No more Dr. Saturday

This is hard to believe and makes me a little sad:

Hello again friends, and goodbye.

Any rumors of my demise over the last two weeks have been greatly exaggerated, but only slightly: What began as a much-needed offseason hiatus on the heels of signing day is now permanent. After three-and-a-half years and upwards of 6,000 posts, this is my final entry for Dr. Saturday and Yahoo! Sports.

That's obviously from Matt Hinton, who started as Sunday Morning Quarterback way back in the days when blogs were just blogs and established himself as an intelligent-enough voice that he got picked up by Yahoo in 2008 and became Dr. Saturday. It's appropriate that he says in his farewell post that the goal was to "offer a steady signal amid the barrage of noise" since that's pretty much exactly how I would describe it. He runs the only non-team-specific site out there that (a) covers basically everything of note, (b) doesn't include the typical cut-out-all-the-thoughtful-stuff journalism filter and (c) still includes enough high-brow analysis and strategical stuff to be worth visiting (mmmm, Smart Football).

SMQ was much of the same except with even less of a filter, although there was also a lot less content since he wasn't getting paid to produce page views. I'm not sure that wasn't preferable; I've actually read Dr. Saturday a little less in the last year or two, in part because of the overwhelming amount of content that I didn't think was particularly important and in part because a chunk of that content was written by Graham Watson. I have nothing against Graham Watson, who came over to Yahoo via ESPN (I believe she was the MAC blogger there), but she's no Matt Hinton. Her posts just lack the same level of "this is what it means" insight and thoughtful research and overall knowledge from religiously reading various other sites, which I guess is no surprise since those are exactly the things that made Hinton worth reading.

I'm not sure what his mid-post monotribe on amateurism is intended to convey other than some discontent with what has become important in the college football world -- no disagreements here -- but this cryptic remark piqued my interest:

I'll resurface soon enough, and I shouldn't be hard to find.

The prevailing interwebz sentiment is that he's headed to Grantland, which would be outstanding since that's exactly the kind of site that would let his analytical awesomeness flourish. I'm a little skeptical because of that whole "future of college football" thing; maybe he's gonna work for a school (he's a Southern Miss grad) or do something entirely outside the scope of college football? I dunno. It's hard to envision the latter.

On a more personal note, SMQ was my first introduction to the idea that there was really good stuff out there in the blogosphere, stuff that was a lot better than the typical AP blah and one-sentence-paragraph-filled ESPN columns. I have no idea exactly when I stopped going to newspaper-type sites for my college football content, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that it was due to the discovery of SMQ and MGoBlog and EDSBS. This site was actually intended to be a lot like the SMQ/Dr. Saturday ones: interesting content from a relatively unbiased angle with some relatively insightful/learned analysis and an absolute lack of a filter (language notwithstanding since I do have a job and whatnot), with the combination somehow portraying the "essence" (or whatever) of college football. Whether I've achieved any of those things is another matter entirely.

Anyway, here's hoping Hinton turns back up in the college football world since Yahoo's coverage just got a lot less interesting. Maybe I can help fill the void for the hilariously small group of people who actually read this site.