About Rocky Top Talk

About Rocky Top Talk

Rocky Top Talk ("RTT") is SB Nation's Tennessee Volunteer blog. The majority of the content is provided by Joel Hollingsworth in his capacity as Chief Manager of Rocky Top Publishing, LLC. Other front page authors include David Hooper, Will Shelton, and . . . you! Yes, if you or any other RTT community member write a particularly good FanPost, we'll bump it to the front page and give you all of the credit.

About Joel

Joel Hollingsworth is a 1999 graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law. He wears a despicable tie by day while functioning as General Counsel of a health care organization and frightening orange plaid pajamas by mornings, nights, and weekends as Editor-in-Chief of Rocky Top Talk. His work has been featured on and in numerous websites and print publications on topics ranging from vomit (link vanished! ack!) to tax and copyright law (he's cited as an "expert" in the footnotes, which his wife finds hilarious nearly to the point of incontinence). Oh, and he's written about the Tennessee Volunteers, too, first in 2005 at View from Rocky Top (trudging through The Season of Which We Do Not Speak), and then here at RTT beginning in 2006. In 2009, he served as Editor for (and contributed to) the Maple Street Press preseason annual Rocky Top Tennessee 2009, which features a superb cast of contributors including nationally-known sports writers, Knoxville-based newspaper writers, and A-list bloggers. Joel also contributed an article on the Third Saturday in October to MSP's 2008 Alabama annual and an article on the Tennessee-Florida rivalry to MSP's 2009 Florida annual.

As a sports blogger, Joel guest-hosted at the Yahoo! college football blog Dr. Saturday for a week in March, 2009 and has guest-posted on a variety of other notable sites such as Every Day Should Be Saturday and Burnt Orange Nation, exposure that has helped lead to even more surprising and bizarre notoriety, including interviews by NBC Sports, ESPN.com, and The Sports Tap radio program. He's also mostly to blame for both the 2006 and 2007 College Football Blogger Awards, for which he conned four of the biggest names in our niche to put forth a united effort to promote the entire college football blogosphere.

Joel is also Co-League Manager of the NCAA blogs for SB Nation. He lives in Jonesborough, Tennessee, adjacent to Jackson the Mule, who says hi.

Community Guidelines

• Sense of Humor. Required.
• Decorum. Discussion is good. Disagreement is good. Trolling, flaming, and personal attacks are . . . not so good. Pretend you're in the room with whoever you're talking to or about. If you'd hesitate to say it in person, don't say it here. And let's leave the mean-spirited jokes about our players and coaches to our rivals, shall we?
• Profanity. It doesn't have to be all fairy tales and princesses around here, but let's keep it PG, please. Editors have unrestricted access to the Fulmerizer™, a proprietary device designed to substitute one of a list of former coach Phillip Fulmer's favorite G-rated alternatives for dirty words. ;-)
• Criticism of players and coaches (and bloggers and commenters). Hey, have at it. It's what fans do, right? Just keep a couple of things in mind as you're venting. First, you just might regret critical words when you find out after the season that the guy you were hounding all year was waging a private battle with cancer or something the whole time you were critiquing him from the comfort of your couch. Second, each coach and player should be viewed as one of Roosevelt's "doers of deeds," who "if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."
• Rivals. Gator fan? 'Bama fan? Fan of any other team? Welcome! Seriously. Come on in and join the discussion. You can even talk a little smack as long as it's good-natured.
• Material. Don't rip anybody off. If you find something somewhere else and want to post it here, quote an excerpt and link to the source. It's only right.