An oral history of “Squawk ‘Em Hawk ‘Em,” a fake sports blog started by fake sportswriters

Ole Miss plays the ULM Warhawks this weekend in Oxford, Mississippi. Ole Miss has done this once before, most notably on this corner of the web, in the fall of 2008. That football season marked the first one “covered” by this website—albeit in a prior, blogspot-based iteration. It was a season that was fun and remarkable, and allowed for lots of wiggle room with regards to figuring out what exactly we wanted to do around here.

We also maybe had 100 visits a day, so we didn’t exactly care about or even understand things like “editorial stances” and “search engine optimization.”

So when you’re a senioritis-stricken undergraduate running a small, snarky blog about Ole Miss football, you get things like Squawk ‘Em Hawk ‘Em. Squawk ‘Em Hawk ‘Em (or “SEHE”) is also a football blog, but it’s not about the Ole Miss Rebels; it’s about the Louisiana-Monroe Warhawks. It’s also not something that, unlike this website, was written by fans of the program it features, but rather it was written by us—that is to say, yours truly, Whiskey Wednesday, and Juco All-American—and it was where we pretended to be fans of the ULM Warhawks to, uh, cover a football game?

I can’t be sure where it came from. My memory is hazy. So I’ve reached out to the aforementioned Whiskey Wednesday and Juco All-American to recount exactly what the hell we were even doing with ourselves online ten years ago.

So, Juco, how’d this thing get started?

Juco All-American: Well, it all started with a rare, rare instance of me thinking ahead. I was doing Blogger Q&As, as I had been doing with other games for that season, and a few weeks prior to the ULM game I realized we did not know of any ULM blog we could reach out to. We looked, and couldn’t find one anywhere. So I jokingly said that we should make a fake ULM blog to respond to my questions. And then we built out the joke.

(I seem to recall it being Whiskey Wednesday’s idea. Alas, these details may never truly be known. -ed)

You (me. -ed) came up with the title. I wanted it to be some fake cheer the students would do. When we landed on “Squawk ‘Em Hawk ‘Em” we laughed for probably ten minutes straight. Just thinking about students swaying in the stands doing a call and response style “squawk em” “HAWK EM” chant was, at the time, hilarious. (It is still hilarious today. -ed)

So then we just started writing uninformed articles about ULM football to plant the seed and go from there. My favorite was when I started calling the ULM quarterback, Kinsmon Lancaster, “The Lank!” and tried to drum up a “The Lank for Heisman” campaign.

Whiskey Wednesday: So I just looked in my Gmail chat logs to jog my memory and apparently one thing we did was write some recruiting tidbits, one of which was that ULM had a shot with Barkevious Mingo, who was in high school at the time. We were very optimistic fake Warhawks fans.

We actually did get real Warhawks fans to read it. I do remember that the ULM folks who commented on stuff even felt we were being too optimistic, like “hey man, maybe ease up a bit.”

Juco All-American: I think it was Bob who got the ULM scout site to pin it to the top of their message board. (It was. -ed) And we got Ole Miss fans to head over to it as well as we started with just one or two comments from the SEHE account on blog posts we were writing. We linked back to “his” blogposts and promoted ourselves as this ULM student who had started a blog and wanted to be a part of the greater college football blogging community.

I think part of the reason it wasn’t immediately obvious it was a farce is that we slowly rolled stuff out. It wasn’t coincidentally started the same week as the game.

But yeah, when we started getting a bunch of ULM fans commenting on the articles we were writing, that was maybe the funniest part. But on top of that, we made Ole Miss fans suuuuuper mad with ridiculous predictions about the game and doing things like calling Ole Miss fans racist. Looking back, it would have been really sad and not funny if Ole Miss had lost to ULM.

Whiskey Wednesday: I’d love to see if there is a way to look up the comments to see which of our commenters took the bait. I know a few got in some comments thread scraps with the SEHE account.

Juco All-American: I don’t remember who it was, but there was one regular Cup commenter who said in the comments early on “Alright, guys. This post was too much. Good job with the trick though.” Or something like that. And we deleted it immediately.

Author: It was fun to put up a ruse, although I kinda felt bad for the ULM fans who posted links to it on their message boards and whatnot, like we were a serious blogging operation. It was also fun (and difficult!) to write with such consistently bad grammar. I don’t know how PFTCommenter does it so well. Anyway, we wrote some really ridiculous shit. Look at this post on why the SEHE editor hates Ole Miss so much.

I’m super duper pumped about the upcoming Ole Miss game, and here’s why!

I grew up an LSU fan. I can remember back in the 1990’s when the Tigers weren’t all that good and Ole Miss was in it’s typical mediocre state. They would send all 10 of their fans down to Baton Rouge and they were just the rudest, snobbiest people EVER!!! They loved rubbin’ your face in it when you lost and they would just be so stuck up to everyone around them. If you’ld ever visit Oxford (or OxFART!) you’ll see what I’m talking about. I mean it’s just another poor little town in the rural South and they act like it’s some sort of luxury resort or something with their stupid stores and they all drive around in BMW’s like we’re in Europe or something. What a joke. It’s just a bunch of spoiled trust fund babies who are going to grow up and join their daddy’s law firm some day but in the mean time they’re going to do a lot of drugs and get STDs from their girls.

And another thing, they all talk about how hot their girls are but they’re not that hot! Monroe, LA has some great looking girls that I wouldn’t trade for those Ole Miss hags in a heartbeat!!!

All they do is sit around all day in their frat houses and drink shitty beer while listening to Dave Matthews before playing golf with all of their frat buddies. It’s stupid and it’s not a real college experience.

Also, my biggest problem with Ole PISS is how racist they are! I mean they wave confederate flags and play Dixie at their games and they jump around all like a bunch of hicks whenever that damn song is played by the band. I’m surprised they actually show up to cheer on a team which is made up of all kinds of people who aren’t WASPy rich kids because they’re all intolerant bigots!

Okay, and while that was ridiculous, it was pretty enjoyable to poke ourselves in the eye a bit. Ole Miss fans deserve it sometimes, so it was fair for us to dish it out a bit.

Juco All-American: And it was all for a fake Q&A exchange, which we did independtenly! Like, you and I emailed each other back and forth like we normally would with another website, and actually crafted something with two voices and stances. We kept it authentic.

Author: And it is weird to think all of that work was for the sake of a totally unnecessary blogger question and answer exchange. My kingdom for that sort of free time again.

Anyway, Ole Miss beat ULM by a bazillion, The Lank did not win the Heisman, and Squawk ‘Em Hawk ‘Em was shuttered. Or, rather, we stopped writing it. It’s still somehow a website you can visit, so do that, we guess?