The End

After 18 years, the Awesomeness comes to a close.

It will soon be nineteen years since the first time I put virtual pen to paper and wrote about Iowa Hawkeyes athletics. It will soon be eighteen years since I helped start Black Heart Gold Pants, almost by accident. It will soon be nine years since the day we decided to get our independence back, left BHGP, and started Go Iowa Awesome.

Today is the last day that Hawkeye Beacon, the legacy entity encompassing that nineteen-year experience, will publish. Back in 2023, we incorporated the site into the Rivals Network. With the purchase of that network by On3, the site is reverting to Tom Kakert’s guys, and the site I still call Go Iowa Awesome will cease to exist.

I admit to occasionally going back in the BHGP archives¹ to revisit the greatest hits. Those early years were particularly well-suited to complete obsession: I had no wife, no kids, and few work responsibilities. I was fifty miles from Iowa City, and close enough in time to my graduation to still have some insight into the inner workings of the football program. There were heady days, when a post would catch fire and the hits would pour in. There were days spent on edge, when we took a position that would certainly ruffle some feathers in the football offices. There were days when we would post something that we believed only Adam and I could understand or appreciate. Often, we were right about that.

We accidentally created a community of like-minded fans, just because nobody else was having that kind of fun with Iowa athletics. I got thrown out of the 2010 spring game merely by associating with two of our readers. We hosted a day-long party built around the worship of a spiteful god responsible for the annual annihilation of Iowa’s running backs room. We got obsessed with a Korean girl-pop band and Ken O’Keefe’s favorite songs.

I met my wife during the BHGP years. I got married and had kids. And I did the same thing all of those other writers and reporters that we used to mock did: I got older, and mellower, and less inclined to curse online. The stakes of the games got lower, the stakes of the words heightened. No longer do I take Big Ten Media Days off from work, nor do I keep daily tabs on things like recruiting. Age has brought perspective.

And sometimes, that sucks. I often look back fondly on the fanaticism, on the free time and excess energy needed to love a football program like I did back then. The offseason feels shorter these days — the season does, too — and the spare hours are now much harder to find than the waiting is to endure.

When we moved Go Iowa Awesome to Rivals, we knew we were subjecting the site to corporate overlords who could snuff it out at any moment. We also knew it wouldn’t be the same as it had been. Rivals justifiably had guidelines and standards that we never would have met when writing parodies about Adam Woodbury’s eyepokes. There’s a reason why I never wrote for that site. I could never truly bite my tongue.

And while I don’t love BHGP like my kids, I still feel like BHGP was my first kid. I built it from scratch with two guys who became great friends, and watched it flourish in ways I never would have imagined. I’m proud of what we did there, and at Go Iowa Awesome, and no corporate shenanigans can change that. It’s a sad day here, but one that had to come eventually. Goodbye, old friend.

1. When Rivals took over the site, we lost the back archive of GIA posts, so things like “Kirk Ferentz’s The Raven” are generally lost to the langoliers of the world wide web.