Adios From Green Akers

You know you’re getting older when the dates stop sticking as firmly.

I first visited Off Tackle Empire, as near as I can remember, in 2010, on a linkthrough from ESPN if you can believe it - back then, the four letters voluntarily compiled a list of links to external websites in their college football coverage, many of which were SBNation blogs.

I couldn’t tell you when exactly my first article went up on this site, only that it was right around the start of the 2013 season. Ten years later, this is the last one.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, some of which longtime readers will recognize from other longtime contributors who moved on. Life doesn’t get in the way as much when you’re a 25-year-old bachelor still living in your college town as compared to 35 years old with a 7-month-old, a spouse who occasionally wants a moment of your time, and a mortgaged house with a never-ending project list.

That’s part of it, but the truth is, I can still find time for the things I really care about. I get to almost every Detroit City FC home game; the D&D group I joined during the pandemic still meets most weeks; I started going to a monthly poker game earlier this year. Life’s not so hectic that I couldn’t hunt-and-peck and/or thumb out an article here and there, were I motivated to do so.

No, the bigger thing is that too much of this whole environment absolutely sucks now, both right here in particular and in the college sports realm more broadly.

The best description I’ve found for this is “enshittification.” I have no idea who first coined this term, but there’s a pretty good example of the process here.

I’m not trying to get my last piece here yanked by some soon-to-be-laid-off higher-up who’s never written an article about sports, so as to the “right here in particular” bit, I’ll try to be polite.

The network may as well have told me to hit the bricks when they ceased support for all podcasts two weeks before March Madness. I’m not saying ours was a wild success—God knows we didn’t do anything close to what we might have to promote it—but the true cost to host it was also de minimis, and it had become something of a passion project, and the company threw it in the garbage disposal with the most obviously BCC’d email to their “these shit podcasts” list that you could possibly imagine.

But, you know, when a media company is struggling, the best way to turn that around is obviously to produce less content.

This came not so long after the company finally went through with scrapping its old commenting system, one of the unique features about this platform that was fantastic in enabling organized conversations both as live events unfolded (i.e. game threads) and in slower-paced situations such as reacting to a major piece of news. They promised it wouldn’t materially affect the user experience; that, in fact, their study of the topic proved people wanted this.

That was all a lie.

They knew it, we knew it, they knew that we knew it, and we knew that they knew that we knew it, and so on for probably a few more levels of that. The legacy commenting system was just some unclear level of extra expense beyond what this new crap costs them, and as is so common in this field, “make number bigger right this second” prevailed over any kind of long-term mindset, such as preserving the base of return viewers we’d been carefully building for well over a decade. Ah, well, what are you gonna do?

Many of these lines of criticism can capably describe how I’ve come to feel about college athletics generally, but the best way to look at this is the simple act of accessing your team’s games, whether in person or watching on TV or online.

I noted earlier this week that Michigan State’s schedule this fall, almost entirely dictated by the mandates of TV networks, now has two games on Fridays, only two home games after September 23rd, and of that home slate, the 2nd-best game is now a 5:00 kick paywalled on Peacock.

Networks aren’t going to stop locking their most treasured, expensive content—live sports—beyond additional toll gates, and they’re sure as hell never going to accept one second less of commercials during their broadcasts. The predator conferences aren’t going to stop seeking out the best brands that get them into the best markets, and every new addition moves Big Ten Football closer to NFL Jr., North Division where your team spends 80% of the year playing teams you don’t give a shit about. Schools aren’t going to stop rolling out more alternate uniforms in colors that aren’t their colors to try to get you to buy a fifth or sixth jersey while claiming “the recruits love them!!” and charging ever-more money to sit on a cold bleacher with nonexistent WiFi.

The decisionmakers, the stakeholders in this sport know what they have—a captive audience on par with what Facebook or Amazon developed for themselves—and they’re just going to keep turning the juicer until no more money falls out of it.

None of this is surprising, of course. Nothing that exists in this world is safe from monetization and optimization anymore, and if along the way, it means that more of the sacrificial human labor that plays the actual game that is the actual driver of value in this whole thing gets paid better for it, maybe it’s fine that some sentimental mooks like me fall out of love with the sport. I knew I’d be Old eventually, I just honestly didn’t think it would come before I’m even supposed to get my prostate checked annually.

Swinging back to this particular spot to wrap up before I lose the last of you, it’s been time well spent for the most part. There’s real value in interacting with people outside my tribal bubble and doing it here has encouraged me to try to do it elsewhere in my life.

I hope the content was either enjoyable or at least worth a hate read/listen, and if it wasn’t, as always, your refund is in the mail. Matter of fact, why don’t you go out to the curb, that must be the FedEx truck pulling up right now. Nope, just stay out there, I’m sure I heard it (and we’re just gonna close the door).

But however justified I consider my reasons for drifting away from this sport, this community deserves writers who are still able to throw themselves in with abandon. I’m sure inertia and force of habit will keep me watching for a bit longer, at least unless Scottie Hazelton’s defense still can’t remember that tight ends are allowed to catch the ball and therefore must be covered.

Regardless, be well, and as always, Go Green.