If I had to guess, the editorial staff will get hit pretty hard. I think the successful best writers will stick around. Not sure the national coverage will change much.
their Eagles team is by far my favorite. Charlie O'Connor is very good for the Flyers but he's not really suited to be a beat writer. PSU guys suck. Arsenal guys are very good. Phillies/Sixers I have a lot of coverage options so I'm not too worried. honestly I just need the Birds with Friends podcast to continue.
The fact that LSU has two beat guys likely indicates enough interest in the product to keep them employed. I imagine the writing staff won’t be gutted because that would lead to subs being canceled.
Hey Ryan we are sports fans. All the owners of the teams we enjoy are dumbasses as well. Zero impact here.
They never replaced our Athletic beat writer. Maybe hiring a new college grad who challenged fans on Twitter to come up to the press box and fight him hurt subscribers.
Was pretty clear The Athletic was trending toward unsustainability in its current form pre-acquisition, so I'm all for this. The NYT is basically the one modern newspaper with the war chest to push an investment like this and make it work if they so choose.
We think it's nuts every few years when a HS kid pretends to be recruited and commits without offers. This is crazy.
All of college football focuses on the results of recruiting, but the process can be full of unpredictable run-ins, twists and turns. The Athletic spoke with numerous coaches about their craziest stories on the recruiting trail, when a visit doesn’t quite go as planned. And every coach knows Rule No. 1 about in-home visits: If mom serves it, you eat it, no matter how spicy it is or if it includes raccoon, squirrel or some mystery meat. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I put my finger down my throat’ As a head coach, you gotta eat. And the worst days are Sunday because all your assistant coaches want you to go with them to see kids they’re recruiting. So, you might have to eat four or five dinners. And I can’t tell you how many times I put my finger down my throat, not because the food was bad, but because I had to eat at the next place. Seriously. Particularly in the SEC and the South. On Sunday, when they give you a schedule, you’re doing home visits from coach to coach all across the state … Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, wherever. On Sunday, you might have to go to church with somebody, but starting right after church, you might have to eat four to five times that day. That’s all I’m saying. Because you better be excited for what’s coming up next, walking in that kitchen like, “Oooooh, this smells good.” If you don’t, mama’s not going to trust you. — Former Power 5 head coach ‘I’m a Cowboy, and I’m not talking about a Dallas Cowboy’ I’m going to recruit a kid on a Sunday in rural North Carolina. When I pull off the interstate, there’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I see a horse at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don’t pay any attention other than seeing it and thinking, “Well, that’s odd.” It was in, like, a parking space. But I keep driving because I’m trying to pay close attention to where I’m going. I’d never been to this young man’s house. I get to the house and go in and we’re talking, and I’m comfortable and talking and doing my spiel, and as I look to my left, I see the same horse I saw at Kentucky Fried Chicken earlier, but a man is on it, riding it down the road. I’m looking at this horse, but I’m trying to talk to the kid, his mom and his grandma. It’s odd he’s coming down the road with a box of chicken in his hand, but I’m trying to focus. Another five minutes pass, and this horse and this man and this box of chicken come 10 feet from the window I was looking out of. So now I’m like, “What’s going on?” Nobody’s saying anything about this, and I’m kind of wondering what’s happening. About 15 minutes later, the back door of the house opens, and in walks this guy wearing chaps, a vest, and he’s holding a box of chicken. And he’s sweating. So grandma says, “Coach, I want you to meet my brother.” Before I can get a word out of my mouth, he runs up to me and says, “I just want you to know I’m a cowboy. And I’m not talking about a Dallas Cowboy. I mean a real cowboy.” And that was dinner. He was getting chicken for us to eat while he was there. We got the kid, and from that day I nicknamed the kid “Cowboy,” and I still call him “Cowboy” to this day. — Power 5 assistant coach What do you mean eat the whole thing? I was at a recruit’s house in Louisiana, and I get this plate of rice with gumbo and a big, whole crawfish sitting on top. I like crawfish, so I snap it and eat the tail, but the mom is still kind of staring at me like, “Go on.” Eventually, it becomes clear they expect me to eat the crawfish whole. So, I kind of play it off. I’m nibbling on the claws and giving them the thumbs up like, “Yeah, it’s great.” Well, at some point the mom and recruit get up and leave the room for something, and I grab the crawfish and throw it in a trash can by the kitchen table as fast as I can. They came back in, and I was like, “Mmm, that was great.” We never talked about it again, but I know they found that crawfish in the trash can. We got the kid, though. — Power 5 assistant coach Swallow without chewing, if necessary We were recruiting a kid from a Russian family from Hungary, and they made an authentic Hungarian meal, a traditional goose blood dish. You swallow it without chewing it if you don’t like it. — Power 5 head coach Food can be a big part of stepping into an unfamiliar home, but sometimes it’s a literal zoo out there. ‘The Shaquille O’Neal of pit bulls’ I’m recruiting a kid in a small, small town in east Texas. He had some horses, and he and his dad were into pit bulls, and they had a bunch of dogs. I knew that a little, but I went with one of our other assistants and we eat dinner, and we’re having a good time and we start talking about the dogs. Well, I’m from an urban area. You start talking about German shepherds or pit bulls, I’m already ears up. Where I grew up, those aren’t friendly dogs. Where I’m from, you see one of those dogs, and you better have one eye on ’em because they may get you. Especially if it’s not your dog or you don’t know the dog. Our other coach, totally different. He grew up in the country, and he’s like, “Yeah, let’s go see ’em!” They go, “Well, we’ll just bring ’em in the house.” He brings in two pit bulls, and these were the biggest dogs I’ve ever seen. This was like the Shaquille O’Neal of pit bulls. So I’m sitting there sweating. The dog is sitting next to me, but you’re trying not to show any weakness to the family and the kid. I don’t want them to think I can’t handle a dog. You’re trying to act like it’s no big deal, but this thing is foaming at the mouth and looks like he’s about to taste any part of my body that gets in front of his mouth. I’m literally sweating bullets, and the dog is staring right at me. And the recruit tells me the dog sitting next to me, they’ve had to change the chain-link fence in his kennel four or five times. I asked why. “He chews through it.” I’m like, ‘What?!” “Yeah, he eats chain link.” And I’m like, “You’ve got this dog in the house sitting next to me that literally eats metal?” But I was able to make it and for like an hour and a half, tried not to make any sudden movements and didn’t feel like I totally blew it, but when we were done and about to leave, the dad pulls me aside. “Hey, Coach, I know you weren’t the most comfortable in there.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Ah, I saw you sweatin’ in there. Those dogs do something to you.” I promised him I wasn’t scared of dogs. I have dogs. But my experiences with pit bulls were a little different. I was holding on there for a little bit. And he says, “You did good, Coach.” And we got the kid. — Power 5 assistant Mingling with jungle cats I show up at the house, and it’s in a real nice area, big house. Right when I get out of the car, this big ol’ Rottweiler runs at me, jumps on me, pins me against my car. So I’m already on edge a little bit. Turns out, the mom was a veterinarian. So I go inside the house, and they’ve got these big, like, jungle cats just stalking around. These were not housecats. These were big, big cats. So we’re doing the visit, but I’m keeping an eye on ’em the whole time. Eventually, the kid’s dad goes outside to tend to the grill. The mom and him go out there with him so I’m in the living room alone for a few minutes. Right when they leave, one of the cats jumps on the counter where a few big steaks were sitting out. He starts licking it, nibbling on it. I stand up, kind of stomp and start yelling at him to get off the counter. He’s not listening. The dad opens up the door, backhands this huge cat and knocks it off the counter and leaves again. Cat does the same thing again. I try to get him off. Nothing. Dad comes in and knocks him off with a windup backhand again. Eventually, we eat. Couple weeks later, I come back with the head coach. I didn’t tell him any of this. We pull up, same dog does the same thing. But I’ll never forget his face, trying to stay composed while he’s giving this recruiting pitch and talking to this family, and all these giant cats are stalking him, walking all around his face on the back of the couch. — Power 5 assistant coach Recruiting is often unpredictable, and that goes well beyond a teenager deciding where he wants to spend the next stage of his life. The process of securing a commitment can feature plenty of twists and turns no coach ever expects. How to find a lost recruit We were having a recruiting weekend. Every kid would fly into the airport on Friday afternoon. But it’s a little drive from the airport, so sometimes we had a staffer go pick the kids up and drive them to campus. So we had about three or four kids who flew in that weekend, and the other coaches went and got their kid. Well, we had a running back from Fort Worth fly in, but the coach who was supposed to pick him up gets caught in traffic from a snowstorm. He’s late, and the kid gets off the plane, but there’s nobody there to greet him or pick him up. He’s wandering around, but another university that’s one of our rivals has an assistant coach at the airport, and he spots the kid. They were trying to recruit him, too. And he goes up to the kid and says, “Just come to our campus for the official visit.” (Laughs) Finally, the coach gets there, and he’s calling me and telling me he can’t find the kid: “I looked all over, went in the bathrooms. He’s nowhere to be found.” He explains he was a little late and everybody was off the plane. I tell him to look for the guy, he has to be there. So we think maybe he never got on the plane. So I call the kid’s mom, and she says “No, sir, I took him and put him on the plane myself. He got on the plane.” So we’re sitting around in the office and guys are driving their guys back and we’re trying to figure out what happened to the kid. One of the coaches says, “You know the recruiting coordinator at (rival school)?” I told him I knew three or four guys over there. He says, “You call them. I bet that sumbitch is over there.” So I call over there, and they’re laughing like hell: “Yeah, he’s here on a recruiting weekend. Too bad for you guys.” How about that? We paid for the guy’s flight and he ends up over at the other school. (Author’s note: They did not get that player.) — Former Power 5 head coach Sometimes nature calls I was doing an in-home visit with a top recruit and I was in the middle of the conversation and I just started sweating. I had to stop and say, “I have got to go use your restroom.” So I paused and went in there and when I say blew it up, I mean I blew it up. — Power 5 head coach ‘I literally thought guns would be drawn’ I was recruiting a kid in Jersey, and we ended up getting a car service to get through the NYC traffic. We go over to Newark for a visit and we just had a black SUV. We park it by the house and our driver is sitting in there and everybody’s phone in the house is blowing up. Everybody on the street thought we were FBI and doing a drug bust or a police sting on the street. One of the guys we were visiting with had to go outside and wave everybody off and assure the block everything was OK. I laugh now, but I literally thought guns would be drawn. We did get the kid. — Group of 5 head coach Polish that Grammy I was recruiting a kid, and his dad was part of a prominent music group I loved. I grew up listening to them and I was psyched to meet him. They had won a Grammy, and when I got to the home, the actual Grammy trophy we all know was, like, at the bottom of a shelf and it needed to be polished. I was like, “Wait a minute, now. This is (name of the group).” The next time I came back, they had the Grammy polished and on the top of the shelf. (Laughs) And we got the kid. — Power 5 assistant coach The exploding television We were recruiting a kid we had no business landing. I had an assistant coach with me once who wore a hearing aid. But at some homes, the TV is always on. You’re trying to talk about your school and the young man’s life, but that’s just what happens. They wouldn’t turn it off, and he couldn’t hear. So my assistant coach turned his hearing up, and it started having feedback with a frequency that was so high-pitched it blew the TV out. It was an old-school, 52-inch box TV that was sitting on the floor. It was like “Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep-BOOM!” And all you could see on the screen was a small circle. I knew what happened. The dad couldn’t figure it out. He was like, “What happened to the TV?” All you do then is keep talking. (Author’s note: They got the player.) — Former Power 5 head coach A real recruiting fight We’re eating dinner, and I’m there with another assistant coach on staff. (The recruit’s) dad was a phenomenal chef and made this spread. Everything was phenomenal. Everything was going well. Neither one of us to this day know what happened. But the next thing we know, the mom and dad are screaming at each other. The dad slams the door and leaves. We’re both sitting there like, “Oh my gosh.” I don’t know why they got in an argument. They apologized, and we just kind of kept it moving. We did get the kid, though.
Sheil Kapadia is leaving The Athletic for the Ringer. huge loss, he's their best NFL guy in my biased opinion. he must be getting big money from the Ringer because he just got a huge promotion to national last year.
Bummer but inevitable. Detroit’s best MLB and NHL best guys are with The Athletic but both seem to get massive engagement with their stories so I assume they are safe. Would be brutal if not.
Posted more for the news that they’ve eliminated sports business journalism from the coverage. Wonder if Richard Deitch is also out (haven’t seen that). It’ll be really interesting to see who stays/what coverage remains after the reorg
Five years from start of the thread to sale. Six until the layoffs begin. Pretty good run for a tech startup.
when they were in venture capital mode every salary was inflated; like every "Why I am joining The Athletic" piece was "I get paid more and have to work less". so I guess a lot of the fat trimming will come when contracts are up for renewal and they give them the option of taking a cut or taking a hike makes sense why Andy Staples got out before the NY Times took over in an appreciable way if youre a beat reporter not on podcasts/youtube its best to start doing so now
Man, I really liked the idea of the Athletic, so it’s a bummer at what it’s become. Still subscribe though. I also like their app for game results/scores way more than any of the alternatives.
I find the whole athletic thing interesting. I would very much watch a documentary/read long form articles about the founding through all of the issues they're going through. Tech bros try to solve journalism
I’ve enjoyed my athletic subscription for the most part but I’ll be letting mine lapse in September. Pretty shocking what the times did, but also not surprising at all