The Offseason

OR "Ask not what the blog can do for you. Ask what you can do for the blog."

The period between the end of basketball season and the beginning of football season is a long, dry stretch in the college sports blogosphere.  You've got spring practice and football recruiting commitments, but that's really all there is in terms of regular, hard news to talk about.  Beyond that, you're largely left to looking back and looking forward.  We plan to do some of that--for both the basketball and football teams--over the next four months, but we're also open to ideas that you, our gentle readers, may have for offseason discussion topics.

Caveat: The most likely way for brainstormed discussion topics to get implemented is for some of you to get the conversation rolling with FanPosts.  (FanShots are OK, too, but something more than a sentence or two is more likely to draw comments from your fellow TOCers.  FanPosts are also more likely to attract the notice of people in the wider interwebs searching for information on a topic using The Google.)

It's now been nearly a year (360 days, to be exact), since we launched this site.  Over those 12 months, a solid base of readers/commenters has emerged.  Reader dialogue has really picked up in the last few weeks, coinciding with the Final Four run, and people are taking advantage of the FanPost/FanShot options on a pretty regular basis.

We'd love to see that momentum continue over the summer heading into football season.  LVS and Pete will be doing some football preview stuff, and I'll be doing my usual offseason basketball analysis.  But I think there's a real opportunity to continue to build something that's bigger than just the musings of three MSU fans with limited time--namely, a vibrant community of Spartans trading observations, ideas, and emotions.

Building that kind of community was my goal when I made the move from the old site, and--my rambling, obscure-statistics-based posts to the contrary--remains my #1 goal for the website today.

So have at it.  What would you like to see happen around here between now and September (or beyond)?  And how can we as a blog community make it happen?