Every Day Should Be Saturday shuts down after over a decade, with SB Nation apparently set to launch a new college football site

It’s the end of an internet era as we know it. Over the last decade-plus, Every Day Should Be Saturday has played a giant role in online college football discussion, first as an independent site since 2005 and then under the SB Nation umbrella since January 2010. The site’s featured everything from massive charity donation drives to offseason crime standings to discussions of such strange things as Knoxville’s Sunsphere to a more effective takedown of Craig James than anyone at ESPN or Poynter ever delivered, and it even spawned its own unofficial Wiki. And in addition to hosting plenty of talented writers, it also attracted a lot of repeated commenters who built a community there and got to know each other on and offline. But site founder Spencer Hall announced Wednesday that while he’s staying with SB Nation, EDSBS is shutting down. The site will remain online with archives intact, but Hall’s moving on to a new project. (Update: that new project is Banner Society, discussed here. Our original post follows.)

…it's time to play Free Bird for EDSBS dot com y'all
https://t.co/7r9GwxqCqo

— ¡BUM CHILLUPS AKA SPENCER HALL! (@edsbs) July 31, 2019

In a later tweet, Hall confirmed that the Shutdown Fullcast podcast (with him, Ryan Nanni, Holly Anderson and Jason Kirk, all of whom have played large roles with EDSBS and with SB Nation’s CFB coverage) will continue:

yes because it can't be killed

we've tried https://t.co/pxx7XUldFX

— ¡BUM CHILLUPS AKA SPENCER HALL! (@edsbs) July 31, 2019

Meanwhile, Nanni hinted at a new site coming:

if you are feeling down about the end of https://t.co/5GoJWeRw1R (and i certainly am), maybe watch this space tomorrow? could be something here? hard to say, i definitely don’t know anything that i’m being cagey about.

— Ryan Nanni (@celebrityhottub) July 31, 2019

And he’s also been been talking about afootballwebsite.com, a URL that currently redirects to this 1999 Texas marching band tribute to the 12 Texas A&M students who died in a bonfire tragedy, but something that may redirect to the new project once it’s up. It will be interesting to see what this new project is and how it fits in with SB Nation’s other efforts. But for now, Wednesday saw a lot of Twitter tributes to EDSBS; here are some of those.

https://twitter.com/thejasonkirk/status/1156694592995172353

https://twitter.com/smartfootball/status/1156661963642085377

https://twitter.com/BrianMFloyd/status/1156664973008855040

https://twitter.com/cjane87/status/1156652687703846918

Writing for Every Day Should Be Saturday the last five years has been a privilege and a joy, and I thank anyone who took the time to read, contribute and share in the strange little community it created. Thanks to @edsbs and @celebrityhottub for giving me the chance.

— actioncookbook (@actioncookbook) July 31, 2019

https://twitter.com/AlexMcDaniel/status/1156662248351391749

https://twitter.com/texaninnyc/status/1156664258584821761

Thank you for some of the best sports writing I’ve ever read, Orson. But even greater thanks for hosting a forum that allowed me to meet some of my now closest real life friends.

— TW (@TWEsq) July 31, 2019

my husband and i bonded over this site very early in our friendship which became a relationship which became a marriage, so thank you for all of that

— Allison DeJong (@allison_dejong) July 31, 2019

Those are just a few of the many people who have chimed in on what EDSBS meant to them, from a place to write to a place to read to a place to find community. There are plenty of other touching tributes in the comments of that last post, too, which currently has over 1,000 comments. At any rate, EDSBS certainly made a giant mark on the college football world, and the tributes illustrate that. And we’ll see what Hall and SB Nation do next.

[Every Day Should Be Saturday]