This Hurts Us More Than It Hurts You, Colin

As some of you might be unfortunate enough to know, the man pictured here is Colin Cowherd, who has a show on ESPN Radio. Like many sports radio hosts across this great land, he relies greatly on blogs to find himself some free, juicy content. (And, of course, acting as if he just came up with it on his own; there's a guy at WFAN in New York who's particularly egregious about this as well. You know who you are.) We tend not to work ourselves up about this too much; if we riled ourselves up about radio people swiping blog stories every time it happened, we wouldn't have time to type. Information is meant to be free.

However: Today, upset with something The Big Lead had written about him (or someone, or something, imagined or otherwise), Cowherd told his listeners to unleash a DNS attack on the site. One of the tech people here at Gawker Media tells us: "When someone floods a website with so many fake hits that the servers get overloaded, the site, essentially, goes down. A programmer could write a script to load the website once a second." That appears to be what happened; The Big Lead was down for about half an hour after the announcement, though it's up and running again now.

Now. We're still not sure why Cowherd decided to go after The Big Lead — we're the ones who said he sucks in a headline — but we're not mad at him. We really just kind of feel sad. It must be frustrating to have a fan base only because of your affiliation with a Vader-esque national network, to want to feel "freewheeling" and "controversial" when your name is Colin. We understand how alone it can feel to realize that the game has passed you by, that the same schtick you've made your "career" out of is in danger of collapsing in on itself like a dying star. When one is threatened and scared, one tends to lash out at the ones they love. So we are sorry, Colin; we can't imagine how hard it must be to go through what you're going through. You're in our thoughts.

Oh, and go ahead and try that shit with us. We dare you.

Why Your National Radio Host Sucks: Colin Cowherd [Deadspin]

(UPDATE: And yes: The Big Lead is still down. Grrrr.)