Trying to be Positive During a Negative Season

It’s not been a fun season to be a fan of the Mississippi St. Bulldogs Football team. There have been a lot of tough losses, and it appears the 6 year bowl streak is going to come to an end.

I’ve been a blogger for a little over three years. I started during the month of October in 2013 with Maroon and White Nation before coming here in August of this year, and during that time, there have been some bad teams to write about. The Men’s Basketball team was a train wreck for the most part during that time, and the 2015 Baseball team was one of the worst in recent history. But now we have a losing football team, and this is a completely different animal than any of the bad basketball teams under Rick Ray and that one awful year of baseball.

I’m writing all this because I think it is important to remind our readers that this hurts. A lot of content coming from our site and other sites has been far more negative than it has been positive, and I can assure you none of it is fun.

I wrote a piece yesterday that was designed to simply try to take the edge off the losing by approaching it from the perspective of my favorite children’s story ever, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I knew some people would get upset by it because it calls this season awful, but I wanted it to be light-hearted because it was based on a children’s book.

Still, people got upset. I’m not writing this as an apology because there isn’t anything to apologize for. I want people to understand that during seasons like this one for Dan Mullen and the football team, it hurts those of us here just as much as it hurts you guys who come to our site and read it.

There is always a section of fans who believe that you should never be negative or critical about the team, coaches, and players. I wrote about that earlier this year. And if you’re one of those people, then you might need to wait until the football season is over before you come back to our site. Our role as a blog is not to be positive all the time.

We aren’t beat writers. A beat writer’s job is to give the news about a team whether or not it is good, bad, or indifferent. We pass along news stories when they happen, but we do that more as a service to try to keep our readers informed.

We aren’t analysts. An analyst’s job is to dissect everything happening on the field and off of it to determine how it will affect the team’s play. We sometimes offer some analysis, but we are by no means experts at it.

What we are is a blog, and a blog is all about expressing opinion. We have quite a few people who write for our site, some more than others, and we all have different opinions. Not everyone who writes here wants Dan Mullen fired. I for one don’t, at least not yet. But there are some who do. We all have our own opinions and we express them whether people agree with them or not.

Right now, it’s very difficult to have a positive opinion of this MSU team. I wish there were. It’s a lot more fun to open up our writing program and crank out all the ways in which the team is performing at a high level and lavish praise upon them. Right now, one of the biggest problems the team has is not giving enough effort, so I can’t even praise them for trying their best.

If you’re the type that hates people being critical and negative when the team doesn’t play well, I hope you’ll find the forums on Facebook or wherever else you can that will allow you to only see positive remarks. I hope you’ll still come to us when we write about the basketball team and the budding excitement surrounding an almost entirely new group of players. Many of our writers, myself included, have already begun to focus more on basketball because we share that enthusiasm.

But if you’re coming to us for football coverage, it hasn’t been fun for some who feel any negativity is a bad thing to read our blog. The season hasn’t been good by any stretch of the imagination, and so long as the losing continues, we’re going to keep sharing our opinions about how bad it has been. We’ll probably never agree on this topic. But the one thing I hope we can agree on is we are all hoping and praying for better days in the future.