Austin Huff looks pretty comfortable on the ESPN Game Day set, set up at his alma mater, the University of Missouri, last year. Mizzou beat No. 1 Oklahoma.

By ANDREW SKWARA
For Brentwood Home Page
It started out as a way to make a few of their college buddies laugh. Three years later, the blossoming blog – korkedbats.com – is making thousands of sports fans across the country chuckle.

“It's garnering about 15,000 to 20,000 page views a month and continuing to grow,” said Brentwood High graduate Austin Huff, who created the site along with Zach Osborne in 2008 while both were attending the University of Missouri. “Initially we just wanted a sports blog to make our friends laugh. It started gaining momentum and now people are reading it that I never would have expected to.”

The blog is a product of Huff's two biggest passions in life: sports and comedy. A former running back at Brentwood High, Huff earned a spot on Missouri's football team as a walk-on and played on two bowl teams. He also attended Missouri's prestigious journalism school and was a member of Comedy Wars, the school's improv comedy team which performed weekly in front of hundreds of students.

“I've always loved sports and I've always loved to make people laugh, and Korked Bats is the perfect mix for that,” Huff said.

Described as “an illegal dose of performance-enhancing sports comedy,” Huff and his staff of writers (many are recent college graduates) have turned the website into a home for a lighter, humorous and often zany take on the latest going-ons in the sports world and pop culture while many other sports blogs focus on dishing out opinions on specific players and games.

“It's not a site for just guys or just sports fans,” said Huff, who was a sophomore on the Bruins' 2002 team that captured a state title. “We don't just talk X's and O's. Primarily, we are intertwining humor and the sports world. We take on all sorts of subjects.”

One recent article on the site explains why Zumba, the fast-rising dance/exercise craze, can help all athletes, including football players perform better touchdown dances.

Another compares American Idol to baseball. Another pokes fun at ESPN's affinity for the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, pretending that the network is launching “ESPN4: The Flyover,” which will focus on teams from the Midwest.

Recent Korked Bats' 'Look-Alikes'

There's a weekly feature of “Look-Alikes” where photos of athletes are placed next to other celebrities who share an uncanny resemblance (St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Lance Berkman and country star Vince Gill were a recent submission).

No sport or anything remotely tied to the sports world is off limits. KorkedBats has tackled soccer, rugby, Nike commercials and even the recent opening of Nordstrom's in the Mall at Green Hills.

There's also video blogs, podcasts, interviews and embarrassing yearbook photos of sports figures like Auburn football coach Gene Chizik, who sported a large afro and an almost-as-large bow tie in his senior picture.

That kind of content led ESPN's SportsNation – a wildly popular sports comedy television show – to peg KorkedBats as its site of the day nearly two years ago.

“That helped us gain a lot of popularity,” Huff said. “We got a lot more hits, more attention and were then able to add more writers.”

So, what's next for KorkedBats? Huff, who has worked for Nashville Sports Radio WNSR's afternoon show and is now with 102.5 The Game, hopes the site can garner some advertising revenue and ultimately find a bigger home where it will receive more exposure. Regardless of its future, he plans to be part of it.

“I love doing the blog. At one point in my life I was working three part-time jobs and still managing the website,” he said. “I'd like to see it get bigger and become more mainstream. We might find some advertisers and get picked up by someone. But, I don't want to turn over the reins to someone else. I love it too much.”