We have a lot of content from our coverage at the Super Bowl which we will publish over the next few days, including interviews and conversations with coaches and players. One of my favorite interviews was with Coach Huey, the running backs coach; just a really cool guy to talk to about football. However, before we post all that, I wanted to give you all a few final thoughts on our time in Miami and what we tried to do.
This was the first time bloggers from our network were credentialed to cover an event as big as the Super Bowl. This meant the fans, real fans, were going to go to Miami and cover the biggest sporting event in the world. We were awarded the same access to players and coaches they award to people like Paul Kuharsky. We were working in media areas alongside Jason Cole, Gregg Doyel, and many of the other writers we so often voice our frustrations against. We had locker room access after the game and press seats during the game.
It was a tremendous experience for me personally, but that was not why I wanted to take the assignment to go to Miami. I took it was an opportunity for us bloggers to show the "big boys" that we could work as hard and produce superior content as they did. Joel Thorman and I wanted to prove that, with this kind of unprecidented access for our blog network, we were not going to f*ck around.
We interviewed over 30 people, recording hours of conversations.
We wrote, on average, six or seven stories a day.
We produced content not just for our own site, but for others.
We did all this with the expressed notion of showing all of you, our fellow NFL fans, what the Super Bowl was like from a fan's point of view. We felt this was our job, our duty. The Super Bowl is a very un-fan-friendly event. It is a convention for the league and their corporate sponsors. We wanted to show the convention from the eyes of the everyday fan. It is our sincere hope that after hours of running around, interviewing league people, posting articles, snapping pictures, transcribing, drinking bad soft drinks to stay awake, and driving to media events at 6:30am so we could drink bad coffee and talk with the Fili Moalas and Scott Fujitas of this game.
We did this to show you how this whole NFL machine works. After the Super Bowl, I had several established media people tell me that the work we did this past week was top notch. Some of those people were writers I've taken shots at. Their kind words are appreciated, but their words are not what I am interested in right now. I'd like yours. Let us know what you liked or disliked about our coverage. Let us know what you think.