Welcome everyone to The People’s Quarterback blog. I know most people are probably thinking or asking a couple of different things right now; (1) “Not another blog?!” (2) “Who is this guy and why should I read him?!” and/or (3) “The only person reading this is Shawn’s friends and family, why is he writing an introduction about himself?” Well let me answer these starting in reverse order. The answer to number three is quite simple; I hope one day this blog takes off and I have all kinds of different readers from all over Pittsburgh and the rest of the country. They probably at one point will ask themselves, “who is this guy”, and I will already have an answer posted for them to read about. With that, the answer to number two is Shawn Quinn. Well that is my name anyway, I will tell you a little bit more about myself in just a bit. To answer the first question, yes, I agree, not another blog! There are already millions of useless blogs and information on the internet that you do not care about and do not want to follow. So don’t follow them! Follow mine…..but, seriously, I hope to provide you with some knowledge, some thoughts, and some angles on sports that maybe you have not thought of before while hopefully entertaining you to some degree. Please give the blog a shot, take the time to check it out once a day for a week, a month, a year and feel free to let me know what you think at anytime.
So back to who I am. My name is Shawn Quinn; I grew up here in the Pittsburgh area and have been a diehard sports fan since pretty much the time I could walk. I went to Bishop Canevin high school (it was Canevin at the time I went, I wish they would go back to the much simpler name) where I played football, basketball and baseball. I went on to play football at Carnegie Mellon University (yes we have a football team, and usually a pretty darn good Division III team) where I had mostly an injury filled career hopping around the sidelines or in the booth on crutches. My Dad was an All-American defensive end at Duquesne University back in the 70’s and my younger brother was an All-State wide receiver and defensive back at Canevin before playing at Duquesne. As you can tell, I come from a football family, but my first love has always been playing basketball. The reason I decided to play football in college was because I very much thought I wanted to coach football someday at the highest level, and the only way to do that was to obviously play football in college. That and the fact that Rick Pitino doesn’t usually recruit 5’11” white guys, no matter how well they can shoot it. Oh, you’re probably wondering about the name of the blog. Yes I played quarterback, yes it comes from The Rock for all you wrestling fans, and no, the longer story behind it is not very important. So why does this make me think I can write a blog and that anyone would care? Glad you asked...
I love sports, I feel the need to know more about sports than I should ever really need to know, even about sports that I really don’t care about. I devour all the sports information I can read, ESPN.com, SI.com, the local newspapers, some of the better blogs out there, you name it, I usually try to read it. Even more so, I love to talk, debate, and argue about sports and even enjoy writing about them with nobody on the other end to talk back. Some friends and I started a football picks website called The Football Prodigies a couple years back (yes, my wife thought we were crazy with this idea) and actually did pretty well, winning at about a 55% clip and giving commentary on our picks both pre and post game. However, we all have real jobs and the time commitment needed to maintain that site and format was just not available for us. I’ve also done some commentary on different aspects of sports in some former pools I used to run including the NCAA Tournament, NFL Playoffs and the College Bowl Season. Everyone who was a part of those pools usually seemed to enjoy my perspective and my writing. I thought why not try this on a larger level. I am not sure if that qualifies me or not to do this, but hopefully all of you can decide on that for yourselves.
Finally, and most importantly, what will this blog be about? The answer to that is pretty much anything that I want it to be about. Usually it will contain my thoughts and opinions on the local Pittsburgh sports scene, the national sports scene, and/or major news or stories going on in the sports world. Sometimes it will just involve links to another site with a really great story or opinion on something in the world of sports. We’ll talk important games, make picks (for non-gambling purposes of course!), debate team and player rankings and pretty much cover the gauntlet of the entire sports world in one form or another. I do hope you enjoy reading The People’s Quarterback and I look forward to your comments, questions, suggestions, future column ideas, and pretty much any feedback you would like to give me on the content of the blog.
Once again, thanks for reading and please send all questions and feedback to squinn@thepeoplesquarterback.com.
