TNIAAM Roast Week: Jared Smith

A decade of Troy Nunes is An Absolute Magician has come and gone. Crazy.

What's even crazier, I am sure, is the amount of times Sean had to explain what the site was about and how he came up with such an awfully long, nonsensical name.

It is pretty obvious now, Sean never quit his marketing job. Nope. It is just nobody ever wanted to hire him again.

If Sean Keeley were in charge of naming the TV show Friday Night Lights, it probably be called "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose: The Story of Coach Taylor, His Emotional Pre-Game Speeches (Which Are Awesome!), His Good Looking Wife And The 50 Craziest Ways To Win A High School Football Game."

Seriously though, how many times has a TNIAAM writer needed to explain that he or she is actually not writing about a real magician named Troy.?

Shit. How many Syracuse fans who read the website REALLY THINK SEAN'S NAME IS ACTUALLY TROY!!?!?!?! (The number would scare a lot of you.)

Gotta give you credit though, a man who is willing to lay his reputation on the line and name is Syracuse University Athletic website in honor of a quarterback that once lost his job to R.J. Anderson as a fifth-year senior— that was even after the infamous play-by-play call that led to the blogs name— should be commended. It takes guts to admit your expectations and standards for yourself were that low.

What do they say? If you set your expectations low than you will never fail right? No wondering this site has been around this long. Jeez.

I really shouldn't poke fun of the quality of the site though. I did write for it for a few years. All the hours spent pounding at the keyboard and defending my obvious grammatical errors and typos was time well spent. That was until I realized I could do so much better when I got married, had a kid and got a real damn job.

Speaking about guys that need to get an actual life on this site, let's talk about John Cassillo and Dan Lyons for a moment

At no other site in the world can someone get as fired up to write a play-by-play breakdown of George McDonald's offense than this one co-led by Cassillo. Take a moment and think the amount of hours John spent RE-WATCHING those football games, charting the plays and then writing 500 damn words about bubble screens.

Yeah, John we get it. Bubble screens are bad. McDonald is a bad coach. Any troll on Syracuse.com knows this. The difference between you and them is THEY spent 10 seconds to think and share it while YOU took five hours.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lyons made a name for himself on this site for not only being good enough writer to be on this site, but because he knew the name and scouting report of every terrible football recruit that Greg Robinson, Doug Marrone and Scott Shafer brought to the Carrier Dome. Seriously dude, what kind of college/post-college life do you live when you can breakdown the worst of the worst of national football recruits? Reflect on that for a second, please.

Together they do a weekly podcast that features more talk about their alcoholism, which features an unhealthy addiction to craft beers, than they do about Syracuse sports.

Excuse me, fellas but a large majority of the Syracuse fanbase do not care about your 9.0% IPA, of which you can't actually pronounce the name, and just want do drink a damn 30-rack of Blue Light during SU sporting events. Hell, they gotta drink that many beers before they download your podcast to listen to anyway.

Another thing about the podcast, how hard is it to get a guest that knows something about the actual team? Are you guys so unlikeable that nobody, even Brent Axe— who do anything, include trying to act like he can write, to improve his brand— will not come on with you?

Speaking about unlikeable folks, what can't we say about Casual Hoya and NoEscalators and The UConn Blog.

Hoya should spend less time tweeting about Syracuse basketball's criminal record, NCAA violations and early March Madness exits and more time figuring out when they're going to fire their head coach, which has allowed his team to brawl with a Chinese team and his biggest accomplishment is reaching the NIT Sweet 16.

Meanwhile, NoEscalators and the UConn Blog still can't figure out how they keep getting left out of conference expansion. News flash fellas, stop writing about how much more your women's basketball team wins than your football team. It might help.

(Wait, that last dig didn't really work. TNIAAM does that now too. Looks like I stopped writing on this site at the right time.)

***

All kidding aside, what an accomplishment Sean and the rest of us have managed.

Sure, I was only around for nearly a quarter of it, but what I crazy run I had.

From covering the Bernie Fine saga and the underrated 2011-12 Syracuse Basketball for SB Nation New York and then with TNIAAM.

Then there was bizarre Year of 2013 which featured: Doug Marrone leaving in the middle of the night to take the Buffalo Bills head coaching job, James Southerland's Papergate, the crazy Final Four run after the worst loss to Georgetown ever (which was made up for by Florida Gulf Coast).

The Year of 2014, which featured the a welcoming to the ACC and Tyler Ennis carrying Syracuse basketball for a record-setting start, which was crapped on by goddamn Dayton in the second round. It also was the start of the end of Scott Shaffer.

The Year of 2015, saw the self-imposed NCAA ban after the sanctions were FINALLY announced. Then we got to see Rakeem Christmas and Trevor Cooney go off together, which was nice.

Life caught up to me in the past year, as my new baby girl, family and job have taken up much of my writing time but what a nice run I had. Had so much fun with Sean, John, Dan and the rest of the gang and still read TNIAAM on the regular.

It would never would have happened without Sean and his fantastic writing and sense of humor. Long live TNIAAM and Let's Go Orange!