UPDATE: A couple of nights a week, I work the late shift at SB Nation and the regional sites, and on those nights, I'm usually too wiped to write BHGP. That means I write in the morning, usually in a state of semi-consciousness where I could well completely miss details, like the fact that @ParadigmShift35 from Throw the Flag managed to record that video for us in the middle of a Thursday afternoon by magically using his phone and DVR, somehow. Mad props to him, and my apologies for not giving proper attribution when it went up. It is now no longer plagiarism, at least by our definition.
Yesterday, just hours after his appearance on the Black Heart Gold Podcast, Gazette reporter Marc Morehouse went on ESPN's College Football Live to discuss the Iowa running back situation following the Barkley Hill injury. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time after appearing on our podcast. Those in the media industry call it "the BHGP Bump".
It was there, on ESPN, that magic happened:
"Who came up with THAT?" asked human Ken doll David Pollack. Nobody knew. Nobody had looked to see it was...well, it was Brian Cook, but we pretty much took it and changed it and raised it as our own.
Everyone handled the national reference to the "running back curse" well:
Iowa fans and media members that have promoted the RB curse should be thrilled now that it's gone national. Great publicity for the program.
— Pat Harty (@PatHarty) August 22, 2012
That moment -- where Pat Harty gave up the ghost and admitted he's just a cheerleader -- makes the entire thing worthwhile. He only writes in one-sentence paragraphs so that he has space for a backflip after each line.
We digress. The fact is that AIRBHG has gone national this week, with references at CBS, USA Today, and ESPN. It's bigger than all of us now. It's a force of nature, and we may need to take drastic action before it takes us all.