Look for this familiar pose come the final round of Bayhill

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It has been reported that Tiger Woods will return to the PGA Tour at the Bay Hill Invitational (Arnold Palmer's tourney) coming up in t two weeks.  I am over the moon excited and cant wait to see Tiger prowling the fairways again (I have been friends with Tiger since '97 so I may be a bit biased) I hope he wins every god damn tournament that he plays in.  The media has been billing this as a "comeback" but in all actuality Tiger has only missed 2 or 3 tournaments that he usually plays, so what is he actually coming back from?  He is coming back from banging hella whores, I mean I guess that's something to "comeback" from, but usually in sports you are talking about a broken ankle or or a dislocated finger or some sort of tragedy -  getting laid usually isn't one of them.  Could you imagine hearing during a pre game show. "well it is nice to see Smith back in the lineup, this is first game back since having sex with 6 different women".  All in all tiger is coming back to the Tour, but this isn't a "comeback".

Howard Stern might be uglier than you but his wife is way hotter than yours.

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Last night my two personal entertainment worlds collided in a hilarious way, it went down when a member of the Howard Stern show called into ESPN and prank called Scott Van Pelt who thought that he had scored a live on air interview with Brian Westbrook.  Needless to say hilarity ensued and SVP got razzed Stern Style check out the video here until ESPN/ABC Disney has it removed.

SB Nation's blogger who covers the Nuggets recently wrote an interesting piece that was a follow up to a post he had done about Melo sitting out his 6th straight game with a sprained ankle. In the article he discusses how his readers went after him for giving the "fan's perspective" and straying from hard journalism.

Its a weird balancing act that folks like him must do, which comprises the "blogger's dilemma" as to whether they should be doing the job of a beat reporter or an editorialist and how to stay somewhere in the middle, while successfully doing both.

Luckily for us at FOF, we get to give purely the fan's perspective as we are entirely "editorial" and don't have to cover a team from a hard news perspective. However, that will all change when our Project Franchise team, but our analysis wont - in fact, we expect it will get even more interesting as we will actually be giving the FOF perspective on everything we do - which will hopefully be all positive as the plan is for the fans to decide everything.

Along the way there will be an unprecedented amount of opportunities for our fanbase to create the total fan experience, so we're going to have to get very good at taking the good with the bad - time to thicken up our skin!

How dare you write that about Derek Anderson?!?

What sport should Project Franchise buy a team in?

The first thing we need to decide is what type of team we want to run. Once we pick a sport, then we can begin working on finding specific teams and leagues that we can negotiate with to get our squad. We had an initial vote that included every sport we could think of and have now moved to a run off of the top three:

• Baseball - because of the games history and organization, baseball carries the most cache as a minor league sport with almost all major league players having played minor league baseball at some point. Teams are very prevalent and located in all parts of the country. However, baseball’s following has dwindled in recent years as the other sports have become more popular.
• Football - it has now become the most popular and profitable sport in America on a high professional level. However, the teams are more expensive to operate and not much success has been seen by football teams and leagues outside of the NFL.
• Basketeball - because of the smaller team sizes basketball is likely the most cost effective option and the minor league basketball scene has grown quite a bit in recent years. However, with the emergence of high profile Euro hoops, US minor league basketball tends to draw lower end talent and the teams rarely bring in enough fans to maintain profitability.

Once we've selected the type of sport, the Team Captains will undertake a thorough research project that will help us present a variety of options for leagues that we can buy teams in for the next big vote. If you have any suggestions for teams or leagues we should start looking into now, feel free to submit a nomination.

Help Run The Team - VOTE

Sorry it took so long.  I had an interview last week so I didn't think it would be the best time to shave my head.  Here are the before and after pictures.

That's a zero guard, but since my hair is thick as hell it doesn't look completely bald.  Also since I already miss Jersey Shore after its season finale here's a video to bring back the memories.

Me and my hair

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That's a beautiful head of hair.

Now that we've gotten our first full week into 2010 we wanted to share a bit of info about Project Franchise and Front Office Fans. Since launching in early October, we've posted almost 300 stories, have over 150 members and have run 100 polls - with the most popular vote being for When the fans would want to see Chris Johnson & Rajon Rondo race.

We've gotten over 30k visits and nearly 50k pageviews and our traffic in recent weeks has been higher than ever, which has given us some great feedback and helped us reach a whole new audience of fans. In 2010 we will be taking the next great leap forward working with a host of other SB blogs and growing the fanbase and giving them more opportunities to help us build the perfect team.

For more info on what we did in 2009 on FOF, check out the detailed stats.

Thanks for all of your help and involvement and we look forward to a great 2010.

This week a couple of our SB friends wrote interesting posts where they interviewed the local mayor of towns where their favorite major league teams have, or are considering having, a minor league presence.

First is a post from The Copper & Blue about the Edmonton Oilers setting up an AHL team in Oklahoma City.

Then the Bleed Cubby Blue guys ran an interview with the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, where the Cubs are working on renegotiating their deal to continue holding Spring Training.

Both posts are pretty interesting and help provide some prospective into the relationship between sports teams and local markets - even on a minor league level. As we've done a bunch of exploratory work with a variety of league commissioners and team owners, its become very clear that having a supportive local government makes a huge difference in the team's ability to succeed and grow - so that is definitely high on the list of requirements for the team that we take over and the market they play in.