It is 2023 already, and I’m told it’s been 2023 for more than a full week. Those bastards snuck another one past us.
With college football ending tonight, midnight is a rather natural inflection point for us between our two biggest seasons, and with that, we’re looking a lot at what this year can and will hold for The Barking Crow. So, as the website’s primary traffic driver (apologies to License Plate Boy, but I brought in two thirds of our pageviews last year and I am only one third of the Stu’s), here’s the thought for 2023:
I Am Going to Do Way Less Than I Want to Do
At present, we have three models, more or less: Our bracketology model, our college football model (inclusive of Movelor), and our NHL model (Gelo). We have 24 others cued up on our immediate list. They aren’t going to happen! Not this year, anyway. Not most of them.
What we do around these parts is lay out an ambitious list of objectives and check off something like ten percent of them. This…doesn’t really work that well. We would be better served by identifying what is possible and then doing that, iterating throughout in order to maximize production, especially in revenue-driving areas. But until we complete that pivot, this is what we do, so would you like to look at our priority list for the models? Regardless of how you answered that question:
1. Men’s College Basketball
2. College Football (inclusive of FCS)
3. Women’s College Basketball
4. College Baseball
5. Women’s College Volleyball
6. College Softball
7. MLB Trade Calculator
8. NHL
9. NASCAR
10. Formula 1
11. IndyCar
T-12. ATP/WTA
14. PGA
15. LPGA
16. Men’s College Ice Hockey
17. Women’s College Ice Hockey
T-18. Men’s & Women’s College Soccer
T-20. Men’s & Women’s College Lacrosse
22. MLB (inclusive of injury risk and likely trade deadline approach)
T-23. NFL, NBA
25. Men’s College Wrestling
26. Illinois High School Cross Country
27. Texas High School Football
Not Listed: The Other College Sports, MLS, Other Soccer (World Cup Qualifying, for example)
At the top, we have a lot of overlap in fandoms, and we have a strong belief college volleyball is on its way to massive national prominence. We would be surprised if college volleyball does not command larger TV contracts in 2030 than women’s college basketball. We would be stunned if it isn’t there by 2040.
Next up are the professional sporting areas where we’ve either already done some modeling work (NHL), there’s a lack of mainstream probability models in the market (tennis, golf), or both (motorsports).
After that, we’ve got another block of college sports—add-on models to our block at the top. Ice hockey and soccer and lacrosse are probably very difficult to model well, but to model passably? With an elo-based system? We think we could do that well enough to put out bracketology for each, and with college fans more and more becoming fans of all college sports, as streaming options increase visibility into lower-money sports, we see a growing market for that which could, in our own silo, grow through add-on clicks: For example, a Boston College fan checking our hockey bracketology in February may click through to both our baseball and lacrosse bracketology, then follow those sports more closely partly because we help make it possible to do that.
From there, we get to the rest of the Big Four, where plenty of models are available but we’d like to be involved because the pie is just so big. (Apologies to MLS, which should maybe be on our list but is always one we forget, which does say something.) The only real idea we have at this point for bettering what’s out there is adjusting a FanGraphs-style MLB model to account for the degree of injury risk on each roster (to punish teams built like the current Angels, for example) and the likelihood of various teams making various degrees of improvement at the trade deadline based on franchise history and what teams in their sphere of orbit tend to do in July.
Finally, an Iowa State-specific market in wrestling followed narrowly by two high school sports, including IHSA Cross Country, which is the first thing we ever modeled and would be a pet project but could also open us up to the high school ranks, which could be both fun and profitable.
Again, none of this is imminent. The only things that are imminent are men’s college basketball and the NHL, neither of which are new for us.
College Basketball!
The focus in the college sports world turns to basketball tomorrow, after Georgia and TCU do whatever they’re going to do tonight in Los Angeles. We plan on launching some sort of bracketology by morning, probably in a basic model we will call “lite.” It won’t be our best work, but what is, and it’ll give us a good enough read on who’s in what sort of category as we (this is where we get into trying rather than planning) flesh out the rest of the model for this year.
The Notes
The notes are doing well for us, and with writing our sweet spot ability-wise (relative to video or graphics or general social media behavior), that’s good. They’ll continue to be a priority this year, and while we keep ironing out what they cover and how, we like the format, where we’re primarily emulating Matt Levine.
The Bets
Futures are our wheelhouse, but we’re trying not to overprioritize the bets at the moment, so we’ll likely keep spinning in place there and try to get on the right side of even again in baseball season. The bets aren’t going away, and there’s plenty of content to be had there, but betting’s polarizing and addictive and not all that creative a space for us, so we try to keep our toes dipped only mediumly into that pool. We would really prefer to not become a betting website. But, to some extent, we will follow the money.
**
There is plenty more between those lines, but at the high level, this is where this third (more than half, really) of the pie is headed in the year 2023, which again has evidently already begun. Thanks for joining us on the ride.
Bark.
