The STF Q&A: Kyle Whelliston of ESPN and The Mid-Majority

Every other Friday, STF will run a Q & A with some people who know much, much more about college basketball than we do. Look for insight and analysis from some of the top professionals in the world of college basketball. Today, we have Kyle Whelliston, ESPN Columnist and founder of The Mid-Majority. Basically, he is the godfather of the mid-majors, and STF is damn proud to have him for an interview.



Q&A With Kyle Whelliston


STF: Where did your love of mid-major basketball come from and what made you start the outstanding Mid-Majority blog (which has a new design as of today)?

KW: I'm about as unlikely a mid-major fan as anyone could be. I went to school at the University of Oregon, where I spent mild winters at the Track Town Pizza buffet, listening to Grateful Dead tapes on my Walkman and secretly wishing I was like Terrell Brandon. When I moved back east in 1997, realizing that my life made no sense, I was looking at going to Temple or Nova but ended up at Drexel instead, a school I would have never heard of if it wasn't for Malik Rose and the win over Memphis the year before. I guess that's where it started.

I went to a lot of games at Drexel's lovable old Quonset hut, which is now named after a rich Greek dude, and learned the rhythms of the America East, such as they were. I was taught to hate schools like Stony Brook and Delaware and Boston University, without really knowing fully why. In November, schools with strange names, stranger even than "Drexel," would come through and play us. The questions that enter your mind during those nonconference tilts: "Who are those other guys on the floor? Where do they come from, what are they about?" That, right there, is the gateway to this world.

During the 2003-04 season I went to 82 games, mostly in the Philly and Tri-State areas, because I wanted to know the answers. I didn't have a girlfriend or anything, so it was easier to do. Then, one day, I was sitting in the stands at the Palestra, up near the radiator, and thought to myself, "You love college basketball so much, why don't you marry it? Or at least make a college basketball website." I chose the latter.

STF: I'm completely fascinated with of the 100 Games Project from a few season back. Not even just about the basketball, but the logistics of planning the entire trip. Can you please explain how that project came about, some of the highlight and lowlights so of being on the road for the entire season and what your travel plans for this season are?

KW: The 100 Games Project was a gimmick, pure and simple. I would go to 100 games, write something about each one, and put the reports on a site which was originally supposed to be a repository for mid-major schedule information that would help me find where the games were -- you talk about logistics, try finding a game in your area in the agate type of the sports section instead of a map. (The map site eventually grew up and became Basketball State, bbstate.com.)

Inexplicably, people started coming for my game reports instead of my cool database. I always got good grades in English, and I was at Oregon's J-school until the Gulf War I turned me off to the whole idea of journalism, so I guess I could write a little. And there was a turning point around Game 11 when I realized I was on to something that was affecting people on very deep levels, and that the quest may have even been quasi-spiritual. I had to finish it. With the limited resources I had, the travel, and the amount of unpaid effort the project took, I still have no idea how I made it through all that. I spent a lot of nights sleeping in truck stops on the road, a tradition I'll keep up even if I end up making millions from this. (Plus, the Wi-Fi always, always works there -- I dare anyone to try to piss off a trucker who's trying to check his MySpace messages.)

Of course, I use my magic maps now to construct massive coast-to-coast itineraries every year that take me from the WAC to the SWAC. Working with ESPN helps a lot too, I won't lie. I have 108 games on tap for this season, and that's with no games scheduled for December. I'm telling you, these new NCAA rules about scheduling and "Multi-Team Events" are perfect for me because they let me see huge numbers of games in November. It's like Myles Brand (my president back at the U of O) sent me an angel.

STF: How did you get hooked up writing about mid-majors for ESPN?

KW: After the 100 games thing, people from very recognizable corporate organizations started to e-mail me and find my phone number, which was a real shock at first. I got an offer to turn the 100 games into a book, another to spend the 2005-06 season on the road for a book. I also got a few sniffs from national media outlets as well. All but one of those, however, were drawn to me because they felt I could show how humorous, wacky and non-threatening life outside the Top 25 was, and the amount of pride these schools have made me feel that was inappropriate. ESPN was and is a good fit for me because they wanted me to tell stories.

STF: Teams like Gonzaga, George Mason and the entire Missouri Valley seemed to have gained tremendous amounts of credibility over the past seven or eight years, what influence do you think that writers and bloggers like yourself have had in the recent rise in mid-major love by the major media ?

KW: Anyone who really thinks the Valley only has a decade or so worth of credibility is invited to read Steve Richardson's "A Century of Sports" and just page through the pictures: four national titles, Bird, X-Man, Big O, Memphis and Louisville in the 1970's... I could go on for 100 years. And a decade ago, you didn't really even hear that much about Gonzaga during the regular season, and this was while they were messing up everybody's bracket every year. There's no doubt that the increased coverage of mid-majors is because of increased media -- in a landscape with unlimited news sources and more ESPN's than HBO's, there's just so far you can stretch the 40 or so elite programs before you start assigning dedicated reporters to cover the Duke assistant coaches 24/7. There's a lot more room now for these stories to germinate and grow in January and February, and it helps people know where these teams came from. Jumping on a mid-major bandwagon in March is like cutting the first hour out of "Hoosiers" -- the setup's the best part.

Blogs like ours offer such an incredible opportunity to offer readers around the world something that wasn't available when the Valley and Gonzaga played in the dark: the feeling of what it's like at and inside a real live college basketball game, instead of the detached "let's see what's going on in the ant farm" approach that the national media tends to specialize in. There are a few independent outlets now that stay away from recycling the same frontrunning hype as the traditional media, but I'm guessing that it's because they haven't been properly inspired. I love what you and Extra P. and the others do here, the writing on STF is charged with a lot of excitement and passion for the game experience. I'm not just saying that because you "friended" me on the Facebook.

As far as my own influence goes? I still have remarkably little outside my small and lethally rabid fan base, and I like it that way. it helps me keep my mid-major edge.

STF: Give us some of your favorite mid-major stops along your many roadtrips and some gymnasiums you wish had been left off of the travel plans?

KW: I won't lie, I've been to some pretty bizarre and/or horrible gyms the past few years... synthetic rubber courts, lighting so bad that you get migraines for days afterwards, and the place where the HVAC unit and the septic tank are too close together so you get a few wafts of fecal scent during games. I don't want to name names or anything, because these places are total embarrassments to otherwise fantastic institutions of higher learning. I like places where I go in and feel like home, where I could spend 16 winter nights at every year. The Palestra is where my heart will always live. High Point's place feels like a southern mansion. Boylan Gym at Monmouth has always been one of my favorites, it has a very low-slung roof and is always toasty. I'd go ahead and move in to any of those, but I'm married to someone who'd rather not sleep in a cot.

STF: This is pretty much a personal question, but how are my Bucknell Bison going to do this season? Mastropaolo is out, but I'm a big fan of Tyree and Vegotsky.

KW: I once had a very similar knee injury to Mastro's, so it personal for me too. I saw a lot of Bucknell last season, and Vegotsky stuck me as a smart player whose shooting discipline will naturally get better as he progresses. Tyree is very exciting, and I think the primary joy of this year for Bison fans will be watching him develop into, possibly, the type of sudden-threat combo that most NCAA-threat mids have. Bucknell could be right back up there in the national picture in 08-09, especially if Mastro does decide to take a redshirt and come back, instead of walking with his teammates. That's all a long way of saying I think they'll finish second, a few steps behind Holy Cross.

STF: What was your favorite mid-major team/story to follow since you have been involved with the Mid-Majority and ESPN?

KW: Without a doubt or a moment to think about it, George Mason 2006... Northwestern State 2006 is a close second, but that's only because they didn't make it as far. I was sitting down with one of my uberbosses in Bristol last month and he mentioned how lucky I've been to find all these great stories, but honestly, I go to so many games I'd have to be an idiot or a very poor planner not to run into them. My proudest moment as a real journalist so far was writing the first national puff piece on that Mason team -- this was January 3, 2006. Hardly anyone remembers just 22 months later, but all anyone was talking about in the CAA was Old Dominion, which had just come off an NCAA year and had a lot of returning starters.

STF: Before we let you go, give us your pick for the season's top mid-major team and a mid-major no one is talking about that can sneak up on everyone?

KW: You're going to be hearing a lot more about Davidson from myself and others this year, especially if they can knock off Duke, UCLA and/or UNC in neutral-court situations. I promise to try to keep the slingshot puns on the school name to a minimum. Very few people are talking about Western Michigan right now out of the MAC... this is a team that has been building to this year as a peak. The Broncos have a versatile big in Joe Reitz, and accomplished young guards with David Kool and Shawntes Gary. A good friend of mine is trying to arrange a trip to Kalamazoo on Nov. 21 for the Davidson-WMU game, saying the winner is good for a first-round NCAA upset. I agree.