How this newsletter plans on covering the 2024-25 college basketball season

it's an Announcement that's not really an Announcement but I guess it qualifies

Welcome back! I hope you’ve had a nice offseason. I hear things are happening in other sports…let me check this out.

Interesting! I’m sure I’ll eventually find out what that’s all about. For me, we’re about at basketball time. (And Tigers time!) This is Year Three of the Substack version of this newsletter and Year Eight of me writing in a public forum about college basketball in some fashion. Two Octobers ago, I got this version of the project rolling with an announcement post of how I’d be covering things. That was on October 24, 2022; this seasonal announcement is on October 7. That’s for a reason we’ll get to shortly.

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First, let’s cover preview season. For the second straight year, all 31 conferences will be previewed, and all 364 teams will be written about. (RIP Pac-12 for a season.) This is predictably a tremendous undertaking every time I do it but I think it’s super useful. I personally learn a lot about each team while writing, I form things to watch for, and it helps me come into the season with far more writing ideas than if I didn’t do preview content. Readers (you) also like it because you get to learn about teams you may not know much about. Win-win, even if my hands are in pain.

Rather than do the 31-to-1 countdown I did last year, I like the idea of changing things up. The average college basketball fan, for better or for worse, is a fan of a Power Five-ish team that likely isn’t elite but is in a good conference and would like to read about other top-flight conferences. The deal I’ll make you is this: you get to read about your conference and in the same week, you can read about the other 30. Preview week. What a concept.

This year’s change-up goes as follows: six (or seven, due to 31 total) conferences per day across five days. This sounds insane but it goes as such: one of the Power Five (ACC, the three Bigs, SEC), one of the Next Five (AAC, A10, MWC, MVC, WCC), and four of the one-bid leagues, all in alphabetical order. The Power Five and Next Five leagues will get their own posts; the one-bids will be bundled into groups of four or five. That’s a total of three posts a day, 15 in a week. This is how it looks on a schedule.

• Monday, October 21: ACC (P5), AAC (N5), America East, Atlantic Sun, Big Sky, Big South (one-bids)

• Tuesday, October 22: Big East (P5), Atlantic 10 (N5), Big West, CAA, Conference USA, Horizon, Ivy League (one-bids)

• Wednesday, October 23: Big Ten (P5), Missouri Valley (N5), MAAC, MAC, MEAC, Northeast (one-bids)

• Thursday, October 24: Big 12 (P5), Mountain West (N5), Ohio Valley, Patriot, Southern Conference, Southland (one-bids)

• Friday, October 25: SEC (P5), West Coast (N5), SWAC, Sun Belt, Summit League, WAC (one-bids)

That sounds like a lot, and it is. But! I’ll turn all of it into a link at the top of the main page you can refer back to throughout the run-up to the season, along once the year starts to see if I was right or more likely wrong. ALSO: one P5, one N5, and one LM preview, totaling six (or seven) conferences, will be made free to draw in some new readers. Just like the average college sports media member, you, too, can be interested in exactly 6 or 7 conferences at any given time. That’s Week One of the preview.

Week Two centers around five aspects of schemes, or specific sets, that I feel will hold an outsized impact on the college basketball season. I have not scientifically ascertained the exact five, but I have gone with pretty good guesses as to what this might look like. These go as such; I’ll make one of them free, probably the first because I’ve already written about it at length.

• Monday, October 28: Houston’s defensive ball-screen blitz

• Tuesday, October 29: How Coach K used Paolo Banchero, and how Jon Scheyer may use Cooper Flagg

• Wednesday, October 30: Jahmai Mashack of Tennessee’s ability to own the point of attack defensively

• Thursday, October 31: A specific post set Graham Ike and Gonzaga use to dominate

• Friday, November 1: West Virginia’s ploy to play spoiler behind Tucker DeVries sideline pick-and-rolls

Depending on video availability, and a scrimmage schedule I have blissfully done little research into, maybe we’ll have preseason video to use. If not, whatever, we’ll live.

The goal is for these to be shorter posts that play to the algorithm somewhat. I don’t do YouTube videos and I’ll leave that to Kevin Sweeney and Eric Fawcett, but now that Jordan Sperber has resumed his college basketball career, I do think there’s a potential hole in college basketball coverage that can be filled by posts like these. (Another spoiler: I’ve been bouncing around an idea in my head called ‘Wonka Syndrome’ for teams/coaches/systems that seem to be trying everything in the hopes something works. That’s TBD, because I gotta see who does that first. I also have a piece lined up for opening week I’ll keep behind closed doors for now.)

That gets us to the start of the season on November 4. There will also be a season-opening essay of some sort as is my standard, likely on or before that day. In-season, there will be the standard Weekly/Weekend Watchlist post, along with a rotating series of posts that includes everything from game previews to game reviews to explanations of a team’s offensive/defensive scheme to schematic breakdowns to key March stats to, as always, how stats and history would pick the NCAA Tournament. I try to cover a lot of areas here; I look forward to the wonky stuff I find in 2024-25.

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Scanning this schedule, you have perhaps noticed one thing. Here is THE ANNOUNCEMENT.

I’m not doing Tennessee coverage this year. This is a decision I made privately a few months ago. Instead, this newsletter will remain focused on college basketball at the national/regional level. You’ll still get the weekly watchlist, along with 1-2 additional articles with stats, video, and my own research. You’ll also still get all of the NCAA Tournament research I do in February/March, so with all that in mind, I’m keeping the price at $30/year, the same it was when this started two years ago.

I’m aware that this decision is going to disappoint a significant amount of people. Even after a couple of seasons in which a lot of non-Tennessee fans have found my writing, the metrics available to me on Substack say that 14% of all subscribers (north of 3,000 at the moment) are located in Tennessee. While naive to think all of those 14% are Tennessee fans it’s likely that the largest fanbase of readers on here is Tennessee. That’s double the next-largest state.

There are a variety of reasons for this decision. Personal time, and my own desires, are the main reason. I’ve done the Tennessee thing for seven years now and have written about some terrific teams, have grown closer to a specific nerd section of the fanbase, and have largely been satisfied with what I’ve put out. As nasty as this sounds, I think that in some meaningful way I’ve aided in making basketball fans in the Knoxville area a little smarter. Possibly dumber, who knows, but we’ll see.

There have been a lot of good things to come from this; one that is not a good thing is my schedule during the season. Show Me My Opponent takes anywhere from 4-10 hours (depending on quality of opponent) to produce. That’s about 15 hours or so a week, along with the three other posts I did last year. I’d estimate I spent about 25 hours a week during the season working here, along with a 40-hour day job and a wife that correctly expects me to be an alive, sentient being when she is at home. I wasn’t, and frankly I’d like to be a much better husband this season. I don’t enjoy admitting this, but some sort of transparency is required to explain.

Beyond that, I want a new challenge. For better or for worse I think I’ve mined all there is to mine of the Tennessee story short of being a beat reporter, which I have no interest in doing. I started this Substack so I could explore more of the national side, which I really, truly enjoy. I find a lot of joy in writing stories I didn’t have a ton of pre-baked narratives on, as that engages the academic parts of my brain best.

Anyway! Too much negativity. I will still write about Tennessee at some point this year, because I expect them to be one of the ten best teams in the sport and that’s inherently interesting. Instead of writing about them every night, though, it’s probably just going to be a couple times this season. A break is healthy sometimes, even if it might disappoint a good base of good people who’ve been fans of mine for some time.

I’m telling you this now because of that October 24, 2022 announcement. The first paid subscribers on this page signed up on that day. They’re the Day Ones. Along with that, a good batch of people signed up between then and November 7 or so that same year. If you’re in that group, your yearly payment anniversary is coming up in the next month. I wanted to tell you now to give you those 2-4 weeks to make the call for yourself. If this is where you get off the newsletter’s books, I completely understand.

However, if this is where you get on because you weren’t into the whole Tennessee thing, welcome aboard. When one door closes, another opens; it’s time for this one to be firmly opened.

There’s your announcement. Enough dramatics. I’ll see you again on October 21.