My wife and I signed a lease in Champaign three years ago last week. The Covid-19 Pandemic was only a couple days old, and the NCAA Tournament had already been canceled, so we decided to stop our house search in Champaign and rent instead. The world seemed to be turning upside down, so we figured that renting was the best way to navigate the uncertainty.

I had already quit my job in St. Louis, and she had already started her new job up here (I believe she was in training in Memphis that week and then home over the weekend), so we had already begun our move to Champaign. And we had come up to Champaign the weekend before to tour several homes for sale. This time, with our St. Louis condo under contract, we needed to find somewhere to live starting early April. We chose to rent, not buy, mostly because it felt like the world was about to crumble.

I begin this way because, now three years into turning my hobby into my job, I still feel like that. I feel like I'm renting, not buying. I'm three years in and I still can't put a nail in the drywall because I'm worried about the security deposit, so to speak. I feel like I still can't do what I came here to do.

The first few years, the answer was obvious: Covid. The first seven months it was as simple as "yeah, there's no sports right now", and then, once college football and basketball returned, we were still renting the sports. No fans. No interviews besides Zoom. Football practice began again in September of 2020 but there was no chance to watch one single minute of it. Totally understood that. Can't risk a single player getting Covid.

As Covid has faded away (at least in terms of legislated restrictions), the restrictions around the things I hoped to cover did not fade away. Those restrictions remain in place. Limited access to football practice; no access to basketball practice. And any access to players is limited to pre-arranged media scrums with no chance for a one-on-one conversation. I had always covered the team informally, and suddenly every informal way to cover the Illini was eliminated.

So I pivoted to covering the team "formally." Like a media member. But after three years of struggling with that, I still feel like an outsider. I still feel like there's no tread on the tires and I'm slipping and sliding all over the place. By choosing to cover the team like I do, I guess I've sacrificed any chance at gaining credibility. I'll explain this with a story, and it will be long, but like always, I promise to land the plane.

The best part of being credentialed for home basketball games is the ability to observe things from up close. Illinois has the best media seating in the Big Ten, and being able to see (and hear) the coaches and players really enhances what I write about. I'm forever grateful to the DIA for credentialing me and allowing me that access.

But I don't use that access like everyone else does. I used to attend all press conferences, but then some stuff happened and I'm no longer comfortable in that room. I used to apply for credentials for every road game but now I sometimes just buy a ticket on StubHub and sit with friends. My writing is always about my personal experience - I travel to every single road football game and Tyler or I travel to every single basketball road game so that we can tell you what it was like in there - and sometimes I can get a better sense of things from the stands. Especially when I can purchase a ticket near the Illini bench (like the Maryland game).

Covering the team that way, though, has led to IlliniBoard being, uh, de-emphasized. We're at the bottom of all the lists. As in, at the Big Ten Tournament in Chicago last week, every other media outlet was given media seating. IlliniBoard was moved to overflow.

Before I give all the details, please remember, I'm the one who will sometimes wander around the arena (or go pace somewhere). When I was moved up into the stratosphere for the Texas game at MSG, I complained out loud for Brad Sturdy's sake, not my own. I'll grumble, but I can accept "they get to sit here, but you have to sit over there" when seating is extremely tight.

But this was a step beyond that. Eight steps beyond that. This was every other media outlet (and some blogs) getting at least one seat (sometimes two) while IlliniBoard wasn't included in the seating chart. We were instructed to sit in overflow. And when I asked about overflow during the afternoon session on Thursday ("do we go to the hockey pressbox up top?") we were told that the hockey pressbox was being used for something else and that overflow would be in the media room.

I want you to think about that. I've applied for a credential (for both Tyler and myself) to cover the team in Chicago. Both were approved. I took the train up, stayed at Tyler's house on Wednesday night, he took off work, and we both headed down to the United Center on Thursday. And when the seating chart is put up for the evening session (starting with the Illinois-Penn State game on Thursday), we're not on it. Our instructions were to sit in the media room underneath the stadium and watch the Illinois-Penn State game on TV.

That's probably the best way for me to explain the disconnect between media approvals and media usage. The media approval side really sees no problem in suggesting you watch the game on TV in the media room. After all, you're just there to get quotes from the players afterwards, right? Why would you even need to watch the game? You can watch on TV, grab a stat packet after, ask the coach one question, and write your 800 words. For me, I'm only getting the credential so I can observe up close and write about what I observe (and I'm likely not even going to attend the presser), but "ability to actually watch the game" is below "ability to attend the press conference" on the media approvals side.

Now, thankfully, for the evening session, the Big Ten went back on what we were told for the early session and they opened up part of the hockey press box. That's where Tyler and I sat for that game. But in the media email the next morning (middle paragraph)...

I honestly feel bad for the Indiana media who were there on Friday. They always bring a massive number of reporters, and for some of them to be asked to watch the game on TV, well, it's just not right. At that point, if you can't seat everyone, you just have to restrict the number of credentials you hand out. I can assure you, media aren't traveling all that way to watch the game on TV in the work room in the bowels of the arena. (Hopefully they employed a system for Indiana where every site gets at least one courtside reporter with everyone else in overflow, but that's not how Thursday worked.)

Back to BTT Thursday. Every newspaper and website besides IlliniBoard that applied for credentials to cover Illinois-Penn State was given at least one courtside seat. Sometimes two. The choices didn't even make sense. An example:

The SB Nation blog Champaign Room was given two courtside spots and Illini Inquirer (247) was given one. Jeremy, Derek, and Joey all do this as their job while the Champaign Room guys just do it as a hobby in their spare time. I mean, more power to them, and I hope they're writing things for free at SB Nation as a buildup to starting their own site some day, but I'll never understand a hobbyist prioritized over a full-timer. It's why I always stayed way out of the way (and never even applied for a BTT credential) when I was a hobbyist.

Tyler and I discussed our plight in the hospitality room before the Penn State game (before learning that the hockey press box would be opened for that session) and decided that the only way to handle a situation like this is to speak to the person responsible directly. I went to where he was stationed in the United Center and pleaded my case. To his credit, he apologized and said that if Illinois continued in the Tournament, he'd squeeze us in (at least one seat) for each Illini session. Penn State's Andrew Funk then took care of any future Illini sessions.

But really, my frustration wasn't really directed towards him. It's directed towards... the last three years. Everywhere I turn I feel like I'm getting squeezed. I knew it would be difficult to walk the fan/media tightrope, but these first three years have felt more like a clothesline.

Seriously, what do I have to do? I've gained the ear of the fanbase over the last 14 years and no one seems to fully recognize that. I've been a free PR department for the football program 10+ years now, getting to know their players and spotlighting them in one-on-one interviews and covering their charity work, yet I can't write those articles anymore because the places where those articles were conceived are no longer accessible to me. I have media members telling me I don't belong in the pressbox, I have other media members trying to prevent me from asking questions at press conferences, and IlliniBoard is viewed as 9th out of 9 when it comes to Illini media outlets at the Big Ten Tournament.

All of that leaves me with one feeling: why did I work so hard? Like, what was the reason for building something from scratch? Is it all about the name on the second line of the credential (your outlet), not the first?

I had an opportunity to do the SB Nation thing. When their Hail To The Orange blog went away, they contacted me about moving my blog to SB Nation. They even knew I had been on The Solid Verbal podcast before and had Dan Rubenstein call me to pitch me. I eventually said no (because the current version of IlliniBoard is what I pictured and I didn't want to deviate from that).

When Fletcher Page left the Illini Scout.com site to go cover Georgia, the guy heading up Scout at the time contacted Brumby to offer IlliniBoard returning to Scout (which was then bought by 247 a few years after that). Brum and I discussed it and we said no. I just wasn't interested in the "crank out recruiting articles" thing. I had the current version of IlliniBoard in mind.

So I stuck with it. Kept my head down. Cranked and cranked and cranked on articles. Three years ago right now, I quit my job and made the leap (to build that version of IlliniBoard). And after three years, I'm now questioning if the only way to gain traction and earn close-to-the-action media seats is to have taken those SB Nation and Scout offers years ago.

This past weekend in Des Moines was more of the same. I decided to do the media thing and not the "buy tickets on StubHub" thing because A) the media seating is courtside and B) StubHub tickets are just a tiny bit expensive (especially when Kansas fans are buying tickets to the same session). I have this debate with myself all the time. If I'm just wanting to watch the game up close, as a fan, shouldn't I pony up for great seats? Am I cheating the system by trying to use media seats to get close to the action? But the media seat has a table, and I can have my laptop in front of me, and that allows me to tweet and research stats in real time. I should apologize for wanting to cover the team - this is what I do for a living.

But again, the way it works is rather infuriating. One Illini media outlet applied for a credential, was given a courtside seat, and didn't show. The best way to explain my feeling towards that is to say that your downtown office building has 8 parking spots for 12 units, one guy with the right company behind his name applies for and gets a spot, you never see a car parked there, you ask him about it, and the answer is "oh I don't even have a car - I just wanted to see if I could get one of the spaces." I'm scratching and clawing and trying to build my brand to where I can earn one of those seats and others are grabbing them based on the media company they work for and then not even bothering to show up?

In my frustration over the Big Ten Tournament, when I was on the train back from Chicago that Friday, I felt like I needed some kind of data that would prove that I have the ear of the fanbase. Just going by day-in, day-out Twitter views wouldn't work because any tweet that causes discussion (a ton of responses and arguing in the comments) will inflate the view counter. To get a baseline of "how many people see each tweet?", it would have to be done during a game when the tweets are flying by. We're putting 240 characters out there - how many people are seeing them?

This is an important data point because someone's follower count can't really be trusted. As I've said the past few months, I was somehow added to one of those "follow these recruiting people" lists this past fall and my follower count skyrocketed. Mostly thanks to 1000+ follows from high school football players. They get lists from their coaches and are told "follow these people" (to get their name out there) and suddenly three-fourths of my new followers had bios that said "2024 ATH from Georgia, 6'-1", 178 lbs, 3.54 GPA." And those kids aren't actively reading everything during an Illini game. I'm sure almost all of them followed and then muted me from their timeline. They wanted me to be aware of them, not the other way around.

What matters more, in my eyes, is how many people are actively scrolling Twitter and looking at your tweets (either by following you or following a list). And to determine that, I felt like the best way to track it would be to use in-game tweets. I'm not going for "did you have a tweet go locally-viral and get 50,000 views?" here. I just want to see how many people see the "Funk now 6-9 from three" tweets during the game because I was pretty sure I'd have more than everyone else.

And I was right. I won't attach names to all of these numbers because I don't want to make this about this person or that person. My goal while building that spreadsheet was to make my case to the Big Ten for putting IlliniBoard in overflow while eight other eight outlets were seated next to the court. If I have the ear of the fanbase, why do you consider me dead last in terms of media seating? I have the subscribers and the Twitter activity to prove that I should be near the top of the list.

So I totaled up views for every account given a seat by the court to compare to my own. I added all of the tweets between 5:30 and 7:30 (during the Penn State BTT game) from every account tweeting down by the court plus me tweeting from overflow upstairs. I ignored two "mini-viral" tweets from two of the accounts which gained all of their views from people returning to it for discussion that night and in the morning. I just wanted flow-of-the-game stuff. (An example there: my tweet at the end of the Arkansas game where I listed our point total the last three NCAA Tournament losses, got 56,000 views because it was debated that night and the next morning. That's not the type of thing I'm going for and it would artificially inflate my number. I just want to find in-game tweets to see how many fans are following along in real time.)

Here's the results. And I'll use A-B-C here instead of names:

A - 9,838 average views per tweet
B - 6,863
C - 6,843
D - 5,709
E - 2,829
F - 2,513
G - 1,501
H - 1,214
I - 188

Be careful here. This was a very specific data set during a game. You might go to your own Twitter account and see that one of your responses in some back-and-forth argument under someone's account had 4,000 views and that might lead you to say "I have more clout than some of the Illini media courtside". No. Go look at when you had 84 views during the game when you tweeted "why can't we make free throws?". This is very specific data which is seeking one outcome: when the in-game tweets are flowing from all media members tweeting from the same event, whose tweets are seen by the most people?

I believe mine are. I'm "A" on that list. I made screencaps of all my data in case anyone wants to challenge all of this, but since I'm the only one I'm choosing to identify, I'll just give you one screencap of a few of my tweets that Friday :

The little number on the bottom right - that's Twitter reading how many times someone viewed your Tweet. And as you can see from the "15h", I did these screencaps 15 hours after the game ended (which means the numbers will be higher now if you go to look at them).

My entire point here: how is any of this possible? How can I build up such a following, build up a subscriber base, and constantly get squeezed out? Why did I spend all of this time grinding and grinding and grinding as a part-timer if I'm going to get sent to overflow once I've been doing it as my full-time job for three years? Shouldn't market share be recognized? Or is this just as simple as "oh, he's a fan - he doesn't matter"?

Look, this isn't just about Twitter views. And, to be honest, because I choose to tweet maybe 10 times during a game, not 50, that probably helps me on the "views per tweet" thing. They don't get as lost in the shuffle (although as I'm saying that I immediately think I'm wrong because I don't think Twitter works like that - my tweets would still get lost in their shuffle because most diehards follow everyone who had a seat down there).

My argument here is not "I'm the king of the Illini media world!". Hardly. I'm not the one called for media interviews from other Big Ten radio stations. I don't tweet as much as everyone else, I don't cover recruiting, I don't live-tweet from press conferences - I'm in the shadows a lot. Hell, I got season tickets for football last year and there's no cellular data in my section until the crowd thins out in the second half so I couldn't even tweet during home football games last fall.

So in that sense I can see how I'm not "recognized." Being the voice asking the question at the press conference probably does matter more than engaging with the fanbase immediately after a game. In 2023, I believe B is way more important than A, but it doesn't matter how I see it. It only matters how those organizing media access see it.

As I said above, though, this goes well beyond that. At the Big Ten Tournament, eight outlets were given courtside seating and IlliniBoard was put in overflow. At the NCAA Tournament, six outlets were put courtside and IlliniBoard was put in overflow. And I have just as much of a Twitter presence, if not more of a Twitter presence (actual, engaged followers), than nearly all of those outlets. I spent fourteen years building a subscriber base without the backing of a single media organization. I wrote one thing down on a sticky note which I stuck to my desk years ago - "if the work is good, people will notice" - and I let that be the guiding principle. People noticed, this is now my job, and... I'm sent to overflow for the BTT one weekend and the NCAA Tournament the next.

So just look at all of this from my perspective. I moved here to do my thing at football practice and we keep getting squeezed out (although today's 30 minutes of open practice was a nice surprise). I go to Chicago for the BTT and am asked to watch the games on TV under the arena. For the second year in a row I'm sent upstairs at the NCAA Tournament (and that's after being denied a credential in 2021). I have one goal - get as close to the action as possible (at both practice and in games) and then report back on what I see - but it's been 36 months of being pushed away from all of those things. Press conferences have been lost to the tyranny of narratives, so I try to utilize every other opportunity to read the coaches, the players, and even the fans so that I can return to my laptop and tell you what's going on. But it keeps getting harder and harder to be close to anything. All I'm asking is to be close enough to do my job.

For football, at home, I gave up on the pressbox and built my own "pressbox in the stands.". Perhaps that was some kind of signal that I'm not serious about all of this (I was just trying to get closer to the action and I still need that field access at the end of games like it's oxygen). For basketball games at home, I gave up on the press conferences and remain courtside for a half hour to better get a flavor of the postgame. Maybe those things signal "he's not even trying to be a media member because media members do these exact things". I feel like I'm trying to set a new standard for how games are covered, and the DIA has been great about retaining my credential at football and basketball games (as well as a permanent courtside IlliniBoard seat at basketball games), but I just can't gain any traction outside of that.

Sorry this was so long. I'm just frustrated. And I promised to do one thing - share every part of my journey with you, even the ugly and the uncomfortable - so that's what I'm doing. Sorry you have to read this and not football practice notes (they're over on the Slack channel for subscribers).

Bottom line: I feel like I can't get close (to the action, to the players) like I used to. My entire second career is built upon observing these teams from up close.

And I feel like I keep getting squeezed out.