“How do you look in orange?”
It was January 29th, 2024. Two days earlier, Ed Cooley had made his much-anticipated first return to Providence. Five days before that, an anonymous YouTube account had released a feature-length documentary covering Cooley’s controversial departure. Now, an anonymous DePaul basketball fan was claiming responsibility for the documentary. In the process, he was opening the curtain on the explosive behind-the-scenes reaction his work had provoked.
**
The idea was ambitious and simple: One documentary centered on each of the Big East Conference’s eleven teams. “Jake,” a twenty-something living in Los Angeles, ran and still runs an anonymous DePaul basketball fan account on Twitter. “Blue Demon Degenerate’s the biggest DePaul basketball account on the app,” said Tommy Goggin, a current senior at DePaul, when I spoke with him last week. In an interview earlier this month, Jake described the account as “more of an alter ego.”
Through his work as Blue Demon Degenerate, Jake had belonged to the Big East basketball solar system for years, joking and sparring with fans across the conference and the sport. Like many who follow college basketball online, especially those with Big East ties, Cooley’s 2023 exit from Providence drew Jake’s interest. It was dramatic. It was compelling. It was mysterious and messy and massive, the story of a homegrown icon turning his back on a city which loved him. It gave Jake an idea.
“I thought it’d be a great documentary.”
Jake is not Blue Demon Degenerate’s real name. If it is, it was a lucky guess. The man behind the Blue Demon Degenerate online identity has not publicly revealed his name, and The Barking Crow did not request identification as a prerequisite to quoting him in this article. In researching this story, I exchanged messages with Jake on Twitter and spoke with him over Zoom. He left his camera off while I recorded. Jake told me that he graduated from DePaul in 2022, from the university’s film school, and that he currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works what he called “a really boring desk job.” He’d like to work in the film industry, but he’d prefer live action to documentary work. When the documentary idea arose, Jake viewed it more as a hobby than an opportunity to advance his career. Still, it appealed to him. He’d get to make a movie at no financial cost.
“(With) live action, you have to pay for cast, crew; it takes a long time; you have to write it; you have to coordinate with everybody. I have a day job. This was something where I would think, ‘Oh, I can come home from work and I can edit for hours.’ I really love to edit, so it was really that way to make stuff without having to get money from somebody or get permission from somebody.”
Jake landed on the name “Big East Films,” wanting to separate the project from his goofy, chaotic Blue Demon Degenerate identity. The name “Big East Films” was an obvious trademark infringement, and the intellectual property violations didn’t stop there. “The credits is a full Jerry Vale song,” Jake laughed, explaining that because he wasn’t trying to make any money, he wasn’t worried about the constraints of copyright.
“It really is just a YouTube video. People post full games on YouTube, so I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll just make this documentary, and I’m not gonna make a career out of this. I’m just gonna put it out there.’ That’s why I didn’t even put my name on it.”
In the end, the documentary centered upon interviews with seven figures: Two worked in media covering Georgetown basketball. Four were Providence fans—one student, one townie, and two alumni. Jake reached the student and the alumni through Goggin, a lifelong Providence fan before he attended DePaul.
Goggin and Jake only know one another online. “I’ve never met him. I don’t even know his name. But we’ve talked a lot over the last four years,” Goggin responded when asked how the pair first became acquainted. “My freshman year, I won a hot dog eating contest at a basketball game. I posted the video on Twitter. I think that was the first time I really talked to him.” Goggin estimates it was November 2023 when Jake asked for help arranging interviews. Goggin was happy to oblige. His great-uncle attended Providence more than fifty years ago and holds Providence basketball season tickets. Goggin told me this great-uncle has owned those tickets since the seventies, when the Providence Civic Center first opened. Goggin’s mother graduated from Providence in 1993.
There was a seventh interviewee, a neutral but interested party in the hot war between Providence and Georgetown. As Goggin told me:
“When (Jake) said he got John Fanta, I realized this was going to be a pretty big deal.”
**
John Fanta is 29 years old. A 2017 Seton Hall graduate, he’s fast become a college basketball institution. Jim Root, a writer and podcaster for The Athletic and others, told me last week that Fanta could best be described as a “hype man.” Root is not the only one to make the comparison. “If college basketball had a hype man, it’d be @John_Fanta,” wrote Hoops HQ’s Twitter account yesterday, advertising its glowing profile of the broadcaster, columnist, podcaster, and general content creator. At least as early as the 2022–23 season, “hype man” was a term widely used to describe Fanta, whom Root further described as “energy personified.”
Late in the fall of 2023, Jake created Twitter and YouTube accounts for Big East Films, publishing a trailer for his proposed eleven-documentary series. Fanta, per Jake, “liked” the trailer and followed Big East Films on Twitter. Through the account, Jake reached out. Fanta quickly agreed to participate in the documentary.
“He was great. That’s why I got him in the doc. He’s awesome. He’s a great orator, a storyteller. Just has an unbridled passion for Big East basketball and college hoops.”
On December 22nd, Jake released the trailer for the Cooley documentary. He named it Divine Providence, playing off a quote from Cooley’s introductory Georgetown press conference which many had perceived as a taunt: “It is Divine Providence that I’m here.”
Jake released the full documentary on January 22nd, five days before Providence hosted Georgetown at the Providence Civic Center, now named Amica Mutual Pavilion. Whether through Fanta’s star power, simmering fury within a jilted Providence fanbase, or excitement over the broader promise of Big East Films—a promise to celebrate the Big East rather than mourn its former iteration’s demise, as ESPN’s Requiem for the Big East did in 2014—Divine Providence performed well in its first week online. Plenty of YouTube videos garner more than twenty thousand views in a week, but for a feature-length debut from an anonymous filmmaker, the results weren’t half bad.
“Up until it came out, I had no idea how long it was or what it was going to go through,” recounted Goggin. “It was such better quality than I expected. It was just so good. I think you could see that with the fanbase, too. They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, someone’s telling our story.’”
To Providence fans, the documentary was indeed vindicating, covering Cooley’s rise from an impoverished childhood in South Providence through his twelve-season career as the Friars’ head coach. It captured what Cooley meant to his hometown, where he had a key to the city and where Ralph Tomei—Goggin’s great-uncle, the season ticket-holder—theorized the Friars would have one day built a statue in Cooley’s likeness had Cooley not left. It captured the rage Providence fans felt when Cooley did leave, becoming the first head coach in Big East history to jump immediately from one Big East program to another.
That rage is where the documentary became incendiary.
Publicly, Cooley’s departure from Providence and arrival at Georgetown only took a few days. Kentucky eliminated Providence from the 2023 NCAA Tournament on a Friday, March 17th. Over the weekend, rumors began to bubble. In a Sunday night interview with Providence’s local CBS outlet, Cooley sent mixed messages regarding those rumors: “Sometimes in life,” Cooley told WPRI sports director Morey Hershgordon, “change is needed for emotional stability and wellness,” adding that “just because you’re at a place doesn’t mean it’s forever.” In the same interview, he referred to Providence as his “dream job.” Any hope that comment provoked was short-lived. The following morning, the Cooley residence showed up on Zillow, listed for sale. Hours later, insiders across the industry reported Georgetown’s new hire, and by Wednesday, March 22nd, there was Cooley, talking about “Divine Providence” at a press conference in Washington, D.C.
Privately, Cooley’s departure from Providence might have been longer in the making. The Zillow listing of the Cooley family home included a disclosure form, complete with Cooley’s signature. That signature is dated March 3rd, one day before a blowout loss at home to Seton Hall closed out Providence’s regular season. Presumably, the form was prepared before March 3rd, but even if Cooley decided to sell his house that week, he coached three games after contacting a realtor. Providence lost each of them.
No one ever definitively proved the timeline of Cooley’s contact with Georgetown. Jake’s documentary shared no new evidence, relying on publicly available reporting and accounts from media and fans. More than anything, Divine Providence illustrated the reactions of the Providence fanbase to what many felt was an underhanded move by Cooley, framing the January 27th Providence–Georgetown game’s significance for both the diehards and the curious. In the words of Kevin McDougal, who runs college basketball social media accounts for Barstool Sports, “The game itself was more than just a basketball game.”
Had Divine Providence shown only the disclosure form and Cooley’s March 3rd signature, then stopped, the ensuing backlash would have looked different.
Divine Providence did not stop with the disclosure form.
The fourth Friars fan interviewed for the documentary—the one who was neither related to Tommy Goggin nor one of Goggin’s high school friends—was a man named Matthew Lebeau. Lebeau did not attend Providence, but like others in Rhode Island, a state with only minor league professional sports, Lebeau is a Providence basketball fanatic. Lebeau didn’t respond to my requests to interview him for this story.
In the documentary, Lebeau referred to Cooley as “Basketball Hitler,” making sure to be clear that this was not an off-the-cuff remark.
As Jake put it, “The Hitler thing got a lot of flack.”
Hitler comparisons are undeniably offensive. At the same time, Ed Cooley is far from the first public figure to be compared to the Holocaust’s architect.
“If you actually think that when someone says a basketball coach is Hitler, that he’s legitimately comparing him to Adolf Hitler? I don’t know what to tell you,” said McDougal when asked which part of the documentary was most controversial. Instead, McDougal—like a majority of those who posted criticisms of the documentary’s content on movie review site Letterboxd—referred to a set of rumors the documentary covered, salacious rumors, rumors about Cooley’s conduct away from the basketball court, rumors offered by Providence fans to Providence fans as an explanation for why their beloved coach turned traitor, rumors never accompanied—online or in the documentary—by evidence, but loud and prominent rumors nonetheless. Towards the end of Divine Providence, the documentary dwelt on these rumors for roughly five to ten minutes. The section included statements from Lebeau.
When asked, Jake stood by his decision to include the rumors in the film. “(Divine Providence) acknowledged that rumors existed. That’s all the documentary did. It did not assert any opinions on the rumors. It simply stated that these rumors existed, and if you’ve been on Twitter for more than five seconds in Big East land, you’ve probably seen them asserted in way worse ways.” He added: “To not acknowledge that those rumors exist would be more disingenuous than to acknowledge them and put them in the documentary,” and, “It was an important part of why some people thought that he left.”
Jake also stood by the inclusion of Lebeau’s “Basketball Hitler” line, saying that the job of the documentarian is not to craft a narrative, but to capture a scene. “The documentary is not saying that Ed Cooley is Basketball Hitler. The documentary is portraying a guy who is saying that Ed Cooley is Basketball Hitler.”
For the first week, these criticisms were muted, at least publicly. Most people watching the documentary were Providence fans. Most people watching the documentary were familiar with social media’s troubling but established norms. Criticisms levied towards Jake, still anonymous under the Big East Films label, had more to do with the length of the documentary and the production value than the content included. “A lot of people were like, ‘Yeah, the audio sucks,’” Jake told me. “And they were right.”
For the first week, the public still didn’t know there was any link between Big East Films and Blue Demon Degenerate, Jake’s DePaul account. Jake changed that on January 29th.
**
Jeff Goodman has worked in college basketball media for upwards of twenty years. He’s worked on the internet for most of that time, leaving the Associated Press in the early 2000’s to join a site named School Sports. In the decades since, Goodman’s worked for Fox Sports, CBS Sports, and ESPN, among others. Currently, he reports and podcasts on behalf of The Field of 68, a media outlet he founded alongside Rob Dauster. He also writes for Hoops HQ, the Seth Davis-founded website which published yesterday’s aforementioned John Fanta profile. Goodman is known for being active on Twitter, where he has over three hundred thousand followers.
So, when Jake—on his lunch break at his day job the day Divine Providence launched—received a direct message from Jeff Goodman, he knew who was messaging him.
“I had eaten no breakfast that day. I’d had two and a half cups of coffee, so I was wired. I think it was a busy day. And I get this DM and I’m like, ‘Oh my god,’ because he has three hundred thousand followers.”
Jake says Goodman started by asking for his name, which he declined to give. “I think his first DM was ‘Who are you?’ or ‘What’s your name?’ or something. There was no, you know, attempt at being civil.”
Goodman messaged Jake, “Told you will be getting sued,” adding, “You honestly might lose a lot of money for this. I don’t think you will serve time though.”
As Jake remembers it, “He said, ‘I have it on good authority you’re gonna get sued,’ which at the time I was like, ok, that could be a realistic possibility. A couple different parties might have a gripe. I thought, ‘Well I can’t really afford to get sued. That would suck.’ But then (Goodman) said, ‘I’ll sue you into prison,’ or whatever, and it’s like, ‘Well that’s not how the law works.’”
Jake, still very much a DePaul basketball fan on the internet, tried to pivot the conversation to DePaul’s coaching search: “Got it. Are you team Schertz or team Wade?”
Goodman did not accept the changed subject. Instead, he sent the message that would become the defining phrase of Divine Providence’s eight-day life.
“How do you look in orange?”
Jake indicated the conversation ended quickly after that, with the following exchange:
Goodman: “In the offseason, when I have time, I will track down who you are.”
Jake: “I’ll be at Wintrust!” (Referencing Wintrust Arena, DePaul’s home court.)
Goodman: “You are a bad human being!!”
Jake: “I disagree. We can talk about it if you want.”
Jake sat on the DM’s for a few days. Goggin says Jake told a group chat what had happened, and that he—Goggin—and others in the chat encouraged Jake to share the screenshots publicly. Eventually, Jake did, tweeting from the Blue Demon Degenerate account that he, the person behind Blue Demon Degenerate, was also the person behind Big East Films. He offered an explanation for why he kept Blue Demon Degenerate and Big East Films separate: “I wanted it to be it’s (sic) own thing.” He tacitly addressed the film’s controversial elements: “Every single view expressed in the doc was *not* my own.” He shared the screenshots in which an established media personality tried to intimidate a hobbyist documentarian, promising to find the true identity of Blue Demon Degenerate, a DePaul basketball fan account with a few thousand Twitter followers.
**
A lot of people don’t like Jeff Goodman.
“Goodman’s always been the kind of guy who’s buddy–buddy with coaches,” said Goggin. McDougal described perceptions that Goodman’s “in the pockets of all the coaches,” that Goodman’s reporting is shaped towards helping coaches with whom he has relationships. Longtime college basketball writer and podcaster Mark Titus, currently a coworker of McDougal’s at Barstool, described Goodman thusly on a podcast recorded the same day Jake shared the screenshots:
“My biggest problem with Jeff is that he tries to wear every hat you can wear in media, and you can’t do that. He tries to be the Big J (journalist), like, ‘I’ve got all the scoops. I’m the professional in the building’…But then he’ll do his podcast and his show and he’s trying to do what we do at Barstool, where he’s trying to joke around.”
McDougal was more personal in his assessment: “The guy stands on this ground that he’s so morally correct and that everyone else is a piece of shit, but he does everything the right way. But then he’s harassing a (24)-year-old…saying, ‘How do you look in orange?’”
There’s an old piece of social media wisdom which says, “Each day on twitter (sic) there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” In very Twitter fashion, this aphorism originated from a 2019 tweet by an account named “maple cocaine.”
On January 29th, 2024, Jeff Goodman was Twitter’s main character, at least in the sports-interested corners of the site. Thousands of college basketball fans reacted to the screenshots. Jake’s original tweet sharing those screenshots has been viewed 8.2 million times.
Initially, and to a large degree still today, fans assumed Goodman’s intimidation campaign was an attempt to protect Cooley. When Cooley originally left Providence, Goodman had drawn criticism for his public defenses of the coach. “It definitely felt like he was carrying Cooley’s water,” remembered Goggin. “He’s like a PR firm for Cooley,” said McDougal.
It’s possible defending Cooley was among Goodman’s motives. A source affiliated with the Big East expressed doubt that Cooley had ever seen the documentary, though the source indicated Cooley is at the very least aware of Lebeau. But Goodman would not have needed permission from Cooley to jump to the coach’s defense. It’s possible Goodman was, in part, trying to defend Cooley.
What is known, what was well-established in statements from both Jake and from Goodman himself last January, is that Goodman was trying to protect John Fanta.
**
Dauster, Goodman’s co-founder at The Field of 68, played Division III basketball at Vassar College before embarking on a career in media. Together over the last few years, the pair have assembled a podcast network which now comprises roughly twenty shows.
The Field of 68 relies on a large network of contributors, a roster which has at times included names as famous as Tyler Hansbrough, Doug Gottlieb, and John Fanta. Goodman hosts a podcast with Purdue legend and broadcasting star Robbie Hummel. Dauster hosts a podcast with Fanta and former Clemson guard Terrence Oglesby. Both Goodman and Dauster, as well as Fanta, regularly appear on The Field of 68: After Dark, a late-night live show reacting to the events of the college basketball evening.
On the day Divine Providence was released, Goodman was not the only Field of 68 founder to tell Jake to prepare for legal action. In a tweet that evening, Dauster told Jake he “should be more focused on hiring an attorney” than on responding to Dauster’s jokes about DePaul. As Jake tells it: “He clowned on DePaul, which he did a lot, and I said, ‘This sucks,’ like I normally do, and he said, ‘Shouldn’t you be more focused on finding an attorney?’ or something.”
In our conversation, Jake spoke more highly of Dauster’s handling of the situation than Goodman’s. “It was more civil. He tweeted publicly, as opposed to Goodman’s private DM’s,” explaining that after the initial, public back-and-forth, he and Dauster exchanged private messages he described as “a genuine attempt to understand each other.”
“Dauster didn’t do anything wrong, besides say the attorney thing. He wasn’t harassing me.”
Dauster did not respond to a request for an interview for this story.
In the Blue Demon Degenerate tweet thread, the one where Jake explained he was the person behind both Blue Demon Degenerate and Big East Films, the one where he shared the Goodman screenshots, Jake wrote (sic):
“Some people are of the opinion that I tricked a certain interviewee into doing this or that I was dishonest about the doc during production when in reality they had final cut over their lines and *did* cut (seven or eight) lines from the film. Which is fine. They had every right to.
“But it sucked when i started hearing rumors that this same interviewee was telling people that he didn’t know what the doc would look like when it aired when in reality they had seen the entire thing and said it was outstanding.”
Jake confirmed, in our conversation, that these tweets referenced Fanta. He also shared screenshots with me of private messages with Fanta which appear to show Fanta specifying which lines he wanted cut.
“We talked about it a little bit face to face, on Zoom. I showed my face and everything. I said, ‘Hey, I know you work for Fox and you work with the Big East. If there’s anything you don’t want in this doc, take it out before.’ And I made (sure) to say ‘before.’ Because once this goes out, you can’t put it back in. Even if I wanted to delete it, somebody would have saved it.”
“He saw the entire thing. He said it was outstanding—that’s verbatim. And he had some really good quotes that he took out. I won’t say them, out of respect for him, but he had some really good ones. And he said, ‘I just can’t, because it’ll affect my standing with Fox,’ and you know, he’s an employee and I respected that.”
Fanta declined to comment for this story.
The afternoon of January 29th, the day Jake released the Goodman screenshots, Mark Titus was recording The Mark Titus Show. Earlier in the recording session, he’d discussed the ongoing controversy, where he made the “He tries to wear every hat you can wear in media” statement referenced above. Amid a later discussion of the 1992 Dream Team losing to a college all-star team, Titus’s phone rang.
“Oh my god, breaking news. Jeff Goodman is calling me right now.”
The Mark Titus Show didn’t publicly share its recording of that phone call. After hanging up, though, Titus said, “Jeff Goodman might not be as big a piece of shit as previously reported.” Then, he added:
“Goodman’s looking out for Fanta.”
Later that week, on a separate episode of his podcast, Titus elaborated. “The story (Goodman) tells me is that Fanta had—not problems—but he wasn’t feeling great about the documentary.” He also shared what was by then public knowledge: On Monday, January 29th, the same day a feud over John Fanta’s involvement in a YouTube documentary boiled into internet war, John Fanta lost his father to a heart attack.
“Just a terrible thing,” Jake said when asked about Fanta’s loss. “I can’t fathom what he was going through.”
Jake and Fanta had corresponded after the documentary was released, during the week between January 22nd and January 29th. Jake’s recollection:
“He DM’d (Blue Demon Degenerate), because (Big East Films) had been nuked, and he politely asked for (Divine Providence) to be taken down, which I declined. And then he said, ‘Can I have your number? Can we talk about this?’ and I said, ‘It’s kind of too late for that, and no I’m not gonna give you my number because your friend Jeff Goodman just told me that he’s gonna find me and put me in prison.’”
“I said, ‘Respectfully, I can’t give you my number and you know that,’ and he said, ‘All good,’ you know, or ‘Thank you,’ or something. And that was it.”
Multiple sources shared that Fanta indeed found himself in an uncomfortable position following his appearance in the documentary. If Fanta has ever publicly commented on Divine Providence since the film was released, I was unable to find that comment. One source was emphatic that Fanta did not ask Goodman or Dauster to try to get the documentary taken down. I could not find a second source to corroborate that claim.
“Two possibilities existed with Goodman and Dauster attacking me,” Jake told me. “One is that Fanta told them to do it, and they tried to go and take it down on his behalf. Or: Fanta didn’t tell them to do it, and they did it anyway, and he did nothing to stop them.”
What Fanta knew about Goodman and Dauster’s actions is unknown. What Fanta knew about Big East Films before the documentary’s release has been a point of contention, at least for Goodman. Like Fanta and Dauster, Goodman declined to comment for this story, but in his public explanation of his actions, a video posted on January 30th, he accused Jake of having “misled those he interviewed by naming his company Big East Films, implying credibility and an affiliation with the league.” Fanta has worked for the Big East since 2014 in both full-time and part-time capacities.
“Fanta’s a grown man,” McDougal told me. “He decided to do the documentary. He doesn’t need Jeff Goodman to be his white knight protecting him.”
Jake used the same phrase to describe Goodman’s actions. When I told him I’d be seeking comment from Goodman and Fanta, he replied, “I’d love to hear (Goodman’s) side of the story,” adding, “I know he thinks he’s a white knight and he’s sticking up for Fanta, which…leads me to question what Fanta told him.”
In the same statement in which he accused Jake of misleading those he interviewed, Goodman criticized Jake for hiding behind anonymity. Jake, in turn, criticized Goodman for trying to hide in private messages.
“I wish that if (detractors) didn’t agree with something in the doc, they would have been vocal about their criticisms in a public setting,” Jake told me, expressing a wish that there had been more public debate over whether “Basketball Hitler” and the Cooley rumors belonged in the film.
**
Goodman’s attempt to silence the documentary was unsuccessful. Instead, the DM’s did the opposite.
“It was like the Streisand Effect,” Goggin related. “Before all that, it had gotten more views than I’d been expecting…but (the Goodman DM’s) are what really blew up.”
“It ended up being Streisand Effect to a T,” said Jake.
Divine Providence’s final view count is unknown. “I went to bed when it had seventy (thousand) and it got taken down in the middle of the night,” remembered Jake. “Somebody said it crossed six figures.” Whether the final count was closer to seventy thousand or one hundred thousand, at least twice as many people watched Divine Providence in the eighteen hours following the release of the Goodman DM’s as had watched the film in its entire first week on YouTube.
“You think: If Goodman had never sent those DM’s, it becomes a minor thing,” said Goggin. “People still go back and watch, but whatever. But (the Goodman DM’s) solidified it in college basketball social media.”
Meanwhile, Goodman and Dauster were dealing with what Dauster publicly called “the internet outrage mob.” One specific criticism seemed to get under Dauster’s skin.
“This narrative that (Jeff) doesn’t want to help a younger generation of media is BS,” Dauster posted on Twitter, quote-tweeting Goodman’s video statement. “We have 15 podcasts on our network hosted by students, interns and recent grads on our second channel. Get reps, build a resume and profile, some get school credit. That’s his doing.
“There is a generation of writers currently thriving in this business, myself included, that he helped break in. This network exists because he decided to help me build it so I didn’t have to hunt for a real job during a pandemic. He’s made himself available as a resource for a huge number of young writers, podcasters and creators currently in the space. It was disheartening to see some of them join in the pile-on.”
At least three college basketball media figures who’ve worked with Goodman—Brian Rauf, Kevin Sweeney, and Sean Paul—also defended Goodman on Twitter that evening, offering similar sentiments.
In compiling this story, multiple sources across college basketball media spoke highly to me of Goodman and Dauster as friends and spoke highly of the pair’s role in helping them launch their own careers. At the same time, they acknowledged an economic reality: Students, interns, and recent college graduates are a cheap source of labor for a podcast network which relies on its quantity of content to generate revenue.
In an interview with a site named House Enterprise, an interview published the day after Jake released the Goodman DM’s, Jake compared Goodman and Dauster to a cartel:
“‘Rob and Jeff, they kind of have this gatekeeping mentality about content on Twitter where it’s like a drug cartel kind of thing,’ (Jake) said. ‘That’s like their territory, and if you step on their turf, they will take you down.’”
**
As all internet blowups do, the controversy mostly burned itself out. Signs appeared on college basketball broadcasts supporting Blue Demon Degenerate. Orange shirts appeared with “Divine Providence” written on them in the same font the movie used for its title card. Goodman himself made jokes referencing some of his infamous messages.
But what became of Blue Demon Degenerate, whom we’ve been calling Jake? What happened to the guy whose homemade documentary about Providence basketball drew upwards of seventy thousand viewers before somebody (Jake assumes it was the Big East, but points out it could have been one of any number of musical rightsholders) persuaded YouTube to suspend Big East Films? And what happened to the ten remaining promised documentaries?
“I wanted to (continue the series),” Jake told me. “It would have been difficult. It would have had to change.”
“I thought, ‘Great, if people really want to see this series, might as well make some money off of it and then ramp it up.’” But while Jake spoke briefly with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy about continuing the series with Barstool, nothing came of the prospect.
“I would have taken it in that direction if it would have been easy to do so. It wouldn’t.”
Recently, Jake took a step back from the Blue Demon Degenerate account, which currently refers to itself as “semi-retired.”
“I feel like I had to take a break. Which…big deal, who cares. (But) I just felt like I was obligated to be on it. I was on it all the time.”
“I remember watching Georgetown/Creighton or something, and it was 10 PM, and I was like, ‘I feel like I have to watch this game. Twitter’s gonna talk about it,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. What the fuck? I don’t care about this game.’”
“I’ve been more focused on my real filmmaking career in the last couple months. Trying to get that going. There were moments where I would blow off getting coffee with somebody to watch 9 AM Big East hoops.”
On November 22nd, ten months after he released the documentary, Jake posted a clip from Lawrence of Arabia on the Blue Demon Degenerate account. It would be his last tweet for two months.
In the scene, T.E. Lawrence is speaking with Mr. Dryden, a member of the Arab Bureau within British intelligence.
“Only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert,” Dryden tells Lawrence. “Bedouins and gods, and you’re neither. Take it from me, for ordinary men, it’s a burning, fiery furnace.” Lawrence strikes a match to light Dryden’s cigarette.
“Up to that point,” Jake said, “(Lawrence) does that trick with the match where he puts it out, and the whole thing is, ‘The trick is not minding that it hurts.’ (In that scene), he does the match, and you think he’s gonna do his little trick again, but he blows it out, because he’s sort of done with it. And it cuts to the desert, and he’s on to trying to accomplish bigger things.”
**
I’d like to acknowledge here that I’m the wrong person to write this article. To varying degrees, I’ve publicly criticized all three of Goodman, Dauster, and Fanta, both for their roles in the Divine Providence scandal and for other things. I have also criticized Fox Sports. I’ve praised Fanta as well, and I’ve been told good things about both Goodman and Dauster as people. Those good things come from people who know them personally, which I do not.
Like “Jake,” better known as Blue Demon Degenerate, I have engaged in at least some level of anonymous sports media. Unlike Jake, my name has been publicly available since 2019 with only a small amount of searching. I never tried very hard to hide it. But I definitely came at this story from a perspective and set of experiences more similar to Blue Demon Degenerate’s than to Fanta’s, Goodman’s, or Dauster’s.
The point is this: I’m certainly biased, and it would be unfair to all four individual parties for me to not acknowledge that.
I’m also the wrong person to write this article because most of what I, Stu Streit, do under this NIT Stu pseudonym is supposed to be at least a little bit funny. My other primary pseudonym, Joe Stunardi, is for analysis and information. NIT Stu is supposed to be fun.
I researched and wrote this article because I felt nobody had assembled a full and fair account of what exactly happened with Divine Providence, John Fanta, and the Goodman DM’s. This was my attempt to assemble that full and fair account. Again, I have no doubt that this article was shaped by my own biases, and again, it would be unfair to all parties to pretend it was not.
I hope it was fair.