By Jay Coulter
jccoulter@gmail.com
I can remember not too many years ago having to drive 20 miles to find the Sunday Birmingham Post-Herald. The same for the Montgomery Advertiser. It was a fall football tradition following a big Auburn win. To get your Auburn football news you had to look for it.
I remember grabbing the papers and reading columns by Clyde Bolton and Alf Van Hoose. It was many times the only real Auburn coverage we’d get all week.
How times have changed.
Today, thanks to the internet there are numerous choices when it comes to Auburn football. There are the pay services of AUTigers.com and Auburn Sports.com, which are worth every penny. All the newspapers are online and of course, there’s YouTube where you can get instant highlights.
But as you’d expect, the places I like to visit the most are the blogs. In my opinion, this is where you gauge the true climate of Auburn fans. It’s a place for fans to write and for fans to respond.
There are no filters. I’ve read on more than one occasion where Auburn Athletic Director Jay Jacobs has bad mouthed blogs. He knows it’s a place where the truth is told. It’s a daily editorial page and I’m sure he’d just assume it go away.
Thankfully that’s not happening with Auburn fans. When I started my first blog, Football Saturday in the South nearly four years ago, I was about the only one blogging about Auburn athletics.
Jerry Hinnen came shortly after with The Joe Cribbs Car Wash. His site still has the most creative name of all the blogs in the country.
Today there are several, relatively new top-notch blogs that you need to bookmark and visit every day.
My friend, Jeremy Henderson has launched an awesome site called The War Eagle Reader and he updates it daily. It’s an awesome read and it’s one of the first places I visit each morning.
Today, I discovered another new blog, The Corner of Wire Road and Shug. It’s very new and shows promise. It has a great look to it.
And then there’s The Auburner, which is less of a blog and more of a general interest Auburn web site. The guys who write for it are hilarious. It’s true comedy.
And as you know, the newspaper guys have gotten into the act. The best is without question Phillip Marshall of The Huntsville Times. He should quit his job and start a pay site. He’d get rich.
There’s also Charles Goldberg, Christa Turner and Jay G. Tate who do blogs as beat writers for their respective newspapers. They are must visits.
If you haven’t already, make sure and check out these sites. You get a lot of different perspectives from many different view points. And most of all, it means never having to say that football season is over.