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.
As for why this site is the Thin Red Line, well, it takes you back to deep Alabama Crimson Tide lore.
Most are aware of the famous 1926 Rose Bowl, when Alabama thundered out onto the Pasadena field to face a media-darling PAC 12 powerhouse, Washington. That day Alabama overwhelmed the Huskies with their size and power to claim the school’s first national title and put Southern football on the map. That’s the Wikipedia version we all know.
But before that, the University of Alabama was a school (indeed, a state) of skinny farm kids; mostly tough local boys raised in a scarcely-populated Reconstructionist South. Ornery, scrappy, hungry. And that is how the organized football team played when it was founded in 1892.
Despite those impediments, Alabama football held the line…as well as cultivated a reputation for dominating them on both sides of the ball.
So, until the 1906 Iron Bowl, when ‘Bama emerged from a rain-soaked red mud field in victory over the Auburn Tigers — a game where Alabama would earn their appellation ‘Crimson Tide’ — they were simply known as the Thin Red Line.
Before ‘Bama™️, before there was a dynasty, before there was a century of iconic wins and multimillion dollar visual spectacles — before the Tide became college football’s main character — there were 20 years of young men fighting like hell to win.
So, our name is equal parts: fitting homage, mission statement, and life coaching: fight like hell for everything, no matter where you come from, where you are, or where do you want to be.
Gump to a standard.
(It also was not copyrighted in the context of sports until yesterday. By me. Take that, Greg Byrne!)
UP NEXT: What exactly is the College Football Playoff Committee’s endgame with Notre Dame?
It might be more craven than hypocritical.
All text and original art herein is (C) 2025 of TRL Media. All others are the sole properties of their respective owners, and are used with permission or with attribution as applicable Fair Use transformational content.