forward to was getting to lead and manage our squad. I failed in a million ways, but our people were always kind and generous, even when they had to tell me that, no, they did not in fact read the 35-page “guide to working at Pistols Firing” I put together.

One unintended benefit was befriending the folks running Boone Pickens’ team. I’ll never forget his invite to me to fly with him to the Missouri State game in 2018. He wasn’t in great health at the time, and he actually drove out onto the tarmac where our plane was idling and at the last minute decided to bail. The rest of us still flew up to the game, but we left at halftime to get back. I remember taking off adjacent to BPS as the lights started to pop the dark Oklahoma sky and the players ran around the field like ants, thinking, “Man, this is not a thing I expected when I bought the domain pistolsfiringblog.com on GoDaddy in 2010.”

9. Emptying the Tank

Interestingly, this place became both far more than I ever dreamed and also fell far short of what I eventually realized it could be. So there are probably some lessons to be learned (or some therapy to be had) in there, but one thing remains true for each day from the last 10 years. I emptied the tank on every sentence, every tweet and every game.

While I might not have been the best writer or podcaster or reporter or didn’t know how the media actually worked until about 2014, I hope you know that what you got was all of my emotion, everything I had about all of these silly sports every single time. That’s a vulnerable place to exist, but I think (hope?) it resonated.

To be transparent here, I struggled a lot at times with how much time people spent on the site, on what amounts to entertainment. We probably do that too much as a society to begin with, and I often felt complicit. My reconciliation (justification?) there was that I supposed folks would be spending that time on OSU sports anyway, and I wanted to make it good, but I definitely had some wars in my mind over it.

I hope somewhere within that I was able to point to what actually does matter in life and didn’t remain too fixated on the sports. I have changed a lot over the last 10 years, and what filled up my mind when I was 25 doesn’t as much now that I’m 35. I’m sure (or I hope) I’ll be able to say the same in another 10 years.

I was glad for the opportunity to write about how the Lord changed my life when our daughter died, and that wasn’t just some emotional rhetoric around a traumatic event. It’s what I believe and seemed to me a reasonable way for a follower of Jesus to respond to death. I’m hopeful my eternal perspective resounded in my writing because I always (always!) tried to remind readers that while college football is fun (really fun), it is also, in the end, a temporal joy. Simply a shadow of what’s to come.

10. The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done

Outside of following Jesus, the most important decision I’ve made in my life is to start this website. That sounds insane, but it’s true.

Starting this website led to a cascade of other events in my life including (but not limited to) getting a job covering golf at CBS, which led to working from home, which contributed to us entering into foster care, which led to us fostering and adopting our oldest daughter, who has changed my life in both meaningful and trivial ways.

The entire trajectory of my life is different all because a bunch of you enjoyed reading my thoughts about OSU’s running backs or the language I pulled out of Travis Ford’s contract that showed just how much OSU had to pay him to walk away. I am both grateful and humbled by that reality.

I don’t know how to end this, but if I don’t end it soon I’ll probably just keep writing until I’m babbling about Keiton Page’s usage rate.

Do this for me. Promise yourself after you read this that you’ll consider that thing you’ve always wanted to do or that project you’ve always wanted to launch. Think about how to do it wisely and responsibly (I did this site for two years while I kept my day job). And then just … do it. It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and you will want to quit 39,000 times (roughly). But it will be worth it because even when (not if, when) it fails along the way, you will be learning and growing. Your life will not be in stasis.

As for me, I’ll probably have some wine tonight with my wife while we yell at our kids to go back to bed and discuss the last 10 years. I will tell her about how much fun I had with all of you, my internet friends, and which teams I enjoyed writing about the most. She will not care at all, but I will also tell her how I think Marshall is going to thrive and how I hope he lets me keep my 100 percent discount to the PFB store into perpetuity. She will roll her eyes, but I know that she will be proud of me for a thing I did.

And then at the end, maybe (maybe!) I will get mildly emotional and tell her that I’m thankful for how much she supported me along the way and how much fun I had doing all of this. I’ll tell her that I’m actually both glad and sad that I’m leaving, and that I’m not sure what to do with that. Then I’ll close by telling her that I’m so grateful to have had an audience to talk to along the way and that I sure hope they enjoyed the show.