This website launched 5 years ago tomorrow back on July 6, 2016. We’ve now been in this home we built for just about as long as our old website existed back at SB Nation. It’s been a long, strange trip for me personally to still be here today doing something, that frankly, still brings me a lot of satisfaction.

On this occasion, I wanted to tell the brief story of how we got to this point in 2021 with some comments at the end on life in this crazy Notre Dame world:

The Beginning Before the Beginning

I started writing on a personal Blogger page sometime in 2007 covering a bunch of random topics to pass the time and scratch an itch inside of me coming off an undergraduate life of heavy political science writing. By 2008, I had started covering Notre Dame football at the growing beast that was Bleacher Report. I was 25 years old, largely bored in a sports medicine distribution job, and had a lot of time on my hands to research and write.

Something never felt right about B/R for 2 reasons. One, although we had a team of lead writers for Notre Dame pretty much anyone could publish to the site and the comment sections could be insane. It was the wild west with trolling everywhere. Two, towards the end of my time the B/R team attempted to designate writing assignments with the promise of being paid for our services. That sounded nice but I was skeptical of their motives and didn’t like being told what to write.

By 2009, I was getting emails asking me to join this place called One Foot Down.

Enter Whiskey

Whiskey founded One Foot Down in the spring of 2009 and had been pumping out articles on his own before I showed up. I jumped aboard not long after the Brian Kelly hire and recall Whiskey having a relationship with the Barking Carnival Texas site who asked him to join the FanTake network and then were later instrumental in convincing us to move over to SB Nation after the 2010 season.

We had been at FanTake for such a short period of time, there were just a few of us writing for the site, but we were promised complete freedom while also well aware the stipend from SB Nation ultimately opened the door to a loss of that freedom. Foreshadowing! Those Texas guys also started and ran FanTake, more or less telling us it would die off when they moved to SBN. I think we made the right decision.

This is Real

The previous SB Nation Notre Dame site was Rakes of Mallow led by Chris W (follow him @rakesofmallow) who stuck around at OFD for a while before starting his own wonderful newsletter and podcast. During the 2011 season things went smoothly. By then we’d added a bunch of new writers and we were left to our own devices. The site grew tremendously from the attachment with SB Nation and the search engine power they provided. It reminded me a lot of being a college freshman–everything is new, fun, and probably never quite as entertaining as it would be in the beginning.

Then, SBN started rolling out new website designs and writing platforms behind the scenes with new guidelines. At our peak, I think we had close to 30 writers involved to various degrees and it was up to me to onboard and get everyone acclimated to the process of using the site. I was supposed to be at work calling companies about batches of Lidocaine and instead I was dumping around 30 hours per week into operating the website, in addition to taking time for my own writing.

The Beginning of the End

We started to feel pressure that things wouldn’t last with SBN sometime during the 2014 calendar year. SBN initially left us alone in terms of content–and they were always completely nice to us–but bit by bit they started to ask us to do more and it was unsustainable for me, and frankly, our mission for the site.

Our team talked about our options extensively but decided to push forward and see what happened. Would SBN back off? By 2015, it was getting to be too much. Of course, posts per day were always a big topic of discussion. We eventually settled into 2 posts per day being our sweet spot but even that took a Herculean effort from some of our staff. Churning out content just for content’s sake became very unfun.

Throughout 2015 we were besieged with calls to write at least 4 posts on the weekends, publish breaking stories on even the most miniscule news and rumors, while being asked to get a post up during the football season on every touchdown or big play in a game. We knew then there’d be no turning back. SBN did not back off.

The Big Pivot

Not every site was the same but how we worked things is that SBN (Vox Media) sent me a monthly stipend check and then I’d PayPal our writers their share based on how many articles they wrote. Once we decided to leave, we stopped paying everyone and put the money in a big pot to start our own site.

That fall of 2015 I had a call with the SBN college football managers and basically led them to believe we’d try our best to regroup for a big 2016. “Yeah, let’s do all that insane stuff you’re asking us to do!” Instead, we spent the next several months building what would become 18 Stripes.

We kept things under wraps before I said goodbye to OFD on June 17, 2016. At the end of the month, I officially stopped writing and we took all but one of our writers with us to our new home.

Here, Today

I have bunch of random thoughts to share with our readers after 5 years of 18 Stripes and an even longer time in this blogging game:

*The site name came to me one night in that mysterious pre-sleep mode complete with the logo and everything.

*Looking back, I had forgotten I started a new job a week after 18 Stripes launched. A couple months later we found out my wife was pregnant with our first child. Add all of this to the absolute disaster of a 2016 football season and it was a whirlwind 6 months for ya boy.

*I often think back to articles that were my favorite or made me laugh the most. I usually go back to THIS ONE from fishoutofwater back from 2014. We giggled for days adding ideas to the email inbox.

*Everyone wants a lot of comments on their article and it’s always a strange feeling when something you’d guarantee to be popular only then passes through the internet with just a few comments.

*I’ve always thought it was human nature and better for traffic when Notre Dame loses, or additionally, doesn’t play very well. Everyone seems more engaged and locked into their opinions.

*I’m really proud of how well behaved, thoughtful, and intelligent our comment section has been at 18 Stripes. I really appreciate all of our daily readers.

*I may have told this story before somewhere. The craziest drama I’ve dealt with for the site came during August camp in 2014. I’m on my honeymoon in St. Lucia completely off the grid, no phones, no computer, nothing. One night I get out of the shower and my wife says a bunch of ND players were suspended and that it was on the ticker of some random TV channel. She had me for a second than burst out laughing that she was joking. A few days later we landed back in JFK in New York and in the days before Slack when our writers emailed each other my Gmail read over 1,300 messages. In a twist of irony, the Frozen 5 scandal broke when we were gone and I was furiously scrolling through all these emails trying to catch up on the latest news.

*Does anyone remember when some guy was wholly copying my articles and posting them at Bleacher Report well after I left there? That was so weird.

*I know there was a lot of skepticism and criticism when 247Sports launched their product and gave us the Composite scoring system for recruits. However, it’s been one of the best things to happen to people like me running a website that can focus a lot on recruiting. It took a while for Notre Dame fans to let go of Rivals as the king.

*I’ve had a handful of parents email me over the years. Sometimes they are being nice and appreciative of something that was written about their sons. Other times, the opposite.

*I’ve only met about half of our writers in person. We had a big meet up for the 2011 spring game that included several of our staff. I can’t even process that this was over a decade ago.

*When we first started at SBN they made it a big deal to interact in the comment section. Back in the day, I used to reply to as many people as possible. These were also the days for me of this person is wrong in the internet and I must argue with them which is a switch that turned off some time in the last 6 years or so. As you get older time management becomes more important!

*It’s been a good long time since readers got really upset with me. Quite nothing like the review after the 2014 Navy game in which my original title was “The Win That Felt Like a Loss.” That one had 205 comments for a win but I guess my title was appropriate given my thoughts about traffic when losing. People were really pissed about my ‘overly negative tone’ but remember this was still an 8-1 team that had basically beaten FSU before the bye week. Not many want to hear bad things at times like that. The team lost their next 4 games, by the way.

*How I react and how I watch other people react to the outcomes provided by Notre Dame fascinates me, especially as I’ve grown older (and hopefully!) wiser. Often groups are separated into Pollyanna’s or overly negative people but I tend to think the most common groups are those who just want to have a good time with their favorite team and those who are a lot more critical and view things less for entertainment’s sake. Both sides can have an interesting mix of negativity and happiness depending on the day.

*18 Stripes has a Facebook page. It hasn’t been updated since September 5, 2017 and I can firmly tell you it will never be updated again.

*Five to six years ago I used to write a lot more quick-to-publish articles mixed in with articles I’d been working a very long time on before pushing them live. Sometimes I might work on something for 3 to 4 months, no joke. As I get older there are way fewer articles written within a day or two (we basically don’t cover breaking news unless it’s huge and always preferred the route of waiting and gathering our thoughts) but I don’t work on other things for quite as long, either.

*I’ve been vocal about the early signing period in December wrecking the writing calendar for us covering college football. Missing out on the big February recruiting bonanza makes that second week of January to spring practice stretch just a cold, brutal time to keep producing football content.

*We hope to make it to a 10th anniversary, we’ll see! If anyone is interested in joining 18 Stripes as a writer shoot us an email to [email protected] and we can talk.