There was a time when fantasy sports felt like the future.

Twenty years ago, you did a fantasy draft with your friends and stepped into this strange, expanding online world filled with people who were every bit as obsessed as you were. There were message boards, homegrown websites, early commissioner services, writers building audiences from scratch and entrepreneurs operating out of garages because they believed this thing could become something much bigger.

And then it did.

I entered the fantasy sports industry just after the turn of the century, and from my seat it combined almost everything I loved into one place. You could build something. You could compete. You could find people every bit as obsessed as you were and measure yourself against them. You could work harder, study more, see something before somebody else did and actually have that matter. It tapped into that high-grade competition that gets harder to find as one walks through life.

As you already know, I was hooked. I’m still hooked.

But the world around it has changed. And not just fantasy sports. Something fundamental is moving beneath our feet.

Look around almost any creative industry and you can see versions of the same thing happening. Sports media. Hollywood. Journalism. Music. Social media. Streaming. AI. Even the leagues themselves and the businesses orbiting them. Things that once seemed permanent suddenly do not. Things that took decades to build can now be disrupted in a handful of years.

NBA teams barely have beat writers anymore. Fantasy commissioner services increasingly look like abandoned buildings even though millions of people are still playing these games. Newsrooms disappear. Talented people get laid off. Platforms rise, change the rules, capture an industry and then change the rules again.

And surrounding all of it has been an enormous shift in how content is valued. What used to be about building something people returned to became a fight to capture somebody for five seconds before an algorithm moved them somewhere else. Depth started losing to velocity. Expertise started losing to immediacy. The work increasingly became shaped around the machine instead of the machine serving the work.

I started seeing the early signs of this around 2015. Good talent was continuously being let go while the dominant business model became selling advertising next to free content. Then advertising stopped paying what it once did. Facebook sold publishers on the pivot to video and helped saw a leg out from underneath an already unstable chair. Twitter was already deteriorating before Elon Musk came along and accelerated the chaos. Algorithms increasingly took over not only the distribution of content, but the way content itself was made.

Slowly, then suddenly, the people creating the work were no longer deciding how that work reached people.

YouTube became the natural pairing for podcasting, which was great in many ways, but it also helped completely saturate the market. A very small number of creators make enormous amounts of money. Some make decent money. Everybody else is fighting for peanuts and hoping scale eventually saves them. Spotify now has technology designed to help people skip advertisements. Social platforms can move the cheese whenever they want because they control both supply and demand, and they know there is another creator standing in line behind you waiting for whatever scraps of distribution they choose to hand out.

And with the economic foundation of much of the content industry eroding, the currency quietly changed: likes, followers, views, impressions, engagement.

The scoreboard changed without anybody really voting on it. A real episode of Severance.

There are only so many eyeballs, ears or, as I prefer, earballs available in any industry. Jam an effectively infinite number of content creators into that equation and it is going to leave a mark. And when platforms weaponize algorithms for their own benefit, the incentives change. Carefully crafted, comprehensive work becomes sporadic content dumps designed to catch the algorithm at the right moment.

Not because creators suddenly stopped caring. Because the economics changed underneath them. This is the part that matters: somebody still has to pay for the work.

Somebody has to pay the writers. Somebody has to pay the analysts. Somebody has to fund the tools, the technology, the research and the thousands of hours it takes to create something exceptional, something worth the price of admission and capable of making the experience better for the person using it.

That is not greed. That is not some dirty admission that commerce exists. That is how industries continue to exist.

Without revenue, there are fewer professional writers. Without revenue, fewer talented analysts can justify doing this full-time. Without revenue, fewer companies can invest in better products, better tools, better technology and better people. Eventually, what remains is an endless stream of content that adds noise instead of value, makes the experience more chaotic instead of better and ultimately helps nobody get better results.

Strange times, indeed.

There is obviously a different discussion to be had about the handful of gaming companies that have done extremely well financially. That was predictable, and there are important conversations to have around that entire part of the ecosystem. But for about 99 percent of everybody else trying to operate a real business in this space, the reality is much simpler.

At some point, you have to sell something. And if you are going to sell something, it better be good.

That realization is embedded in the DNA of SportsEthos. When we founded this company, I believed it was mission-critical not only for the success of our operation, but for the long-term health of the industry we wanted to participate in, that we place real value on revenue.

Not revenue for revenue’s sake. Value creation.

There has to be an economic exchange somewhere because that exchange allows you to reinvest in the work. And if you are asking somebody to pay, then you better make damn sure the value is there.

That part matters to me enormously because I have lived on both sides of this. I once had the luxury of producing my fantasy content for free while working for a large corporation. I also spent years working journalistically, breaking stories and enjoying the national attention that came with it.

It felt great. And, as it probably should have, eventually it started feeling like empty calories.

Times changed. Advertising changed. And I reached a point in life where I did not need affirmation. I needed dollars to justify my full-time involvement compared to the other things I could be doing with my time, capital and energy.

That is not cynical. That is adulthood.

Once it became clear that the full-on free model was becoming destructive to the industry around it, the plan in my mind became pretty simple: do both things better than anybody else. Build free content that is legitimately excellent. Build premium products so valuable that people willingly pay for them. And never confuse one to be the enemy of the other.

Our free content, best found at SportsEthos.com, has long been something I am incredibly proud of. I am obviously biased, but I believe our fantasy basketball writers can stand next to anybody in this industry. The people here care about getting it right. They care about the work. They care about improving. They care about becoming better analysts tomorrow than they were yesterday.

They are not here because they discovered some algorithm hack. They are here because they love this stuff.

And we have tried to create an environment where talented people can actually develop rather than simply becoming another disposable contributor pumping material into a feed. That matters because great analysts are developed through repetition, accountability, making calls and seeing whether they were right. Through writing thousands of blurbs. Through watching games. Through building projections. Through missing. Through learning why they missed. Through coming back the next day and doing it again.

Real expertise has inertia. It compounds. That is what we are trying to build.

At the same time, we paired that free ecosystem with premium products designed around a completely different promise: if you give us your money, we are going to give you something worthy of it.

Not because everything needs to sit behind a paywall. It doesn’t. Not because we want to extract every possible dollar from everyone who visits the site. We don’t. In fact, we’ve reinvested every single dollar we made so far back into the business, to improve the experience, build better products, and create new, more sustainable opportunities for both our team and our users. We simply want to make products so good that people pay for them and walk away feeling like they got more value than they paid for.

That sounds simple. It is not. It means earning the right to ask for somebody’s money every single year.

The Bruski 150 was the foundational effort behind that philosophy. It started as one product built around an obsessive level of analysis and became proof that people will pay for expertise when the expertise is real, the work is deep and the results justify the investment.

That pursuit has since spread throughout the company. Not because we found some trick. Not because we hacked an algorithm. Because we did the work. And because we kept reinvesting.

That distinction is especially important now because social media platforms have become unavoidable participants in this ecosystem. They do not care whether the fantasy sports industry survives. They do not care whether sports journalism survives. They do not care whether the next generation of great analysts can make a living. That is not their job. Their job is to maximize whatever metrics matter to their businesses.

We use those platforms because they are critical for reach, but we also fully recognize how destructive algorithms and the ecosystems built around them can be to industries and, ultimately, to the value delivered to users.

We work through them. We do not work for them. That distinction matters.

The same conversation is now beginning around AI. We are going to use AI. Of course we are. It would be ridiculous not to. AI will help people research faster, organize information faster, build products faster and solve problems that used to require enormous amounts of manual work.

But technology should make expertise more powerful. It should not become an excuse to stop developing expertise. It should help great people do better work. It should not eliminate the reason great people exist in the first place.

That is the line I care about.

Because I do not want SportsEthos to become another machine designed to produce the maximum number of things at the minimum possible cost with no regard for quality or value. I want the technology working for the analysts. I want the analysts working for the users. And I want the users to feel the difference.

That is the model.

Free does not have to mean disposable. Premium does not have to mean extracting every dollar possible. Both can simply mean making something exceptionally good for the people it was built to serve.

Longtime beat writer Tim Kawakami, one of the most important figures in Bay Area sports print journalism and someone who played a critical role in the early days of The Athletic, once made the point beautifully when discussing what free content had done to journalism:

“If Netflix’s Reed Hastings felt some inherent need to invest in journalism, do you think he’d assemble the best staff, set up the technology … and then give the content away for free online?”

That question extends far beyond journalism.

Great things cost something to make. The question is whether the value on the other side justifies the cost. That is the standard. And we are going to keep testing ourselves against it.

We are also going to continue bringing you plenty of excellent free content. Wait until you see what we are building with the new Ethos 360 page, which will be accessible to everybody and then enhanced for members. Look at our injury pages. We have built them to go far beyond whatever the latest automated social post tells you.

Look at the new blurb feed. It is not just information. It is another environment where writers and analysts develop because they are doing the actual work of becoming analysts, every single day. Look at our daily articles. The goal is to give you the most useful information, the best information and the fastest information possible while still knowing you can trust what you are reading.

Real work. Professional work. And then there is the premium side.

For those who want the deeper edge, the deeper tools and the elevated experience, that is where we are willing to go completely overboard.

The B150 sits at the center of that.

Whether you are playing season-long fantasy, DFS, making wagers or participating in prediction markets, there is simply an enormous amount of accumulated intelligence behind it. Years of information. Years of player evaluation. Years of understanding markets. Years of understanding how people draft. Years of seeing where projections fail. Years of understanding where public perception moves too far. Years of knowing which signals matter and which ones do not.

That accumulated knowledge has inertia. It is difficult to replicate because it was not created last Tuesday.

There are other people in this industry doing outstanding work. ETR, in particular, deserves mention because I saw the quality of that operation up close when many of us were at Rotoworld, and I have tremendous respect for what they have built.

But we know what we have. And we know what goes into it.

Which brings me to perhaps the most important people in this entire equation: our paying members.

Everything we have built continues to exist because people decided the work was worth paying for. Every subscription allows us to reinvest. It helps us build the next tool, hire the next great person, improve the next product, take another swing and keep talented people in this industry when they could very easily be doing something else with their lives.

Our staff is filled with people with elite-level talent, people who could be applying that intelligence, work ethic and creativity in all kinds of fields. But they also see what I see.

There is still enormous opportunity here.

Fantasy sports represents something profoundly human: competition, friendship, obsession, research, trash talk, community, the joy of being right and the pain of being spectacularly wrong. It is the Tuesday morning waiver claim you somehow cannot stop thinking about. The ridiculous trade you spend three hours convincing yourself makes perfect sense. The group chat you have had with the same idiots for 17 years.

That stuff matters. It always has.

Twenty years ago, when this industry was exploding, the people building it understood that none of it was guaranteed. Many of them had been operating out of garages just a few years earlier. They had sunk their own money into companies nobody knew would survive. They had worked absurd hours because there was no blueprint.

Hard work was not some inspirational slogan. It was the baseline expectation.

There was a feeling that people were building something together even while they were competing against each other. The discourse was healthier. The opportunities felt bigger. People were grateful to be participating in something that was still being invented in real time.

Maybe that is what this moment asks of us again. Maybe the down moment on the graph is not just something to complain about. Maybe it is an opportunity.

If SportsEthos can become proof of concept that high-quality fantasy content can successfully operate in two lanes, one allowing people to access this great game quickly and easily for free, and another giving enthusiasts who truly want an edge and an elevated experience something they cannot get anywhere else, then we can make both sides work while helping support the industry underneath them.

That is the strength of the model.

We do not have to pretend technology is going away. We do not have to pretend AI is going away. We do not have to pretend social media is going away. And we certainly do not need to spend our lives wishing the old world back into existence.

We can take everything that was great about that world, the competition, the craftsmanship, the obsession, the accountability, the expertise and the feeling that the work actually meant something, and build those values into whatever comes next.

We can use the new technology without becoming subservient to it. We can use social platforms without allowing an algorithm to determine what our work is worth. We can give away an enormous amount of excellent information while still creating premium products valuable enough to finance the people producing it.

We can grow. We can reinvest. We can build.

And we can prove that quality still matters. That expertise still matters. That craftsmanship still matters. That people will still support great work when the value is undeniable.

To me, that is the opportunity in this down moment on the graph. Not merely to survive it. To come out of it stronger.

To help prove that there is still a real business model underneath doing outstanding work for people who genuinely care about the game.

That sounds like a pretty good plan to me. I hope you join us in it.

With all of that said, here is this year’s Bruski 150. Unwrap your presents early. Enjoy the premium difference. Plunder. 💰

THE BRUSKI 150 PROCESS

Creating the Bruski 150 takes about 400 hours between July and October. Every year the process gets more advanced as we accumulate corporate knowledge. I do full-blown evaluations of about 450 players overall with about 225 players that end up in the ranks, which as you might have guessed started off as a 150 player list starting in 2010. Overall I evaluate every player on a roster. This is how we win.

RESULTS

And WIN we did! Even with the competition buying the Bruski 150 and using it against me, I had another Main Event league win with four squads finishing top-3 in high stakes. I got hit by Bam's 83-point game in the playoffs but more importantly I had the best regular season record in 30-DEEP. I got another FSWA nomination to bring my total to five (including two FSWA Writer of the Year awards), which are largely because of these ranks.