A Republic, If You Can Keep It
It's a big week in college sports! Ok, it's technically the deadest of dead zones between collegiate basketball and the start of football season, squarely in the gap after the College World Series has ended but before the buzz for Week Zero kicks in. It's a brutal time where little happens.
But earlier this week on July 1, the collegiate sports colossi On3 and Rivals merged, along the way grabbing some sweet, sweet Yahoo! Sports money in exchange for a seat on the board of the combined company. Both On3 and Rivals previously hosted team-specific sites and forums for a whole raft of various college fanbases, many with distinct factions on one side or the other of the divide. Some of those fan sites are combining their efforts. Some are shuttering. Some are rebranding. But you can guarantee that none of them will ever be free again. Expect even more paywalls, banner ads, and autoplay videos. Assume that they will experiment with AI-written articles. Sports Illustrated already has. So has ESPN.
Media consolidation under the aegis of private equity funds has shredded newsrooms and sports blogs alike. None of this is new. There is more money sloshing around collegiate sports than ever before; there are massive media deals, conference realignment fees, exorbitant coaching salaries, and NIL contracts agreed to and broken in turn. Every piece of content is bought and paid for by the sports betting duopoly of DraftDuelKingsFans. The Big 12 nearly hocked the damn name of the conference to find some extra cash in the proverbial couch cushions. The Big Ten and the SEC are currently negotiating to proceduralize what has already been evident for years: there are only two power conferences and two power media behemoths, and all else matters nought. We head into a football season where the totemic icon of Lee Corso will finally retire and take a much deserved break, only to be replaced by Pat McAfee‘s discordant tones, brought to you by Home Depot and AFLAC.
So there's cash aplenty and more than enough hype. The interest in college sports of all stripes, both women's and men's, has never been this high. So why does it feel like it just sucks so damn much, when the core product remains, at its best, absurdly and addictively exciting? Why does sports media writ large just feel like a fucking slog?
Shouldn't this shit be fun? Why isn't it fun? This should be fun!
Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just you. Or maybe the corporate powers that be took what was, at its core, something about the delight of tradition and fandom, of family and tribe and region, of rivalry and history, and then commoditized it, packaged it, streamlined it and sold it to the highest bidder. It could perhaps be that.
My point, as we near 500 words into this jeremiad, is that there must be a better way. College sports, all college sports, are fun. They should feel fun. There must be a path to build a community of like-minded college sports fans from across the wide swath of the Big Ten map, one that encourages talking shit and making jokes and welcoming all others (even Michigan fans) to belly up to the bar, grab a cold one, and enjoy the games that we love without the incessant ads and autoplay videos that facilitate some private equity firm's bottom line.
And so here we are. Let's bury the lede in the final paragraphs (although if you're this far in, you know where we're going here). In the midst of what feels like the twilight of collegiate sports and sports blogs as we know them, we're cheerily whistling past the graveyard and trying something new.
Why go independent? Because this should be fun.
At our core, we’re just fans of these teams. We’re not insiders. We’re not breaking news or getting scoops. We have day jobs! We have more than enough typos and swear words to prove that we’re not ChatGPT-drafted. Our mission is to entertain you during those 10 minutes you’re waiting to pick up your kid from school, or check out at the grocery store, or take a shit, and we aim to sound like one of your smartest ball-knowing friends roughly a pint and a half in while doing so.
No matter what fanbase you ascribe to, we're glad you’re here (even you, Iowa fans).
Happy Independence Day. Welcome to the Republic.
