I hate having to do a gap-filler post for September. I need to do a season-opening post for the Flex Schedule Watch (people are already starting to leave comments on my last post from last year), and probably would have if not for a perfect storm of circumstances. In the early part of the month I was still thinking I was going to do a post about recent developments in college sports, and then a couple weeks ago I suffered a serious injury I’ve spent most of the intervening time recovering from and in no shape to do any sort of serious thinking.
I might still have gotten something in this week, but I have a lot of work to put into it, more so than normal. I want to say something about the impact of the NFL’s new TV deals on flex scheduling (about which we know frustratingly little), and I have to update the Flex Scheduling Primer for not only that and last year’s developments, but some of the more immediate flex scheduling impacts from the 17-game schedule and ESPN getting a pair of Week 18 games. That’s made it seem like a more daunting task for me to get into than it normally is, and it’s had to compete for my time and attention with various other things, including the fast-approaching NHL season and concurrent debut of new TV partners for that league, which has been an especially big time sink given my newfound emphasis on graphics packages, and mock-ups of same, on Twitter.
None of that is to excuse my lack of posting this month and I absolutely should have gotten that Flex Schedule Watch kick-off post in, and I definitely will get it in in the next week, if only because the protection cut-off point is fast approaching. After that we’ll progress week to week as normal, and I have some ideas for what to do after that (including the return of something long dormant), but whether or not next year is any more productive than the past few years have been is anyone’s guess. (But I sure as heck don’t want to still be living with my dad a year from now, if only because I don’t want to be party to acknowledging the most blatantly corrupt and all-around terrible World Cup host selection ever.)