I'm back! Sort of...

A year later, it's time for another announcement.

It’s been about 13 months since you last heard from me.

Since then, I joined the coaching staff at Mississippi State University with an official title of Senior Director of Basketball Strategy — basically a fancy name for being in charge of all analytics and video needs for the program.

We had a great start to the season. We won 14 of our first 15 games and peaked as high as 12th in the Kenpom rankings.

The second half of the year was more up and down. Granted, we were playing in one of the best conferences in college basketball history, but it was a bit of a disappointment to finish 8-10 in SEC play. We wound up an 8-seed in the NCAA tournament, but ultimately fell to Baylor in a game that came down to the final possession.

Overall, it was a fun season. I learned a lot, worked hard, and got to experience what high-major college basketball is like for the first time.

But once the season ended, I found myself uncertain about my next step. As you probably know (or at least can imagine), working on a college basketball coaching staff is quite a commitment. Of course, I knew that going in — I had previously worked for three seasons on staffs at Nevada and New Mexico State — but I still found myself considering other options.

Simply put, college coaching is a hard industry to work in if your heart isn’t 100% committed to your team and to your profession as a whole. I had a feeling in the back of my mind that I wasn’t sure if this is what I wanted to be doing long term.

The question was… should I go back to this newsletter?

— — — — —

In my farewell email from June 2024, I wrote about how the last couple years of Hoop Vision had been difficult. The audience growth was still there, but I was running out of content ideas. It was a difficult challenge to figure out what to write about each week for the newsletter.

I basically had developed the following in-season routine:

• Saturday: Watch as many games as possible while taking notes and clipping anything interesting

• Sunday: Desperately try to turn those notes and clips into a cohesive (and original) idea for the newsletter

• Monday: Start writing first thing in the morning to hopefully have a final product done by dinner time

• Tuesday-Friday: Forget about the newsletter for a few days and work on longer term stuff (usually YouTube videos) and private consulting work

Because I was running so low on content ideas, the Saturday through Monday routine became painful to execute. (I realize there are much more painful jobs out there than writing about basketball, but that realization unfortunately still doesn’t solve writer’s block.)

It also greatly limited by scheduling flexibility. Yes, I was my own boss, but I pretty much had no choice but to work weekends during the season in order to finish newsletters that were time sensitive.

All of that to say, going back to writing the newsletter was pretty much a non-starter for me. I had no interest in writing again. Considering the newsletter was my biggest source of income when operating Hoop Vision, I would need a new way of making money if I were to go back to my entrepreneurial roots.

The next question was… is there a new business model for Hoop Vision?

— — — — —

I’ll be honest, for the first six or so months I was working at Mississippi State, I rarely thought about Hoop Vision. It was nice to longer have to brainstorm content ideas or tweet any type of analysis.

But at some point after that six-month mark passed, I started having the urge to make YouTube videos again. A YouTube video is only as good as its title and thumbnail, and I began actively keeping a list of potential ideas again. In fact, I think the time away from Hoop Vision — and the ability to use my experiences at Mississippi State as inspiration — helped me brainstorm.

YouTube had always been my favorite part of Hoop Vision. In my spare time, I watch YouTube videos about how to make better YouTube videos — just for fun.

I also think I’m pretty good at making them — although coming up with a quality idea is still the hardest part. Over the years, I figured out how to turn nerdy or obscure topics into (relatively) viral videos. I’m proud of the fact that a 16-minute video on the intricacies of Houston’s ball screen defense has over half a million views.

If you’re unfamiliar with YouTube as a business, it has a very robust system for content creators to make money. When a video is published, ads automatically get placed on it. The creator receives a portion (55%) of that ad revenue.

The ad revenue can be quite lucrative if a video truly goes viral, but it’s also hard to depend on. First of all, plenty of my videos don’t go viral. Second of all, even some of my viral videos just don’t generate as much ad revenue as normal. (There are several possible reasons for this, but I’ll spare you the details.) And third of all, my videos take a long time to produce. I can only post so many in a given year — which limits ad revenue.

So in order to rely less on YouTube’s automated ad revenue, YouTubers have had success doing a variety of different things. Here are three of the biggest:

1. Brand deals. This is where a creator/YouTuber directly partners with a company and integrates the brand into their videos. I’ve done this in the past (like with Hudl at the beginning of this video). The advantage of brand deals is you don’t have to split the ad revenue with YouTube like you do on their automated ads.

2. Product sales. Instead of selling someone else’s product, this is where a creator can sell his or her own. The most common product sold by YouTubers is simply merch, but it’s become increasingly common for the biggest YouTubers to get into things like food and beverage.

3. Courses. For creators that lean on the educational side of things (teaching their audience about a subject), a course is a way to go deeper into that subject while potentially charging a premium. It’s an especially good idea if your audience is interested in professional development.

Brand deals are great, but I still have the problem of low video inventory. I can only produce so many videos in a year, which limits the number of possible brand deals. They also can be hard to find — or at least hard to find “good” brands. I get a lot of emails from sports gambling companies, for example, but personally have no interest in selling gambling to my audience.

Developing your own product is a lot of work. I’ve made merch in the past, but that was mostly just for fun and not really to make any tangible amount of money.

Then we have courses — an idea I’ve had in the back of my mind dating back to COVID times. When the 2021 season was up in the air because of the pandemic, my backup plan (in lieu of writing the newsletter) was going to be teaching a course. Then the season ended up happening after all and I went back to business as usual.

So that leaves us with one last question… What is my final decision?

— — — — —

After a couple months of deliberation, I told Coach Jans in early June that I would be leaving Mississippi State. It was an emotional conversation for me, because I did feel that I was in someways letting him and the program down in leaving after just one year on staff.

I have a ton of respect for Coach Jans and am happy to report we’re still on great terms. In fact, I continued working for about six weeks after that initial conversation — to help the program until they were able to bring in a replacement.

Which means: Hoop Vision is officially back! Sort of…

I won’t be writing this newsletter. Hoop Vision PLUS (the paid newsletter many of you subscribed to) won’t be back.

Instead, I’ll be putting my attention towards a big project: Creating an online course.

The course will be putting everything I’ve learned about basketball analytics over the past decade into one place. I’ll have more details on it in the near future, but one thing I’ll add for now is that I’m not doing it alone. I have a (notable) friend involved that will be adding just as much value to the course as myself.

My YouTube channel will also be back. Actually, I already have a video completed. It’s not public on the channel yet, but I wanted to give my newsletter subscribers a first look at it. The video is titled “The Play that is Destroying Defense.” It features one of the most used offensive sets in the SEC last season — and explains why it bucks the trend of 5-out basketball.

My YouTube output will likely be sparse until the course is done. That’s because I want to be able to advertise for the course within the videos themselves. So that means the priority is to get the course done first.

However, I can tell you I will be more focused on broader (“big idea”) YouTube videos that are evergreen in nature rather than reacting to recent games/events. Not only are evergreen videos more fun to make, but they tend to perform better on YouTube and allow me to control my schedule better. I’m trying to avoid the schedule I had last time around where I basically had to work weekends to get the newsletter done.

As a result, I’m not sure how active I’ll be on Twitter this time around. Twitter was a huge part of my business model in the beginning of HV, but — due to algorithm changes — it’s become significantly harder to bring your followers off of the platform to other outlets (like the course or YouTube channel). Also, the best tweets are often time sensitive — something like this one which was sent out right after Kansas beat Texas Tech. Will I occasionally tweet out interesting in the moment videos? Maybe! But it definitely won’t be my focus. Evergreen is the new motto.

— — — — —

So that’s where I’ve been and what my plans are for the near future.

For now, there are two main ways you can support Hoop Vision:

1. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and turn on post notifications. Turning on post notifications ensures that you get alerted of future videos when they are released.

2. Subscribe to this newsletter/email list if you are not already. It’s free and I’ll be using this space to send out updates and new information on the course.

It’s not going to be easy pivoting away from the original Hoop Vision business model, but it’s a necessary change to keep things fresh and exciting.

I’ll keep you updated on how everything is progressing. But for now, it’s time to get to work!