Sports Illustrated layoffs

Here's the odd thing - I'm sure we've all been accused of being fans for School X and hating School Y covering high school sports or whatever - well here you have a business model that celebrates absolute fandom in terms of sports coverage - the Fox and Friends of sports coverage or whatever.
Who knows? Maybe it works. People just want to be reminded how awesome their team is.

 

This goes with the general trend that too many people only want affirmation, not information, from the media.

 

Aren't there school-centric coverage sites that exist out there, especially for college football teams? I was under the impression that they usually start out more "cheerful" than down the middle coverage, but eventually morph into something more critical and obsessive than any sort of mainstream coverage. That definitely seems to be the trend with, say, message boards.

 

If this is in fact a trend, it's not a new one. Rivals has existed for more than two decades.

 

I've never paid attention to those sites - are they profitable? I'll check Rivals to find out recruiting histories of a player that seemed to come out of nowhere - but that's about it. Seems like any "data" gleaned from viewers of such sites would pretty much begin and end with LocalU's merch and/or game tickets.

 

They kinda run the gamut. Some are pretty fanboy, but a lot do pretty good work. It’s less of the long form stuff, but they can dig in, get some good insider-y stuff.

 

The guy who wrote that is something like 40 years old. He’s s former coach who did freelance writing/analysis for a magazine that covered ND.

 

Profitability depends on the market and following. The Texas Longhorns site? Hugely profitable and the staff size reflects it. Same with some Big Ten schools. Washington State? Maybe enough for one person to be full-time. Some of the ACC schools have one or two full-timers and that's it. Some have six or eight. Really varies.

 

The player ratings are crap. If you don’t go to one of their camps Rivals docks you a star in their rating. I also love when some kid totally off the grid is a no-star until a P5 school discovers them then they’re suddenly a 4-star

 

That's why I like looking back at them. I'm guessing they don't have the ability to evaluate players and simply assign stars by how much interest there is by the Big boys. I'm guessing 5 stars are blue blood interest, 4 stars are power 5 interest from across the nation, and 3 star is pretty much just interest from closest P5 conference. Two star is interest from G5 conference schools.

 

From someone who, uh, knows someone very familiar with the situation, that's pretty much on target.

 

Sadly, this is the truth. Fans hate objectivity. They want to be told their team, their coach, their quarterback is the greatest on earth even if they suck. Took me 10 years to learn this and I spent the next 20 years failing to prove otherwise.