Connecting players to fans is now part of a program's job
On recovering some of what the portal era took
Start with this, just to be super clear: The transfer portal is good. NIL is good.
This is something your humble newsletter author has been saying for dog’s years now: Paying talent is morally correct. Giving players free exercise of their career options — as their coaches have enjoyed for decades — is the right thing to do.
Even better? The combination of these two independently good ideas has generated a whole host of benefits for the sport. Fringe NBA prospects — which is to say, very good college players — stick around longer. European stars flock ashore. Talent filters in and up. The best teams in college basketball are older, more talented, more efficient, and more fun to watch than at any point in the past two decades. A fairer deal for athletes has led, by happy chance, to a comprehensively improved college basketball product. The whole thing’s worked out pretty great.
There have also been drawbacks. Implementing a system as wooly as NIL has led to a Wild West atmosphere, a mad rush governed more by handshake than contract. One wealthy booster can elevate a program or drive it off a cliff. Mid- and low-majors face (more) structural disadvantage. Average fans have been (even more) exploited, begged to crowdfund collectives and subsidize “talent funds.”
Chief among all the gripes, though, the one that has always resonated the most, is this:
I just can’t love my team like I used to.
We have heard this lament from readers dozens of times in the past few years. We hear it from traditionalists, who think college sports has gone totally off the rails. But we also hear it from the enlightened. We hear it from who agree players should earn money and transfer freely — more power to them! — but who still can’t quite get their head around what it means to be a fan anymore.
A big group of players show up in the summer, you see them play for the first time in November, the season flies by, and then by April most of them are gone. Rinse, repeat. Falling in love with a group over two and three and four year cycles — going on a journey with a core group of guys, through their peaks and valleys, and watching them all crest together — just doesn’t happen in the same way anymore.
When fans have asked how to deal with this, we never know what to say. Um, yeah, great point. Kind of rough. It is what it is? Try to fall in love faster? You can’t tell people how to be a fan, how to form relationships with their teams. It’s a personal experience, and it’s supposed to be organic, and for all of the benefits of the NIL/portal era, the full breadth of that romance has undoubtedly been lost.
Which is why it was particularly interesting when, on this week’s episode of the Basket Under Review Podcast, Virginia coach Ryan Odom — yep, Ryan Odom was this week’s guest! check it out on all your podcast places! — brought up Virginia’s in-house documentary series (at around the 20:40 mark).
At first, we figured Odom was just being nice and plugging his program’s content work, not that we minded at all. But in fact, as Odom explained, the documentary, “Proving Grounds,” is part of a considered strategy, an attempt to introduce a die-hard Hoos fanbase to an entirely new staff and roster:
“We had two goals (for the players) this summer: connect them to each other, and connect them to this place,” Odom said. “(The documentary) gives you behind the scenes info as it relates to putting together a roster and connecting a group. …
“It also, in my mind, was really important for us because we have an entirely new team. It was really important for us to get the personalities of this team out there to our fans, because I think that’s one of the things that’s lost right now in college athletics is you have this turnover, and then fans begin to get frustrated with things. They’re like ‘Well, this guy’s gone, now this guy’s gone, OK, who’s this new guy coming in?’ Well, you can’t wait until November to start introducing your team to the fans. And that’s why we wanted to do this documentary — to get these guys’ unique personalities and stories out there.”
This had never occurred to us. It seems very smart! So smart, in fact, so that we were sort of surprised we hadn’t also heard a coach talk about it — at least not so straightforwardly — before now.
Admittedly, this is a national hoops publication that tries to cover big narratives as well as many details, and so the rhythms of every Division I school’s summer hoops content release schedule aren’t something we’re super dialed into. But it also feels like very few Division I programs, even high-majors with the resources for staff videographers and Final Cut subscriptions, have so deliberately attempted to build relationships with fans quite like this. And, sure, maybe it’s a little different for Virginia this summer, as it transitions not just from one coach to the next but from one era to the other, from the Tony Bennett Epoch into something totally new, all the while attempting to retain the spirit of what appealed to so many fans (beyond wins) for the past 15 years.
Still: How many schools are doing this already? How many are actively thinking this way? How many are simply happy to let the offseason play out, safe in the knowledge that fans will eventually come around — especially if the team gets off to an 11-1 start? (This is not a rhetorical question; please drop some examples in the comments!)
This got us thinking even more. To stick with the Virginia example: In September 2024, the Richmond Times-Dispatch laid off David Teel and Mike Barber, two of the state’s (and profession’s!) most respected journalists, and two of the very best covering the Virginia hoops beat. Both have since landed at other publications and/or coverage areas, thankfully, but their departures from the state’s capitol newspaper, and its ruthless trimming of the beat, was simply the latest indication of how hollowed out local budgets and the classical daily coverage of college sports have become.
Journalists at all kinds of publications — including newsletters! — still exist, of course, and will continue to cover all kinds of college programs for the foreseeable. There will always be recent grads excited to write for the local Rivals site (or equivalent). National reporters will always show up for a good story. But the kind of in-depth, scoop-battling, let’s-profile-every-player-on-the-roster-before-the-first-game-and-show-up-to-every-away-and-travel-to-every-tournament-site-no-matter-what local news that used to be fans’ lifeline to their teams is significantly diminished.
The irony: Fans need more of that stuff now, and more quickly, than ever.
It is not college athletics programs’ jobs to solve the crisis of the local American newspaper, obviously. That is not the argument here. The argument, rather, is about what makes the most strategic sense for college programs themselves in 2025 and beyond. If you want to take advantage of the landscape, and refill your roster quickly, and speed up your rebuilding timeline from a couple of years to a couple of months — and why wouldn’t you, if you can get your evaluations and constructions right — you have to also acknowledge that the people who pay for your product might find that process dehumanizing and cold.
Coaches intuitively get how important fan enthusiasm is. It’s why they carry couches on freshman move-in day and paper frats with free tickets. It’s why they lose the run of themselves on the sideline and beg their own crowds to stand up and get loud. If you’re willing to do all that, you might also be willing to hire a talented crew of content producers that can spend an entire summer doing everything possible to connect fans with your latest crop of players, or bring on a gifted feature writer who can tell each player’s story better than they can tell their own.
Maybe it’ll work, maybe it’ll fall flat. It’s never going to replace the four-year journey fans used to go on with teams and players, the journeys they remember and long for. It’s never going to replace the feeling Indiana fans had when Christian Watford made that shot against Kentucky, weighted with all that came before. It will never manufacture the kind of bond Virginia fans shared with the team that lost to UMBC and then won it all. Even the fans happy for players to be paid won’t get back everything they lost in the exchange.
But it’s at least worth a try. Worst case, you get some decent clips for social media. Best case, executed at a high level, you meaningfully accelerate the relationship between team-specific fans and the team itself — the same way coaches have accelerated their relationships with players they recruit and the squads they put together. Everything is faster now. Why not this?
The sport has changed for the better. Fans’ relationships with their own teams have not. Maybe that bond will never be fully repaired. But it makes a lot of sense — for the sport, for their players, for themselves — for the coaches to give it a shot.
A quick housekeeping note
This was a free post on Buzzer, my newsletter about college basketball. Hi. If you liked it, please consider signing up to receive these posts in your inbox. If you really liked it, consider a paid subscription — almost all of what I write is for my paid subscribers, who are among the most beautiful and interesting people on the planet. Scientific fact.
Speaking of whom: Thanks to all of the paid subscribers for your support throughout the summer. Numbers have stayed relatively steady despite it being, you know, the late summer, when vacations reign and not a whole lot happens in the sport itself, alongside a slower posting schedule on my part. You guys are still here, and I appreciate you more than you know. (Especially you Founding Members, with whom we’ll be resuming our regular Zoom calls soon. Keep an eye on your calendar invites.)
I plugged it before, but seriously: Check out the podcast! We’ve had a series of great guests to date, and the whole BUR crew, from the video to the writing to the audio and visual production, is doing incredible work on a daily basis. (Spoiler alert: I somehow won the first game of College Basketball Jeopardy and will be participating in the champions round soon. I’m going to get smoked.) Here’s the Spotify link, and here’s the one for Apple Podcasts, where you should definitely rate the show five stars even if you’re never heard a single minute.
We’ll be picking up the cadence in the coming weeks, as September hits and the kinds of comprehensive team-by-team conference previews we rolled out last fall (alongside the usual essays and features, etc.) hopefully make the countdown to November feel much shorter. If you have any particular ideas for things you’d like to see this upcoming preview season — or even as we get into the season itself — by all means shoot us a note or drop them in the comments below.
Have an amazing Labor Day Weekend and official end to summer, good luck with back to school or whatever else you’ve got going on, and here’s to the eventual return of the greatest sport on Earth. Cheers.