By Jeff Rice
This Wednesday, several thousand athletes will make the transition from prospect to recruit, signing letters of intent to attend — and play football for — universities across the country.
In doing so, they will end months of official and unofficial visits, daily wooing from coaches that would make Terrell Owens blush and speculation from frenzied fan bases convinced that one dozen 17-year-olds hold the key to their team’s next national championship.
National Signing Day has become a national holiday, made so by the ever-growing interest in college football, the subsequent interest in college football recruiting and increase in media coverage.
At the forefront of that print and online coverage are Rivals and Scout, two swiftly growing giants whose histories intertwine. After some early struggles, they have turned handsome profits while transforming recruiting from a niche topic to one that is followed and scrutinized as much as the college game itself.
Rivals began 2007 with more than 180,000 active subscribers, 80,000 more than it had as of the previous January. It received 3.5 billion page views in 2006, up 50 percent from the year before.
Scout — a company founded and run by a team laden with former Rivals executives — has more than 200,000 active subscribers. It receives more than 3 billion page views annually.
Six years ago, neither existed in its current form.
Jim Hickman, then a publisher of a Seattle-based magazine called Sports Washington, founded Rivals Networks in 1998, launching Rivals.com 16 months later.
In June of 2000, as the dot.com squeeze began to take effect, Hickman left the company, which was liquidated nearly a year later.
About the same time a group of investors led by Shannon Terry, Rivals’ current Chief Executive Officer, bought up much of the company’s remaining assets and re-launched it as Rivals.com, Heck- man — enlisting the help of several former Rivals executives — launched TheInsiders.com, which eventually became Scout.com.
Both teams had learned valuable lessons the first time around.
“The popularity of Rivals.com under the old leadership was never the question, “said Rivals Chief Operating Officer and Editor-in-Chief Bobby Burton. “The question was how you could publish while not perishing.”
The “old “Rivals had relied — at its peril — nearly entirely on advertising sales for its revenue. The new model sought to generate revenue from subscriptions, signing licensing agreements with several college team publications — BlueWhiteIllustrated.com among them — while still maintaining its national presence.
Like Rivals, Scout generated money from subscriptions and continued to cover college football and college basketball, placing an emphasis on recruiting, but it also began coverage of the NFL.
“When you think online, it’s news, sports and entertainment, “said Patrick Crumb, Scout’s senior vice president and general manager. “Sports is a big category, and different media properties cover it differently.”
Major media online companies highlight the top national stories. Fans of a particular team often must sift through several links to find stories about their team. Scout sought to turn the process inside-out, linking national stories to team sites.
“Our network gets people directly to what they’re more passionate about — their team, “Crumb said, using Penn State’s fan base as an example. “They’re not crazy about college football, they’re crazy about the Nittany Lions. We get people to their passion, and beyond that.”
Where there had been one network, there were now two — built by many of the same people at different times. It fostered what remains a uniquely competitive environment.
“That competition generally takes place on the local level, I think, “Burton said. “It’s not so much Rivals versus Scout as it is, say, Blue-White Illustrated (Rivals’ Penn State affiliate) versus Fight on State (Scout’s Penn State affiliate).”
“We know the Rivals guys very well, “Crumb said. “I think we have a very good relationship with them. We definitely have some common interests, especially recruiting. We do things that are good for the industry and responsible.”
There is no mistaking the effect those that cover recruiting have had on the process itself in recent years. Recruits as well as coaches are among the millions of fans who read daily online updates of who is visiting what school and when. Recruiting tactics have also been altered.
A few years ago, Burton interviewed a cornerback recruit who had been told by coaches at a prospective school that he would be “the next Charles Woodson.”
Burton talked to four other recruits that night that had been told the same thing by the same coach. He published a story about it not long after.
“Within 30 minutes, I had the recruiting coordinator calling me and said, ‘You’re killing us,’ “Burton said. “Kids get told white lies. It used to be things that wasn’t just a white lie.”
The flip side is that the success of the recruiting sites has given birth to hundreds of contributing reporters, of various journalistic backgrounds, who collectively inundate recruits with phone calls. The frenzy feeds itself, but the publishers believe the positive effects outweigh the negative.
“Kids are checking out stories, parents are checking them out, “Burton said. “The Internet now gives kids more tools to make more informed decisions, whether it’s what the depth chart looks like or general research on the university.”
Both companies show few signs of slowing down, and not just because of a steady influx of subscriptions and what is improving advertising revenue. Rivals last month began selling subscriptions that gave fans breaking news alerts via text messages. Scout, which has considerably more corporate backing since its purchase by FOX last August, hopes to expand its Major League Baseball and high school sports networks.
And as they continue to monitor each other’s progress and look towards the future, those who run both networks can look back on a time when 1-900 telephone numbers were fans’ primary sources for recruiting news.
“There was always a business there, “Crumb said. “It just wasn’t particularly well-known.”
Those days are over.
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