The Starting 22

Twenty-two players start every college football game. Eleven on offense. Eleven on defense. Every one of them has a job that matters, and the outcome depends on all of them doing it.

That number is deliberate.

Diehard Sports Network covers college sports programs that the rest of the industry walked away from. Seventy schools across six conferences and an independent whose fan bases never stopped showing up — they just stopped getting covered. We built the infrastructure to fix that. We proved it works.

Now we need the fans to help us scale it.

The Starting 22 is not a subscription. A subscription gets you access to something that already exists. The Starting 22 builds something that doesn’t exist yet — professional coverage for your school’s community, run by a local publisher with the tools and training to deliver it at a level the Power 4 takes for granted.

Here’s how it works.

When 11 fans claim Starting 22 memberships for a school, that’s the greenlight. That’s the signal that tells us this community has enough committed support to onboard a publisher. We start recruitment and training. The remaining 11 fund the publisher’s ramp — the first months of content, community operations and revenue development. When all 22 seats are filled, the founding roster is locked. The door closes.

You pay for one year — $125 a month for 12 months or $1,250 upfront. After that, we never charge you again. Lifetime access. Lifetime founding member status. Your name on the site permanently. Direct line to the publisher and the CEO.

I’ve spent three decades in this industry. I covered college sports at the local level in markets like Birmingham, Orlando and South Florida. I ran editorial operations for CBSSports.com. I was president of the Associated Press Sports Editors. I watched every version of the model that was supposed to save local sports coverage fail the same way — it required scale these communities were never going to have, and when the money got tight, the coverage disappeared.

The fans didn’t disappear. Eighty-one percent of them say they’re dissatisfied with the coverage their program gets right now. Seventy-seven percent say they’d pay for something better. They have been waiting for someone to show up.

We showed up. We published 138 articles in 12 weeks of soft launch. Our newsletter open rates run above 70 percent against an industry average of 21. Two hundred former UAB players signed up in three days by word of mouth alone. The system works. The audience is there.

What’s left is reaching every community that needs this. That’s 70 schools. Seventy fan bases that deserve dedicated professional coverage and have never had a realistic path to getting it — until now. The Starting 22 is that path. When 11 fans step up, the launch begins.

We’re opening all 70 schools right now. I launched the first four myself — UAB, Troy, Jacksonville State and South Alabama are already producing content. As those markets grow, they’ll get their own local publishers too. Every school on the board is taking Starting 22 members today, and every school is waiting for its first 11 to greenlight a publisher launch.

If your school plays in the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12, the Sun Belt — or if you’re a UConn fan who’s been out in the cold since the Big East collapsed — this is for you.

Claim a seat. Greenlight your school. Help us build something that provides these diehard fans the coverage of their teams that they have always deserved.

Join the Starting 22 →

Interested in being a Diehard publisher? Apply here.