This newsletter's schedule and plan for the 2023-24 basketball season

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?

I was going to wait to post this until next Monday - the official start of college basketball season in my brain, dadgummit - but considering practices for a lot of teams began this Monday, might as well. Subscribe below if you haven’t already.

Last year I started this Substack after years of doing free posts at a different site, which I have yet to turn off the auto-renew for. Ah well. The plan then is the same as the plan now:

1. Provides useful, high-quality analysis of Tennessee basketball that is not available anywhere else, diving into minute details and sharing an obsessive fan’s perspective that is not written by a homer or an overly objective analyst.

2. Discusses college basketball at-large and offers statistical, in-depth pieces on various items.

3. The big one: shares content that is not hot takery, clickbait, boring, or tossed-off. I promise you that if something appears on this site, real effort has been put into it.

I have no changes to the original mission statement here. I still believe this has real national appeal. There are reasons, multiple, why my work has made cameos in The Athletic, On3, 247, The Field of 68, and more. It is not because I try to pimp it out, because I am extremely uncomfortable talking myself up. It is because that a lot of people out there think it is good. I really hope you do, too, and if it isn’t, you (the subscribers and the readers) need to be the ones to tell me to sack up and fix it.

That all stays the same. What will change a little this year is the posting schedule itself. Last year’s commitment was four posts a week: three about Tennessee, one about the national college basketball scene. This year is different. I have three promises.

1. You are going to get FIVE POSTS A WEEK. That’s four plus one, baby! Theoretically, this means one for every weekday. I am a normal M-F day job guy outside of this newsletter and treasure the two days off, so there will not be any postings on here on Saturdays/Sundays until the NCAA Tournament rush.

2. Generally, two of those posts will be about Tennessee. Unusual as it may seem, I am not an idiot. Generally. I have written about Tennessee hoops for six years now and that’s where a majority-ish of the reader base lies. Tennessee plays about two games a week; the Show Me My Opponent series will continue to run this year. Every game will be previewed.

3. Two posts will be about the national scene. This could be anything. I did some coach interviews last year and some team profiles both in MBB/WBB. Given this newsletter’s status as a stats-first blog I think it would make a little more sense to include more articles in this style or this one. Team profiles are cool because you get the initial rush of follows/interactions with fans of that team, but I don’t think this site should be exclusively that. Still, they’ll exist.

4. BONUS! A fifth post will be a weekly watchability guide that includes a column-type thing. I admit that this is probably inspired by loving Drew Magary’s Jamboroo series when I was younger but now, it’s more inspired by Patrick Mayhorn’s FBI Watchlist series at Meet at Midfield for college football. The goal is to provide the games I find most interesting day-over-day along with a short piece on whatever comes to mind at the time.

Basically, the only thing actually going away is the Tennessee recap/column that I have written the last couple of seasons. This is possibly an unwise choice because those have proven to be fairly popular, but as the guy who actually writes them I don’t enjoy doing them much anymore. Maybe the column-type thing in the section above ends up being about Tennessee on occasion but it won’t be a focus. I may just be aging out of it but turning the team I cover into Feelingsball isn’t for me right now. Hopefully another local writer takes up that concept?

The good news: there is no change in cost from 2022-23 to 2023-24. None! It’s still $30 for a full year. I’m just reposting last year’s subscription structure below:

• FREELOADERS: $0.00. The good news is that you can still subscribe to this site as a free subscriber. With this subscription, you’ll get to read the weekly watchlist/column and the rest will be behind a paywall.

• MONTHLIES: $5.00/month. Don’t do this one. Substack does not allow you to set a subscription price for monthlies below $5, which is really annoying. In my world this should be $3/month. If you’re a current monthly subscriber, email me and I’ll up-convert you to a year at no additional cost. You’ve paid enough already if you signed up last October for two dang years.

• YEARLIES: $30.00/year. This is the best value, and frankly, I think it’s pretty fair. For the equivalent of $2.50/month, you receive access to everything on the site and you don’t have to email me. A win for everybody!

If you are a current Tennessee student or faculty member, click here and get this subscription at $20 for a year. If you have an “email from an educational institution,” which I guess just means you have .edu in your email name, click here for something that is also $20 a year.

If you’re not convinced of the value add here, I’ll add this: I want to use my connections in the hoops world to make this a host site for some of the best, most intelligent, least fanboy-like basketball discussion that you can find on the Internet. Not just in Knoxville, not just in Tennessee, anywhere. We’ll also have cameos from various friends in the hoops world - not doing name drops, sorry - as they use their expertise to make sense of what looks like a pretty wacky season in store.

Another goal for the season, and we’ll see what this actually looks like, is to take a road trip or two at some point. Does this mean attending Illinois/Missouri around Christmas time? Does it mean doing a state of Indiana tour sometime during conference play? Does it mean going back to the Final Four, whether men’s (Phoenix) or women’s (Cleveland)? Unsure. TBD.

Lastly: I’ve been pondering a few different ideas for how to best build out that zone of discussion. Is it a message board? Is it a Discord channel? Is it Twitter? A Twitter alternative like BlueSky? I don’t have an answer yet. If you want to help me answer that, hit up the comments here (I’m making them free to all, not just for subscribers this time) or reply to the email here with your thoughts.

The next post will be on Monday, October 16. It will be about the college basketball season. From October 16 to April 8, 2024, minus a self-imposed one-week break over the holiday season, the plan is for you to get five posts a week over a 24-week span. That’s 120 total posts, or $0.25 USD per article. If you hate Tennessee - fair - remove about 40 (counting preseason stuff) from that for about $0.38 USD for articles you’ll actually want to read. I think it’s a good deal. I hope you will, too.

See you soon.