By popular demand (well, some demand, anyway), I’m going through the stats to see what you read on SportsMyriad this year.

Traffic was down just a little year over year, which isn’t surprising even though the blog didn’t operate all 12 months of 2010. In 2010, I was trying to make this a full-service, revenue-generating blog, so I was posting more frequently. This year, I concentrated a bit more on work that actually pays money.

Still, readership wasn’t bad. Here’s what surprised me:

– 2012 medal projections keep getting traffic even without recent activity.

– The Ultimate Fighter recaps really dropped off. Perhaps that’s because Season 13 wasn’t great.

– Single-Digit Soccer started with a bang and dropped to nothing. That might be the biggest disappointment for me. Some of the posts drew less than 20 page views.

– My best MMA writing didn’t do well at all. That included an in-person report on TUF tryouts, my response to a ridiculous Washington Post piece, my take on the media hysteria over an ill-advised kids fight, and the only conference call transcript you’ll ever need.

Here’s what didn’t surprise me:

– Angry Duke-bashers were all over my post on the lacrosse scandal. Angry promotion-relegation backers didn’t bother. And when I angered Title IX critics, I had a thoughtful discussion with them but got little traffic.

– The WPS-Borislow documents and other breaking news all did pretty well.

Here’s the full list (excluding the posts that drew tiny page views), expressed as percentages of my traffic:

Through it’s 21-month existence, SportsMyriad has seen erratic activity — flurries of posts, then very little. I’d expect the first couple of months of 2012 to veer toward “very little.” I really need to sit down and wrap up my next book, and I may still have a few features for espnW along with the occasional sports culture post at Popdose.

But please keep me in your RSS readers (or at least follow me on Twitter) for the following reasons:

1. If some news breaks in WPS, I’m still likely to have some of it here.

2. When I get back to business here, I’ll be really revved up to go. Have to update all those 2012 medal projections, you know.

Happy New Year to all in whatever sports you enjoy.

http://storify.com/duresport/wps-vigil-dec-5-what-s-division-i-anyway.js?border=false&header=false&sharing=false&more=false

http://storify.com/duresport/the-wps-vigil-dec-2-update.js?border=false&header=false&sharing=false&more=false

http://storify.com/duresport/the-war-on-nonrevenue-sports.js?border=false&header=false&sharing=false&more=false

Here’s what I’ve been doing for the past eight months or so:

– Working on a book about mixed martial arts.

– Writing about women’s soccer and a few other topics for espnW and ESPN.

– Writing about MMA for USA TODAY.

– Contributing to USA TODAY’s magazine specials.

– Blogging at SportsMyriad and Mostly Modern Media. SportsMyriad includes the ambitious 2012 Olympic medal projections.

Being a Duke grad in sports media was quite uncomfortable during the days of the Duke lacrosse saga, in which a stripper wrongly accused three players of rape and the media tore Duke one way, then the other. (I’d say my employer was fairer than most.)

Early on, I had the sense that the accusations were flawed. Brendan Nyhan, the blogger behind the terrific rhetoric-busting blog Spinsanity and then a grad student at Duke, cataloged some of the problems, even as the talking-head media ranted itself silly about the culture at Duke. Didn’t matter that the talking-head media didn’t know a damn thing about Duke.

Of course, neither did KC Johnson, a then-unknown history professor, but he got a good head start delving deeper into the problems with the case. The Chronicle, my proud student paper, did a fine job with it. (Johnson, much to his credit, acknowledges their fairness.) Eventually, the accusations were doubted. Then dismissed. Not just “not guilty,” but “innocent.” Simply put: They did not do it. No one did.

The irony about Johnson’s blog was this: Johnson was exposing the dangers of groupthink, yet simultaneously demonstrating them. He showed that rape accusations that get a lot of play in the media can lead many to a rush to judgment. Absolutely. And then his commenters, a band with various grudges against Duke, urged him to take it further and turn the screws on Duke itself. They weren’t entirely wrong — a group of 88 faculty members, including a classmate and a former professor of mine but no one else I knew, took out an ad that didn’t explicitly say, “Yay, let’s go get the lacrosse players,” but it could’ve been more tactful. (I did show the ad once to a neutral party, who wondered what the fuss was all about.)

Johnson did his best to distance himself from the most extreme elements in his comments. A black accuser against a mostly white team can bring out the worst in a lot of anonymous people, and Johnson rightfully wanted no part of that. But after one howling mob departed Duke, exhausting its tired stereotypes of a rich white school in a poor black state, Johnson had another mob on his blog. (And the comments on any Chronicle story that had anything to do with lacrosse. Or sports. Or nearly anything.) The mob wanted to paint Duke as anti-jock, incompetent, arrogant and so on.

Duke was in an impossible situation. A rogue prosecutor, Mike Nifong, had indicted three lacrosse players on rape charges stemming from a party that made the whole team look awful. Keeping the whole team away from anyone who was about to rush to judgment was an impossible task. Imagine if the lacrosse season had gone forward and the team had been attacked at an away game.

Johnson and company had little sympathy. They kept the pressure on Duke. Even after the three accused players were exonerated and settled out of court with Duke before any accusations could be stated in court, even after everyone justifiably sued Nifong back to the Stone Age, the remaining players and parents sued Duke and Durham for anything and everything. Repeat: These are NOT the players who were accused of rape. (A separate lawsuit by those three against many people in Durham had several counts survive summary judgment this week.)

That led to the unusual sight last spring, when Duke won the NCAA lacrosse title led by a band of seniors who still had an active lawsuit against the school.

After nearly two years, the court has ruled on motions to dismiss. The headline: Motion denied; suits go forward. The details: Not so fast …

Read through the 150-plus pages of the ruling in Carrington v Duke, and you’ll see lot of the phrase “the motion to dismiss is granted.” As far as Duke officials are concerned, most of it is gone. The people you’d typically meet as an undergraduate have little left to face in court other than Count 11, a tricky legal argument over school administrators’ fiduciary responsibilities. It could be an interesting test case.

The rest of it has been tossed aside. And as if the message wasn’t clear, the court included this message:

Having undertaken this comprehensive review of the claims asserted in this case, the Court is compelled to note that while § 1983 cases are often complex and involve multiple Defendants, Plaintiffs in this case have exceeded all reasonable bounds with respect to the length of their Complaint and the breadth of claims and assertions contained therein.

So my alma mater can be somewhat relieved that much of this awful matter can be laid to rest. I’ve actually wondered if Duke could sue Nifong for putting the school in a position in which they were going to get taken to court and defamed in the media no matter what school administrators did, but I’m saying that as a philosopher/journalist/alumnus rather than as a lawyer (which I’m not).

And still, the school loses. If you want to think of Duke as a place that attracts people with entitlement mentalities, the judge’s comments support your case. So will golfer Andrew Giuliani’s since-dismissed lawsuit.

So when it comes to national championships worth celebrating, I’ll stick with the basketball team. And Becca Ward.

(HT: The excellent Sports Law Blog)

I was a little preoccupied.

Programming will continue to be irregular over the next couple of weeks while we fiddle around in anticipation of SportsMyriad 2.0. But please do stay tuned.

After 10 years, 4 months and a few days, I left USA TODAY at the end of March 2010. In my time there, I wrote about soccer, mixed martial arts and Olympic sports. I edited the online sections for soccer, boxing/MMA, Olympics, golf, hockey, high school sports and horse racing. (Not all at the same time, but many at the same time.) I dug into the technical side to help with IT work on our automated stats and scores. And I was a guinea pig on blogs, backpack journalism (with video), Twitter and some other things I’ve probably blocked from my memory.

I learned plenty and met people I’ll never forget, but it was a good time to go. I left after the Vancouver Games, for which I was the Nordic/biathlon beat writer after being called in to take over the online prep work with three months to go. I have other projects I want to pursue, and I hope to continue the most enjoyable part of my job — writing — as a freelancer.

The rest of my agenda, in no particular order:

• My new blog, sportsmyriad.com
• More family time
• Promoting my book, Long-Range Goals, The Success Story of Major League Soccer
• Working on another book, likely comparing sports fans across cultures and generations
• Starting a blog not related to sports. Details tba and tentative
• Freelancing elsewhere

If you want to hire me as a freelancer but failed to catch any of my writing for the national newspaper and its Web site, you might want to check out my work portfolio.

A few highlights, not necessarily the very best of my work (others can judge that) but offering a wide sampling:

• Feature with video: Mixed martial arts fighters often play a weighing game
• Feature with video: Women’s jumpers still hoping for flight in 2010 Games
• Feature with multimedia: Eight venues, one day: An Olympic odyssey
• Feature with unexpected interviews: Iceland eyes gold medal in handball
• Feature/scene piece: At Whistler, there’s just no party like a biathlon party
• Feature: Refs face tough calls in mixed martial arts
• Feature: Fighters’ entrance music gets brawlers in the mood
• Feature: On the field, Landon Donovan is showing a lot of game
• Feature: Maykel Galindo’s road from Cuba to Chivas USA
• Event story: Demong, Spillane give USA 1-2 finish in Nordic combined
• Game story: Weight lifted with U.S. soccer victory, gold
  
• Game story: Donovan answers D.C. fans’ taunts in 5-2 Galaxy win
• Interview: Clausen walking tall to third Olympics
• Interview: Wit keeps serious swimmers in sync
• Column: USA is a legitimate, if peculiar, soccer nation
• Column: The world’s game is needed more than ever

First part of the e-mail address is duresport. Then gmail.

Big matchups in Europe, a U.S. league playing eight games in one day, two more U.S. leagues kicking off and an MMA card halfway around the world. All times ET

SATURDAY

Noon: Soccer, FA Cup semifinal, Aston Villa-Chelsea, FSC. Brad Friedel’s revenge?

12:30 p.m.: Soccer, Germany, Bayer Leverkusen-Bayern Munich, ESPN Deportes. #3 vs #1.

1 p.m.: MMA, UFC 112, Yahoo! Sports and pay-per-view. Two title fights in Abu Dhabi.

4 p.m.: Soccer, Spain, Real Madrid-Barcelona, GolTV/ESPN Deportes. Tied for the lead.

6 p.m.: Soccer, MLS, Philadelphia-D.C. United, FSC. One of eight games on the agenda for Saturday. Chivas USA-New York is on TeleFutura at 4. The other six are on Direct Kick and MLSSoccer.com

7 p.m.: Soccer, USSF Division 2, Carolina-St. Louis, webcast. The shotgun merger of the NASL and USL begins its first and likely only season before a long-term Division 2 solution emerges.

SUNDAY

6 p.m.: Soccer, WPS, Sky Blue (NJ)-Chicago, FSC. Season starts the night before in Washington. Well, Maryland.

Universal Sports has coverage from curling’s World Championships, cycling’s Tour of the Basque Country and the triathlon World Cup season opener from Sydney.

More TV: Soccer America, USA TODAY