After a long, tough process, MasterRWayne, JakeTheSnake, and I have finally reached an agreement on the 2008 Writing Fellows. This was a much harder process than I thought folks mainly because there were so many strong applications. Of the batch I sent to Jake and MRW, not one of them was a "bad" candidate. We had people with medical backgrounds wanting to focus more on injury diagnosis. We had tough, no-holds-barred funny men in the same style as KSK. We had family-friendly folks wanting to focus on the personal side of Colts players. But, most importantly, we had several strong, capable writers with lots of new ideas. It was very hard to say yes to only two people. I even considered expanding it to three or four, but that would have been too much. In the end, we decided on someone who has a strong interest in statistics and a long-time contributor looking to expand his voice.
So, without further ado, please welcome the 2008 Stampede Blue Writing Fellows: mgex03 and the21eraser (aka, the artist formerly known as ppr314).
Blogger mgrex03 is a stats whiz (something I, MRW and Jake are not) and wants to work on a new stats system he's developing to "predict" games or game trends. If his system works, we will hail him as a genius. If it doesn't, he's still a genius but we won't ask him to do our taxes. He'll also blog about a number of other subjects, including Fantasy Football and the evolution of the defense (just to name a few). Blogger the21eraser is a longtime Stampede Blue contributor, and we look forward to hearing his opinions on the Draft, free agency, Vince Young (hehe), and the up-coming 2008 season. Look for both our fellows to do a little more weekend blogging than I normally do.
A big thank you to all that applied for the fellow opportunity. Those that did will get extra special consideration if they apply again next year.
Next up: Free agency, the Draft, and the build up to the first game at brand new Lucas Oil Stadium. The "off-season" for 2008 will certainly not be boring. We have a lot of new and exciting content in store for you both with these new bloggers and with a new "brand" coming from SB Nation, which is so awesome I look forward every day going home and beta testing it. Even though our guys didn't repeat in 2007, 2008 is still a great time to be a Colts fan and an SB Nation contributor. Go Colts!