I hope you didn't think we were done with this.
It's come to our attention that several of our nominations are totally invalid, because as committee members Peter and Joel pointed out, the previous year's winners are ineligible.
So, uh, whoops.
With that, let's touch only on the categories that are changed, because really, you don't need to read me fawn over grown men. For the full rundown of our nominations, here are Parts I, II, and III.
Funniest blog:
The temptation exists to declare something like, "If Orson's not the funniest, then nobody is!" and storm off or whatever, but that's not fair for anybody. Our nomination, then goes to mgoblog, whose brand of esoteric humor doesn't fly at quite the breakneck speed as Orson's, but still makes us feel clever for understanding anyway. Congratulations, Brian. You get sloppy seconds.
Best ACC blog:
Anybody but Eagle in Atlanta. Not because he won last year; he just makes me so mad!
Best Big 10 blog:
This will probably end up going to last year's runner-up, MZone. But they're not part of the BTB, so death to the infidels! My vote sticks with RUTS.
Best SEC blog:
With Orson out of the way, this clears the path for previously unheralded Valiant Underdog, a powerhouse of a Vanderbppffffffhahahaha never mind, we'll go with more Three-fer Madness:
1a. 3rd Saturday in Blogtober receives the first spot because it's first alphabetically. Seems a bit unfair. Anyhoo, it's a Tide fan and a Vawl fan blogging together! Mass hysteria! It's actually really well done, professional, excellent the whole way through.
1b. Then there's Dawg Sports, and to call TKK "wordy" is like calling the inside of a volcano "warm." For crying out loud, even his testimonials sidebar is even over 400 words long. But it's a good thing! There's nothing worse than reading 10 pages of someone who's trying to stretch 3 pages of material, and there's nothing better than 10 pages of good material.*
1c. Lastly, we must mention Rocky Top Talk, because every time I go there, I end up thinking to myself, "wow, he spends way more time working on that site than we do. For an example just from the main page, don't ever expect a post of ours to look this good. Ever.
Best national blog:
Well, SMQ's right out, having won last year... so in comes EDSBS in a stunning upset! The crowd goes wild!
That, of course, will not fly. So forget that. We do like the ubiquitous Wizard of Odds, who somehow or another manages to break just about fucking everything ever. He posts about 5 times a day during the season, and there's no better rundown of mainstream press coverage than his daily Reporters' Notebooks. We highly recommend adding The Wiz to your RSS feed; you'll wonder incredulously why you hadn't done so earlier.
MNC:
Every Day Should Be Saturday SMQ
The guy shits wisdom and farts brilliance.** He shouldn't know this much. Only Phil "The Thrill" Steele knows more, and Steele is not from this world. If there's any justice in this world, by this time next year SMQ will be doing what he does for a large media organization, and for great sums of money.
Anyhoo, I think that covers everything, other than Best Writing going to two writers and not three. This is probably the last of our "let's cram like 20 outside links into one post so you can get bored a quarter of the way through" nomination series, so be happy for that. Back to regular programming later. And by "regular," I mean "arbitrarily assigning sexual deviancies to Big Ten coaches." But you knew that.
*Of course, this statement is patently false. We can all name about 6,000 things better than reading. You get what I meant, though.
**That probably won't be making it in his testimonials.