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How much do fans matter on a fan-driven network like SB Nation. They mean everything. It’s a network with the founding conceit of giving fans voices to communicate with other fans. Ideally, at the end of it everyone is an expert, doing away with the type of lowest-common denominator approach that defined traditional sportswriting for so many generations.
No more.
Before this became my full-time job, I was a fan like you. I’d spent several years reading BON and other sites around the network for my teams and I decided that I could find no more perfect outlet for the sports writing that I was becoming aware of wanting to produce.
So I just dove in. I started creating FanPosts in the hope that Peter Bean would notice them and promote them to the front page. When I started, that was the only goal that I had. Nothing more. It’s one of the most modest goals I’ve had in my entire life. Let’s just say that PB noticed them.
All of that is to say that when you empower fans, it can produce outcomes that even the people most involved in creating those outcomes never knew was possible when they started. If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what would qualify.
In that spirit, SB Nation brings you, for the most time, the FanPulse Top 25, an attempt to quantify and bring together the knowledge of fans to produce a more meaningful poll by allowing the people who actually watch more football than the people on specific beats to weigh in with that knowledge.
Does the AP consistently hate Texas? Give Oklahoma and, ahem, SEC schools too much love? Do the so-called experts have too much influence? Now you have a national platform to share those views and a community in which to discuss them.
Here’s how it’s going to work — the first step is to SIGN UP HERE to receive a vote in the poll. A chance to make your voice heard across the country and all the SB Nation communities. You’ll receive a Top 25 ballot every week and participate in a 1-2 question survey so that we can respond to your opinions and experiences if any part of this process needs improvement. Then we’ll publish the results every week right here on BON.
Let’s do this and have some fun. Maybe at the end of it, it will produce outcomes that I can’t even begin to imagine today. Why not be a part of that?