Big 12 Sports

I'm trying something new this year to stay on top of all the Big 12 football news. The past several days I've been tracking down the major newspapers covering the Big 12 and subscribing to their conference-related RSS feeds. The idea is that I'll collect them all into one mega-RSS feed, so I'll have a constantly updating stream of Big 12 news. This is called a "river of news" in RSS-speak.

Here are the papers and sports sections I've found so far:

If you know of any papers I'm missing, please let me know. After I collected all their RSS feeds (which was a painstaking process), I subscribed to all of them in my RSS reader, put them all in one folder, and then made that folder public.  Here's the result:

http://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005856014/tag/Big+12+Sports/view/html

It's a river of Big 12 sports news from all of the above papers. It probably has more content than one person can reasonably keep up with, but that's okay. The idea is you can dip your toes in the river at any time and get a sense for what's going on. Ideally I would like it to focus only on football, but most newspapers don't have sport-specific feeds, just college-specific ones. So I'll have to settle for a mostly football river.

That URL is too complex to remember, though, so I set up another URL here:

http://big12.randyl.org

It will redirect you to the first URL, and is much easier to remember.

I mentioned curating this list was a painful process. There are several reasons:

  • It's not obvious where a newspaper's RSS feeds can be found, or if they even have any. Some newspapers have an RSS page that lists every feed. For others, you have to go to the Sports section, for example, and look for an RSS link.
  • Sometimes the RSS links don't work. Tulsa World was the worst offender. They have an entire page of RSS feeds, but They. Don't. Work. Ugh. As far as I can tell, the only way to get an RSS feed is to search their website for keywords (like "OU Sports") and then choose RSS as the display option.
  • Sometimes the RSS feeds are out of date, like the Houston Chronicle. They have a list of feeds for various college teams, but they return results from last year.

To end on a more enjoyable note, here are several things I've learned from my river so far:

The Charleston Daily Mail is doing a segment each week on the traditions of West Virginia's opponent. 

  • Their first opponent was Alabama and is detailed here. It discusses, among other things, how a muddy field led to Alabama becoming known as the Crimson Tide, and how the varsity team being forced to sit the first quarter of a game led to the elephant becoming their mascot. 
  • Their second opponent was Towson, detailed here. Their mascot has been, over the years, the Teachers, the Principals, the Schoolmasters, the Indians, the Golden Knights, and finally, the Tigers (along with 27 other NCAA teams).
  • Maryland is their opponent this week, but that article hasn't posted yet. Edit: Link is here.

And finally, Bob Stoops' favorite gift ever was a shower head.