Board Games: Sports Message Boards

[pdiddybull32]

Board Games: Sports message boards become major players

By Edgar Thompson

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Hi, I'm Larry - my friends know me as 1ChopCity1 - and I'm an Internet message board addict.

Hi, 1ChopCity1!

It's been 30 minutes since I analyzed Florida State football and I already feel like I'm out of the loop. I spent six hours the other day debating Jeff Bowden's red-zone package. I know more about the kids in the 2008 recruiting class than I do about my own kids. I'm just glad there are people who understand my struggle.

Hey, how about blowing off this meeting and breaking down Bobby's right tackle rotation?

Sound familiar? Are you a college football message board maniac? Or is someone close to you afflicted by the insatiable need to tap away at a keyboard and get the latest on every pulling guard and pulled hamstring?

Perhaps a 12-step program is next for people like 1ChopCity1 - also known as Larry Bishop of Roanoke, Va., a habitual visitor to Warchant.com, the Seminoles' primary fan site.

"It's like a drug," Bishop said. "I'd be on it so long when I first started. I've gotten better with it, but I still love it."

The boards are burning year-round, but they'll start heating up again this week as pre-season camps open throughout the country.

Bishop, a former high school coach now in the art business, figures he has posted more than 13,000 times in the past five years. Nowadays, he's under strict house rules to log on only after his wife goes to bed.

"If I wanted to keep my family - I'm not saying it was that deep - but I didn't want to have any friction in the household," Bishop, 36, said.

Ross Weinstein, a Long Island resident who goes by NYGator on Florida's two main fan sites, became such a serial poster that he forced himself to go cold turkey for three months last year.

"It's a real disease. I'm not joking," Weinstein, 36, said. "It's like anything. If there's an outlet, people are going to find a way to overuse it."

Like Weinstein did during a vacation to the Dominican Republic, where he made the time to duck into Internet cafes to get his Gators fix.

What's everybody yakking about in cyberspace?

Everything from who should be starting and sitting to who should be fired and hired to who's in trouble and why. And the postings pile up from all over the globe.

"It's amazing how diverse the demographic is," said Gene Williams, who founded Warchant.com in 1995. "People all over the country, out of the country - England, Australia. You don't realize you have a 12-year-old in Tampa arguing with an 80-year-old who lives in Seattle."

The message boards also are home to close friends and family members of players or potential recruits. Ernie Sims Sr., whose son, Ernie Jr., played linebacker for FSU the past three seasons, is a Warchant.com member. Randy Miller, whose son Drew is an offensive lineman at Florida, is a regular on GatorBait.net. Former Gators offensive lineman Shannon Snell spent his final three seasons online defending Ron Zook's teams under the handle "Showstoppa75."

Controversy isn't tough to kick up on the boards, but truth often is.

"It's just a rumor mill," said Robert Merkel, a longtime Gators booster from Palm Beach County who used to frequent Gatorcountry.com. "There's very little fact to any of it. It's like reading Alice in Wonderland."

Yet enough solid information has been offered that the boards can't be ignored.

Entries from Alabama's fan site, TiderInsider.com, were subpoenaed during a lawsuit filed against the NCAA by former Tide assistant coach Ronnie Cottrell, who was fired for recruiting violations involving Memphis linebacker Albert Means. In a related case, lawyers asked Tennessee booster Roy Adams to discuss entries he posted on the Volunteers' fan site Gridscape.com.

But the posting that boosted boards from nerd to national status came from an Auburn site when a fan wrote about Alabama coach Mike Price's drunken escapades at a Pensacola strip club. The April 2003 incident led to Price's dismissal less than a month later.

Despite that landmark moment for Auburn fans, Rodney Orr, who owns TiderInsider.com, said the Tigers still trail the Tide when it comes to breaking news about the rivalry. Orr claims Terry Bowden's 1998 decision to resign as Auburn's coach and the subsequent hiring of Tommy Tuberville broke on his site.

FSU fans were the first to read about some recent trouble at Florida when allegations appeared on a Warchant.com message board that Gators cornerback Avery Atkins hit the mother of his infant son. Atkins left the team and faces a charge of misdemeanor battery.

Jamie Newberg of Scout.com, a recruiting service affiliated with more than 200 fan sites, thinks coaches and administrators have no choice but to check postings.

"They're going to blast what we do. They're going to blast the message boards, the posters," Newberg said. "But when they're in their offices, they're reading that stuff and they're seeing what's out there."

Coaches who read the boards have differing opinions.

"Sometimes they make sense, other times they're just talking," Central Florida's George O'Leary said.

Asked for his opinion about the boards, Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer wasn't as tolerant: "You really want me to say? I don't know if I can say all that and print it."

Like them or not, schools monitor the boards. Steve McClain, who heads the sports information department at Florida, has staff members check message-board content the same way they always have clipped newspaper articles about the program.

"When you think there's no more room for growth, it continues to grow," McClain said of the message-board chatter. "It makes you wonder how much room there is for growth. But I wouldn't be surprised if in five years I'm making the same statement."

Bare-bones Internet chat rooms sprung up in the mid-1990s, but were accessible primarily to the computer-savvy. A decade later, everyone can easily join the discussion.

"It's not like it used to be, when everybody got up and read the sports page," Florida Athletic Director Jeremy Foley said. "Now everybody gets on and logs on to the Internet and either reads it or posts on it.

"It changes how people get to interact with the world of sports."

This new culture has a good and bad side for board heads like Bishop and Weinstein. These days, being a fan can consume a lot of valuable time.

Dakine Beckman, a Seminoles fan and stay-at-home father from Plantation, said he averages about eight posts a day during the season, but as many as 20 on game days.

That's nothing.

"There are guys who have posted triple digits in one day after a loss," Beckman said.

Bradley Pike, a third-generation Florida graduate from Tampa, can relate. A 35-year-old father of two small children, he has made more than 20,000 posts on the message board at GatorBait.net since 2001.

"That's 4,000 posts a year, 10 a day," said Pike, a financial analyst who goes by the handle GordonGecko. "When you break it down, it's not that much."

Fellow message board addicts would agree: It's never enough.

http://x.go.com/cgi/x.pl?name=MyESPNLocal-ncb&srvc=sz&goto=http://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/content/sports/epaper/2006/08/06/a1b_boards_0806.html

[E.T.]

Hi, I'm E.T. and I'm addicted . . .

8-)

[fishinBULL]

so sadly true