Good Luck Stoss, Dudzik and USA Nerves

To be honest, we’re anxiety-ridden messes about tomorrow evening’s USA game against Ghana already and not entirely in the mood for gnashing our teeth about JMU offseason fodder. We’ve also watched every critical USMNT game over the last twelve years or so together and this year life has contrived (for good reason this time) to split us up and I think we’re even more nervous not to share our nail-biting afternoon tomorrow. (Wait – has the blog turned us into a bitter old married couple? guess so).

So this post isn’t for everyone, but we do want to send some big “best wishes” out to two former Dukes.  First, to soon-to-be-former Daily News-Record JMU beat reporter Matthew Stoss (@MatthewStoss)! Stoss had the unfortunate duty of taking over for Mike Barber at a time when pretty much the entire fan base has been, and continues to be, justifiably pissed off with JMU’s position re: athletics as a whole. Matt was funny, smart, and generally gave a great effort covering a thankless and paranoid end-of-Mickey era and the women’s hoops run of glory. We might be the only ones, well of course our guy Dukie95 too, who really enjoyed he and Marc Selig’s short-lived Dukes of JMU Modcast and we always appreciated that Stoss seemed to have interests outside of just athletics. We have no idea what the journalism world pays, but for anyone with a complaint about his time, we’d just like to postulate that it just might be fairly difficult living in a small, old-boys club town when the old boys you cover make a generous, but tenuous living off the performance or lack thereof of a group of 19-year-olds.

Second, word is former JMU QB Drew Dudzik has been hired as an offensive assistant at Duke. Nearly saved our ass in the Montana semifinal and of course, 21-16. Good luck Drew!

For our fellow fanatics, @MattJones36 is taking over the football beat. He’s a VT grad so chances are he’ll be toeing the line on unwarranted condescension soon. Hope not.