Welcome to The Original Posters

Background

As most of you know, it’s not always easy for fans to get information about your favorite college football team. One of the things we try to do on The Football Brainiacs is to tell y’all what we might be hearing on a particular subject. For various reasons though this isn’t always easy. Among those reasons is that information from, in, or around the program can be misinterpreted by a source. Or as is often the case, things change or sometimes people are just wrong. But to be perfectly honest, in our personal lives we still enjoy getting texts or calls from people telling us what might be happening. Even if some of the information turns out to be incorrect, we still enjoy the up and down of it all.

We are not journalists. We’ve made that very clear from Day 1. We’re just guys like y’all. To us, the importance of this game is in how it effects young peoples’ lives (which is why we try to be careful when we talk about recruits while still attempting to be genuine and honest) and how it brings people together. We recognize that the press is meant to play a critical roll in acting as a check on the “establishment.” But let’s face it, we write about a game. We aren’t the Washington Post, or the New York Times, or any of the other publications out there whose presumed intent is to educate a citizenry in order to further the cause of democracy and advance the marketplace of ideas. In short, we don’t try to take ourselves too seriously.

To the point about TFB not being journalists, we have learned it’s very important that when we offer “inside” information it needs be supported. So in some respects while we never have nor will claim to be journalists, the goal is to hold ourselves to a high standard when relaying information to you, our readers. We’ve been right about a lot of things, and we’ve been wrong about others. And to be honest with y’all, we often debate among ourselves about whether we should post something or not. TFB hasn’t even been around a year, but with your help it has become a very popular website with a great community of readers. You’ve allowed us to make mistakes, both learn and grow, and we’re incredibly grateful to you for that.

What is The Original Posters?

After some serious thought, we decided to create a place where we as individual Brainiacs (not necessarily as representatives of TFB in an official capacity per se), and certain other individuals can post thoughts and “inside” information. We’re calling this addition to the site, The Original Posters (The OPs or TOP). We are often approached by people who may have a “source” and wish to share information, or a young writer looking for an opportunity to contribute, or a person schooled in the x’s and o’s that wants to offer some thoughts. But, up to this point, we haven’t really had a proper outlet for them to share with TFB family. The OPs is a new blog area that will allow others to write and share with you.

The OPs posts will not vetted by TFB. Some of you may not enjoy this new addition to the site, while some of you may find it quite entertaining. Some of the information you’ll read on The OPs may prove to be completely wrong but it is not intentionally wrong or malicious, it’s simply not vetted in the same way as something we would post collectively on TFB. This isn’t to say that we’re all of a sudden going to be right about everything on TFB. Again, we have a number of people who approach us about wanting to contribute, but we’ve never really had a way to incorporate their work into our site. This will give them that opportunity. And this will also give readers, who are interested, an opportunity to read posts by TOP contributors who may have some information they want to share. The expectation is it will also give us a place to evaluate guest writers who we may eventually bring on to TFB as we strive to continue to give you the best, and most importantly FREE, OU coverage possible.

While we will not vet the information on this site, we WILL moderate the comments section. All the same rules of respect and civility for each other and for the posters apply here. If you don’t like what a poster has to say or you feel they are completely wrong, you’re free to disagree respectfully. But if you cannot do that, then please do not comment at all. If we feel The Original Posters is something that adds to TFB, we will try to grow it and bring in more and more contributors.