Tom Dienhart to Rivals.com

So who is going to take Dienhart's gig at Sporting News?

 

I heard from a birdie that they've talked to or have had contact with Wendell Barnhouse (Star-Telegram) and Cory McCartney (Sports Illustrated.com) but I'm sure there are others involved.

 

I never thought there was much pretense about the Rivals and Scout team sites being fan run. Heck, Scout has been going around recruiting independent fan sites to move their sites under the Scout flag (happened with the UL-Monroe and UL-Lafayette fan sites in the last year). When it first started, before the 2001 bankruptcy, Rivals tried to recruit me to do a team site. I declined and the site never happened. I suspect they tried this approach with a lot of reporters and were turned down, so they turned to fan/media wannabes.

It worked.

But I look at a couple of the team sites and I'm starting to see some bylines by ex-print guys who have accepted buy-outs from their old employers...could this be a trend?

I think Rivals' real success comes from its state recruiting sites. The guy who does the site in Louisiana is a long-time newspaper guy who works hard, does a good job and has a reasonable perspective about what he's doing (not a big ego trip for him). I think the Texas site is thorough. What has happened is Rivals figured out that there is an insatiable appetite out there for recruiting information but newspapers generally don't have the inclination nor the resources to meet the demand. If you took all those team fan sites under the Rival banner and sent them away, Rivals would be doing well based on the state recruiting sites. Thats its bread-and-butter. Definitely a niche, but a niche it has embraced and surpassed its print competitors in.

Having said that, there are things they do in recruiting coverage that I can't stand. The rating system has so many things wrong with it. The way they pester the athletes has changed the dynamic of recruiting for everybody, both the media and the colleges. There've been a couple of times when an attention-hungry kid has changed his commitment with every visit so he could grab the headline on the Rivals site that day.

So just because I say they do a good job with it, doesn't mean I like everything they do. But credit where credit is due, I say.

 

How much do they actually pester them? I've heard that there are "rules" about how many calls they can make to a recruit in a week. Don't know how strictly it's enforced.

But it certainly makes our jobs harder when we have to make the two or three calls into a team's recruit in a year. It's become, "Take a number." Nothing makes me want to leave this more than not being able to get ahold of some hotshot high school kid.