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To the BTB community, a plea for joy.
Greetings BTB Community,
It feels weird having to write this post in the middle of a 6-1 season for the Dallas Cowboys, but there is a part of the community that is definitely unhappy at the moment, and they are letting it be known in the comments. Whenever this happens and seems to be taking over the threads in general, I try to step in and attempt to, hopefully, reset things.
So let’s address some things.
- The fight over Dak Prescott and Tony Romo. This seems to be at the heart of 90% of the problems showing up nowadays. If I may indulge my own perspective for a minute, I’ll do it in hopes of making a larger point. I love Tony Romo. I’ve spent years defending Romo to friends and family who seem to have no idea how good he is at quarterback. If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said this is still Romo’s team, no questions. But I’ve changed my opinion. Briefly, it’s not because I think Dak is a better quarterback, but because I think when you are winning in the NFL, you don’t mess with it. A six-game winning streak is a rare thing, a season like this is a rare thing. I’m riding it until it breaks. So even though I love Romo, and think he’s a better quarterback than Prescott at this point in Prescott’s career, Prescott seems to be what’s right for this team, at this point.
To me, it’s not about Romo versus Dak, it’s about the Dallas Cowboys. This is kind of the point I’m driving at. As someone who loves Romo and has spent his career defending him, it doesn’t hurt me in the least to bench him as long as we’re winning. And it won’t hurt me in the least to bench Dak if he starts losing. It’s not personal. I can’t dictate how you think about things, but I would ask that when you are ready to fire off that venomous response to someone else defending either Romo or Dak, think about the fact we’re winning. We’re 6-1. We’re contenders again. So don’t make it personal. Don’t feel that you have to defend either guy’s honor to the death. There is no real right answer here. So relax a bit. Maybe Romo would make the team better if he played, or maybe he would mess up the magical chemistry happening right now. We don’t know, nobody knows. So everything is a hypothetical in that argument.
2. There have been complaints about some writers having a bias. This site has never claimed to be a straight news site. The writers here carry their own biases into their writing, and as long as there is some basis to back up what they write, I never ask them to stop. This has always been the policy here, writers are free to express their opinions. People are free to dispute them. The problem comes up with people start pushing their criticisms more to the writer than the content of what they write. Or they feel the need to repeatedly attack a writer’s work to make a point. This really comes back to one thing I’ve always preached - just show some respect to your fellow member and/or writer. Know they are just expressing their opinion, and you can express yours. It’s baffling that people feel they need to attack a person to make their point. As I’ve always believed, that’s lazy debating. That’s trying to score cheap points. The funny thing is in most of these instances, if the person would just leave out a few words from their comments, they would be perfectly fine. But they have to throw in moron, hater, asinine or some other pejorative. It’s totally unnecessary and just causes the quality of the comments section to go down.
3. There is too much censorship, specifically about female gifs. This is totally on me, and I’m not going to apologize for it. I’ll briefly make my case, but if you don’t agree with it, you’ll have to make your own choice about accepting it or moving on. I started this site with the hope that it would be an oasis for football talk in a sea of ugly forums that existed at the time. I’m still beholden to that principle. That’s why I limit the profanity, and it’s why we’ve cracked down on the gifs of females over the years. There is one reason we’re being so strict, because every time we loosen up on it, some people take it too far. Then we have to reign it back in again. Everybody has a different definition of where to draw the line, and while the gif we cracked down on recently may be pretty innocent compared to others in the past, almost inevitably someone will decide they want to use their own. And it gets a little more provocative. Then another person does it. Then another. Soon, the mods are spending time debating about what goes too far, and then I have to spend time on it. These gifs are not important to what we are doing on this site. You can find these type of gifs and more in a thousand places on the internet. If you feel that this type of gif is intrinsically tied to your enjoyment of this site, then you’re at the wrong site. I won’t be backing off this.
4. We’re spending too much time on Dak vs. Romo articles. Maybe so. It is a big story and continues to evolve as the season rolls on, but maybe we have gone too far. To make things worse, there are a couple of more articles coming up about this very subject, I hope you will give them a fair hearing and not rush to the comments to criticize. But I hear you on this complaint and will certainly look into a course correction. If you want to see other types of articles, I’m always available by email. Shoot me a line.
Conclusion: A view from this side of the fence. Look, we’re never going to be prefect on this side, meaning me, the writers and the moderators. We’ll make mistakes, we’ll write things you think are ridiculous or go against every fiber of your being. I’ll make decisions that you think are ridiculous, some people will think I’m a dictator, that I’m a prude, that I’m drunk on censorship power. After doing this for 11 years, I’ve been called all those things and worse. I’m willing to live with it because I have a certain vision for this site, one I believe in and one I won’t compromise, although I will listen and amend things if I think they’ll fit within the vision. It has served me well, and I believe it has served this site and this Cowboys community well.
So if you have an issue, send me an email, don’t take it to the comments section and try to get others on board. This will not help your cause. I don’t think I’ve ever ignored an email, and if I have in my 11 years, it wasn’t on purpose, I just missed it for some reason.
And don’t argue with the mods if they make a decision about something. If you feel you’ve been wronged, hit me up. Arguing about these things in the comments section lowers the quality of the comments section.
Circling back to the headline of this post. We should be celebrating this season. And I must say, a large majority of the BTB community are doing just that. They are commenting, but they are not getting personal and they are enjoying their time at BTB. So thanks guys, happy to have you on board. A group of people are unhappy and are showing it in the comments, hopefully this post will help clear some of that up.
As always - Go Cowboys!
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