Way, way back in the day it was pretty hard to follow Northern Illinois football if you weren't there every single game.  The amount of media coverage was scarce, even well into the last decade when the Huskies started turning heads around college football.

There would be the occasional article in the Daily Chronicle or the Northern Star, but that would be it.  There really wasn't anything for the hardcore Huskie fans like myself.  That's why I decided to create Red and Black Attack in September 2007.  My inspiration for this was reading entertaining articles on what is now Black Heart Gold Pants and wanting to match what these Iowa fans were doing.  Back then there were virtually no blogs out there for smaller schools like NIU.

Before I became part of the SB Nation platform, it was really easy to start up a blog on google blogger.  I decided to move here because of the serious limitations that the GB template put writers under.  Nowadays, pretty much anybody can sign up to either GB or Wordpress and start a blog.  It's not rocket science.  They key to being successful is never about how pretty your blog looks, but about the content.  You could have the most amazingly designed website on the web, but if the content is crap, nobody is going to read it.

I've been working my butt off writing on this blog consistently.  It truly is a grind and is a new challenge to the media types out there.  The traditional media has been forced recently to tap into blogging themselves and social media just to catch up with the advancement in technology.  The Daily Chronicle did an awesome thing with the launch of HuskieWire.com.  It's a great website and I guarantee a LOT more people read that website than the receive the physical DC paper every morning.  Even the official website has a blog called Huskie Happenings, that really needs to be marketed more and have some sort of feed associated with it.

Social media like twitter and facebook just add to the chaos.  Sure you can use something like google reader to keep track of RSS feeds, but twitter is the mainstream way of doing this now.  If you aren't reaching out to social media then you aren't hitting the maximum amount of possible people that would want to read your articles.

I mean, just look how far we have come since the early part of the last decade.  Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, New Media, etc. are all fairly new terms in this constantly changing environment.  Hell, I'm just a hardcore fan that happens to like writing about my beloved Huskies.  I'm no reporter, I just want to provide the masses with every single piece of Red and Black info that you can find on the internet. 

Anybody can have a voice now through any type of these medias and make an impact.

New QB Terrance Owens will be starting for Toledo, and while he may be talented, he doesn't quite have the in-game experience yet.  NIU wasn't able to get to the quarterback too many times against WMU, but they did start to do a few more timed blitzes here and there in the second half to get to Alex Carder and throw him off of his rhythm.  Here, we'll break down the final play of the game where Demetrius Stone put pressure on Carder and Jake Coffman intercepted the ball.  This wouldn't have been possible without the amazing powers that be running godawgz.com. There wouldn't be any highlights on there if it weren't for the magic of DVR or digital transfer to an online database of highlight videos.

The zone blitz

On 2nd and 10, the Huskies start off in sort of a nickel 4-2-5 type of defense, but note how Demetrius Stone is creeping up towards the two other linebackers at the start of this play.

Continue reading this post »

There's nothing better than being in Huskie Stadium on gameday.  The tailgating, the camaraderie, the overall feel of excitement inside and around the stadium is something that's impossible to match.  It was easy for me as a student to attend games.  Heck, all you had to do was pick up the tickets at the convo free of charge and walk to the stadium on gameday.

Then one day all of a sudden you graduate and then you make a life decision to move somewhere else.  Maybe you found an excellent job that required you to move or you just needed some sort of a life change.

As you may or may not know, I live in Austin, Texas now and I feel as though I do an adequate job on updating this blog for all you folks out there.  Here are some of the technologies that help me do this and predictions for the future:

Continue reading this post »