Colonials Corner

Beginning Tuesday morning, we’ll have a slate of posts pop up throughout the week with a breakdown of the 2010 football team. Each post will contain a breakdown of one or more positions, a depth chart at the position, and any news about the players lost/gained at the position.

A tentative schedule for each (note: there’s been a slight adjustment to the original schedule):

• Tuesday Morning – Quarterbacks and Special Teams
• Tuesday Night -  Backs and Receivers
• Wednesday Morning – Offensive Line
• Thursday Morning  – Defensive Line
• Thursday Night – Linebackers
• Friday Morning – Secondary
• Friday Night – Overall two-deep depth chart, newcomers to watch, and schedule breakdown.
• Saturday – Q+A out of the comments

Please be patient as all of the posts come up. Don’t ask “Who’s starting at DB?” in the QB post. Don’t ask: “Did Raphael Johnson get another year?” in the QB post. It’ll come up (he did, by the way).

If you do have a question that you don’t see answered in any of the posts by Friday, feel free to submit a question and I’ll answer them on Saturday.

Just a heads up, we can’t really do much in the way of updates right now. Our computer has decided it no longer wants to work properly, so until the issue is fixed (hopefully in the next 24-36 hours), we won’t be able to update.

Shouldn’t be any major news: the RMU football schedule is out now on the RMU athletics site, and I think it’s still going to be another week or two until we have a finalized recruiting class for basketball.

Just sit tight and hopefully we’ll be back up and running as soon as possible.

Update: Most, if not all, issues have been corrected. The gracious webhost here got us back online earlier today, we’re back up and running at full steam.

Even the commenting issue seems to be extremely localized, as I’ve only had one person complain about it now. I’ll continue working with that person if they still have issues.

Thanks for your patience.

Some of you may have noted a few cosmetic changes around here in the links, and may have seen references elsewhere, so it’s time to make the announcement.

Earlier this week, I began my new role as the publisher of PaPreps. It is the Pennsylvania high school section of rivals.com, and I’ll be editing all of the content on the site as well as producing and writing articles on Pennsylvania high school sports.

It’s another step in my career, as I’ll now be writing for a national media company (Rivals is owned by Yahoo! Sports). At the same time, it allows me to continue writing for the Beaver County Times and continue writing here. Naturally it will take some of my time, but it shouldn’t be too drastic of a change. But please keep in mind that the Times and Rivals pay me for the work, whereas I run this site on my free time and out of my own pocket, so they will naturally take priority.

I took down the “Colonials Corner Elsewhere” section because a large chunk of the articles are sadly no longer available. But if you want to read my material elsewhere, you can always check out papreps.rivals.com, timesonline.com, or just look for links on my Twitter feed. Links are also available in the Bio/Contact section.

As always, thank you very much for continuing to read and support the site.

I haven’t had the chance to say anything about this because of an incredibly busy week, but I wanted to share this with the readers of this site.

We’ve kept this site singularly focused on Robert Morris sports for multiple reasons, but as you can imagine, I do have interests that lie elsewhere. I shared some of them before on the old blog, and I’ll be starting up my own website in the very near future to coincide with some other positive developments that have occurred in the last few days and weeks (none negatively impact this site).

I’m a huge music fan, and I’m also a fan of non-profit works. With the devastation in Haiti, two of those interests have dovetailed.

Grammy winning rock band Linkin Park established a charity called Music For Relief several years ago as a way to use their resources and their music to raise funds for various causes. This week, they launched a program centered on relief for Haiti called “Download to Donate”. They have multiple songs from a wide variety of artists that you can listen to, and you can download all the songs for a fee.

The fee is whatever you want. 100% of the donations go to relief efforts in Haiti. I’ve included the widget from their site at the top of this post. Feel free to listen, to share, and to donate. Please visit the Music For Relief site to donate.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Happy Holidays from Colonials Corner. We’ll be back in a week with coverage of the men’s basketball team taking on Youngstown State. No idea where the original image is from, but thanks to whoever put it up.

With all the major Colonial sports on vacation, we’re taking one as well. We’ll be back this weekend with a recap of the football season. Until then, enjoy the turkey, family, and football. Have a “turducken” in honor of John Madden.

After trying to allow people to be adults, I’m going to start restricting the ability to comment on this website. I’ve asked people, publicly, to try and discuss facts mixed with opinions, to not engage in spreading rumors or dangerous speculation.

That request has gone unheeded. The discussion begun by the poster known as “D” regarding Kevin Quinn’s injury status is completely inaccurate and has been deleted. I’ve talked to Quinn, and “D” is completely off base. Wherever “D” picked up the information, it wasn’t from Quinn, and I’m going to believe someone who contacted me directly rather than someone posting anonymously on a website. I’d love to talk to “D” but that individual used a fake email address (as many of you have) and his IP address is a public one. “D” can feel free to email me if there’s an objection.

I’ve also deleted the comments accusing Jeff Sinclair of faking his injury for similar reasons.

I’ve been dismayed at the negativity and the direction the comments have been going in anyway, so this is the last straw. You know the old saying – one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. I’m exploring ways on how to effectively deter false information and derogatory comments from ruining readers’ experience on this site. Comments are now being consistently monitored. That means it may take several hours for your comment to appear on this site. I’m going to try a couple different methods and will be tweaking things over the weekend, so I encourage comments throughout the weekend, as well as feedback and potential ideas to help regulate the site.

I started the website as a way to disseminate and discuss news about Robert Morris University sports. I’ve been very pleased at the response and the number of individuals visiting this site (both the old version and the current one).

However, I will absolutely not tolerate the following from commenters: Continuously engaging in relaying false information that negatively impacts another individual (“D’s” crime); racist or derogatory language; profanity; sexually explicity language; and anything else that crosses the bounds of civil and decent human discourse.

If you have a problem with any of that, feel free to email me at achiappazzi@gmail.com. I welcome the opportunity for you to express your views, but I’m going to run this site as I see fit with the least amount of headaches possible.

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, but this is the way it has to be.

We’re going to experiment with this format during the game on Saturday. We’ll try it for a few weeks and if it works, we’ll keep it around.

You can post all you want in the comments and discuss the game before, during, and after it occurs. I will not be joining you, at least all that often, as I’ll be down at Heinz Field covering the Youngstown State/Pitt game for the newspaper.I’ll drop in afterward after I listen to the archived broadcast.

You can listen live at rmucolonials.com. You can also follow the stats live at VMI’s website, by going here.

Keep it clean and enjoy.