Okay, I’m probably one of the last bloggers to chime in on this, but I’m the first to admit that I don’t spend a lot of my day reading about the blogosphere and its place in the world. I pretty much just watch the games and the news and provide my commentary. But this new feud between “Friday Night Lights” writer Buzz Bissinger and Deadspin editor Will Leitch caught my attention when a headline about it appeared on my Yahoo home page. Both writers appeared on “Costas Now,” along with a deer-in-the-headlights Braylon Edwards, to talk about the role of blogging in sports. It’s probably best to view the entire segment – which can be seen here – but if you just want to hear Bissinger’s side of things, watch the YouTube video below.

As I was listening to Bissinger’s comments, I probably had the same initial reaction as most people in the blogosphere. Bissinger made some good points about the tone and poor writing on some (or most?) blogs, but his anger and venom made him come off like a bully. Not only that, he came off like a dinosaur, so I guess he’s the sportswriting equivalent of that T-Rex that smashed and crashed his way through the city of San Diego in “Jurassic Park II.”

The writing on “Friday Night Lights” is excellent and Bissinger did win a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he wrote on the Philadelphia court system in the late ’80s, so it’s clear that the guy knows how to write. He just feels that the environment in which he grew up – the group of (sports)writers reading and critiquing each other’s work in the newsroom – is under attack by hundreds (or thousands) of faceless bloggers who are too cynical and smarmy for their own good, or worse, who can barely write at all. Of course, that mentality is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

As in any endeavor, there are both good and bad sports blogs. But Leitch makes a good point when he says that blogging is a meritocracy. If you can’t put a coherent thought together or write boring stuff, you’re not going to build a readership. We here at The Scores Report try to write serious, knowledgable sports commentary with a dash of the silly and strange. Anthony Stalter is a football nut who actually studies game film in the offseason. Coach Z is a commentator for the Big Ten Network and has the experiences of a long coaching career to draw upon. I played college basketball for Bo Ryan, where we broke down hundreds of hours of tape, which ultimately led to a Division III National Championship in my junior season and All-Conference and All-Region honors in my senior season. The bottom line is, we know our stuff, but we’re not afraid to admit it when we’re wrong.

You’ll also notice that the comments we get from our readers are typically well thought out and reasonably polite, and the debates rarely delve into personal attacks. While we’re trying to create a sports bar atmosphere here, we want it to be a nice sports bar – a place where you can go and enjoy a cold lager while debating with another patron about the role of Spygate in Tom Brady’s legacy, or if Kobe deserves to win the MVP award even though he wasn’t such a good teammate last summer. And you can have these debates without having to worry about that patron heading off to the bathroom only to come back to smash a pool cue over your head because he didn’t like your argument.

So, in my mind, much of what Bissinger said was valid (however venomous), but since the more popular blogs tend to be the ones that write to the lowest common denominator, maybe he isn’t getting a clear picture of just how many good sports blogs are out there.