The 2005 Eagles season was maybe the worst I'd ever experienced as a fan.
The year prior the team was coming off a Super Bowl appearance and appeared loaded for bear for another run. Then it just all went to hell. Terrell Owens went crazy, seemingly every notable player on the team got hurt (Donovan McNabb, Brian Westbrook, Todd Pinkston, Tra Thomas, Jerome McDougle, Hank Fraley, Lito Sheppard, and Correll Buckhalter were all lost for the year), the Eagles got swept in the NFC and managed only 6 wins on the season.
It was in the wake of that mess that I decided to start blogging about the Eagles (here's the old site!). The season had just been so demoralizing that I held all this hope that the draft would be what turned it all around and brought us back amongst the elite. So I remember doing all kind of research on the draft that year and writing for hours on end about it. Of course, virtually no one was reading this... But I just kept plugging away.
It was a few months later when David Halprin, the founder of the SBNation Cowboys blog, "Blogging the Boys," contacted to me to asked if I'd be interested in writing for their fledgling enterprise. Yes, a Cowboys fan is partly responsible for the creation of Bleeding Green Nation! The scandalous secret origin is revealed!
Fast forward 6+ years and the site that used to look like this and had literally less than 100 people reading it over that first draft weekend looks like it does now and had over a million visitors over the course of the 2013 draft weekend.
However, like the awful 2005 season marked the start of my reign at BGN, the awful 2012 season will mark the end. Starting today, I'm stepping down as the editor and lead writer at BGN. There are so many people that helped me along the way, but more than anything I just want to thank you. You, the person reading this right now. For a good chunk of the life of the site, I didn't get any money for doing it at all. The main thing that motivated me to keep it going was the amazing community that had sprung up around the site. That and an insatiable need to constantly tell everyone what I think about the Eagles...
So thank you BGNers. My new day job is going to take me away from running the site, but it's not going to take me away from the site altogether. I'll still be writing when I can and of course you'll see me in the comments on gamedays living and dying by every play just like always.
The obvious question is, what's next? Well... I said to myself that if I was ever in a position where I could no longer dedicate the time to BGN that the site and the community deserves there was one guy I wanted to take it over. As you'll see below, he's been training, he's been living the life and he's ready.
Welcome back JimmyK. Or should I say, hello again ByeDawk :(