Let’s Not Call It Good-Bye…Let’s Call It “Smell Ya Later.”

Some things it seems aren’t meant to last forever.  America’s quadrennial interest in soccer, pre-teen romances, and sports blogs are three things we all know can have a life-span shorter than a Christian Scientist with a severed artery.  By this time next week, the end of the World Cup will relegate soccer to that same American sports broom closet as the Olympics, the relationship between Lisa Simpson and Nelson Muntz will exists only in re-runs, and Sports Blog Movement will no longer show up in your news feed.

This incarnation of SBM started in January of 2012, the idea being one site dedicated to to cross-promoting the works of independent sports bloggers. We raised up against the iron-mauled sports blog tyranny of the ESPNs and the Bleacher Reports of the world.  After two and a half years, over 1,100 posts, and over a dozen different contributors, it time to realize that this attempt to be the next big thing in the world of sports blogging has met the same fate as many other revolutionary ideas…we’ve gone the way of the USFL, the Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football experiment, and that fucking “glowing puck” from when Fox covered the NHL.

The difference is those failures were easy to see.  Football in the spring? Hmmm…. A guy giving liquored-up NFL fans with GEDs comparisons to the Battle of Verdun? Yeah… Turning hockey into a Sega Genesis game that you don’t even get to play? Fuck that.

But SBM had content that kicked ass, largely because it had of contributors who kicked more ass than a 1997 version of Jean-Claude Van Damme would have if they had invented an ass-kicking version of Viagra. The upside is we know that, so we are going to drop fifteen and punt. In other words, SBM didn’t work, so we are suspending the site. But that doesn’t mean we are suspending the creation of awesome content.

Although you won’t see any new content on this version of SBM, Ryan Meehan and I are making plans as we speak to continue our collaborations. Jeremy Wiebe is probably too smart to answer my email asking for continued collaborations. To be honest, I’ve come to love the work of all the people I’ve worked with on SBM over these past few years, but to be honest, this bit is way funnier if I deliberately slight some of them.

That’s really why it is important for you to realize the content of SBM isn’t going away.  The individual blogs we were trying to promote are still out there, and they will continue to be the home of the content you have come to expect.

And who knows…maybe…just maybe SBM will be back someday…