For tone. Go ahead and get emotional. It’s only the greatest song ever recorded.

Ahem.

As of this month, EDSBS will be joining SB Nation, America’s largest and finest collection of blogs devoted to sports, sports, and in its spare time, sports. The mortal known as Spencer Hall will be joining them as well, for whatever he’s worth.

What does this mean for this site? More focus, certainly: spread out across two blogs does take its toll, especially when life happens to throw non-bloggy type things in your way. (See: “Bathing,” “Being human with other humans,” or “doing much of anything else.”) This is no complaint whatsoever, but instead a note on the influences forcing a bit of consolidation. A more focused writer is a better writer, even if the focus is on making sodomy jokes while discussing college football writing. Hopefully being full-time will alleviate some of the stresses and shortcuts one takes under extreme chronopressure. (Okay, we’ll still take shortcuts, but the stress will be slightly less than it was.)

Additionally, the site and its writers will be in very good hands, and allow for the freedom you’ve come to enjoy at EDSBS. Profanities, tastefully done as always, will remain present when necessary. Tech support, as good as it’s been on a volunteer basis, should be even better under the watchful eye of a full-time IT staff. Perhaps we’ll even try to bring the site up to, oh, we don’t know…2003 standards. Don’t hold your breath, but it might happen. Posting should increase, as we’ll just be doing EDSBS, and thus let loose on the internet to bound like the untrainable giant breed puppy we’ve always wanted to be. Otherwise: same url, same layout, same writing, only more of it.

We’re also thrilled to be working with the fine ranks of SB Nation suit-types and bloggers this brings, many of whom we’ve come to know, love, and occasionally fear since the inception of EDSBS: Jim Bankoff, Peter Bean, Joel Hollingsworth, and our old compatriot and online heterosexual same-sex-but-not-gay life partner, Chris Mottram. Let love rule, and let us hug as men do: it’s a fine crew of people, and we could not ask for better.

As for the other, more esoteric things we did for Sporting News under the Amateur label: those will continue, as well, perhaps even with passable camera work, especially in the offseason when we’re so desperate for entertainment that nearly killing yourself is preferable to the alternative of sitting around and missing football, sweet football. Hopefully these will form a book, and then you can purchase this book, and read it on long winter nights when you need something you can read, enjoy, and then burn for warmth.

In short, it’s a wonderful move with one sad aspect: we’ll have to leave our comrades at the Sporting News, since running this site and side work is a full-time gig. They are owed all thanks and due praise for supporting us over the past year and a half, and for the invaluable life experiences they made possible. Saying final goodbyes next Friday will be difficult, and there’s little else to say about that.

So: EDSBS remains, nothing changes except more and better content, and we still get to do this from our kitchen table and the IKEA chair in the living room. The only thing that changes? We’ve been asked to stop wearing the autographed Tebow T-back we type all posts in, and have deeded over to the Shanoff Institute for Tebow Studies. We recommend a bleaching and stout wash cycle before handling with gloved hands, sir.

In conclusion: thank you for letting us do this. It is you who are owed the cocktails, not us. A salute is in order: