Beauty with no beat
The joys of selling out
NOTE: If you are looking for my basketball writing, go here.
“No, not really.”
This has been my response to the same question I’ve been asked for over a year now: do you miss writing exclusively about Tennessee basketball? This response is usually met with “I thought you loved it” or “I’m surprised to hear that,” though more recently it’s been getting “I see your side of it.”1 Now that it’s gone from small-time operation to actual second job, this question still comes up with some frequency.
I do not mind being asked about it, and truth be told, I still get to cover Tennessee basketball in some form/fashion. When they play Louisville in Knoxville in a few weeks, I will likely be at the game covering it for my new site. (PLUG TIME: Basket Under Review dot com. It really is that good.) But it’s not for this newsletter, and it’s not as part of an overall beat that I was on for seven full seasons at a couple different outlets.
There are items here or there I miss. In Tennessee’s exhibition game against Duke, it took me a while to figure out which players corresponded to which jerseys, which is part of the player movement era and part because I simply don’t know the roster like I once did. It would be nice, for instance, to have read a bunch of practice reports or to have listened to my friend Mike Wilson’s belief that JP Estrella would be really good this year and was constantly showing that in practice.
This is part of what you give up when you go from covering one team to 365, or thereabouts. Truthfully, I don’t think I touch on all 365 in a given season, but we can safely assume that 250+ show up in my weekly Watchlists at some point and that somewhere around 20-40 of those get a devoted piece on them prior to the NCAA Tournament. (So far in 2025-26, it’s IU Indy and Alabama, which is not how anyone, including me, would have guessed it would go.)
This enables me to cover more of college basketball but with less depth than I’d have if I was still on one team. I would like to do local radio hits with slightly more confidence, I guess. I miss some interactions with Tennessee fans, though frankly I don’t miss how negative it would get the second something went wrong.2 I still miss the Vol Pass. I live here, or at least near where ‘here’ is for Tennessee, but my game attendance is a bit down just because I no longer have to go when Tennessee plays a tomato can in November.
All of this has been worth it. I got to cover the Final Four in April, got a new job with a new site out of it, and make more money off of basketball coverage than I ever have. For transparency’s sake, my final season covering Tennessee basketball (2023-24), which was more like 60% Tennessee/40% everything else, brought in around $16K after taxes. This helped us fund a couple of useful home repairs, including a new kitchen floor, but it’s obviously not full-time money. I still had my desk job.
Last year post-tax touched $28K. This coming year will beat that if I’m calculating it right. These are good things. It’s still not full-time money, but it’s more than if I’d stayed on the beat. I present this not as a humblebrag - though this extra money did fund the Final Four and an anniversary vacation3 - but rather as the reality of beat writing in 2025.
Unless you work for a legacy site or you cover a professional sports team, I don’t think what I did is feasible as a full-time job. You can maybe come close, but whatever you cover has gotta be super-popular for more than a few months out of the year. Tennessee football could probably sustain itself to some extent. Unfortunately, despite having been the superior program for going on a decade, Tennessee basketball cannot do that.
Outside of a scant few basketball programs with heavily online fanbases - Duke, Kentucky, Purdue, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, UConn, UNC, Kansas?4 - I’m not sure full-time men’s basketball beat coverage can be independently funded, at least not to feed a family. I really, truly hope I am wrong, but my personal experience of covering a top-10 program for most of the last decade proves otherwise. I don’t want to cover football or baseball; I am exclusively a basketball man for writing purposes. Not saying that I dislike these other sports! I simply don’t know about them like I do this.
So: I went national. It’s been great, with some slight few exceptions. The reason I say “no, not really” is because, genuinely, I have been happier writing in the last year-plus than I had been in a long time. I mentioned to some friends a couple weeks back that I am the most confident in my own writing I’ve ever been. This is not exclusively because I’m not on a true beat anymore, but I have lanes I can signal into and define myself in that weren’t available before.
There is no real point to this post, other than it’s kicked around in my head for several months now. But whenever youths ask me for tips, which does somehow happen from time to time, I simply say this: go do things you’re going to enjoy doing, even if it’s not full-time. It’s a nice way to exist. I have greater work-life balance than ever before and I can travel now.
The other question I get is this: “do you still root for Tennessee?” That answer is a complicated yes.5 Being more removed from the program and team now, I don’t have to watch every game as intensely as I used to. During a recent game against Northern Kentucky, I had it on a laptop screen and looked over every few minutes because I was simply more curious about the ending of the Indiana/Penn State football game. (I have another post about how much I’ve been bummed out by this college football season, but that’s for another time.)
This is not due to not caring. I would still like for them to win games, because they are my favorite college basketball team. Yet I’m way less stressed during the games, because my livelihood and career does not depend on them winning a game or on them blowing out a team to make everyone happy and get more people to sign up. If they lose: whatever, it’s not going to ruin my day. If they win: great, it’s not going to determine my day. I feel healthier and am at my lowest weight since 2016. That last point is probably running-based but don’t stop me from making a point.
So, sure, I sold out. I have a better career than I had before, I am happier than I was before, and my future feels brighter with a greater purpose than it did before. Do I miss writing exclusively about one team? No, not really.
If you want to read actual basketball writing:
https://www.basketunderreview.com/
This one is better than “you abandoned the Vols.” I’ve gotten that twice.
The 2022-23 season, where I had a bit of a breakdown, really sticks in the craw. I try to be nice online because life is short, but people were furious that I liked a team that eventually went to the Sweet Sixteen as a 4 seed. It’s a game, people. I still have not un-muted most of these types.
Charleston. I also took a personal trip to Detroit to celebrate the end of unemployment.
I may have missed one.
My wife actually defined this for me recently: “you’ve emotionally removed yourself from Tennessee football.” That is accurate. I watch the games, I generically hope they win, I do not particularly care if they win or lose. That, and my father (Michigan grad) and I’s relationship really blossoming in the last half-decade, has changed things fundamentally for me. Sorry. Or not, who cares.