Welcome to the Thin Red Line.

Since many of you will already be familiar with our decade-plus body of work with Vox Media Inc. and Roll ‘Bama Roll, you will know our irreverent and rambunctious prose about college sports. Sometimes even occasionally delving into the intersection of sports with society, law, statistics — but, we promise, we never preached, and it was never partisan.

Here, is more of that…but without a corporate filter. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

We want this to be a place for adults to talk about sports intelligently, and engage with the subject matter and one another like adults without jannie overreach and sanitized HR-speak looming over your every thought. Not every space has to be safe for a child (or overgrown children in major US coastal cities), nor must it be tailored to their sensibilities. And this will not be.

You can even shitpost! Refreshing, isn’t it?

You’ll get a feel for it though, promise. We know ball.

At heart though is a general ethos: we care about readers, and always have. In that spirit, we will make you a series of ironclad promises.

• To the extent possible, we will try to post most days of the week. At least 3–4 in any event.
• We will try to be incisive, give you more of what you want, less of what you don’t, occasionally provide you with different frames of reference and points of view or things to consider outside of mainstream sports media.
• We will be mindful of your time and the vast number of entertainment options you have at your fingertips. You’re not a #click. You’re a person, with real lives, real demands, and real options.
• So, you’ll see haiku contests, the Gump Box, Blog Polls, Xs and Oats basketball breakdowns, link dumps, editorials, Giving Away Money, stats, and more — I built them, I own them, they come with me.
• Sadly, we can’t guarantee dissertation-level subject-verb agreement, that we won’t use they/it interchangeably when talking about a team, that spelling will be error-free, or that we won’t unleash commas and em-dashes with alarming promiscuity. But you can listen to stories and get notifications when new ones are published, which is a cool tradeoff— like a Gump RSS feed.
• This subsite on Medium is not subscription-based, nor will it have advertisements. You’re free to support us, of course. But you’re not obliged. We’ll build something better. The hosting could (and likely will) change in the future if I (and some friends) migrate to a fancier shop and have to cover hosting etc. But it would always be nominal. A few bucks. The page template has PayPal and Buy Me A Coffee links at the bottom of posts — again, no obligation there. It’s an expensive world, my friends. (Medium may hit you up every now and then, but we have no part in that.)
• Lastly, and easily the most important: this is a free speech zone (it is legitimately horrifying that we even have to type that sentence). We will never, ever censor comments or ban users who want to engage in good faith discussion, debate other readers (or me), nor cast you into the digital fires of Mount Doom for ideological disagreement or the sin of simply being heterodox — you can even veer wildly off-topic. As long as you are not absolutely raining down personal invectives and the worst of slurs, etc., we’re good. Just as your time is valuable, so too are your moral agency and intellectual autonomy equally valuable. No one has a right to police them for the sake of a few ad bucks to enrich private equity overlords. Ahem.
• Your job? You just have to read (or listen), hopefully enjoy, and engage. So, feel free to leave a comment, share and chat with others. You can also follow us on the Twatter machine at TRLsports.

Deal? Deal.

I also promise that as we get comfortable with the platform over the next post or two, there will be embeds and photos and interactive content, etc. All the stuff you’ve come to expect from a modern THMB. This is just prologue.