COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — Hello.

If you follow WSYX ABC 6 on Facebook, there’s a solid chance that at some point you’ve asked one of the following questions over the past eight months:

Who is running this page?Have they been drinking?Is this a real news station?Did they get hacked?

It’s a completely understandable question given some of our content. Let us explain.

Last year, during the College Football Playoff, ABC 6 tried a new strategy when covering the Ohio State games. It included trolling, ALL CAPS responses, and being a little bit aggressive (OK, really aggressive).

From memes and GIFS mocking their opponents, colorful language, cheering unapologetically for the scarlet and gray, to bantering with fans of TTUN in the comments, it was a different way of covering Columbus’ beloved Buckeyes. We even teamed up with the popular restaurant “The Refectory” to film a short on how to roast a duck before the Oregon game. It was fun.

We also decided it wasn’t enough to just troll the fans, so we decided to go after our Sinclair sister stations as well. Our partners in Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas and South Bend, Ind., all felt our wrath.

But why? That’s a great question. First things first, our audience absolutely loved it.

Many people questioned the ethics of what we did. Others left the page, and others sent us messages saying how unprofessional we were. They weren’t wrong. News stations from across the country owned by Sinclair were reaching out, asking if we were hacked.

But we kept going.

Look, it’s a changing world. In 2024, Disney released an R-rated movie that said the F word many times. Both major candidates for president said that word multiple times while on the campaign trail. Also, we live in the age of social media. With the rising popularity of platforms like Barstool and the Pat McAfee show, we had an inkling our audience would respond to this style of posting. We had no idea how much they would, though.

Millions of impressions. IN ONE DAY. Three times. We had SEVEN TIMES more impressions during the National Championship game than we did on election night. We would literally post an update, and refresh the page a minute later with hundreds of reactions and comments.

We can’t count the number of times people said the poster needs a raise, or that they should be in charge of the entire station. The person who was running it fought with the boss through the channel multiple times, begging to cuss. One time, they came about as close as possible to it when Jack Sawyer ran back a fumble and broke all of Texas’ hearts. (The linked post has been edited, but look in the comments if you want to see the original)

After calming down, we edited that post and took that out, but the screenshots lived on. They were being posted everywhere, across the internet, in the comments of the edited post. We received multiple complaints about it, so we decided to issue an apology. That did not go as anticipated.

Within an hour of the initial post, there were 1,500 comments and more than 10,000 reactions. The apology post doubled that, with the overwhelming majority angry at us for apologizing. They said we were real, we were fans, and it was the genuine reaction that they all connected with. It was insane.

At this point, it had grown to a point that it received national attention from multiple websites. It was featured on the front page of “Awful Announcing.” Similar coverage for the Blue Jackets would later end up on Bleacher Report and Bardown in Canada, as well as the Chicago Blackhawks Sports Network.

Then, Ohio State won the natty. It was one of the best nights. We had so much fun posting with everyone, getting into the comments and bantering, flexing creative muscles and utilizing the talent we have at the station.

But then what?

Once the season was over, we had to figure out what we had. It all kind of happened suddenly, and through the chaos of the CFP, we just kind of went with it.

We’ve now had five months to work on it, come up with ideas and figure out a way to integrate it into our news coverage.

The person behind it had so much fun with it, but the top priority is to maintain our integrity as a news station. It’s provided a unique challenge, but it’s been an absolute blast to navigate.

We have some really exciting pieces of content planned for at least three games this season, Texas, Penn State and Michigan. We will also similarly cover any games after that, and we may “flex” another game during the season if it’s called for, like Illinois. We don’t want to ruin a good thing by doing it too much, but we have seen the response to it and it’s hard to ignore.

But no, we have not been hacked, we haven’t been drinking, and it’s not an intern. It’s an experiment, and you’re all a part of it as well.