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Ewers or Bust- Lord have mercy I’m bout to bust


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Aside from just being generally pathetic and aggy, having the petition started by one of the the guys who I recently listened to lecture us on the surly pod about "don't tweet at 'cruits!" literally start a petition to show a 'cruit that Longhorn love seems like a distinction w/o a difference.

“He doesn’t want attention! Sign this petition!”
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Spoiler

To expose the coldest, battiest college football takes, you have to be devoted. Meet Pete and Message Board Geniuses

Christopher Kamrani Nov 15, 2021 comment-icon.png 49 save-icon.png


Incoming call. 
NO CALLER ID.
“Yeah, this is Pete.”
Meet Pete. He has asked to remain only as Pete, because Pete has a real job, with real responsibilities, despite moonlighting as one of the newer, more influential voices within the cult of college football. What Pete has undertaken since launching one of the more obscure and demanding social media accounts last August is finding a way — and the time — to take the spiking daily temperature of college football fan bases across the country. The Twitter account @BoardGeniuses, now with nearly 28,000 followers and growing rapidly each week, showcases the lunacy and the humor, the pathetic and the brilliant, on college football message boards nationwide.
“Initially, it really didn’t get much traction,” Pete says. “In fact, I almost stopped doing it a couple times because it didn’t get a lot of traction.”
As recently as August, the account was hovering around 3,000 followers, and Pete was questioning if it was worth the amount of time he devoted in every hour of his day, seven days a week. Lightning struck. ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt followed. Then other prominent media minds did, too. Then more fans from every corner of the college football multiverse. Pete was scouring the deepest corners of the fixated, flummoxed and fervent portions of the sports internet to unearth just how truly bonkers some posts are.
Pete is a Utah State alumnus and fan. He never was a serial message board poster himself, but would occasionally log on to try to understand what his contemporaries were thinking. A lot of them he knew, despite their inane and random screen names.
“Most of them were, what I always considered to be, fairly intelligent, emotionally mature people,” Pete says, “and then I would see stuff I would post on there. It was just nuts. It bothered me, but it was also entertaining, so then I started going to other boards to see: Are other schools’ fans just as nuts?”
Oh, yes. Undeniably.

To expose some of the coldest, most asinine sports takes known to mankind, you have to be devoted. In-season, Pete has a hardwired routine. Every 10 to 15 minutes of every hour, he will peruse message boards he knows will be ripe for posts worth disseminating to the world. That’s just during the weekdays. On weekends, he will have varying message boards surrounding some of the biggest games that Saturday cued up and ready to refresh either on his phone or laptop. If he’s out running errands, a mental timer still goes off. If he’s at a Saturday rec league game for one of his kids, it still rings. (His wife and kids still do not know that he is this esoteric mastermind.) “Sometimes,” Pete says, “I wished I had never started doing the in-game posts.”
But they’re too irrational to ignore. For example, when Kansas took a 7-0 first-quarter lead on No. 4 and undefeated Oklahoma on Oct. 30, Pete knew the message boards were about to be doused in kerosene and lit by someone. Anyone.
“I know someone is going to be pissed and want to fire Lincoln Riley because they’re down 7-0 in the first quarter,” Pete says, chuckling.
By Saturday, when the Sooners lost their first game of the season to Baylor, it was clear to one poster that “some people are just better off assistants.”
 
Pete has an array of paid memberships and free memberships to message boards that run the gamut. And, because you knew this was destined to be an integral part of this story, Pete was asked to list the message boards that, regardless of outcome or ranking each week, deliver the goods.
“Well,” Pete says, “there’s many.”
Texas A&M.
LSU.
Clemson.
Nebraska.
Miami.
Florida State.
Oklahoma.
Texas.
What, then, is the common thread for a “good” message board from his cherry-picking perspective?
“If the board is free, you’ll probably get crazier stuff on a board that’s free,” he said. “People who are paying for a board are usually exchanging different types of thought in terms of recruiting, rumors, things like that. There’s still pretty good stuff on paid boards. Free boards typically have more crazy stuff.”
As for the most docile, Pete says the message boards out West are predictably as logical as it gets. The measuring stick there is going to be skewed no matter what based on the entirety of this very unique, very warped world in which college football fans exist. He says Oregon and UCLA are just too logical at times. USC can get nutty based on the various coaching search rumors, but that’s about it.
“Outside of BYU,” he says, “everyone out West is pretty reasonable and understands their place in the world, I guess you could say.”

There’s always someone at Texas A&M who posts that an impending season will end up being a 15-0 campaign and with the Aggies hoisting a national trophy. There’s someone who will predict Texas Tech will find a way to get Urban Meyer out of Jacksonville and to Lubbock. Those takes are among the tamest. To anyone who’s ever forgone tying a rope around their ankle before cliff diving into these wacky waters like Pete, you understand that these domains can be predictable: filled with embarrassing typos from aimless avatars demanding jobs lost or conspiracy theories as to why one team is either struggling or thriving.
Geographically, there’s one conference that dominates the lunacy unlike any other: “It’s the SEC by a mile, and it’s not even close,” Pete says.
Every once in a while, though, a gem is presented from a fan base you’d least expect. Each month, Pete saves screenshots of some of his favorite message board posts, and as the end of the month approaches, he ranks the top 25 posts the last four weeks. No. 1 in September came from a Toledo message board in which a dedicated Blades poster named @falconplucker, who has been on the site since 2007 and posted 1,880 times, went in-depth on a recreational peyote trip and how his drug-induced meeting with Toledo coach Jason Candle was going to help the team.
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Peyote-caused adventures aside, message boards have been a place where “insiders” come to actually share information that turns out to be true before official news breaks. Pete says in late October there was a post on a TCU message board that stated someone inside the Oklahoma athletic department knew that longtime coach Gary Patterson was going to be let go that Sunday. It was true. But Pete isn’t out to necessarily discern which posts have real informational legs or not. He enjoys watching the conspiracy theorists try and piece theoretical puzzles together digitally with the help of other very passionate fans who want to find a morsel of truth in this digital sea of ambiguity.
“People go there for two things: They go there just to vent and to try to get inside info,” Pete says. “There’s people that are going to give them inside info. Whether that’s legit or not, I don’t think people really care. They just want to feel like they have some piece of information.”
Example: Pete knows that if he were to go on an Oklahoma message board and write that he knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Lincoln Riley and that Riley would accept the Dallas Cowboys job if it were to become open, that would undoubtedly get traction.
“Somebody is going to run with that like they’ve got inside info,” Pete says, “even though it’s one post and nobody knows who I am.”
The desire to be in the know in college football is second-to-none. Just ask Pete.

Message-board culture is the most pronounced in college football. It’s where fans and boosters and donors and alumni go to blow off steam and share mainly very incongruent information on the state of their programs. Sure, there are devoted message boards for pro leagues and even college basketball. But there’s something about college football that just syncs perfectly — a perfectly flawed synchronization — with message boards.
“I think there’s a little bit of ownership that everybody has in their team in the sense that if you’re a fan, you’re a fan because you went to that school, you carried a diploma, you’re one with the university,” Pete explains. “Or you grew up going to those games and your dad was a fan and your grandpa was probably a fan, so there’s something inside of you that’s emotionally tied. As the football team goes, so goes you. If they lose, it’s almost like you lose a part of yourself or you feel slighted in a sense. If they win, you feel better about yourself. There’s more of an emotional tie. I can choose to cheer for somebody else. I can’t choose to cheer for another college team. I am who I am.”
Pete says he cannot remember receiving one nasty email since starting this journey in August 2020. Now that the account’s popularity is soaring, he routinely gets tips from followers on which fan base is losing its collective mind. Pete knows. He’s always one step ahead. To the best of his knowledge, does Pete think, though, that various coaching staffs across the country are keeping tabs on the message board hysteria? He has heard of graduate assistants being tasked with following what some fans are shouting into the ether in all caps. Hell, even Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne follows the Twitter account.
“Maybe it’s just for sheer entertainment that he follows,” Pete says. “But I don’t think head coaches are scouring it looking for who they should start at quarterback or whatever.”
As he’s swiftly reminded, there are plenty of head coaches flooding the message boards as is.
 

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8 minutes ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

Aside from just being generally pathetic and aggy, having the petition started by one of the the guys who I recently listened to lecture us on the surly pod about "don't tweet at 'cruits!" literally start a petition to show a 'cruit that Longhorn love seems like a distinction w/o a difference.

It's cool to just not say anything. 

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54 minutes ago, Orange&White said:

If the fucking burnt ends zealots are going to continue shouting down anyone that doesn't have the flair, immamac might as well just boot every person not in burnt ends off the board and y'all can have your circle jerk amongst yourselves. 

pretty overwhelmingly the % of folks who have not paid attention to NIL and not paid the very inexpensive $10 per month for Burnt Ends have some fucking terrible opinions about NIL and recruiting.

we have a poster here (who liked your post) with 25k posts on Surly come into the recruiting thread, post dumb shit that is ill informed, then is confused when people shit all over him.

just like everyone should look down on people who post here a LOT without being treefiddy, that's how i feel about people who make their way over in from the football board or elsewhere, ask dumb questions, make ill informed comments then get their feeling hurt when people tell them to join burnt ends.

i told him and i will tell you - join burnt ends you coward.

if you care about the Texas football team, it bringing in the best players and the team getting better you pay the money. if you can't afford it that's one thing. but as long as you have been around - here and the last place - i am going to go way out on a limb and say you absolutely can afford it - you just choose not to.

also, don't be a pussy and actually at @immamac if you are going to call him out by name.

Edited by NoName
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17 minutes ago, Tex Pete said:

Mine, too. My beef is with people shitting on other people who want to be proactive. Beyond tweeting at recruits or their families, I really don't care what people do. We should all contribute in the ways that we can.

You are so right. I'm going to start working on an open letter to the Ewers family. 

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1 minute ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

You are so right. I'm going to start working on an open letter to the Ewers family. 

I'm going to find a Nebraska fan and an old flip phone so I can do the cell phone flop out as I book my 2023 National Championship tickets to see QE lead us to the first of 8 straight titles.

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I thought the petition thing was a joke. Jesus christ that’s a new low. If & when he comes here it won’t be because a bunch of people signed a petition. 

And major lulz at the god complex from the Burnt Ends crowd. Sorry I don’t feel like paying Cade brewer to never break a tackle or for me to have dinner with a bunch of 18-22 year old men. Or for the whole damn team to go 5-7.

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1 minute ago, Laxtonto said:

Just to redirect the outrage in this thread... Darren Rovell is a little bitch and we are ruining college football

 

It's not cheating; it's inequity..which is fucking life. Cheating is what was happening before when the actual rules were being broken. Tell me you love a cash poor program without telling me you love a cash poor program.

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2 minutes ago, IDIOTsavant said:

It's not cheating; it's inequity..which is fucking life. Cheating is what was happening before when the actual rules were being broken. Tell me you love a cash poor program without telling me you love a cash poor program.

Yup. "Cheating" my ass, it's working exactly as intended.

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3 minutes ago, Helobious said:

I thought the petition thing was a joke. Jesus christ that’s a new low. If & when he comes here it won’t be because a bunch of people signed a petition. 

And major lulz at the god complex from the Burnt Ends crowd. Sorry I don’t feel like paying Cade brewer to never break a tackle or for me to have dinner with a bunch of 18-22 year old men. Or for the whole damn team to go 5-7.

Sign the petition or shut the fuck up 

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ad95dfc859d16642babf8eecb1da53b6.png

Can’t believe no one has called out Columbus, TX. Didn’t know Ohio State moved.
Whoa. Where’d you see/hear this?

Weed dealer, obviously.
Some of y’all have lost your fucking minds.  The last five pages of this thread are the most bizarre shit I have ever seen in the history of the UT internets.

Do you live in Oklahoma or SEC country and just get internet access or something?
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11 minutes ago, Helobious said:

And major lulz at the god complex from the Burnt Ends crowd. Sorry I don’t feel like paying Cade brewer to never break a tackle or for me to have dinner with a bunch of 18-22 year old men. Or for the whole damn team to go 5-7.

funny enough, you also don't see the value in paying three fucking dollars and fifty cents a month for this website even though you post here all the fucking time. much less the dollars for burnt ends.

dude you are in the RECRUITING FORUM. if you don't understand the value of NIL, the concept of why BE is with the Tight Ends or how much of a difference $10k makes to a college player in 2021 you should probably go take your opinions to the football board.

Edited by NoName
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2 minutes ago, 40acredropout said:

Orangebloods, y'all didn't see?

Just kidding.  A TTU person with both a personal and professional relationship with CC.  Neg me to Bolivia if this goes sideways but the intel is solid.

 

such assurances only bring forth the fatwa when unsuccessful...

May you be correct or may the gods have mercy on your soul

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3 minutes ago, 40acredropout said:

Orangebloods, y'all didn't see?

Just kidding.  A TTU person with both a personal and professional relationship with CC.  Neg me to Bolivia if this goes sideways but the intel is solid.

Wild. The guys I know from work who have talked to Cody Campbell said he’s relentless. It really must have not come down to money at the end of the day. Or it was just a an absolutely freaky number from the Texas side.

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2 minutes ago, 40acredropout said:

Orangebloods, y'all didn't see?

Just kidding.  A TTU person with both a personal and professional relationship with CC.  Neg me to Bolivia if this goes sideways but the intel is solid.

Cody Campbell, co-founder of Double Eagle/Point Energy, anticipating the question. 

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17 minutes ago, Helobious said:

I thought the petition thing was a joke. Jesus christ that’s a new low. If & when he comes here it won’t be because a bunch of people signed a petition. 

And major lulz at the god complex from the Burnt Ends crowd. Sorry I don’t feel like paying Cade brewer to never break a tackle or for me to have dinner with a bunch of 18-22 year old men. Or for the whole damn team to go 5-7.

SrY uR pOoR

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