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batman10023

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Here is the problem with Scout (mainly because I had a Scout membership a few years ago for baseball because I liked their prospect scouting reports):

1)  They charge a premium (or at least they did) for discount news.  If I need to read a three sentence news break, I can read Twitter for free.

2) They lack original content- Almost all of their news is just news.  You can pick that up anywhere, google, twitter, espn, anywhere basically.  There is no reason for anyone to actually read those articles because you can't glean anything from it.  It's utterly useless, without any insight.  There are only a few sites that actually have decent reporting.  The Yankees were one of them back in the day because they had a good reporter that wrote scouting reports on a ton of prospects (which wasn't the case normally back in the day).  

3)  There is nothing that brings you back, no weekly series, no recurring article that you can't find anywhere else, nor an easy format.  Bleacher Report used to be worthless to anyone, but they got their act together by consolidating news, so you can get a ton of information on a single screen.  Scout doesn't have that, it has a webpage for each article.

4)  Lack of discussion- Now this is something they admittedly tried to correct and failed (with JI as an example) because there is very little discussion based on the content.  Some of the more active sites have hundreds of replies on any given topic, so if you don't go there for the article, you go there for the reactions.  Heck, half the time I click on Reddit stories, I'm just there to read the reactions, let alone the article.  

And still worth 9 million? Sheesh.  

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31 minutes ago, win4ever said:

Here is the problem with Scout (mainly because I had a Scout membership a few years ago for baseball because I liked their prospect scouting reports):

1)  They charge a premium (or at least they did) for discount news.  If I need to read a three sentence news break, I can read Twitter for free.

2) They lack original content- Almost all of their news is just news.  You can pick that up anywhere, google, twitter, espn, anywhere basically.  There is no reason for anyone to actually read those articles because you can't glean anything from it.  It's utterly useless, without any insight.  There are only a few sites that actually have decent reporting.  The Yankees were one of them back in the day because they had a good reporter that wrote scouting reports on a ton of prospects (which wasn't the case normally back in the day).  

3)  There is nothing that brings you back, no weekly series, no recurring article that you can't find anywhere else, nor an easy format.  Bleacher Report used to be worthless to anyone, but they got their act together by consolidating news, so you can get a ton of information on a single screen.  Scout doesn't have that, it has a webpage for each article.

4)  Lack of discussion- Now this is something they admittedly tried to correct and failed (with JI as an example) because there is very little discussion based on the content.  Some of the more active sites have hundreds of replies on any given topic, so if you don't go there for the article, you go there for the reactions.  Heck, half the time I click on Reddit stories, I'm just there to read the reactions, let alone the article.  

And still worth 9 million? Sheesh.  

No one with an IQ over 30 pays for any news service. I still haven't met a person that actually pays for ESPN insider service. 

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Any hockey fans here will remember names like Eklund and Code. Total ripoffs under the guise of having inside info. I honestly thought these kinds of scams got exposed by '07 but apparently not. They're the John Edward of internet sports forums. Throw enough sh*t at the wall and something eventually sticks. 

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1 hour ago, win4ever said:

4)  Lack of discussion- Now this is something they admittedly tried to correct and failed (with JI as an example) because there is very little discussion based on the content.  Some of the more active sites have hundreds of replies on any given topic, so if you don't go there for the article, you go there for the reactions.  Heck, half the time I click on Reddit stories, I'm just there to read the reactions, let alone the article.  

They claimed they were a forum company. That they were all about the conversation. When they told me that the current forum with well over 2 million posts was just going to be an archive, on a different domain possibly, I wanted to laugh. I couldn't think of a worse idea. When I got them to admit that they had 1 guy working on the forum software (I met him, he was nice) and that he didn't do that full time it was clear.

These forum companies IPB, Xenforo etc have teams of developers that live and breath this stuff. And they can't keep up. One guy that does your forum programming? Not gonna cut it. 

So glad I passed on the money. I knew they were going to ruin this site. Just couldn't let that happen.

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10 minutes ago, Maxman said:

They claimed they were a forum company. That they were all about the conversation. When they told me that the current forum with well over 2 million posts was just going to be an archive, on a different domain possibly, I wanted to laugh. I couldn't think of a worse idea. When I got them to admit that they had 1 guy working on the forum software (I met him, he was nice) and that he didn't do that full time it was clear.

These forum companies IPB, Xenforo etc have teams of developers that live and breath this stuff. And they can't keep up. One guy that does your forum programming? Not gonna cut it. 

So glad I passed on the money. I knew they were going to ruin this site. Just couldn't let that happen.

This site puts me in a bad mood, ruins my Sundays in the fall, and takes more time from my day than I care to admit and after 10+ years we all owe you a big thanks.  I'm sure you could have taken some money and ran but you keep the collection of misfit jet fans together because as much as we hate the Jets we can't let go.  

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They claimed they were a forum company. That they were all about the conversation. When they told me that the current forum with well over 2 million posts was just going to be an archive, on a different domain possibly, I wanted to laugh. I couldn't think of a worse idea. When I got them to admit that they had 1 guy working on the forum software (I met him, he was nice) and that he didn't do that full time it was clear.
These forum companies IPB, Xenforo etc have teams of developers that live and breath this stuff. And they can't keep up. One guy that does your forum programming? Not gonna cut it. 
So glad I passed on the money. I knew they were going to ruin this site. Just couldn't let that happen.

Thank you Jesus and you too Max


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During the pitch they kept saying that Jim Heckman pitched this entire idea when he was at Yahoo. And Yahoo was stupid for not listening. So they bought Scout and were doing this here. I remember thinking, pretty sure this is the one thing Yahoo got right.

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Just took a look over there.  Threads of Sooth offering "one day only specials".  And of course, crickets.

So sad.

Imagine this is similar to a chick you dated leaving you for a "better" guy.  Then a couple years later you see her and she's a single pregnant crackhead.

The bitch chose wrong.  :D

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3 hours ago, win4ever said:

Here is the problem with Scout (mainly because I had a Scout membership a few years ago for baseball because I liked their prospect scouting reports):

1)  They charge a premium (or at least they did) for discount news.  If I need to read a three sentence news break, I can read Twitter for free.

2) They lack original content- Almost all of their news is just news.  You can pick that up anywhere, google, twitter, espn, anywhere basically.  There is no reason for anyone to actually read those articles because you can't glean anything from it.  It's utterly useless, without any insight.  There are only a few sites that actually have decent reporting.  The Yankees were one of them back in the day because they had a good reporter that wrote scouting reports on a ton of prospects (which wasn't the case normally back in the day).  

3)  There is nothing that brings you back, no weekly series, no recurring article that you can't find anywhere else, nor an easy format.  Bleacher Report used to be worthless to anyone, but they got their act together by consolidating news, so you can get a ton of information on a single screen.  Scout doesn't have that, it has a webpage for each article.

4)  Lack of discussion- Now this is something they admittedly tried to correct and failed (with JI as an example) because there is very little discussion based on the content.  Some of the more active sites have hundreds of replies on any given topic, so if you don't go there for the article, you go there for the reactions.  Heck, half the time I click on Reddit stories, I'm just there to read the reactions, let alone the article.  

And still worth 9 million? Sheesh.  

Good points, I'll add one more:  The internet is a dead medium. 

Meaning that everything that is going to be invented has been invented and we're now at the point of redundancy and the weeding out of that which is not significant.  The idea of an aggregator of sports content and sports forums was bad to begin with, you'd think they'd have learned the lesson of local sports radio which dwarfs national talk.  Jets fans want to talk to Jets fans, period.  If we want to talk to Jaguars fans we can just Google a Jaguars forum and be done with it. 

There was a popular adage about 10 years ago that "content is king".  That's where this get-rich-quick Scout nonsense came from.  That's not the case anymore.  Content has been replaced by Twitter.  People care more about the reactions of others to live events rather than the live events themselves.  Just look at JI.  Vibrant community, tons of traffic, people who want to hear others reactions to a niche and express themselves.  Take that pure idea and bundle it in a suite of boring articles across a dozen sports it gets lost, loses its focus.  It didn't matter if the UI was awful or not, the community realized it was being pimped out, sold out, and watered down, we're smart enough to know when we're being monetized.  We resented it, left to find what we lost-  that simple place run by fans, not suits.

SAR I

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3 hours ago, JoJoTownsell1 said:

No one with an IQ over 30 pays for any news service. I still haven't met a person that actually pays for ESPN insider service. 

Yeah, the pay for news service era is pretty much over.  

2 hours ago, Maxman said:

They claimed they were a forum company. That they were all about the conversation. When they told me that the current forum with well over 2 million posts was just going to be an archive, on a different domain possibly, I wanted to laugh. I couldn't think of a worse idea. When I got them to admit that they had 1 guy working on the forum software (I met him, he was nice) and that he didn't do that full time it was clear.

These forum companies IPB, Xenforo etc have teams of developers that live and breath this stuff. And they can't keep up. One guy that does your forum programming? Not gonna cut it. 

So glad I passed on the money. I knew they were going to ruin this site. Just couldn't let that happen.

Scout was horrible so many years ago, I have no idea why anyone would have wanted to buy that site in the first place.  I'm surprised, they haven't turned that into well a "scouting" site.  There is a huge market for sports prospects in baseball, basketball, and college football.  Heck, even with football, would love a website that had practice reports besides the beat writers.  

They have the name, and the big company backing, wish they would just turn it into pure scouting.  

The forums were horrible there, bright green, huge signatures that took up half the page, some resident idiot Packer fan that practiced "holier than thou" posting, and that guy was there in like '07 or something.  Years later, I remember checking a bunch of forums to hear draft reactions, and his big insight was how amazing of a pick Stephen Hill was and how disappointed he is the Packers passed on him.   Yeah, they didn't update anything there for a long time (pretty sure it was the same when I last checked in there) and huge waste of potential.  

 

2 hours ago, bitonti said:

the 5 letter web domain is a huge portion of that value. CBS Sportsline sounds good when you say it but typing it on a phone is a pain

I think Scout is a prime domain name, although I pretty much bookmark anything on my phone so I don't have to type it out and fight with auto correct.  

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11 minutes ago, win4ever said:

Scout was horrible so many years ago, I have no idea why anyone would have wanted to buy that site in the first place.  I'm surprised, they haven't turned that into well a "scouting" site.  There is a huge market for sports prospects in baseball, basketball, and college football.  Heck, even with football, would love a website that had practice reports besides the beat writers.  

The team that was put in place when the MTV guy purchased Scout back from FOX was the original Rivals team. They thought they were going to do the same thing they did back in the day, only bigger. With people paying for it.

We are going to build a huge premium site. And we aren't paying for it. They are.

Except it didn't happen. :)

I thought they paid like 60 million to Fox to get it back. I didn't look it up, but that is what I remember them saying. The guy was like I will fly to you to talk about JetNation. They had a crazy budget. So they paid 60 million, shelled out all this money to buy \ lease sites and they went for 9 million in bankruptcy. Ouch.

 

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None of that is too surprising to me. They went on a crazy run to just try to buy people up with no real vision or understanding of what made it work. Their best forums were pretty much the ones that were born there because nobody that was actually a fan of the team started their own site like JN or JI. Its one thing to donate to guys who are providing services you enjoy and you know are not making a killing and something totally different to pay to some giant company for nothing special. Most of these "sports conglomerates" have all flopped. Its as if everyone was blindsided by the success of Bleacher Report and had to scramble to try to make their version of that. 

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46 minutes ago, SAR I said:

Good points, I'll add one more:  The internet is a dead medium. 

Meaning that everything that is going to be invented has been invented and we're now at the point of redundancy and the weeding out of that which is not significant.  The idea of an aggregator of sports content and sports forums was bad to begin with, you'd think they'd have learned the lesson of local sports radio which dwarfs national talk.  Jets fans want to talk to Jets fans, period.  If we want to talk to Jaguars fans we can just Google a Jaguars forum and be done with it. 

There was a popular adage about 10 years ago that "content is king".  That's where this get-rich-quick Scout nonsense came from.  That's not the case anymore.  Content has been replaced by Twitter.  People care more about the reactions of others to live events rather than the live events themselves.  Just look at JI.  Vibrant community, tons of traffic, people who want to hear others reactions to a niche and express themselves.  Take that pure idea and bundle it in a suite of boring articles across a dozen sports it gets lost, loses its focus.  It didn't matter if the UI was awful or not, the community realized it was being pimped out, sold out, and watered down, we're smart enough to know when we're being monetized.  We resented it, left to find what we lost-  that simple place run by fans, not suits.

SAR I

I don't know if the internet as a medium is dead, but you have to establish something of value, and it's getting harder and harder to stand out.   You can't follow suit to an established one and upend it without being better.  

So Facebook upends Myspace because people got tired of the music, ads, and amateurish look.  Technically, they are the same platform, but Facebook stood out because it was cleaner.  Even if the idea is established, people have to differentiate themselves somehow.   

In terms of content, one website that I visit frequently is TurnontheJets.  Most of their stuff is redundant, but I love their context stats, because it helps break down the offense in a logical fashion.  I'm not going to find that at too many sites, so because of that content, I'm much more likely to check out their stuff even though I can get the same information elsewhere.  

I faced this issue years ago, with a site owner that would not relent on the idea that he needs to attract people with something unique.  He built a website with sub-sites for every single team in pro-sports, and select college teams as well.  And I wrote for the Yankees, and he kept insisting on daily game recaps like he was going to compete with the myriad of websites that provide more detailed and instant game recaps than me writing them up, while balancing my college work.  I kept telling him to go with sabermetrics (it wasn't mainstream then) and fantasy (again, nowhere near as mainstream as it is now) based articles, build a base, and then try to compete.  You need something that makes you stand out so people come for that content.  Would not listen one bit, wanted to compete directly with ESPN, with a startup website that didn't offer much else.   And he wasn't some dumb guy with money, he was a lawyer, and from what I could tell paid a ton of money for website design, domains, technical support.  They refreshed after a few years, but still run the website, with barely any traffic. 

I think even for football, there are a ton of avenues to pursue when the time comes:

1) I think film review will be more common, as it helps people see the results better.  

2) I think football will have a sabermetric revolution, with advancing technology.  I expect football velocity, spin rates, trajectory to be major areas of interest, first in scouting, and then eventually into mainstream like pitcher's velocities now.  The physical breakdowns for prospects have already started with SPARQ on the mainstream, but I think it'll go much further.  

3) I think a fantasy match-up breakdown website will take off because so many people have money riding on these sites.  Basketball has BasketballMonster as a good website, but football doesn't stay nearly the same statistically, so I think a website that factors in many things will take off.  For example, a couple of years ago, I was big into FanDuel, so a friend of mine signed up for this website that provided stats based on match ups for baseball.  So if a hitter has done well vs. a pitcher, a pitcher with similar stuff, in that park, in similar park, recent streaks, lineup breakdowns, bullpen workload, recent movement in Vegas one way or another, etc.  We used to take it one step further, look at umpires and their propensity to call balls/strikes, humidity level at the stadium, elevation, rain forecasts, wind directions.  We made decent money, but the more we went on, we figured that there was just so much information out there that it was hard to pick the right one.  However, I do think a website that can bring it all together has potential.  

4) Scouting, I know Draftbreakdown is a big site, but I think they can take it further if they could get their hands on All 22 tapes, and actually provide scouting reports on these guys.   

13 minutes ago, Maxman said:

The team that was put in place when the MTV guy purchased Scout back from FOX was the original Rivals team. They thought they were going to do the same thing they did back in the day, only bigger. With people paying for it.

We are going to build a huge premium site. And we aren't paying for it. They are.

Except it didn't happen. :)

I thought they paid like 60 million to Fox to get it back. I didn't look it up, but that is what I remember them saying. The guy was like I will fly to you to talk about JetNation. They had a crazy budget. So they paid 60 million, shelled out all this money to buy \ lease sites and they went for 9 million in bankruptcy. Ouch.

 

Lol, definitely took a loss on that one.  I think the premium cost thing really hurts, because they don't provide anything that you can't get for free.  People will pay, if they see a benefit, but they aren't going out of their way just because of the name.  

I was on JI when it happened and I kept thinking, why did they have to merge onto their forums?  Why not buy the domain and keep the same forums?  Obviously, they wanted freedom from IPB or other boards, but for their theory, it would be a downgrade for all the members.  I thought maybe it would work if the forums were improved, so it was a seamless transition, but then people became territorial, a whole bunch of "We're JI posters" acting like a hostile takeover, with the few people left there acting like victims of a war crime, and ended up in a disaster.  With all the money they spent, I don't know why they didn't just invest in some better boards.

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2 hours ago, jason423 said:

None of that is too surprising to me. They went on a crazy run to just try to buy people up with no real vision or understanding of what made it work. Their best forums were pretty much the ones that were born there because nobody that was actually a fan of the team started their own site like JN or JI. Its one thing to donate to guys who are providing services you enjoy and you know are not making a killing and something totally different to pay to some giant company for nothing special. Most of these "sports conglomerates" have all flopped. Its as if everyone was blindsided by the success of Bleacher Report and had to scramble to try to make their version of that. 

So true. We joined USA Today sports group here years ago. It was a no money deal, they just wanted our comscores. They basically partnered with 200 sites, had every site give them their comscores and then they said they were top 5. They brought in top guys from ESPN, had a huge summit in Vegas and were going to take over the world. They made ad sales promises that they never came close to delivering on.

Then their network fell apart completely. The Scout pitch was very similar to what happened with USA Today. Except with USA Today, there was no risk. They weren't looking to change anything, they just wanted credit for the traffic. Scout's model is more dangerous since they change everything and all they wanted is video content because they could sell higher CPM ads for video.

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1 hour ago, win4ever said:

I don't know if the internet as a medium is dead, but you have to establish something of value, and it's getting harder and harder to stand out.   You can't follow suit to an established one and upend it without being better.  

So Facebook upends Myspace because people got tired of the music, ads, and amateurish look.  Technically, they are the same platform, but Facebook stood out because it was cleaner.  Even if the idea is established, people have to differentiate themselves somehow.   

In terms of content, one website that I visit frequently is TurnontheJets.  Most of their stuff is redundant, but I love their context stats, because it helps break down the offense in a logical fashion.  I'm not going to find that at too many sites, so because of that content, I'm much more likely to check out their stuff even though I can get the same information elsewhere.  

I faced this issue years ago, with a site owner that would not relent on the idea that he needs to attract people with something unique.  He built a website with sub-sites for every single team in pro-sports, and select college teams as well.  And I wrote for the Yankees, and he kept insisting on daily game recaps like he was going to compete with the myriad of websites that provide more detailed and instant game recaps than me writing them up, while balancing my college work.  I kept telling him to go with sabermetrics (it wasn't mainstream then) and fantasy (again, nowhere near as mainstream as it is now) based articles, build a base, and then try to compete.  You need something that makes you stand out so people come for that content.  Would not listen one bit, wanted to compete directly with ESPN, with a startup website that didn't offer much else.   And he wasn't some dumb guy with money, he was a lawyer, and from what I could tell paid a ton of money for website design, domains, technical support.  They refreshed after a few years, but still run the website, with barely any traffic. 

I think even for football, there are a ton of avenues to pursue when the time comes:

1) I think film review will be more common, as it helps people see the results better.  

2) I think football will have a sabermetric revolution, with advancing technology.  I expect football velocity, spin rates, trajectory to be major areas of interest, first in scouting, and then eventually into mainstream like pitcher's velocities now.  The physical breakdowns for prospects have already started with SPARQ on the mainstream, but I think it'll go much further.  

3) I think a fantasy match-up breakdown website will take off because so many people have money riding on these sites.  Basketball has BasketballMonster as a good website, but football doesn't stay nearly the same statistically, so I think a website that factors in many things will take off.  For example, a couple of years ago, I was big into FanDuel, so a friend of mine signed up for this website that provided stats based on match ups for baseball.  So if a hitter has done well vs. a pitcher, a pitcher with similar stuff, in that park, in similar park, recent streaks, lineup breakdowns, bullpen workload, recent movement in Vegas one way or another, etc.  We used to take it one step further, look at umpires and their propensity to call balls/strikes, humidity level at the stadium, elevation, rain forecasts, wind directions.  We made decent money, but the more we went on, we figured that there was just so much information out there that it was hard to pick the right one.  However, I do think a website that can bring it all together has potential.  

4) Scouting, I know Draftbreakdown is a big site, but I think they can take it further if they could get their hands on All 22 tapes, and actually provide scouting reports on these guys.  

Facebook took something cluttered and immature and made it clean.  Scout did the opposite, took clean forums and made them cluttered and immature.  Ads, faux content, they did it all wrong.

As for sports, I'm a firm believer that Twitter is ending not only the internet we know but live sports as well.  Turns out people wanted to go to live football games to sit amongst like-minded fans and share the experience.  They can do that now without leaving the living room.  What makes it different than discussion forums that I've been participating in since alt.sports.football.pro circa 1994 is that it's not just Jets fans in that niche, it's the common fan too, it's the guy at the water cooler but instead of waiting to hear his take on Monday you get to read it in realtime.  I don't need to wait until Monday to get the Post or the News narrative either; their writers spill those beans in Tweets as soon as the game ends and we flip the channel to SNY.

As for the sport-within-a-sport of gambling and fantasy, these are all distractions intended to assist with the fact that most teams do not win, most fans go home losers, the quest to win a Super Bowl is so low probability it borders on futile.  So when the Jets suck in December, hey, I'm happy, I'm in first place in my fantasy league, I can win a few grand, I can still participate in a sport that abandoned me in October.  Fantasy players, casual gamblers, I just don't see these folks as handicappers, it's too much work.

And just about the only thing that's new that's gotten me excited about forums in the past 10 years happen to be your must-read play breakdowns.  Much as I look forward to a juicy new PSL thread to immerse myself in on a random Tuesday, when I see one of your threads I'm all in.  That type of post-mortem is very worthwhile, very educational; just don't try to monetize it.  The value is not in the content, it's in the connection.

SAR I

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46 minutes ago, SAR I said:

Facebook took something cluttered and immature and made it clean.  Scout did the opposite, took clean forums and made them cluttered and immature.  Ads, faux content, they did it all wrong.

As for sports, I'm a firm believer that Twitter is ending not only the internet we know but live sports as well.  Turns out people wanted to go to live football games to sit amongst like-minded fans and share the experience.  They can do that now without leaving the living room.  What makes it different than discussion forums that I've been participating in since alt.sports.football.pro circa 1994 is that it's not just Jets fans in that niche, it's the common fan too, it's the guy at the water cooler but instead of waiting to hear his take on Monday you get to read it in realtime.  I don't need to wait until Monday to get the Post or the News narrative either; their writers spill those beans in Tweets as soon as the game ends and we flip the channel to SNY.

As for the sport-within-a-sport of gambling and fantasy, these are all distractions intended to assist with the fact that most teams do not win, most fans go home losers, the quest to win a Super Bowl is so low probability it borders on futile.  So when the Jets suck in December, hey, I'm happy, I'm in first place in my fantasy league, I can win a few grand, I can still participate in a sport that abandoned me in October.  Fantasy players, casual gamblers, I just don't see these folks as handicappers, it's too much work.

And just about the only thing that's new that's gotten me excited about forums in the past 10 years happen to be your must-read play breakdowns.  Much as I look forward to a juicy new PSL thread to immerse myself in on a random Tuesday, when I see one of your threads I'm all in.  That type of post-mortem is very worthwhile, very educational; just don't try to monetize it.  The value is not in the content, it's in the connection.

SAR I

I still don't understand, how they thought migration was the best mode of preservation there.  Someone on that team had to see it wasn't a good idea because people sort of like talking to similarly minded people, otherwise there are about seven Jets sites alone that should see consistent cross traffic.  

Twitter all but killed the sports reporters and sites like say ESPN are useless.  When I was a kid, ESPN was the go to place (AOL Internet period) where I would sit through an hour long Sportscenter to see a 45 second highlight of my team.  Then the internet became more rampant, and instead of watching ESPN, I used to go on the website to get up to date information.  Then, forums became much more popular, so instead of getting lost in the hellhole of ESPN comments, you could comment with like-minded people on specific forums.  And then Twitter comes along, and the getting the news part is completely gone, I get it from Twitter, see it here, and just talk about it here.  Same thing with Bleacher Report, I just go through their tweet list to see what's new instead of reading most of their articles.  

I think the big thing for hurting attendance (of die-hard fans) at games are really the clarity of TVs.   I don't live in NY, so I don't go to Jets games because I'm rarely there on a weekend they play.  I've been to a few games at Yankee stadium, and it's let down of an experience.  One, the prices are ridiculous.  Second, even with good seats, I have no clue if it's a strike or not, whole crowd reacting like they saw it up close but there is really no way to tell.  The music goes off every few seconds, and barely any intelligent conversation.  At most, it's "Yeah, that was a beautiful line drive" or something.  Same thing with Titans football, have to sit around and look for replays before you know what really happened.  Whereas, at home, not only can watch in HD, I can get numerous perspectives, replays, lack of annoying music, and I don't really have to spend an extra dime.  The thing that makes it worth it is really just the fan experience.  I think I would have a much better time if people could get together in front of say an 80 inch HDTV and just watch with friends.  You have better conversations, most likely better food, and you can still follow along closely.  At stadiums, I almost feel like I'm watching the game on the screens anyway, because I can't tell apart close plays even with good seats.  

I played fantasy for a long time, made some decent money when all you really had to do was be knowledgeable.  I used to kill in baseball (and basketball, because it's most statistically predictable sport) because I knew the prospects really well.  And I was into sabermetrics well before it became mainstream, so it was much easier to predict the breakouts and slumps.   And then fantasy became mainstream, and too many sites popped up talking about prospects or match ups that it became impossible to do anything to get a leg up.  And the season long leagues started to bore me, because I didn't think the payoff was really worth the effort.  Started daily leagues, and it was hit or miss, because you really have to win around 60% to break even, and there are just so many sites that offer valuable information that it's just luck by the end of it.  You find a sleeper, he hits, and then you realize 45% of the league has him, so you don't go anywhere.  

Thanks, I actually write that mainly so it stands out.  I feel like it's under-represented in the NFL and very few sites actually do it (I believe fieldguls, the SB nation site for the Seahawks do it on their site) and Brent Kollman (the guy that made the famous Hackenberg video) does it for the Texans from time to time because that's his team.  Other than that, it's really hard to find, so I figured it was the best way to write and inform the fans, without just repeating the same thing over and over again.  I just have to accept that it's a niche field because there is a limited amount of people that will read 4000 word articles, lol.  

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The Scout site is garbage and 247 isn't much better.  I actually subscribed to the Oregon Ducks 247 site for a while.  What a con job those College "Insider" sites are.... usually run by some flunked-out journalism grad or some fantatic/borderline nutcase moderator.

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