This is the fifth of nine chapters in the history of the Dawgvent, with all its twists and turns. From a handful of football-loving computer geeks to a college football colossus, this is the story of the worldwide leader in Georgia Bulldog reporting. Adapted from the book Sax Attacks, by Rob Suggs.
By 1998, the year the recruiting sites really took off, Vent traffic was overwhelming the Centurion system. National Signing Day of that year was almost apocalyptic. Servers simply didn’t have much capacity in those days; they responded to high traffic by going on the fritz.
This was the year Signing Day became bigger than Christmas for Georgia fans especially. The class was filled with blue-chips. Will Witherspoon's decision, from down in Panama City, was the cliffhanger that probably knocked the system down. One poster used long-distance telephoning to get the word out instantly.
At Jason’s office, the system surrendered to an avalanche of users frantic to know who signed Witherspoon along with Jesse Miller, Terrence Edwards, Boss Bailey, and Nate Hybl—a few of that year’s big “gets.” Quincy Carter had also indicated he was leaving baseball and coming to Athens. Georgia was coming off a huge upset of Florida in Jacksonville in 1997, as well as an Outback Bowl victory over Wisconsin that, at the time, was a true feel-good moment for a team that had sat home last bowl season. The Vent was a happy place—until it went offline.
At the front office of Centurion Systems—what fresh hell was this? Jason’s bosses were less than pleased by the systems crash. “You’re telling me what, Brooks? We were shut down by FOOTBALL CHAT?”
The fans weren’t exactly delighted, either. You’d run to the home computer for your desperate, Signing Day Vent fix, and instead you’d get an error page (“HTTP 404” FILE CANNOT BE FRIGGIN’ FOUND”).
On this of all days? It was the UGA fan’s equivalent of Santa being stuck midway down the chimney. Or Vanderbilt not showing up for a game because of some pandemic.
Jason was getting it from both ends, co-worker and fan alike. Maybe, he observed ruefully, it was time to shut the doors to the site. He actually considered that. He had a life, a wife, and a job, and his days were becoming more demanding. Had he gone that way, you and I would be leading vastly different lives. A few of us might be millionaires, or thinner and sexier, and we would have still have decent eyesight. There might be flying cars and peace in the Middle East.
But no to all that. On reflection, Jason realized the Vent deserved better than to be put down like a stray dawg, so he began to seek donations—what we’d now call “crowdsourcing,” though, again, that terminology had yet to emerge. There was no GoFundMe. You just called your buddies and asked for dough.
For Jason, this was the most dramatic moment of the whole saga. He was accustomed to user “handles” and their brief comments. People were often thought of in the Internet community as “fonts” in those days. Just digital code on a page. But here were letters on real paper, from real people, from across the country, and as he opened them, checks and currency fell out. Venters were bankers. Lawyers. Teens. High school coaches. Guests of the State. Politicians. Housewives.
Many of the checks came with notes that said, “I don’t post, but the Dawgvent is the best thing about the whole Internet. There’s no other place for me to get this information about my Dawgs. Please keep it going, and if this isn’t enough, I can send more.”
The Vent was pardoned and granted probation.
The pluto.centurionsys.com days were over nonetheless, but now Jason knew the Vent had taken on a life of its own. He would build a new home for his site—and he could ditch the clunky “Pluto.centurionsys” address, which wasn’t exactly catchy. It was time to buy a domain—a personalized dot-com—just for the Vent.
Jason and his wife happened to be on their way out of town for a little vacation. His wife was going through the stack of mail she’d grabbed on her way out the door. Looking through the letters and the checks, she marveled at the distance many of them had traveled—fans on the West Coast or from an army base in Germany; an international businessman in Rio; people from all over, making friends and sharing thoughts on a little server in somebody’s office, and all arguing with Rolo.
“These people are from everywhere. Not just around here,” Mrs. Jason said, as their car moved down the freeway. “But they’re a nationality all their own. You have to call your new domain the Dawgnation.”
That had a nice ring to it, Jason thought.
Over time the name Dawgnation stuck, not just around the Vent but elsewhere. Others laid claim to the natural branding of the label (ESPN first then ultimately the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) but its true birth came in the Jasonmobile on its way out of town.
It became possible for the Grapevine, too, to be hosted on Jason’s new server. There was also the Anti-Orange Page, cartoonist and humorist Amy Moore Brown’s (Karate Dawg/Toon Dawg's) gathering for everyone who hated teams wearing orange. (Motto, “Rednecks turn orange in the fall.”)
As the world-ending crisis of Y2K approached, the Vent had a proud server of its own—just as the Quincy Carter era began.
Next: Rivals and Alliances
