Steven Godfrey is a college football journalist for SB Nation. He has recently risen to prominence due to his work investigating his own alma mater, the University of Mississippi, and the politics behind NCAA’s battle to maintain its sweeping definition of amateurism in the face of a sport that is now a billion-dollar industry. (This work has culminated in the written “Crooked Letters” and the televised Foul Play: Paid in Mississippi). Godfrey also co-hosts Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody, a project he describes as a “football marriage of numbers and words” that attempts to use statistics and quantitative rigor to reexamine dogma that has entered college football’s cannon.
The Politic: So to start, I’d love to hear a bit about the big scoop you recently did on Ole Miss. What it was like breaking that story, what got you involved in it?
Steven Godfrey: So, the documentary and the various stories that we wrote, they’re kind of different beasts. It was a very interesting process for me, because I closed on a long-form written piece of journalism while simultaneously we were producing a TV show. So, I learned a lot about why those things usually don’t happen concurrently. It was exhausting.
The investigation into Ole Miss goes back to when I wrote this piece maybe four years ago called “Meet the Bagman.” I sort of by default became the guy who—when something came up around illegal compensation, or NCAA violations, or you name it—that people would contact me. So from there, the Ole Miss situation specifically, because it was my alma mater… I’m trying to remember… I followed it because I was covering college football sort of as a regular, national-level reporter for SB Nation. So I sorta knew what was going on, but the thing that happened was the Laremy Tunsil stuff was what stuck out to me at the time. There was this crazy incident on draft night, I kind of felt like everything that was going on at Ole Miss—because at the time what was going on with the NCAA was pretty limited to improper benefits. It was high profile, because it was an SEC school, but it wasn’t crazy, or even notable. And then Laremy Tunsil and the whole draft night blackmail thing happens, and we’re all like “Holy shit, we’re watching something unfold in real time, on live television.” It was zeitgeist for a hot second.
These kinds of stories usually happen far from the public forum. What was happening in the actual draft in that theater in Chicago alongside what was going on because of those hackers on Laremy Tunsil’s various social media platforms was something else. We all had a conversation after that, and we sort of knew that things would never be the same for everyone involved. It was such a unique story. And I knew, with all the access I had and the things I’d written about that world before, it kind of made sense to go from there. It was funny, I was going through draft prep, figuring out what I was going to work on in the month of April. And that draft, I actually kinda punted on doing a Laremy Tunsil story. He was projected to go anywhere between 1 and 4, most had him as the first or the second pick, but I was thinking “What am I gonna say about this dude?” He had sat out a few games, wasn’t really anything interesting there. So, I ended up writing a piece on Robert Kindaichi, who was another Ole Miss player on the defensive side, projected to be the top defensive lineman. [He was] also a crazy guy, fell out of a hotel window at a party once, way more to talk about. Laremy was a pretty basic deal. Until that happened. And that sort of changed everything about the situation. That’s when we started reporting not only on what happened with Tunsil, but also what was happening with the NCAA. And then that got legs. The story that we ended up creating, what became both Foul Play and “Crooked Letters,” that took the final turn and became something entirely wholly unique when Leo Lewis got involved.
So that obviously became a pretty big story. In the aftermath of that, what was it like as an Ole Miss alum, and as someone who was so involved in the college football community and the SEC writ large?
So you kind of have to check your ideology before you enter the debate, both in the media within the fan bases within the various channels. There’s a pretty noticeable divide—and I don’t think it’s even, but I think it’s a divide—in college football media, between those who believe in the NCAA’s concept of amateurism and those of us who are sane, rational human beings. And it’s a pretty bitter divide at times, where people, to use the parlance of the young people today, they stand for the NCAA. They love ‘em. They believe in the NCAA. And there are those of us [for] who[m] it borders on activism sometimes. And the agency of myself, my group, and those involved, we kind of have to check that at times. But for those of us who want to write, and tell stories about the inherent hypocrisy in the structure of college athletics and the insane concept of amateurism that they peddle, you ask what it’s been like…
I think I’ve learned the hard way that more often than not if you think you’re going to change the conversation, 99.9% of the time, you’re not. That’s a naive fault of journalists, that they think you’re gonna write the thing that changes the thing. And most times you’re not. Sometimes you’re gonna preach to the choir, sometimes you’re gonna rattle the cages of the opposition ideologically. And more often than not, the people who are gonna agree with the point you’re gonna make, they’re not different for it. They might feel a little reinforced. Those who may be against you, particularly those within the actual seats of power, probably won’t change their mind. It just doesn’t change. And you fight those naive moments of, you know, “We’re gonna take the system down!” And you’re not. You’re definitely not. Money is what changes systems.
But I do think this. I think that form the time I wrote “Meet the Bagman” in 2014 until now, almost five years, I’ve seen a slow evolution. I do think it’s creeping upwards. It’s like the same way we saw Americans who were polled on support of gay marriage or some progressive political stance. It doesn’t change overnight. We’ll never have a Roe v. Wade, but you do have a slow, almost glacial turnaround where people finally are warming to the idea that “Hey, if you’re a defensive back in the SEC or the Big Ten, where there’s billions of dollars being exchanged and hundreds of millions of revenue and athletic departments with budgets in the eight figures, nine figures…” (You know, Texas A&M is ridiculous when you look at their numbers.) “Maybe this defensive back who is a cog in the machine deserves more than a degree that is more often than not manufactured and inherently worthless.” That’s starting to change slowly, but I don’t think that has to do with me. I do think that we have the ability to take these, create individual stories, make them entertaining without changing the hard evidence and get people engaged and interested. And that changes their opinions one by one. Sometimes. And sometimes not.
So I guess building on the idea that you’ve bucked that naivete, what is your perspective moving forward? What is your purpose?
I’m 37, so I have a very unique perspective on the ways media has changed over the last five, ten, twenty years. Getting a standard journalism degree at a public state school in red state America was essentially meaningless. That’s because the system has changed. Because the landscape was shifting so fast and we couldn’t really see it. And what we couldn’t see is what this is gonna end—we still don’t know how this is gonna end. We don’t really know what the new normal is, because it changes so much, even now.
I used to worry about keeping a damn job and now having told this story, you don’t wanna be boxed in, don’t wanna be siloed. I’ll be honest with you, it [the story] burned me out. Up until that point, I was 85, 90 percent of my job was college football. Because I drilled down. I thought at the time, “Well, I reported my ass off, I developed sources, I was able to obtain information I could confirm independently, and we took documentation from the NCAA itself to show its own hypocrisy, to show the agenda, to show how they concocted a fake investigation, to show how schools like Ole Miss who are guilty of this, are working with their ulterior motives, all of this. My party line on the story was “There’s no heroes in the story.” Everyone is somewhat guilty, except the student athletes. It’s a handful of heroes on the story. It’s not like I was taking the NCAA on for my alma mater, because I’ll say this on the record. My alma mater was petty, devious and stupid, all at the same time, and that’s not a great combination. So, I got kind of burned out, and it’s something I’m still kinda shaking off. So professionally, I thought, “Well, let’s just open it up. I can’t write about the NCAA forever.” I don’t know if the Ole Miss story is over; the appeals are still going right now. There’s obviously the Leo Lewis story, still in private courts right now. I think we told our story, though. I don’t think that any outcome in the lawsuit that’s going on right now will necessarily change anybody’s opinion, and that includes those in the seats of power. We told our story. I’m a fan of moving on, but I think people have drawn their conclusions. That motivates me to find something else to write about.
I have a few questions about the broader media landscape, particularly in college football. First, I’d love to hear what you think about [new and rapidly-growing sports media company] The Athletic.
My party line is that I have a ton of friends who work for The Athletic and I have a pretty simple philosophy that people working in the media is a good thing. There was a long period of time when there was a shortage, and I think the people do suffer [in that scenario]. I still believe in the Fourth Estate, we’re just under-equipped and naive and can’t get out of our own way. But I do believe in it. So in sports, having however many people The Athletic currently employs is a great thing. It’s only going to help the job market. It’s only going to help the coverage. I read The Athletic coverage of my teams—I’m a Braves fan and a Falcons fan.
The guy, [CEO] Alex Mather, he’s a dipshit. The idea of putting newspapers out of business, you know, I’ve talked to multiple people who’ve worked on The Athletic, and every single one of them has privately walked back that statement that he made saying we’re gonna put every newspaper out of business. They called our site and others “empty calories.” He reeks of the mindless technocratic bullshit that has hurt media to this point but we put up with because we all need to pay our mortgages. It’s the typical “Ask whether you could instead of should” bullshit that comes out of Silicon Valley. But that said, it’s created something that pays a lot of my friends good salaries that they can provide with, and that’s brilliant. The subscription model is particularly interesting too. I’m curious how far it goes. If that becomes the new norm, great. If it gets back to more of an advertisement based thing, great. If it’s more of a marriage between the two, which I think is the likeliest outcome, great. I think most of us are still interested in some form of subscription revenue based model that can maintain the core of what we come from as the media.
So the marriage you mention is the perfect segue. Your work with Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody (PAPN) is pretty innovative at integrating data with traditional sports journalism. However, I’m wondering, as our world gets quantified more and more, what you think the future holds for sports journalism. How much will numbers crowd out the words?
You know, that’s probably a question for Bill [Connelly, Godfrey’s PAPN co-host with a background in data science] to be entirely honest. The genesis for the podcast—other than that we were at a meeting once and Bill came up and said we should do a podcast some time—he kind of saw the idea before. It was kind of born out of the idea that I would go out and do these pieces: “This coach is doing this, this team is doing this,” standard journalism. But I got into the habit of approaching a subject, seeing the preconceived notions, and then calling Bill and asking “Hey, is this actually true?”
What we found, what Bill’s numbers found, is that we have so many preconceived notions about a sport as weird and unique as college football that often times we take faulty concepts and build new ideas with. That was the whole idea. So I’d be embedded with a coaching staff, and I’d go to Bill and be like, “Is this true? Can we prove this?” And he’d be like, “Well, no,” or “Actually, check this out.” It wasn’t about being contrarian. It was more about proving something empirically. The marriage part is then taking all the traditional means of journalism and marrying them to various new forms of data collection. So in that sense, you’re not doing anything that’s different, you’re just doing more progressive forms of information collection.
I’ll give you an example. There’s a defensive coordinator at Texas Tech named David Gibbs, who a few years back was at the University of Houston. Gibbs swears by the fact that you can coach a certain way and effectively create an uptick in turnovers. Bill refutes this emphatically. Based on the numbers, he says turnovers are entirely luck-based. It’s almost like saying “I can coach you into being a great roulette player.” I’m like “CAN You?” It’s what we go over a lot. More often than not, people are begging me to talk to Bill, because people are always looking for the edge. And I think that people are looking for the edge in this moneyball era, but sometimes coaches will hear what Bill says and be like “No, that’s bullshit,” even if Bill insists something is inherently luck-based.
You’ve lived in Nashville for years. Other journalists might be interested in how sports journalism, and college football journalism specifically, tends to be much more spread out than, say, political reporting, where all the big names are based in D.C. I was wondering what impact you think its diffuse geography has on college football reporting as a whole, but also on your own work, that you live in a less journalism-saturated area?
Ooh, you’re leading me into saying something here. Good job.
I live in Nashville for non-professional reasons, but when I started this job, I was already in Nashville and it was really really advantageous to be here. Nashville is three and a half to four hours from most of the SEC, and also half of the Big Ten. Nashville is in a bit of a boom—it’s become a bit of a bachelor party town—but we do have a large amount of flights that come through here. So it’s a hub for me. I can fly direct to most places, I can drive to a ridiculous amount of colleges in under six hours, so that was a huge advantage. [If] you talk about political reporting, it makes sense to be in DC because you can be up on the Hill. For something as diffuse as college athletics, you don’t necessarily have one city. (I think some would argue Houston or Atlanta are the best for that.) But the reality is you have a national title contender in Washington, you have a national title contender in Oklahoma, you have a national title contender in Penn State. They’re all over the country. So you can’t just pick one place and have it encompass the whole sport.
As far as being around less media, I lived in New York when I was very young—I was an intern during college. I loved NYC; I have no interest in living there. I’m just gonna take the high road here: I’m fine not living around journalists. There are a few who live here in Nashville, and I’m good friends with them, but I don’t feel the need to be in journalism circles.
What do you think sports journalism can teach other realms of journalism?
*Pauses* I think from about 2014-15-on, as Trump came and rose, that blind, logic-less adherence to tribalism, essentially, emerged in the media consumption pattern of politics. It was always there, but it sharpened its edges dramatically. And that landscape of viewer feedback, that treats fact as arbitrary in a lot of cases and is inherently almost always cheering against you, is seven days a week for the past hundred-odd years in sports media. I know the stakes are different—I’m not trying to compare the subject matter—but I am telling you the dynamic is the same. So I don’t know if there’s anything we can teach you other than “Hey, welcome to the madness.” But you do steal yourself against this. I did that entire story [“Crooked Letters”] as an alumnus of the University of Mississippi. The overwhelming majority of consumers with ties to a rival program are convinced that everything I was writing is a lie. I don’t know if you’d ever walk into a press conference at, anywhere—the EPA, the FBI, Capitol Hill—and people are sitting there going “That’s so and so, where’d they go to school? Oh of course they said that.” I don’t think that happens anywhere else in the fucking world. I haven’t been on a gurney many times in my life, but if I’m shot and I’m in the ER, the doctor is taking the bullet out, and I ask “Where did you go to school?” and he’s like “Stanford,” I’m not gonna be like, “Ugh, fuck them.” Sports media is where you’re from, who you know, who are your people, and you can’t shake that.
Honestly, my advice is if you wanna cover major college athletics, you don’t need a major J-school degree, but I wouldn’t go to a school with major college athletics, so you can at least purport to have an unbiased, clean slate to these fans. But they will go out and find out. Like for instance, you [the interviewer] grew up in Alabama, so if you’re covering Alabama or Auburn, you must be biased, even though you went to Yale. That kind of insane logic has been in sports forever.
Literally everything I see people tweet about CNN or MSNBC, I’m like “Man, that just sounds like a ‘Bama fan!” It’s the exact same thing.
One last question. I don’t know how well you’ve been reading Bill’s coverage of the Ivy League, but I’m gonna put you on the spot here. #SabanOr Yale Ivy League championships in the next ten years? [Based on a popular trope on PAPN, this is asking which number will be higher: the number of national championships Nick Saban wins from now to the end of his career, or the comparative.]
… Well, I know Brown sucks, we did that yesterday. Harvard’s really good right now. If the line is two and a half, fuck it, I’ll go Yale. You said ten years, right? Yeah, you can get three in ten! Better hope!