Agree with a lot of this. As someone who has worked at places where rankings et al. were simply required (and where that kind of stuff gradually takes hold over everything), I've always thought you can do really smart stuff within any format so long as you actually try. You *can* default to the lowest common denominator and just list a bunch of teams, and people often do, or you can make a list of teams your excuse to say smart stuff about each one of them.
To me, this works two ways: It gives the audience what they consistently indicate they want while also sneaking in depth and information they wouldn't have otherwise sought out. But serving audience demand vs. creating it is a hard problem to solve.
Appreciate your perspective on this considering your background. Is the fans' Pavlovian response to rankings and lists a consequence of being trained over the years to crave this type of content, or have the fans "always" only cared about rankings and "mainstream" CBB media has responded in-kind by satisfying these desires. Chicken-or-the-egg, I suppose?
I simply cannot reconcile why fans of other major sports -- some of whom also follow college basketball -- get to enjoy a more diverse array of content offerings while we remain perpetually stuck with the same shit every season.
Probably chicken and egg, but I think because college hoops numbers on the big sites don't remotely rival the NFL and NBA, editors are trying to do stuff that can compete for editorial prominence with sports that have much larger organic audiences. Which is part of the reason I think Substack will make sense for me long term: CBB media can be a tough place and I don't *want* to compete for clicks with NFL roster updates, I just need a (relatively) small number of people to chuck me a few bucks a month
(There is definitely perpetually an idea that college hoops needs to "market itself" better, and that media has a role to play in that, and so you get a lot of stuff aimed at the broadest possible audience.)
I think you've done a great job of summing up my own frustrations with the sport's coverage. I like some of the guys in the media space just fine but the vast majority are simply regressing to the standard ranking/listicle stuff...and that's just legacy media, not even the obnoxious ChatGPT generated "CBKReport" accounts.
Agree with a lot of this. As someone who has worked at places where rankings et al. were simply required (and where that kind of stuff gradually takes hold over everything), I've always thought you can do really smart stuff within any format so long as you actually try. You *can* default to the lowest common denominator and just list a bunch of teams, and people often do, or you can make a list of teams your excuse to say smart stuff about each one of them.
To me, this works two ways: It gives the audience what they consistently indicate they want while also sneaking in depth and information they wouldn't have otherwise sought out. But serving audience demand vs. creating it is a hard problem to solve.
Appreciate your perspective on this considering your background. Is the fans' Pavlovian response to rankings and lists a consequence of being trained over the years to crave this type of content, or have the fans "always" only cared about rankings and "mainstream" CBB media has responded in-kind by satisfying these desires. Chicken-or-the-egg, I suppose?
I simply cannot reconcile why fans of other major sports -- some of whom also follow college basketball -- get to enjoy a more diverse array of content offerings while we remain perpetually stuck with the same shit every season.
Probably chicken and egg, but I think because college hoops numbers on the big sites don't remotely rival the NFL and NBA, editors are trying to do stuff that can compete for editorial prominence with sports that have much larger organic audiences. Which is part of the reason I think Substack will make sense for me long term: CBB media can be a tough place and I don't *want* to compete for clicks with NFL roster updates, I just need a (relatively) small number of people to chuck me a few bucks a month
(There is definitely perpetually an idea that college hoops needs to "market itself" better, and that media has a role to play in that, and so you get a lot of stuff aimed at the broadest possible audience.)
I think you've done a great job of summing up my own frustrations with the sport's coverage. I like some of the guys in the media space just fine but the vast majority are simply regressing to the standard ranking/listicle stuff...and that's just legacy media, not even the obnoxious ChatGPT generated "CBKReport" accounts.
im trying!!!
I prefer to watch most games on mute for this exact reason. CBB and CFB are plagued with this nonsense as well other "out-of-town" stupid takes.