The State of Stripe Hype

On behalf of the Fan-Sided Blogs network, I wanted to come on here and make a statement.

First off, we want to thank ex-blogger Dave Howard, who recently resigned from this gig, for his service. Even though we disagreed on this situation, Dave’s a nice guy, a soldier and patriot and was a solid blogger and part of our team.

The word team, however, is an important part of what I am going to get to.

When the Bengals decided to sue us, they served papers to my brother, not Dave, and we were the ones under fire. It is easy for a blogger to sit here and want to fight the good fight when he won’t potentially lose thousands of dollars and a family small business he is passionate about.

Were we happy about the suit? Fuck no, we weren’t. We found their claims to “Welcome to the Jungle” and the team’s colors redunkulous. At the same time, we knew we were coming to a misslefight with a plastic butter knife, so, yeah, from our POV we had no choice but to fight for what we could keep and then remove all of the Bengals’ trademarks from our site.

Our plan was to make the changes, and then fight the Bengals with our blog, our words and our humor after the fact. Our blogger wanted to straight up fight the case, and launched an attack before we had any idea what was going on, and before he had even read the letter. We have never censored any blogger of ours, but in the end this is our blog and our network, and, again, it was our asses being sued. Additionally, we knew this fight could damage each of our blogs and our league-wide relationship with the NFL. We simply unpublished the post until we could hold a phone conversation with said blogger, so we could get on the same page. He refused and quit.

We have put his post back up, because he has complained about it and refuses to talk to us about it or change it, even after reading the letter and having all the facts. Again, we are not into censorship, so we put the post back up promptly.

We just wanted to:

A.) Officially state that while we are cooperating with the Bengals, we are not happy about this suit and think it’s bullshit. Going to court is just not the smart fight for us at all at this time. I will say the the Bengals are delusional if they think we are the ones doing its franchise “irreparable harm.” Um, I think Chris Henry, Odell Thurmon and Co. handled that long before Stripe Hype’s inception.

B.) State that we have done everything we can to help Dave and Stripe Hype, but we must defend ourselves when we are being accuse of censorship. We don’t censor our bloggers, we were simply trying to step back, take a deep breath and look at what was best for the network, something a certain someone didn’t want to do. We promptly put the blog post back up when we knew this is what he wanted to do regardless of our input. If anything, I’d call it temporary screening, lol…

That’s our unofficial official statement on the matter. We are cooperating with the suit, amicably parting ways with Dave and seeking a new blogger (e-mail us at fansided@gmail.com).

Thanks for reading…

– Adam Best

Fan-Sided Blogs Co-Director