* cracks knuckles *
* promises self to not write a book here *
OK so the parade of thank-yous first. To ATS, ConnorEl (even though he spells his name wrong, haha), Tobacco Road, dixie, AppreciateIt, carpet, etc., thank you. I know one of you said this is a "relatively thankless job" but honestly, it's not always felt that way to me. I am my own harshest critic, so any time somebody tells me something is anything other than dogshit, I get kinda excited.
To reciprocate, Cam and Les work their asses off. I'm not sure how either of them sleeps. It's hard to carve into WF recruiting coverage when you're constantly being lapped by them, which is nobody's fault but my own.
The point that pulling double duty is going to cause me to miss some things is valid. I missed Wake's home win over FSU but had that game covered by Jamie Shaw (a Rivals basketball recruiting reporter who's since moved to on3). I think there was an early non-conference game I had to miss, too.
I understand the harsh feelings about cultivating a Substack dedicated to Wake Forest coverage and not making it a year with it.
The Wake Up farewell was about as revealing as I'll go in why that move was made, and hopefully helps illustrated why I'm having to pull double duty.
The Twitter shit, I mean, I have a Duke-specific account. It has all of 165 followers. The @WakeRivals account goes back several years and had a built-in following; taking over the Duke site had no such luxury. It feels like yelling into the void and in an effort to get my eyes on more Duke coverage, I've tweeted from my account. I realize the majority of my following wants to see Duke lose by 50 ... but I'm also followed by some Duke fans, and other media types who can give me more exposure.
Honestly, part of my thought process with centralizing and tweeting about both from my account was that they're the two best teams in the ACC and they have two (maybe three) of the top contenders for ACC POY. (Cam is right; Alondes is clearly the POY in my eyes. If you take Paolo off of Duke, they're still a top-2 team in the ACC. If you take Alondes off of Wake ... maybe top half of the ACC? ... not to give away any future My Takes or anything.)
If it's that much of an issue, I'll live-tweet more games from the site-specific accounts. I just feel like that's pretty impersonal.
I do want to address one specific part of Les' post, as it's something that's been mentioned here before: I was never offered a position with Les. I have a DM from him after I'd been picked up by the N&O saying he was going to have me write film reviews and a couple of features/week for his site. So it bothers me to see it submitted as I had a job offer. It's not like I had options to weigh that week. Maybe that's being petty and small ... but I felt the need to clear that up.
In summation: I knew what Rivals asked of me -- and what I agreed to -- would not be universally accepted.
Didn't necessarily think it'd result in a "The Official CANCEL CONOR O'NEIL* THREAD" but hey, here we are. I think I've said my peace here. I kinda feel like I haven't because I should hash out my thoughts better than this, but I've gotta hit send.
As always, I'm reachable in PMs on here or DMs on Twitter.
* Two Ls, man.