It’s generally accepted that we’re a bit overstimulated these days. Sure, there’s an insatiable demand for content, but there are endless feeds (literally), trends that come and go in a flash, and headlines that move a mile a minute.
In life, one of my favorite reminders is to step back and take in the view, to stop and smell the roses. Because that’s where the greatest insights lie, when the revelations come — that all those granules of content and headlines we consume every day add up to form bigger pictures.
We’re entering the age of guides (or maybe re-entering). Think about it — we went from following specific individuals and news/cultural commentators to surrendering our attention to all-knowing algorithms to, now, perhaps something in-between. Users will spend hours scrolling through TikTok without putting much weight into the handle behind the content. But those same users will subscribe on Substack or Patreon and form community and zealous parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, YouTubers, and Twitch streamers.
It is into this environment that OffBall emerged, seeing an opportunity to become a trusted brand, a guide, if you will, to connect the tributaries of the rapid flow of stories in which we swim every day. Not a day goes by that there’s not a sports and/or sports-adjacent story trending on Twitter, there’s always chatter chum for the watercooler. Sports has succeeded in pervading seemingly every nook and cranny of culture. Chris Stone and OffBall, the sports media brand he co-founded, want to help fans make sense of it all, to see the forests forming in all the trees.
“It’s a matter of identifying things that 5 million people haven’t already seen and then trying to assign some cultural meaning to what it is,” said Stone in describing OffBall’s mission. “It’s not that this happened. It’s this happened, and this is why this might be interesting to you or why you should know about this. It’s trying to peek around those cultural corners and assign some framing to all of our stories, and that’s something that we spend a lot of time working on and workshopping every day.
“It’s not just saying, Okay, we identified some interesting stories, but what is the broader story here? What is the throughline here? What is the framing here?”
This perspective is well-understood by Stone. For years, he was Editor-in-Chief of Sports Illustrated, whose weekly publication eventually required a more thoughtful approach to sports coverage as the length of the news cycle shrank amidst the rise of social. By the time the magazine hit newsstands, oftentimes several days would have passed after the big title game or the bombshell blockbuster trade or transaction. But dangit if we didn’t still look forward to reading, knowing there’d be that kind of bigger picture thinking, a different angle or deeper meaning explored. Stone explained that similarity between SI and OffBall, further illuminating the role OffBall seeks to serve.
“[It’s] similar to what I did at Sports Illustrated, because even Sports Illustrated was a weekly magazine. While the majority of magazines are monthly, weekly, once upon a time, was a high velocity cadence,” said Stone, “and sometime in the 1990s, especially as ESPN started to hit its peak, a weekly magazine was not such a high velocity product…
“So what SI had to solve for and putting out a weekly magazine was being able to package a series of stories that everybody in some form knew about, but giving it some sort of cultural weight, or assigning it some sort of framing that somebody else hadn’t thought of, taking you to a place that you hadn’t already gone.”
Producing savvy content is just the start. It takes more to stand out these days and earn and retain audience. As Stone described, content and stories come in many forms — long-form stories, short-form videos, podcast clips, Twitter threads, memes, carousels, Q&As and chats, and the list goes on. In some ways, packaging is less relevant than ever. A good story can succeed in countless forms, allowing users to consume however they’d like. But when it comes to attracting an audience that wants to consume your content, presentation is just as important as substance.
“It is an act of curation,” said Stone, who launched OffBall in 2024 alongside his two co-founders. “You’re packaging something. Think of it almost as like a museum exhibit. You’re presenting something that, together individually, is a lot different than what it is when it’s part of a larger whole. You know, it’s a collection of things, and how things mix and match with each other is really important. And I think when we think about the daily news cycle in sports and culture, we spend a lot of time using the word mix; like, what is the best mix of stories, of tone, of voice, of subject, of platform?”
OffBall puts so much thought into the packaging and approach to content and analysis because they’re not just out to entice the algorithms, they want audience. Not a viral clip or post, though they won’t shy away from massive metrics, but users who consume consistently. Fans who know and appreciate OffBall’s content, packaging, and POV. Fostering those intentional relationships is essential to building a lasting brand in 2025.
“Of course, we all want 100 million [subscribers], right? And we don’t want just 100. But the point is pretty clear — you want the right people coming for the right reasons,” said Stone, “and the right people are people who want to engage with who you are and what you’re delivering them, who are very aware of the fact that I am developing a relationship with OffBall, and that is really important.”
Stone continued: “I think in kind of the AI algorithmic kind of infused model, there is like this sprint to the algorithm that doesn’t really matter. It’s about just your place in line, and I’m saying something that’s very basic, and it’s been kind of picked over and parsed plenty of times before, but that’s not especially rewarding. I mean, we all want great scale. We want all great audiences, but we want audiences that actually care about us.”
OffBall is serving a unique audience. They’re not fans of any one specific sport, but they’re interested in how sports mirror culture and vice versa. This author once wrote about how baseball history reflected American history (the roaring ’20s, racial equality, labor relations, etc.). There’s a lot to learn from following the pathways and permutations of the billion-dollar behemoths, but there are often emerging insights peeking out of smaller (by comparison), more emerging and upstart sports and leagues.
There’s a strategy where OffBall could’ve gone after the less-covered sports, seeking to meet underserved fans. Or they could have gone all-in on sports with already-enormous fan bases, where winning over even a fraction could mean massive numbers. For Stone and OffBall, the strategy is yes; yes to all of it, wherever the dots connect and wherever the stories take them, sports big and small.
“OffBall is already distancing itself a little bit from the everyday who won, who lost, who’s great, who’s not, but at the same time it’s not an untapped space, but we would argue it’s an under-tapped space that gives us like a little bit of a white space to like traffic in sports…,” said Stone, noting smaller sports don’t have as many cultural commentators digging deep as the biggest leagues. “The thing about the underserved sports is you often find things in it that are really interesting things that say a lot about broader sports culture. So that’s why there’s a lot more opportunity to go deep there, because so few people have gone deep on it.”
Stone and his co-founders launched OffBall because they envisioned a gap in the market, coupled with a behavior of curation that many fans were already attempting (and largely struggling) to do themselves. It doesn’t mean their approach is the right one, it’s just different, and the bet is that what they’re doing is appealing enough to enough fans. (They’re off to a good start there) What OffBall is doing is different, and that’s the point.
It sometimes feels like every paradigm has been exhausted, and the next disruption isn’t around the corner, perhaps as it once was. But the increased omnipresence of sports in seemingly every part of society, and the interest that sports-driven stories merit, means the opportunity invites innovation. The audience, the angles, and the attention are there; may the best approach, personality, and packaging rise above the fray. As the sports media lifer Stone reflected on the state of sports storytelling, his excitement for new ideas and approaches was palpable, as he described one that caught his eye recently, sports journalism veteran Joon Lee’s YouTube channel and content.
“There’s probably a more eloquent way I could describe all that, but that’s interesting storytelling to me, and that’s the type of storytelling to aspire to,” said Stone. “And it feels very original…
“There are still people out there who have this belief that you can tell stories in new, interesting ways, that kind of value quality and thought, and they can still be interesting, and you can still have a real sense of discovery coming out of them, as opposed to this culture that is, again, what I referred to earlier, where you end up at a site you don’t even know you’re there and you’re there for 14 seconds, and you may never come to that site again. You just wanted the headline, you wanted the click.”
Stone and OffBall want more than a click. They want a relationship, to earn the trust and affection of an audience that opts in to them, knowing they’ll get content, quality, and insight they won’t get elsewhere. In a vast sea of stories and posts, OffBall, they believe, represents an under-tapped offering. Such that, even while we believe that by staring at screens and scrolling feeds for hours a day means we’re better-informed than ever, it’s that unending, rapid-swipe, attention-deficit consumption leaves a big gap in enlightenment. ‘
It may sound highfalutin and overly aspirational to use such a term, but if OffBall nails it just right, they’ll accomplish such lofty goals, giving fans a unique combination of information, entertainment, insight, and illumination. It’s like Ferris Bueller famously said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” OffBall is looking around for us, ensuring we don’t miss it. And in doing so, they may be providing us the right outlet at just the right time.
