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mgl
More a question on how you personally handle covering the team. You come off as extremely sober in your articles (makes sense, while it’s a fan site you want to maintain a degree of objectivity), and your posting here on the board mirrors that - never too high or too low. How do you behave during games? Your interior monologue? Are you a tv screamer? Do you sometimes need to “take a breath” between watching the team and writing about it? Do you ever get worried?
joshgersh
I feel like I’ve seen a lot of headlines related to changes in recruiting and transfer rules in recent weeks, but admittedly haven’t followed anything. Anything actually noteworthy?
umhoops
45 day transfer window to enter the portal after Selection Sunday, which also applies to grads. I believe this is bumped down from 60 days.
So, I believe that’s May 1st or thereabouts this year.
Bit of a compromise because I think coaches wanted 30 days after the NCAA Tournament, or something like that. More details here:
April grassroots eval weekends are also gone which makes a lot of sense.
umhoops
A lot of it comes down to some of the realities of running the site. For example, during games, I am writing, watching, tweeting, taking notes, looking at stats, moderating the open thread, etc.
So I’m not really holed up in my office suppressing emotion as much as just actually working
As far as my process goes, I actually like covering games on TV a lot more because I have way more of a workstation setup to do that. It’s really hard to analyze a game in person, relative to on TV, but if your seat is decent (pretty rare at this point) you can also pick up other stuff so there are advantages to being there in person.
As far as what I write, I basically started the site because I was obsessed with Michigan hoops and no one cared enough, spent the time to, or could properly analyze the team. There were other people writing about college hoops and analyzing the what and the why that I found super interesting and I wanted to create the same sort of discourse around Michigan.
So, that was always my goal of starting the site. Not so much to capture fan emotions or something like that. Which isn’t something I’d ever really be drawn into reading about other sports either FWIW.
This seems to be a genre of content that’s growing for some reason with fan yelling videos and stuff like that on Twitter. I don’t really understand that TBH. Generally, the sports discourse on social media has really taken a step back between just the sheer negativity, fan accounts that seem to like beef back and forth with each other, the whole conversation on Twitter has really devolved from what it was in the early days of this site.
As far as emotionally or getting worried or whatever, I think people probably underrate how stressful it is to run a business that is fairly tied to a sports team’s success or failure that you have no control over. Different emotions maybe but still emotions.
I would also add that as far as writing about emotions or what not, I think the team perspective on that stuff is super valuable. I also feel as disconnected from it as I can remember in many ways given that it is just so hard to really get valuable insights and context in that sense out of Juwan Howard. It’s hard to know what he’s building and what he sees because he doesn’t share much of it at all.
mgl
Oh, I wasn’t criticizing your approach, I obviously know what/why you do what you do. I was just curious about the divide between your “on-site” experience and the one in-home.