We’re back with our year-in-review article on this opening day of 2026. I’ll take a look back at the year that was 2025 and all it had to offer. This is the fifth edition of the “State of the Blog”, following 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Feel free to read those posts if you want to see how my thoughts have changed over the past several years. As usual, I’ll start with the basic stats for the past year before devolving into a yearly rant.
Annual Stats Since 2020
The chart below shows the annual views, visitors, and number of articles published since I began focusing almost exclusively on college realignment in October 2020. I figured a chart would work much better this year instead of the typical table. As noted in last year’s article, I changed the WordPress plugin that tracks views and visitors in late 2023, and led to a decrease in visitors for 2024. I don’t really know if the switch to the better privacy option for visitors led to a return to normal, but we’ll go with that as the reason.
You’ll see that 2025 was the best year in terms of views and visitors. In fact, 2025 was so good that it set the record for views on this website, eclipsing 2016, when I had 41,093. I will be the first to admit that 63,000 views for a website isn’t overly impressive, even for a niche topic like realignment. This website is more of an aggregator; I don’t typically break any news, and the semi-monthly frequency isn’t great in an era of instant news. Even the few stories that are novel, like Northern New Mexico and Shawnee State, aren’t going to get thousands of views because they involve relatively unknown schools.
The Yearly Rant: Poorly Planned Content Experiments
I typically include a yearly rant on the state of something being broken or an annoyance among college athletics, but this year’s rant is focused on my 2025 approach. I feel I need to provide more information and context for some of the changes I made during 2025. We’ll start with the first one… the failed newsletter experiment.
In late 2024, I tinkered with the idea of sending out some posts via email. I first tried sending them straight from the website, but there were some issues in getting it to run smoothly. Next, I set up a Beehiiv account and tried some test newsletters to myself to get acclimated to the UI. I didn’t like it very much and shelved it for a few weeks. In mid-February, I decided to give it the good ol’ college try and really try to figure out the Beehiiv platform. After some trial and error, I felt comfortable enough with Beehiiv to post the College Realignment Newsletter. Originally, I was posting 2-3 times a week, which became a Tuesday and Friday email in April 2025. In May, I changed the posting schedule again to just once a week. I decided to stop publishing altogether at the end of May.
This truly was a failed experiment and a lot had to do with me. I didn’t have a set plan, which led to constantly tinkering with the posting schedule and format. In the 2024 review, I noted that I wanted to have a “soft wall” where people signed up to read articles. I think this was how I envisioned it, but I failed to drum up interest. There wasn’t an article or announcement; I kind of just rolled it out and hoped people would see the banner in the Realignment Report and sign up. Yeah, that’s a terrible strategy.
When I stopped publishing the newsletter, I had 24 subscribers. Realignment is a niche topic, but it’s difficult to grow when you don’t do any advertising or promotion. That’s on me. I did have some people reach out to me about the newsletter, but that interest fell through. I knew early on that the Newsletter probably wouldn’t pan out, but I still wanted to give it time.
Beehiiv also had some things I did not like, with the User Interface being far from the most intuitive. Trying to include graphics in emails was a hassle to the point where I’d have to embed a picture for the newsletter email and then change the web version to include the embedded version. That’s an email limitation and not a Beehiiv issue, but it’s another thing I had to find a workaround for. There was also the dual-posting to the website and to Beehiiv, which wasn’t always a copy-and-paste job. I still needed to add tags on Beehiiv, format the post, etc. That meant more time devoted to tinkering with Beehiiv and less time to everything else.
One reason that I mentioned in my final publication was the splitting of the audience, which was more like a lack of audience in the newsletter. The website had its best year ever in 2025, admittedly not that impressive in the grand scheme, but it’s difficult to justify the newsletter when the website is doing relatively well. The increased views came at a price…
Burnout
Right around the end of the academic year in June, I felt pretty burnt out. This goes back to the start of the year, when the article Where College Realignment Stands Heading Into 2025 saw a surge in views. Naturally, I saw the increased views and decided the next logical step was to post even more. I posted 9 articles in January 2025, something I hadn’t done in a single month since 2017, which predates the pivot to realignment. I posted 33 articles in the first 6 months of 2025, plus I had the duplicative posts over at the newsletter, which also came out to be 33 between late February and the end of May. Then, I decided to keep the weekly schedule through the end of June on the website, while listing every sport added, discontinued, or conference change… the same changes I list in the Realignment Tracker.
All of that was done while working a full-time job, so my free time was effectively dedicated to lots of writing and formatting. There was plenty of wasted effort, and burnout was inevitable by the end of June. As some have probably noticed, the semi-monthly Realignment Report has been pared back at times. A major reason for that was to reduce the duplicative efforts. Do I really need to go in-depth on the men’s rugby club team changes for an extra 5 views on the semi-monthly posts? Nope.
There were other factors that led to burnout, and even some disinterest in realignment. An outside project I worked on at the start of the year became much larger in scope and saw increased interest as the year progressed. Another project was similar in terms of increased scope, but that was designed to help find all the realignment changes more efficiently, although that was completed in the summer. One aspect of college athletics that I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with is the insatiable need for more money by the schools and conferences. I’m not surprised by this development, and I even mentioned it at the end of my article on the House settlement. “Everything that wasn’t already commoditized most likely will be in the near future.” I knew the future was coming, and it didn’t take more than a few months for it to happen.
So, About Ads and Monetization…
Y’all can rest easy because the ads are staying, but the monetization, as described last year, is not happening. I mentioned earlier that I wanted a “soft wall” for this year, and I tried to implement it with the newsletter, but that didn’t pan out. I also tried a few WordPress plugins, but they wouldn’t function without a convoluted 5-step process to make it feasible. That means no paywall, barring something unforeseen happening with this website. Y’all will have to live with the ads.
In the 2023 review, I mentioned that monetization could mean bringing in the “job” aspects to what has been a hobby… and that’s exactly how I felt when I had the newsletter and weekly posts. Hobbies are meant to be enjoyed, and it didn’t always feel like that in 2025. Whether it was working on the newsletter, the weekly articles, or one of the realignment projects, there were times I wondered if this had crossed beyond being a hobby. That eventually led to mid-year burnout, which isn’t what you want for a hobby.
2026 Content Plans and Expectations
Enough of the ranting, let’s talk about 2026 content plans and what I expect from the website. As we start this year, I am not committed to publishing the Realignment Report long-term because my interest is at an all-time low. I’ve talked about realignment on this website in some form since October 2020. Back then, it was fun to talk about the different scenarios, but some of my takes were quite naïve. That led me to spend more time gathering hard data and information, but that led to more pessimism once it became clear that leaders in college athletics didn’t really care about the sports or the athletes.
They only care about the money, and it’s not hard to see how that has negatively impacted college athletics. College football feels very “corporatized” and private equity is only starting to get involved. There’s a nonsensical push to expand the March Madness tournament for no other reason than more money. It’s even harder to accept that as a fan when the teams that are most likely to benefit are the ones in the best conferences. Give me more mid-major programs and don’t force them to play each other in the play-in games. Most fans want to see upsets, not the same dozen teams trade the trophy every year. In my opinion, college athletics before House increasingly felt like the Last Chopper Out of Saigon.
In terms of expectations, this part is usually difficult. I could sound braggadocious and say, “I expect everyone to read my realignment posts,” but this is realignment we’re talking about here. I’ll sound like a broken record, but forecasting views is not easy because there are so many factors: interest level in the topic, whether the algorithm is friendly on that day/week, whether realignment gets more chaotic or not, which platforms I publish to (and their related algorithms), when I post it (not just the time of day but how soon after the news event happened), and many other things outside my control. Coming off a record year in viewership, thanks in large part to one article at the start of 2025 and my non-commital attitude for the entire year, I estimate a steep decline of at least 50% for 2026.
I don’t have much interest in realignment right now, especially after the last few years. Maybe I should return to the early days and post about hypothetical moves, even if they are unlikely to happen. Or maybe I should just take a break and see if the spark returns. Maybe I’ll pivot to something else. After all, it’s not like I haven’t done that before on this website.
Thank you for taking the time to read the annual New Year’s Day novel. I hope everyone has gotten something from the articles posted in 2025 or before. I’m not sure what awaits us all for realignment in the future. Thank you for your viewership and I hope you have a fantastic 2026!