I feel like when the Athletic first got going, its goal was to staff just about every pro team and a whole lot of major college football and basketball teams. But then it seems like they (belatedly) came to the following realizations:
1. Staffing up in such a way was going to be difficult in terms of both the money involved and in terms of actually finding people who could meet the quality standard they were trying to set (a quality standard that, as others have pointed out, they have since abandoned in many cases).
2. That a lot of these teams do not generate the reader interest to justify a national publication spending precious resources on a devoted beat writer. I just feel like they went in with a "if we staff it, they will read it" mentality without actually looking to see whether enough people actually care about these teams. One example: The Athletic hired a beat writer to cover Georgetown basketball even though Georgetown basketball barely moves the needle in DC, even when the Hoyas are good (and by the time the Athletic came around, the Hoyas were not at all good). I think that experiment didn't make it through one full season.
So now the Athletic is in a situation where it can no longer set money on fire covering some of these teams so it's trying to half-ass its coverage of them, which doesn't seem particularly wise.
