Fan Blogs

Big Ten fans love to follow their school's teams on the Web. So we set out to interview the passionate voices behind your Big Ten blogs.

Q&A: BLACKHEARTGOLDPANTS.COM

How did you come up with the name for your blog? Actually, we were just stone cold out of ideas. We had been called The Hawkeye Compulsion back when we were with Blogger. When we signed a contract with SBN, one of the stipulations was you couldn't use nicknames, like Hawkeyes. We spent like five days talking about it and couldn't really think of anything when one of our guys was like what about Black Heart Gold Pants? We were like, actually that sounds pretty terrible, let's do something else. But he was working the closest with SBN and said we were going with it. When was the blog created? We were on Blogger for all of about two or three months before the 2007 season. We're coming in on our third season right now. We joined SBN in the middle of September, about three games into the season. What made you want to create a blog? At that time, there weren't many college football sites out there, certainly not ones for Iowa that were funny or sarcastic, and that's what we wanted to have. How many hours a day do you devote to the blog? I'm blogging full time at a couple other sites. I would say between the two of us who spend the most time with the site that we both spend about two hours a day. During football season, the combined time spent on the site is no fewer than five hours. I would say it's about a 20-hour per week process during football. How many people contribute to the blog? We have two active editors and two active writers who we basically recruited from our commenting ranks. They don't write often, but what they do is really good and really funny. It's a good departure from our normal stuff because they add to the whole BGHP experience rather than create an echo chamber. What is the best part of the job? The community, by and large, is the best part – the people who are commenting. They pick up really well on what we are trying to do and how much fun we are having with this. That and how not seriously we are taking this. After reading the site, you will see that no fewer than 70 percent of our site is lies. But they're lies with jokes and are funny.

BigTenNetwork.com editor Brent Yarina phoned Adam Jacobi, the co-founder and manager of BlackHeartGoldPants.com, for a Q&A about his satirical Iowa sports blog.

BigTenNetwork.com: With all the blogs out there, how do you all try to differentiate yourself from the others?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: With lots of lying and lots of satire! I talk with Brian Cook at MGoBlog about this a lot and he says you have to be the something if you want anything more than menial traffic. I think we have done a passable job of finding ourselves and being a whimsical Big Ten blog.

BigTenNetwork.com: Since you say lying is a big part of your success, what is your favorite lie you've posted?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: Oh, gosh! I would say it would have been one of the JoePa chronicles, probably the one where he meets [former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach] Bill Cowher and Bill Cowher ends up with the Penn State athletic director's wife. Another one has to be the Joe Tiller cream cheese fetish.

BigTenNetwork.com: Wow, I'm sure those posts got a lot of comments, huh?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: Oh yeah, oh yeah. No one really saw them coming, so I was proud of them.
 
BigTenNetwork.com: On the topic of comments, how do you all monitor the bad ones because that could be a job in itself?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: It's not that big of a problem, honestly. You have to sign up to comment, so you can tell pretty quickly who the trouble makers are. You can ban them or warn them, but 99 percent of the comments we have no problems with. The trouble makers don't stay around very long.

BigTenNetwork.com: Since you were the first Hawkeye blog out there, is it safe to say the Iowa community appreciated your hard work?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: We got a little bit of feedback and took a lot of it out of context. We actually put it in on our left-side bar as if it was some serious praise. They were telling us, "This is kind of good." That's all we needed. But that's not why we do this. We do it because we all like to write and everything that comes with it, the attention and the praise, it helps, but that's not why we started this.

BigTenNetwork.com: Who do you credit for the humor and tone of your blog?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: As far as non-bloggers, there's a lot of Norm MacDonald. He's a hero of mine. You'll also see a little bit of Conan O'Brien and lots of WWE. We grew up watching WWE as kids, so every one of our wrestling posts that anybody but one of our staff writers writes is all about pro wrestling. We don't know about college wrestling, so we pack our stories full of pro wrestling and completely unrelated video. We definitely have fun with it.

BigTenNetwork.com: Big fan of Conan here. How do you try to incorporate his style into you blog?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: The self deprecating stuff. We will even take it old school, with the [pleasuring] Bear. We were watching it back in the Andy Richter days. But just his overall tone -- we have fun with it and don't take it all too seriously. There's way too much of that [serious] stuff going on right now in the sports world and in general. Yeah, we just like to sort of screw around and maybe cover the news when it needs to be covered, but not pretend anything is more important than it is.

BigTenNetwork.com: What are some of the blogs you visit on a daily basis?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: Even if they weren't gainfully employing me and they are, The Sporting Blog and Sports by Brooks are two sites I like a lot. As far as other blogs, I really like Unprofessional Foul. That's a great, great soccer blog. It's honestly too bad that the nature of my full-time blogging stuff has cut down on the amount of Big Ten blogs that I read. The Crimson Quarry, an Indiana blog, it's very well written. I'll read it whenever it pops up on my Google Reader and I don't care about Indiana at all. Paint the Town Orange and Eleven Warriors are a couple others.

BigTenNetwork.com: Can you recall the story or post that really put your blog on the map?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: The interesting thing about it is if you looked at the top five most linked or most viewed articles we've ever written, I'd say they were all serious, which is kind of weird for us. But Iowa did have the whole sexual assault thing go down, and then the whole [football] situation that looked like a cover up. We take it seriously and go out of our way to not make light of things that don't deserve it. Those were two widely read things. Then when the flood struck last year, that one was also really big.

BigTenNetwork.com: So is it safe to say Iowa fans aren't typing in your URL for breaking news?

BlackHeartGoldPants.com: We try to do both. I think we do better at entertainment. For example, we were right on top of the Ed Thomas killing. Once again, we didn't really expect to get a ton of traffic from it. But we had a nice hookup with Google News, and when you look it up and see 800 people on the Web site at one time, you see right away they all came from Google News. We do try to do both, but we're probably best known for the entertainment aspect, and that's fine. It's something we knew would happen. Hawkeye fans can get their news more accurately from the guys who do it full time. We have to provide something that those Web sites don't, and I think we do that.

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