It’s been real!

Got call from the mothership and the news is, that they’re done letting Bulls run in their china shop. Bull Run is going to cease posting on SBNation at the end of September ending a twelve-year run on the platform that had some great memories.

Thank you all for the memories, when I shared the news with some of our past editorial staff it was pointed out that, at its best, Bull Run accomplished the sports bar setting that I set out for. And we got there because of the posters.

I’m left asking myself, what do I do with September, and what do I do after that?

Let’s tackle the easy one first. We’re going out Irish Wake Style. We’ll have game threads and the like up, but I’m not going to pour myself into five pieces a week for four weeks. I’d rather do some light coverage on the season.

I’d love for fanpost to be featured with your random memories and thoughts about the future and we may be doing a Last Bull In / Bulls and Beers reunion show if I can get the band back together.

As to me, what am I going to do? I don’t really know. The Mothership has implied they would like me to reach out to some other sites and contribute there, and I may consider that there are some fun communities and being “not the boss” of some content might be fun.

I’ve requested that the rights to the name “Bull Run” and the website ubbullrun.com revert back to me. SBNation is not obligated to return them, but I hope that since they decided that if it’s not worth publishing Bull Run they allow me the option of doing something else with it.

Whether I get the name back or not, I’m still unsure of what to do with it. A lot of that is honestly doing to depend on what you all want to do, again Bull Run is only worth it for me if the community is interested in it.

This is not the same primordial media goo that created us. Back in 2009 there was very little coverage of UB Athletics in the local media, and the coverage that did exist was harsh. Remember Buck and Sully (Well I outlasted them). Beyond the lack of coverage locally, social media was bereft of a place for UB.

That’s not the case anymore.

There are a lot of guys out there who, let’s face it, are far better writers than me and have far more time and energy to pour into covering UB than I do. I’m interested in keeping the community together because really it’s always been mainly about a place for us all to be UB fans and put everything else to the side for a short time.

I have a ton of thank you’s to dole out, and I’ll do so in a long post sometime next month but in the meantime.

Thank you Dave, Matt, Conrad, John, and Robbie. What you guys helped build was amazing, and special, and I cannot express how much that period helped me when life was hard in other ways. Also thank you Paige for picking up some of the passion for other sports when the original brew crew got pulled in other directions.

Thank you to the UB staff who have went out of their way to bring us in on the action, I’m thinking in particular of Todd Garzarelli and Danny White’s staff.

Thank you so much to the UB Athletes who have represented my alma mater with grace and dignity and have taken her higher than I could have ever imagined back in the 90’s.

Thank’s to the MAC bloggers who took me in back in 2009 and made me a part of their independent community, showed me the ropes.

Thanks to SBNatin blogs with 20 times my footprint they always treated me as a peer. And thank you to SBNation itself for taking a chance on Bull Run.

Finally thank you to all the people who brought comments, discussion, humor, and interest to Bull Run. The only reason I am even considering anything after this is that you guys are wonderful.

I’ll have more later, just digesting all of this.