The 80/20 Rule is a basic business guideline. It says that any business will get 80% of its revenue from just 20% of its offerings or services. For example, we should expect McDonald’s to earn 80% of its revenue from just 20% of its menu items. This makes sense; almost everyone orders either a Big Mac or a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese. Really, most of the menu is revenue neutral; the only reason to even offer a lot of that stuff is to make it easier for Big Mac lovers to bring their non-Big Mac friends into the store. It’s the Big Macs that are keeping McDonald’s in the black.
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| Happy New Year! |
Blogging is the same but moreso. Much more than half of this blog’s readership has come from a handful of posts, and the rest is here either to entertain me as a writer or to give legitimate fans of my writing a reason to come back on a semi-regular basis.
For this reason, I tried to lean into the popular content this year, really focusing on Army Football and on football in general, especially over the later half of 2018. This absolutely worked. However, I then joined As For Football as Senior Writer/Historian, essentially sacrificing the blog wholesale in favor of growing readership over at the new small business.
Good News: AFF is doing great.
Bad News: This blog is on life-support.
My Top 15 posts of 2018 were as follows. As you’ll see, they are (almost) all from before I made the jump to AFF. I’m not sure what the future is here, but I will say that my memoir is done, so if you’re missing my stuff, you should definitely go and read that right now.
Posts are listed by title with links, followed by the current number of readers. As you’ll see, the order is subjective. It’s loosely based on some mixture of reader interest, writer interest, and general subject matter.
15. 4 Corner Billiards, Bridgeport, CT (200)
15. 4 Corner Billiards, Bridgeport, CT (200)
4 Corner Billiards is right downtown in Bridgeport, Connecticut, across from McLevy Green and just down from the city's Government Building. That puts it within easy walking distance of Bridgeport's Metro-North station, and indeed, I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince my beautiful wife that we should take the train there instead of driving. Parking in downtown Bridgeport isn't always easy. However, that would have cost us time, and after all, the kids were only going to be at Rockin' Jump for a couple of hours at most.
This post was part of our ongoing NYC & the Area series. Folks seem to like my attempts at local travel-blogging, but I’ve not been very good about writing up a lot of our adventures.
If you haven't seen Def Leppard lately, they are an efficient rocking machine. They hit the stage at exactly 7:30, rocked the house for precisely ninety minutes, and left frenetically energized crowd in their wake. Those guys are really great. I mean, they have this down to a science.
They've also been touring for forty years! So imagine Taylor Swift. Now imagine her packing arenas in 2048. That's where Def Leppard is today. It's really amazing.
You put the ball in the net, right? I mean, that’s not actually complicated.
Whatever deeper understanding I have of lacrosse comes from having played high school water polo. At a certain point last season, I realized that the two sports employ broadly similar tactics. For example, just as it takes a certain degree of hand-eye coordination to catch a ball while treading water, so too is it not-particularly-easy to catch a ball in a net at the end of a stick while running. In both cases, the ball tends to hit the surface a lot at the sport’s junior levels, but by the time you get to Division 1, crisp passes around the perimeter have long since become the minimum standard of play.
Army Lacrosse started the 2018 season ranked but disappointed through the League play. We went to the Navy game at Michie Stadium, and I watched several others online, but as it became clear that the team was not, in fact, going to vie for a Patriot League title, I let my interest wane.
12. Support This Blog (382)
For much of his life, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle truly disliked writing stories about Sherlock Holmes. Amazing but true. Alas, the public loved Holmes, and when Doyle attempted to end the series by killing off the famous detective, Londoners went crazy. They simply could not accept that Holmes was dead. More to the point, they didn't care overmuch what other projects Doyle himself looked forward to writing in the future. In the end, Doyle bowed to the public's wishes and brought Holmes back from the dead. That decision pigeonholed his writing forever.
I've felt a bit like this lately because when I've talked to folks about the blog, especially in person, they invariably say things like, "I love that sports blog you write."
This was the last post I wrote before joining AFF. The blog was riding high, and I had started thinking that I’d maybe taken the current strategy about as far as it was going to go. Nevertheless, response to this particular post was incredibly positive, and that meant a lot to me.
11. Army Football Preview: Miami-Ohio (531)
After handling their business in California over the weekend, the Army Black Knights are finally back home on Saturday following a long three-game road trip. Army faces a hungry, talented team from Miami-Ohio this week that badly needs a win. In many ways, the Miami-Ohio RedHawks are archetypical of the kinds of teams that Army will face from here on out—strong on defense but inconsistent on offense. This week’s contest therefore promises to be an important harbinger for the rest of the season.
After six games, the Black Knights are 4-2 with FCS doormat Lafayette remaining on the schedule. On top of everything else, a win this Saturday virtually assures bowl eligibility.
There is nothing special about this post. It’s here to show how much reader interest had grown by midseason due to the ongoing focus on Army Football.
“Hey,” Joe asked me later that afternoon, “do you remember that girl Elizabeth? The one you met out by the pool back at my place last summer?”
“Dude, of course I do. Who could forget her?”
Elizabeth was a five foot, eleven inch former farm-girl turned would-be human resources manager and occasional aspiring model. She’d been a senior at Kansas State the previous summer, and we’d hit it off in a major way. She’d had brown hair and cut a stunning figure in her purple triangle bikini. From the pool, we’d gone straight to the bar by Joe’s place and spent the next few hours shooting the breeze and wondering idly if there was any conceivable way she could come up to New York for a visit.
“Well,” Joe said, “she remembers you, too. And she just moved to Savannah. She remembered that you used to live out there. She’d like to hear from you if you get the chance. I’ve got her phone number and everything.”
This week, the nation’s #2 and #3 service academies square off in a football rivalry game for the ages. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at SUNY Maritime. No, I’m not talking about VMI at the Citadel.
It’s Navy-Air Force Week!
*sigh*
This was the post I didn’t want to write. You guys loved it, of course, which means it will probably be a staple going forward. Argh.
We're back from vacation today, having spent a few days camping up by Lake George. It was much cooler up there, but we got rained on a few times. The trip was a lot of fun, but I'm sort of enjoying being back, too.
How was your week? Good?
5 Things has never been the most popular feature on this blog. Still, this particular post did okay. There’s always one or two that will draw a few more readers than usual, and in 2018, this was the most popular of this series.
7. NFL Preview: NFC East (288)
Yup. That’s right. My friend Joe and I are back with another season of preternaturally accurate NFL seasonal predictions. As we did last season, Joe will be covering the AFC over on his blog A Hoosier on the Potomac. I’ll be doing the NFC right here, starting with this week’s post on the Black and Blue Division, the NFC East.
This series did okay. I think Joe is better at this than I am, however.
This has been my low-key summer project. Please keep in mind as we go forward, though, that I don’t have some deep personal knowledge of football gained through years of hard-earned experience. Reading this stuff engaged the tactical part of my brain, and that doesn’t happen every day, but that’s about as much as I can say for myself.
There is at least one post every year that I really love that doesn’t get nearly as much reader attention as I think it deserves. This was that post in 2018.
5. Crunch: New Year’s Resolutionaries (402)
Hannah and I went to the gym together this week—for the first time in a very long time. I’ve been trying to get her to go with me for the past several months now, and I’m glad that she finally agreed. Spoiler alert: my eldest could use a little more exercise. She does gymnastics once per week, and she does basic calisthenic conditioning a little more often, but her routine is not quite a lifestyle. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s not necessarily enough to ensure her long term health, nor is she consistently building the habits that will make her a lifelong athlete as an adult. Her timing was extremely fortuitous. Crunch has been running a deal for high schoolers ($100 for a year with student ID), and this month in particular, the sign-up fee is just $1—not just for high schoolers, but for everyone.
That is awesome.
You guys really liked the workout posts this year. This was the most popular one, but they all did at least 300+ readers.
Sally’s been after me to get back on this, so I guess I’m gonna have to do that.
4. Army Football Preview: Hawai’i (1537)
With the way the schedule shakes out, the Black Knights will need five wins before the Lafayette game to ensure bowl eligibility. This is because only one FCS game counts towards the requisite six, and Army-Navy happens after bowl invitations have already been issued. With tough road games against Oklahoma, Buffalo, and an Eastern Michigan team that has finally learned to finish, Army’s margin for error has become razor thin. The Black Knights therefore need to win now in order to hit the meat of their schedule on the upswing and to give themselves just the slightest bit of breathing room going forward.
This was the most popular of the game-specific Army Football Preview posts. Again, there’s not much special about this particular post. It’s more that interest in the team was super-high coming off the big win against Liberty. This match-up was highly anticipated.
Memoir is the iconic literary form of the U.S. Military Academy. Because a lot of Academy grads go on to positions of great leadership, yes, making their stories important parts of the national social framework. But also because the Academy teaches its graduates to look unflinchingly at their own failings and to be honest about them, and I don’t know how prevalent that sort of thing is in other parts of society. When your default response to failure is, “No excuse, sir!” you have to be a little more diligent about the after action review process. Over time, this makes one tend towards self-reflection, and here we are.
2. #SBRLLR: Beast (Part 2) (556)
I became aware of my squad leader as an individual for the first time shortly after that first parade. We marched from the Plain, West Point’s parade field, directly into the Mess Hall, where my squadmates and I sat family-style around a massive ten-seat wooden table. Cadet Stephen Reich was a good-looking guy with a brown buzz-cut and a decidedly athletic build. He reminded me strongly of my friend Danny G__ from Fallbrook, and I could tell at a glance that he was a good dude away from Beast Barracks just from watching him interact with his fellow squad leaders. That they all loved and respected him was obvious. However, Cadet Reich wasn’t looking for love from his new cadets, nor did he go light on his criticism of my squadmates and me at the dinner table that night. He yelled at us for folding our napkins wrong, for taking big bites, for cutting our cake incorrectly, and for a million other nitnoid, minuscule things. By the time I got back to my room that night, I was ready to hide in my closet until reveille the next morning.
The West Point portion of the memoir was much, much more popular than the rest of it was. That annoys me, but it’s kind of a backhanded annoyance since I am, of course, happy that you liked at least some of it. Personally, I don’t see how you can appreciate any one part in a vacuum, but most folks preferred trying bites here and there to consuming the whole thing in order.
The three posts from this particular time period were very popular. This one got the most readers for whatever reason, but #SBRLLR: Choosing a Life (Part 2) drew 360 readers and #SBRLLR: Beast (Part 1) drew 453.
Other posts in this series averaged between 150 and 175. That’s not bad, but it’s a third of the interest in the “Choosing a Life” to “Beast Barracks” section.
I guess what I learned by swimming—at Army—is that there are some times when folks are counting on you when you simply cannot fail. There are times when your teammates are looking for you to make a play, and you just have to rise to the occasion and make it. Circumstances don’t matter, nor do excuses. The version of you that doesn’t crack under pressure, that’s getting through this, that fights and wins… You just have to be that guy when that’s the guy that your teammates need. The times when I’ve been my best self, when I’ve transcended what I thought were my physical limitations and come up with legitimately peak performances, those have mostly come in these kinds of situations. Learning to channel that, to get to the other side without breaking, to not just hit the wall but to smash it at a sprint, that’s the work of a lifetime.
Jeff really liked the result, as did a lot of you. In fact, it became one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, really launching the Army Football Preview portion of this blog. The timing of this post’s popularity was quite fortuitous.
That’s it. Thanks for hanging with me for another year.
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