The College Football Blogger Awards are an annual effort to honor the best and brightest of the year in the CFB `sphere. Because it doesn't count if a small number of people can't vote on its superiority. Most of last year's winners have been assigned to present this year's awards in those categories, and EDSBS, Rocky Top Talk, Burnt Orange Nation, MGoBlog, Fire Mark May, Bruins Nation and Blue Gray Sky have been dishing out the honors for the last two days. Check out the full list of nominees.
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The best thing about winning an award from your peers? Being ineligible to win it again. At least when the prize is "Best National Blog," that is, a distinction SMQ managed to steal in last year's version of the College Football Blogger Awards. Normally, I'm as democratic as the next guy aiming for cheap, fleeting validation from his tiny corner of the Web. In this case, however, I wholeheartedly endorse the CFBAs "No Repeat" clause for one very good reason: this year, the organizers decided to reclassify SEC super heavweight Every Day Should Be Saturday in my weight class. And I don't need the virtual equivalent of a shattered jaw in some hopeless title defense, with Orson Swindle hovering over SMQ's broken remains after a first round knockout. It's not a fair fight.
It is with dignity, then, and the utmost graciousness that I pass the "Best National Blog" baton to Every Day Should Be Saturday, grateful for the opportunity to maintain for another year the charade that this humble enterprise is EDSBS' equal in covering the game.
The preceding is a technical faux pas in CFBA procedure, which traditionally (to the extent that one year and the better part of two days constitutes "tradition") plays up the categorical drama before announcing a winner. But where Swindle looms in this neck of the 'sphere, there is no suspense: it's like trying to hide King Kong with a tablecloth. For the record, here is the full list of finalists:
| Voting Style | Popular Nomination/Elite Blogger Cabal |
| This year's | nominees... |
| Blog | Low Down |
| 82 Sluggo Win | USC-centered goodness from the underrated pen of Jonathan Tu, a consistently hilarious, deeply committed, adventurous and inobtrusive houseguest. Also, a proud felon. |
| Every Day Should Be Saturday | Grand Inquisitor, funny man, bon vivant and imperialist godfather. |
| Fan Blogs | Rivals' amalgam of on-the-ball obsessives. |
| Fan House | Many-headed AOL behemoth attacking from all angles. |
| The Wizard Of Odds | News-gathering tentacles are all over everything while images of Deadspin links dance in the competition's slumbering head. |
All of those efforts have caused me some degree of anxiety in the last year by demonstrating excellence in some very specific way. The exalted CFBA blogger panel, however, has deemed EDSBS the grandest of all nationally-focused college football blogs. Hosanna.
Swindle, you bastard, if your idea of congratulations is an AC/DC video and some morbid, primal desire to stab me in the ass with a steak knife for possessing some modicum of talent, the reciprocal sentiment - in strictly proportional terms, talent-wise - must include a recreation of a scene from Saw and Pantera shredding the wavelengths out of the color spectrum:
Domination, indeed.
Let us not overlook the very worthy runner-up, The Wizard of Odds, an absolute machine of a blog on the receiving end of my first keystrokes every morning, accompanied by a scowl born of equal parts grogginess, halitosis and dread at witnessing just how badly the rest of us were scooped in the dead of night. If there is only one college football blog that embodies the medium, it must be The Wiz: disciplined, organized, journalistic, omnivorous, well in front of the pack on every story and every trend. For fellow bloggers, it is the definition of 'essential.' If you want it first - literally, at like, 3 a.m. if necessary - you go to The Wiz. On the news front, nobody beats him.
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The man of the hour(s) himself will be along at EDSBS at 5 p.m. EST to present the mythical national championship of college football blogging. Oooooohhh. They haven’t even invented a red hot enough for this carpet.