NSFW! It’s Meltdown Time! And Roll ‘Bama Roll needs your help!

Fifteen years ago, when Joel and Todd created this little indie ‘Bama site called Roll ‘Bama Roll, they had an idea that has now turned out to be both ingenious and oft-imitated: The Meltdown.

And, for fifteen years we have dutifully brought you the best of people freaking the f’ out (who can ever forget such iconic moments as the Texas Face AIDS?) But, there is no secret that some folks working on it are not a big fan, and after a year or two of doing so, and with traffic diminishing across college sports sites generally, we wondered if it was still worth doing?

I have long-defended the Meltdown, and agreed this year to resume garnering misery from the darkest corners of the web, so as to save it. It is a nice way to take stock of fan sentiment across the greater CFB world. Besides, I like tradition. It’d be a shame to let 15 years go to waste.

And the other honest answer is that I’m a spoiled Alabama alum and fan who relishes in the pain of others saddled with the burden of rooting for poverty programs.

Yet, today with scant time remaining before Week Zero, we find ourselves at the crossroads: No one has time to do it. The Meltdown can take one person 8-10 hours pretty easily if you’re scouring all the haunts of lunacy on the web.

So, this is where we need your help.
And my inquiry comes in two parts.

First, should we continue the Meltdown?

Let’s assume the answer to the above is affirmative, and you would like us to continue, would you be interested in helping pitch in? Crowd-source the Meltdown, so to speak?

I have gone back and forth about the best way to do this, and I think if volunteers are willing, we can sort out teams or conferences and sign up.

Here’s how it would work: Say CT4 and MeltdownsAreNotReal are particularly into the AAC this season. One could volunteer to gather AAC freakouts from a few Facebook team pages (those are hilarious, BTW). Another could gather them from Twitter. Yet another from r/cfb on Reddit? Yet someone else could go to message boards.

Or something similar.

Just sign up, collect a few choice snippets, and send them over to a dedicated email address I will set up. Then, I will add my own, gather them all together, do the formatting and editing and redaction etc., and then publish them.

I think this serves several purposes:

• The Meltdown lives on, for a start.
• With more eyeballs, and more people accustomed to visiting difference places of the internet, we can have a far better, larger, and more robust Meltdown.
  Josh or Brent may not think about UNLV very often; Erik and CB may not have time to catch that Rutgers implosion, but someone out there will. And the more and varied of a Meltdown we have, the better.
• No one person will be doing very much. It may take you half an hour to comb through some of the stuff you were already going to read anyway.
• For the lolz. Admit it, Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. has become sacred for many people.

That’s just me spitballing, and I’m 100% open to all suggestions — including pulling the plug if we must.

Leave your comments, feedback, suggestions below. And if we go forward, I’ll start setting things up. Let’s not waste that swinging cactus ladies, gents, and others of questionable fun bits.