Classic Da Blog

Ginning up some interest every Tuesday

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Remember last week, when I overhauled my ad model? At the same time, I placed bids for advertising on the Little Gamers and Joe Loves Crappy Movies comics, so at some point people from there should start trickling in to watch the Sandsday boys in action. For all I know bidding could be high enough to shut out my ad entirely, but if my ad ever does show up in the rotation we could get a few loyal fans for the future. At most it’ll cost me about sixty cents earned from previous advertising on Da Blog, and probably much less, but we’ll see if bidding for Sandsday’s ad space (and the every-site ad space) makes up some or all of the difference.

(Hey, this is my first time writing one of these advertising posts. Give me a break.)

College Football Schedule: Week 3

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Everyone retains their titles this week (and by “everyone” I mean “the two teams that actually had games this week”) but that’s by no means guaranteed this week. Slight change to the schedule: Games on ESPN Gameplan with no other applicable item to put in the TV slot will be described as Gameplan, not ESPN360. All times Eastern.

Lineal Titles (all games on Saturday)
Nevada @ *Missouri 12:30 PPV
*Georgia @ South Carolina 3:30 CBS
North Texas @ *LSU 8 PM Gameplan
Ohio State @ *USC 8 PM ABC
This Week’s HD Games
North Carolina @ Rutgers 7:30 TH ESPN
Kansas @ South Florida 8 PM FR ESPN2
NC State @ Clemson Noon Raycom
Navy @ Duke Noon ESPNU
California @ Maryland Noon ESPN
Florida Atlantic @ Michigan State Noon ESPN2
Louisiana-Lafayette @ Illinois Noon BTN
Iowa State @ Iowa Noon BTN
Montana State @ Minnesota Noon BTN
Southern Illinois @ Northwestern Noon BTN
UAB @ Tennessee 12:30 R’com/Yahoo
Washington State @ Baylor 12:30 FSN
Michigan @ Notre Dame 3:30 NBC
Chattanooga @ Florida State 3:45 ESPNU
Auburn @ Mississippi State 7 PM ESPN2
SMU @ Texas Tech 7 PM FSN SW
Virginia @ Connecticut 7:30 ESPNU
Oklahoma @ Washington 7:45 ESPN
Wisconsin @ Fresno State 10:30 ESPN2
Other Games
Temple @ Buffalo Noon ESPN+
Ball State @ Akron 1 PM CSD.TV
Toledo @ Eastern Michigan 1 PM CSD.TV
Central Michigan @ Ohio 2 PM CSD.TV
Delaware State @ Kent State 2 PM CSD.TV
East Carolina @ Tulane 3 PM CBSCS XXL
Charleston Southern @ Miami (OH) 3 PM CSD.TV
North Dakota State @ Wyoming 3 PM
Oregon @ Purdue 3:30 ABC/ESPN
Penn State @ Syracuse 3:30 ABC
Georgia Tech @ Virginia Tech 3:30 ABC/ESPN
Air Force @ Houston 3:30 CBS CS
Arkansas @ Texas 3:30 ABC
UCLA @ BYU 3:30 VS.
Hawaii @ Oregon State 4 PM FSN/FCS
Western Michigan @ Idaho 5 PM CSD.TV
Middle Tenn. St. @ Kentucky 7 PM Gameplan
Memphis @ Marshall 7 PM CSS
Western Kentucky @ Alabama 7 PM Gameplan
Southern Miss @ Arkansas State 7 PM CSD.TV
Stanford @ TCU 7 PM mtn.
Rice @ Vanderbilt 7 PM
Alabama A&M @ Louisiana-Monroe 7 PM CSD.TV
Samford @ Mississippi 7 PM
Alcorn State @ Troy 7 PM CSD.TV
New Mexico State @ Nebraska 7 PM PPV
Missouri State @ Oklahoma State 7 PM FCS
Bowling Green @ Boise State 8 PM Gameplan
Arizona @ New Mexico 8 PM CBS CS
Utah @ Utah State 8 PM Gameplan
San Diego State @ San Jose State 8 PM CSD.TV
UNLV @ Arizona State 7 PT FSN AZ/FCS

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 9/6-7

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All times PDT.

Saturday
10-1 PM: College Football, New Hampshire @ Army (ESPN Classic). I chose this game almost completely at random. (Hey, Troy-LSU got postponed due to Gustav and would have interfered with tennis anyway, Missouri would also interfere with tennis, and all three lineal title games aren’t even on regional television. FSN South and SunSports for the Central Michigan-Georgia game doesn’t count.)

1:30-5 PM: College Football, West Virginia @ East Carolina (ESPN). Yes, Fox baseball will probably fall off the face of the earth with college football season in full swing.

5-7 PM: US Open Tennis, Women’s Final, S. Williams v. Jankovic (CBS). Rather than the all Williams final YOU demand, you get Williams versus a nobody!

7-10 PM: Ultimate Fighting Championship, UFC 88 (PPV). Eighty-eight, eighty-eight, eight eighty eighty-eight… why isn’t this being held in China? Okay, I’m in an odd mood this week, you can tell because I didn’t even mention Couture v. Lesnar…

Sunday
10-1 PM: NFL Football, NY Jets @ Miami (CBS). OMG it’s the debut of Brett Favre! Let’s watch every single Jets game with such rapt attention our eyes come out of our sockets! (NASCAR or WNBA also possible.)

1-4 PM: US Open Tennis, Men’s Final (CBS). I know nothing about this! NOTING!

Honorable Mention: 12:30-3 PM: IndyCar Racing, PEAK Antifreeze and Motor Oil Indy 300 (ABC). It’s the last race of the season! The championship all comes down to this! (Er… ignore that little Australian race in the corner coming in a month and a half…)

Second Honorable Mention: 11-3 PM: PGA Tour Golf, The Barclays BMW Championship, final round (NBC). More of the playoff that’s nothing like a playoff! Why is this even on here?

5-8 PM: MLB Baseball, Philadelphia @ NY Mets (ESPN). I like cookies.

A major change to the ad model

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After giving it some thought, I have made several important changes to the ad model. Two primary concerns are leading me to adopt an alternative strategy to the one I was considering. First, my sidebar is too narrow to accomodate a skyscraper ad, so the largest ad size the sidebar will accomodate is a square ad. Second, my plans for a square ad were originally to have four a page – but I’ve recently started wondering if that’s exactly the best approach for a site with basically no visitors.

Those concerns, plus the fact that my attempts to let people know they’re better off bidding on my premier ad have mostly resulted in depressing bidding on the Standard ad without increasing bidding on my Premier ad (which STILL isn’t topping the Standard ad’s rates), have led me to change my ad strategy for Da Blog as well. So on the right side, you will see space for two square ads. Those are NOT in the same ad box. One of them is an ad that also appears on the rest of the Morgan Wick sites, the other is technically the same ad box Da Blog has had since August, only it’s now a square box. If you have previously bid on the standard skyscraper box your bid is now null and void and you must bid again with a square ad. To get the best bang for your buck with your square ad, you should be bidding on the top Morgan Wick box, but if you have a lower budget and can’t afford the top box you can still reach most of the same people with the bottom Da Blog box (although the top Premier box will still be a better investment in most circumstances, and now it’s bigger!). I’ve also put advertisements for Sandsday in both of the Da Blog-specific boxes that will run if there are no bids otherwise.

If that’s a bit confusing, don’t worry. I’ve created an advertising FAQ on the Web site that aims to put the answers to any questions you may have – and links to every one of my ad boxes – in one place. That includes not only the ad that appears across the Web site, but a new ad I’ve created just for Sandsday. I’m still debating what to do with the rest of the site, including possibly committing the forbidden act of using Google Adsense.

While I’m at it, I’ve also added a new item to the Around the Horn Drinking Game, fixed some buggy links on Sandsday, and updated the NFL Lineal Title. I’m starting to think I should study Javascript more too… PHP doesn’t seem to work on Freehostia for files whose extensions aren’t .php, so I can’t use it to create a dynamic sidebar unless I rename all my files, and it seems to require the use of Javascript to obtain the user’s screen resolution, which would be nice for fixing one of Sandsday’s biggest problems, the inability to be viewed properly at 800×600 resolution.

OMG! It’s football season! Our lives have meaning!

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Who cares about those amateur college scrubs? THE league of record in America is the National Football League, and Da Blog and Morgan Wick’s football site is ready with complete team coverage there as well!

Start with the NFL Lineal Title; as I said last week, it’s analogous to the college football lineal titles, but because of the NFL’s schedule structure there’s rarely more than one at a time, and never more than two. I need to explain something that I forgot to make clear last week: Split titles in the college football lineal title arise from teams going undefeated, or winning the BCS Title Game (which is why LSU gets a new lineal title this year despite not going undefeated). Obviously, it’s exceedingly rare for an NFL team to go undefeated, so what happens instead is that split titles are created when the title holder doesn’t make the playoffs. Obviously, that’s rather rare as well, and the Patriots nabbed the lineal title on their march to an almost-perfect season, so the Giants start the season with the title this year and will defend it against Washington tonight on NBC.

Speaking of which, starting Week 3 or 4, I’ll start my weekly SNF Flex Schedule Watch, which was perhaps the prime contributor of traffic to Da Blog last year, before it was taken over by webcomics. I correctly predicted the Week 12, 14, 15, and 17 games that were moved to primetime as part of NBC’s flexible scheduling, only missing Weeks 11, 13, and 16. I had thought I did the Flex Schedule Watch on Tuesdays last year, but it was actually a Wednesday feature last year so it’s a Wednesday feature this year.

There is a third concept that I used last year: the “SuperPower Rankings”, my experiment in creating a set of “super-power rankings” from the power rankings produced by the eight leading sports sites (ESPN, CBS, Fox, NBC, SI, Yahoo, USA Today, and Sporting News – Yahoo produced two rankings). It proved to be way too much work, so I’m not doing it this year, but I leave the concept open for someone else to pick up the gauntlet.

The one (well, two) NFL games I know I’ll be watching… and why

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(Hat tip to Sports Media Watch for tipping me off to this one.)

Most of the innovations in sports graphics have been made by Fox. It was Fox who, if not invented, at least popularized the modern score box, and Fox led the way in the transition to the modern score banners used in every non-tennis sport by every major sports operation in some form except on CBS’ football coverage. But a transition more profound than the one to banners, and possibly as profound as the introduction of boxes, may be being spearheaded not by Fox, but by ESPN.

When the new Monday Night Football regular season starts on, well, Monday, ESPN will introduce the “Monday Night Football Dashboard“, which will consolidate the information presented by a box or banner with statistics and player information and that sort of thing. It sounds like ESPN will attempt to condense the banner (although for the past two seasons and this year’s preseason MNF has used something better described as an “orb”, a centered design since modified by NFL Network but not seeing wide use elsewhere) with the line of statistics that has been obvious on college football broadcasts and which recently saw a semi-notorious application on MLB broadcasts with pitch-count-by-pitch-count statistics for each batter.

The graphics designer at ESPN interviewed by the Sports Video Group web site says “I think [viewers will] know it’s a better experience. But they won’t know why.” I know few people obsess as much over graphics as I do, but even if the “dashboard” contains a preservation of the “orb” I find that somewhat hard to believe. At any rate, I sure as hell hope I’m able to catch the MNF opener and see it in action, see just how different it is, and see if it’s something other networks might copy, or if it’s worth copying.

(And might this have something to do with ESPN’s move to only showing college football starting lineups at the top of the screen, above the banner, and only spotlighting “impact players”?)

This makes three straight CADs I’ve posted on and four straight I’ve commented on.

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized imagined nut shot.)

Sure. Attack me for not recognizing someone we last saw in, what, 2004 now? Under a different art style?

I stand by the idea that CAD is ramping up the DRAMA~! faster than some people might be willing to put up with. Just look at the cross-cutting nature of the current storyline; there’s so much drama that we have to cram two examples of it into one storyline.

Is this more of what Buckley called the “stress-testing” of the relationship between Ethan and Lilah?