Underdog Dynasty Turns One Year Old

So many things can happen in a year. You could lose your football team and get it back, you could move to a new conference and make it your bitch. You could even start a new college football website and have it produce some pretty solid success in its inaugural run.

I thought, since today is our first anniversary, I'd take a quick revisit of everything that went well for us in our first year.

For one thing, we managed to cross the 1.5 million page view threshold, a solid average of over 125,000 per month. Not bad for a website that literally did not exist a year ago. That said, a certain group of articles, those that were our highest trafficked, carried the load for out fledgling site.

• So we decided to celebrate April Fools Day by making a "believable as possible without containing any real information" post about the University of Kentucky killing their football program, Yahoo! picked it up, and... well, the thing blew the hell up. To the point that on the April weekend that I was heading to Birmingham to cover the UAB Alumni Flag Football game, one of the callers to Paul Finebaum's show asked the man himself about its legitimacy.
• We covered the shit out of UAB, including but not limited to being ahead of the story when it first broke last fall, as well as pointing out the larger picture swirling around the football program while we waited for it to return - much to the dismay of bammers everywhere. Oh and that time where J.J. Nelson didn't get his money from Adidas.
• As a lead-in to Georgia Southern's first match up against Georgia State with both teams as FBS members, our own Haisten Willis decided to give an explainer as to why Georgia Southern hates Georgia State. You will be shocked to learn that it ruffled a few feathers. But not many, right Panthers fans? *crickets*
• Will Butler spent way too much time delving deep into the incompetencies surrounding the Texas State Bobcats athletic department and the poor job they're doing of growing their brand. Then he also took the time to cover both sides, including a letter to any Southwest Texas alumni out there who were still holding old grudges that need to be mended for the team to thrive.
• On a serious note, Patrick Sparks took a look back at the 1970 crash and all the meaning it holds for the Marshall Thundering Herd football team. Ryan Smith also took time from our humorous "Erase This Game" series to talk about one game that should never be erased, no matter how bad the play on the field was.
• At the polar opposite end of that was Matt Monte's ribbing of Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns fans and their lack of a firm decision on what their team should be called. This was so fun we almost wrote it a second time. Thomas Sherrill also decided it would be a good idea to take every single G5 program and go FULL BOISE on their home fields. My retinae have yet to recover fully, though at least a few of these fields need to happen yesterday.