Recently there has been a lot of turnover in terms of which writers cover the major hoops beats in the New York/New Jersey area.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we know:

**NBA writer Jonathan Abrams left The New York Times for Grantland.com. That leaves Howard Beck — who had this interesting piece today on covering the NBA lockout — as the Times’ primary NBA writer, although former Bergen Record Knicks (and tennis and golf) writer Steve Adamek has been contributing pieces to the Times.

**With Adamek no longer at The Record, our friend Al Iannazzone has moved over to the Knicks from the Nets. Andy Vasquez will cover the Nets for the folks in Hackensack. It remains unclear if The Record will continue to cover the Nets once they move to Brooklyn. (Will folks in New Jersey care about the Brooklyn Nets?)

**At the New York Post, it looks like Tim Bontemps will cover the Nets, replacing longtime writer Fred Kerber, although Kerber is still contributing bylines.

**Our friend Chris Sheridan left ESPN.com to start up SheridanHoops.com, for which I’m a contributor. It appears like Jared Zwerling and Ian Begley will cover the Knicks for ESPNNewYork.com.

**On the high school beat, MSG Varsity scored a major coup by taking both Mike Kinney and Gregg Lerner away from The Star-Ledger. Kinney and Lerner covered boys and girls hoops, respectively, over a period of many years and their institutional memories are tremendous. There’s no denying that’s a big loss for the Ledger, and a big gain for the folks at MSG.

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For those who missed it, columnist Tara Sullivan of The Bergen Record was not permitted into the locker room Sunday at The Masters during a group interview with Rory McIlroy. Tara wrote a column on her experience and Masters officials have since apologized.

“It should not have happened,” Augusta spokesman Steve Ethun told The Associated Press. “We will work as hard as we can to make sure it does not happen again.” 

(Full disclosure: I worked with Sullivan at The Record/Herald News for 10 years and, us both being fans of The Boss, we have attended a few Bruce Springsteen shows together.)

So The Masters did the right thing — in the end — by apologizing, but what about all these reactionary comments at the bottom of Tara’s column?

As of about 2:30 p.m. Monday, there were 21 comments, although it appears many of the more hostile ones have since been taken down.

Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms and men do not belong in women’s locker rooms…writes DukeofWanaque

Why is the locker room interview so imperative in any sport? Why can’t you just give these athletes a break, and wait until they get out of the locker room? csrv says

And here’s my favorite from Rodger1221:

Why would you want to go in there?? Did you not have enough info already? Could you not tell by watching him play, what happened?? I thought the idea of reporting was to report what really happened at an event, not just what one person pehaps thought happened, although it was about him. And with the division of men and women…The family life is being destroyed by females like yourself. Suck it up.

All of these comments from anonymous posters who don’t have to give their names go to the heart of the matter, which is this: Sullivan was denied equal access to interview.

The issue is not that the interview took place in a locker room — female reporters are in men’s locker rooms all the time doing their jobs; they don’t care about checking out male athletes — it’s that Sullivan wasn’t treated equally.

Imagine you were a reporter (on deadline) and were walking in a scrum, of, say, 20 other reporters, down a 20-foot carpet.

At the 15-foot mark, you were pulled aside and told you could not continue.

Everyone else keeps walking, but you must stop.

You have a credential to cover the event, but for some reason (you’re a woman, they don’t like what you wrote the day before, whatever), you can’t continue along with the other reporters.

Imagine if this happened to your wife, your sister, your daughter.

The interview itself could’ve been held on The Moon or Backstage at Springsteen.

But 15 other reporters are allowed to see McIlroy’s expressions, ask him questions, gain additional information while one is not.

Remember that it was reporter in the locker room, Steve Wilstein, who first discovered the  steroid precursor known as “andro” in Mark McGwire’s locker.

If a reporter had been banned from that locker room, he/she wouldn’t have been able to see the andro, break the story and ultimately open the Pandora’s Box known as Steroids.

Although I’m clearly not a woman and was not at The Masters, I had a similar experience two years ago when I was denied access to a Big East basketball team’s locker room simply because the coach did not like what I had written.

A staff employee literally stood in my way, told me the coach said I couldn’t go in (alongside the other 10 reporters) and offered to take my tape recorder in for me.

Though I was shocked and stunned, I ended up giving it to him and getting the recorder back. But I wasn’t able to ask my own questions or see the athletes as they responded. Luckily, this incident transpired at the end of the season, the coach was soon fired and normalcy was restored.

But had it gone on all season, I would have been at a competitive disadvantage simply because I was denied equal access.

And that’s what the Sullivan incident is about at its very core.

It’s not about locker rooms, bathrooms or even The Masters itself.

It’s about equal access for all journalists.

(Photo courtesy AP)

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NEW YORK

For good.

“He posted something we didn’t like much and so we kind of banned him from that,” Self recalled recently with a smile. “If he loves social networking, he’s really not getting a chance to express himself through it right now.”

“He told me more than once,” Taylor, a Hoboken, N.J. native and former star at St. Anthony under Bob Hurley, said of Self’s admonitions about his Facebook posts. “I was just being hardheaded.”

The Taylor incident was hardly the last highlighting college basketball players and social networking concerns.

Across the country, college coaches and administrators are reacting in a variety of ways to their athletes’ postings on Twitter and Facebook. Some schools allow students to post comments under certain guidelines. Others ban social networking altogether.

Nearly everybody seems to agree there are inherent risks to people, especially young ones, posting public messages about what are often private matters.

“It is something that scares me,” Georgetown coach John Thompson III said. “We sit down with the team. We have given thought to what some other schools have done, banning it. We haven’t done that. We try to tell them just to be smart.

“Kids today don’t understand what that what you put out there, you can’t take back. You have a bad practice, the whole world can know about it. You’re mad at a teammate, a coach, yourself, parents, a girlfriend, the whole world can know about it. So it’s something that’s very dangerous. The nature of college athletics, athletics in general, so many people are watching and trying to bait you into things.”

Syracuse guard Scoop Jardine caused an uproar in December when he posted these comments on Twitter.

“@ScoopJardine11 #collegetaughtme that groupies really exist! But we just call them #teamplayers! Ahaha”

“@ScoopJardine11 #collegetaughtme if you f a girl an the news get out they denie it and say he only gave me head! Bye girl!!”

Jardine appeared to be referencing a 2008 sexual assault case involving himself, teammate Rick Jackson and then-teammate Jonny Flynn.

Jardine later apologized and shut down his account, only to later launch a new account, @PhillyFlash11.

“You’ve got to be careful with what you say,’’ Jardine told The Syracuse Post-Standard. “People can take a lot of words and twist them up and read it whichever way they want. If I say something to Jonny that we’ve got an inside joke about, but you all don’t know what we’ve got going on, you can take it and twist it up.

“I’ve always been very careful,’’ Jardine added. “I always put out positive stuff, but it was one of those days where we were just having fun and then it got blown out of proportion.’’

Jardine isn’t the only Syracuse player to get into hot water in 140 characters or less.

Syracuse guard Mookie Jones, a Peekskill, N.Y. native, recently expressed his frustration at his lack of playing time via Twitter: “No matter who you are.the right system can turn you from a roll (sic) player into a superstar.I’m talking rock bottom.”

Danny Parkins, the host of The Score 1260 radio program in Syracuse, then retweeted Jones’s message to his own followers, prompting this exchange with Jones.

“@DannyParkins why you telling people what I said”

“@mookie21jones BC I’m not tellin people anything you didn’t already say yourself man, twitter is public.”

“@DannyParkins well you just got a puclic block.i dont even no you”

Jones said he has since “opened” his Facebook pages to the public.

“It’s open now so you can see the things that I’m writing,” he said after a recent game at Madison Square Garden. “I opened it for the world to look at it now because I kind of limit the negative stuff out so you’re not going to really catch nothing negative on there.”

Still, Jones admits that he uses Twitter and Facebook to “relieve my stress, let some steam out on there.”

“It might be the wrong thing, but I don’t think I go overboard,” Jones said. “I might say little catchy things to get people’s attention.”

He added: “It’s all positive now this year because last year I was a little immature. This year I’m a little grown up. I might have said a couple things out of order.”

Jones said he doesn’t reveal anything about the team’s strategy or injuries through social networking.

“It is a school rule,” he said. “I wouldn’t never do nothing like that. I don’t think nobody else on the team would do that. But my personal thoughts is that if that’s your injury you should be allowed to…They limit us from a lot of things, but I feel like if it has something personally to do with you, then you have every right to say what you want to say because it has something to do with you and it’s your life.”

Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim is not exactly a big Internet guy. He said he trusts his players to make the right decisions; if not someone will inform him and he’ll take matters into his own hands.

“They can’t say something that’s not good socially, no,” he said. “Can they something about my coaching if they want to? Sure. It won’t help them.”

Then, seemingly addressing Jones’s tweets about playing time, Boeheim added: ”I’m not one to restrict what players do or say and freedom of speech. It’s not going to help them if they say something and it gets back to me. But there’s always going to be a certain amount of discontent when you’re not playing as much you should or you want to. I think that’s true on every team. It doesn’t surface too much when you’re winning, but it does surface when you’re losing. Everybody on our team’s a competitor. They all want to play and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with being unhappy because you’re not playing because you want to play. You’re a competitor.”

Last August, Rutgers guard Tyree Graham (@Tyreeg3) tweeted that he had a torn anterior cruciate ligament that had gone undisclosed at his junior college, Brunswick (N.C.) Community College. Graham’s Tweet preceded any announcement by the Rutgers sports information office and became grist for various news stories.

It was quickly removed after Graham got an earful from Rutgers coach Mike Rice.

“Yes, oh he got bombarded with it,” Rice said. “There’s a process that you have to through in Division I and some things are better left untweeted.”

Yet Rice didn’t go so far as to ban Graham from Twitter the way Self did with Taylor and Facebook.

“If something like that happens where it has to addressed, I’m going to address it,” Rice said.

In fact, Rice thinks social networking can be a positive in terms of recruitment.

“They tweet with our recruits that I love, asking them through Twitter how they did,” Rice said. “So it’s a form of communication now. With young people, they often make mistakes and hopefully we’ve harnessed some of the early mistakes of the first month I got there.”

St. John’s coach Steve Lavin has a different approach from Rice and Boeheim.

He’s taken Self’s policy toward Taylor and applied it to his entire team.

“We’re at the point where we’re going to shut it down completely during the season,” Lavin said. “We discussed that earlier this year and we’re going to go ahead and shut it down from here on forward in terms of all social media.

“In the offseason obviously we’ll be mindful of content and what the kids are doing. During the season it could be a real distraction.”

(Photos courtesy Syracuse Post-Standard, NJ.com)

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To review:

**Nike moved the Jordan Classic to North Carolina for April 2011 because of the ongoing renovation at Madison Square Garden.

**Kris Stone, founder of the Boost Mobile game, took that event to Venice Beach, Calif., in 2010 after the 2009 game was rained out and moved inside to the Gauchos Gym.

**Sonny Vaccaro’s legendary ABCD Camp departed Fairleigh Dickinson in 2006 when he retired from the sneaker business, and Chris Rivers briefly held the Reebok All-American Camp in Philly for a couple of years afterward.

Now New York has nothing.

With a huge vacuum occupying the Big Apple, the time is right for some sneaker company to strike.

If Nike was smart, they would move the LeBron James Skills Academy – their marquee summer event – to New York from Akron.

Have you ever been to Akron?

There’s a reason LeBron left. There’s nothing there. Nothing.

Imagine if 80 of the top high school prospects – and 20 of the elite college players – spent a week in July in New York City, or at nearby Fairleigh Dickinson University, site of Vaccaro’s famed ABCD Camp?

Imagine the publicity such a camp would draw.

Dozens of sportswriters from The New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, SNY and other outlets would cover the event, just as they did during the heyday of the ABCD Camp that featured Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Tracy McGrady, O.J. Mayo, Sebastian Telfair and Lance Stephenson.

Aside from Major League Baseball, the summer is generally a slow time in the sportswriting world, so there would be plenty of journalists looking to cover the top players and stories of the summer.

Holding an event in the New York City area is expensive, to be sure, but somebody with deep pockets, like Nike, could afford it.

And such an event would enable Nike to parade its stars – Kevin Durant, Paul Pierce, Steve Nash, etc. – in front of the press in the biggest media market in the world.

If not Nike, what about Li Ning, Under Armour or Five Star?

Vaccaro is going back and forth with Li Ning, the Chinese apparel company, about a potential return to the sneaker business.

What better way for Sonny and Li Ning to make a splash than to hold a big-time camp in the New York area in early July?

“I believe there are going to be opportunities for me to be involved in things next summer,” Vaccaro said this fall. “I don’t know exactly if I will do them or how I’ll do them, but I do know there’s a lot of interest and I’m going to listen.”

Under Armour and Five Star, which is undergoing an ownership change, would also do well to think about bringing back an event to the Big Apple.

Somebody needs to do it.

And they need to strike while the iron is hot.

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The Yankees, the National Football League and the ponies? Yes.

College hoops and college hoops recruiting? Not so much.

Still, what happened on WFAN Wednesday was just embarrassing.

Francesa interviewed four local college coaches — Fordham’s Tom Pecora, Rutgers’ Mike Rice, St. John’s Steve Lavin and UConn’s Jim Calhoun — and could not have been more out of it. (All the audio can be found here.)

It was the first day of the NCAA early signing period, yet Francesa appeared to have no earthly idea of this fact.

To open his interview with Rice, who has secured a Top 10 recruiting class of seven players, Francesa referred to “our college basketball little swing-around.”

“Little swing-around”?

It was Signing Day, Mike.

All it would’ve taken was for one producer to whisper into Francesa’s ear, “Hey, Mike. It’s the first day of the basketball signing period and you’ll be speaking with Mike Rice and Steve Lavin, both of whom have highly ranked recruiting classes.”

Instead, Rice himself had to bring it up early in the interview.

“Today is signing day for us, Mike, and we already have four out of the seven commitments in,” Rice told Francesa. “And a lot of the recruiting experts in the country have us a Top 10 team in the country.”

“Wow,” Francesa said, obviously hearing it for the first time.

Francesa did seem to know that Fred Hill preceded Rice as the Rutgers coach and that Hill came in as a highly regarded recruiter. When Francesa asked Rice how he would be different, Rice gave a sharp answer.

“Experience,” he said, underscoring the fact that Hill had no head coaching experience when he took over. “I’ve had three years of making feel uncomfortable.”

Rice coached at Robert Morris for three years before coming to Rutgers, twice going to the Big Dance.

When Lavin came on, Francesa appeared to understand that the St. John’s coach had  secured an elite recruiting class — although he didn’t explicitly make the Signing Day connection.

“I’m not one to worry too much about recruits, but it sounds like, according to these reports, that you had a Top 5 recruiting class,” Francesa said.

As the interview progressed, Lavin twice had to explain that former Purdue coach Gene Keady is a special assistant/adviser and not an assistant who will teach on the floor.

“He sits in and observes,” Lavin said of Keady. “He can’t instruct or teach on the floor.”

“Oh, he can’t go on the floor?” Francesa asked incredulously.

“No, he’s an adviser.”

“Oh, I thought he was going to be a full-time employee. He’s not  full-time coach then, right?”

“He’s a full-time employee. He’s a special assistant to me. He’d be the equivalent of a Tex Winter for Phil Jackson.”

OK, then.

Never once did Francesa mention a single player, or recruit, for either program. You think he could’ve thrown out, ‘Hey, I hear D.J. Kennedy is your top player, Coach Lavin. What can you tell us about him?”

So just keep all this in your back pocket when March Madness rolls around.

Because you know Francesa is going to bust out a bracket and start pontificating on the state of college basketball come March.

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2K SPORTS CLASSIC BENEFITING COACHES VS. CANCER

Thursday, November 18        Pittsburgh vs. Maryland                   ESPN2           7:00pm

Illinois vs. Texas

Friday, November 19            Championship Doubleheader            ESPN2           5:00pm

DICK’S SPORTING GOODS NIT SEASON TIP-OFF

Wednesday, November 24     Semifinal Doubleheader                  ESPN/ESPN2   7:00pm

Regional Hosts: Tennessee, UCLA, Villanova, Wake Forest

Additional Teams: Arkansas St., Belmont, Boston Univ.,

George Washington, Hampton, Marist, Missouri St., Nevada,

Pacific, Pepperdine, VCU, Winthrop

Friday, November 26            Championship Doubleheader            ESPN/ESPN2   2:30pm

BIG APPLE CLASSIC

Saturday, December 4          Virginia State vs. Virginia Union                            4:00pm

Howard vs. Hampton

JIMMY V CLASSIC

Tuesday, December 7           Memphis vs. Kansas                       ESPN/ESPN2   7:00pm

Michigan St. vs. Syracuse

MAGGIE DIXON CLASSIC

Sunday, December 19           Women’s Doubleheader

Texas A&M vs. Rutgers                   ESPNU           12:00pm

Ohio St. vs. Connecticut

MSG HOLIDAY FESTIVAL presented by Foot Locker

Monday, December 20          Northwestern vs. St. Francis             MSG/MSG+     7:00pm

Davidson vs. St. John’s

Tuesday, December 21         Championship Doubleheader

RUTGERS SCARLET KNIGHTS

Tuesday, December 28         North Carolina vs. Rutgers               ESPN2           9:00pm

ST. JOHN’S RED STORM

Monday, January 3               Georgetown                                  ESPN2           7:00pm

Wednesday, January 12        Syracuse                                      ESPN             7:00pm

Women v. Connecticut

Sunday, January 16              Notre Dame                                  MSG              12:00pm

Sunday, January 30              Duke                                                               1:00pm

Thursday, February 10          Connecticut                                   ESPN             7:00pm

Albany v. BU (men’s)

Saturday, February 19 Pittsburgh                                               ESPN             12:00pm

BIG EAST CHAMPIONSHIP

Tuesday, March 8 – Saturday, March 12                                     ESPN/ESPN2

74^th ANNUAL NIT

Tuesday, March 29               Semifinal Doubleheader                                      7:00pm

Thursday, March 31              Championship Game                                           7:00pm

(Photo courtesy Dime Magazine)

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The Worldwide Leader announced the hiring of Brian Windhorst, who covered the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and maintains a close relationship with LeBron James.

Windhorst is part of a four-man team that comprises ESPN’s new “Heat Index,” “devoted specifically to daily, season-long coverage of the Miami Heat and their new superstar core of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.”

Michael Wallace, the Heat beat writer for the Miami Herald for the past three years, is also part of the group.

In following James out of Cleveland to South Beach, Windhorst has taken heat from Cavs fans, but he defended himself in an interview with Cleveland radio host Bob Frantz:

“LeBron’s people never trusted me. They still don’t trust me. They don’t want me there because they know they can’t control me. If you look at the big stories that are done on LeBron they are written by GQ or from Vogue, or people like that they can control.”

Jason McIntyre at The Big Lead makes the good point that Windhorst is setting himself up to be the national authority on LeBron, much the way Sam Smith, author of “The Jordan Rules,” was on Michael Jordan.

ESPN also signed a deal with Dave Telep, the founder of Scout.com who is considered the preeminent national high school recruiting expert.

This is a clear indication that ESPN is serious about improving its coverage of high school hoops and college recruiting.

And you have to wonder how Scout will fare in his absence.

“I know Scout.com will continue at a high level,” he wrote on his Twitter.

Also, troubled former AOL Fanhouse columnist Jay Mariotti Tweeted that he’s leaving to focus on “other ventures,” including a “book project.”

“Column writing has been a labor of love for 25 years, allowing me to see the world and cover some of the greatest athletes and events in sports. But it’s time to step back from the daily sportswriting grind and focus on my other media ventures, including a book project.

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“I have had discussions with two of the companies,” Vaccaro, 71, said Monday by phone from California. “I have one more left and then a decision will be made. Pam and I see it happening no later than the middle of November.”

Vaccaro declined to name the companies with whom he has met, but sources said one is Chinese apparel manufacturer Li Ning.

As we reported last month, Vaccaro is eying a comeback in which he would become involved in sponsoring and promoting spring and summer AAU basketball.

“It’s definitely for the spring,” he said. ” Something would be done for summer ball.”

The comeback could include the restoration of the famous ABCD Camp in Hackensack, N.J. that has featured Bryant, LeBron James, Tracy McGrady, O.J. Mayo, Sebastian Telfair and Lance Stephenson.

“Would I like to do it?” Vaccaro said of his potential comeback. “Yes. Can it be done? Maybe.”

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We don’t know who. We don’t know when. But sometime in the coming days or weeks, some entrepreneurial journalist is going to scoop everyone else and land the biggest sports story of the year, and maybe the decade.

Odds are it will be someone like Chris Broussard of ESPN The Magazine, Chris Sheridan, Ric Bucher or Marc Stein of ESPN.com, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports or Brian Windhorst of The Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

My old Columbia University classmate Richard Deitsch of SI.com put out these odds on Twitter:

Chris Broussard 2-1

Brian Windhorst 3-1

Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc Spears 4-1

Ric Bucher or Marc Stein 5-1

Howard Beck/Jonathan Abrams 8-1

Ian Thomsen 9-1

Stephen A. Smith 14-1

Deadspin: 17-1

Field 20-1

Richard Deitsch 250-1

Maybe it will be somebody right here in New York City like my colleagues Alan Hahn of Newsday, Frank Isola of the Daily News, Howard Beck of The New York Times or Marc Berman of the New York Post.

Two things are for sure, though.

First, whoever breaks it will have landed the hugest story of the year and should be able to translate that into respect/props/money/perks from their bosses and fellow journalists.

Second, it won’t be “breaking news” for long.

In the old days of newspapers, you’d break a story and your competitors would have to wait a day to catch up. People interested in the news would have to buy your newspaper to get the story.

Then came the Internet and it became a race to see who could get the news posted quickest online. That led to blogs like this one, where journalists could post information directly to the Web, without having to deal with those tiresome and tired editors…whom most self-respecting journalists dislike.

Now comes the age of Twitter/Facebook/TMZ, where something is literally breaking news for a couple of minutes before everyone else picks it up, adds to it, subtracts from it…or waits for it to be “verified” or “confirmed” by The Worldwide Leader.

“Obviously, I’d love to break the story,” Broussard told ESPN. “Everybody would love to break the story, but we’ll see what happens.”

(Photo courtesy AP)

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Instead, McIntyre went on to create the popular independent blog that was purchased by Chris Russo, chief executive of Fantasy Sports Ventures, for “a figure in the low seven figures,” The New York Times reported Tuesday on its Website.

“If The Record had moved me [from covering high schools] to stuff that I cared about, I probably would not have left or gone the blog route,” McIntyre, with whom I worked at the Herald News and Bergen Record for several years, said Wednesday in a  phone interview.

“If I had gotten the job at ESPN The Magazine — they were  looking for an editor — the blog probably wouldn’t have happened. Things just happened.”

McIntyre covered boys high school basketball and other prep sports at The Record in the late 1990s when he said he approached the editors there about doing something similar to ESPN.com’s Page 2.

“I had an idea,” said McIntyre, who now lives in Bucks County, Pa. “This was the late ’90s and early 2000s. I thought we could’ve done a cool Page 2 which ESPN was doing, a mash-up of sports and culture and humor. I had the thought of doing that and I pitched it to The Record. They kind of weren’t feeling it.

“They weren’t interested and then I started to tinker with blogging.”

In the pre-blogging era (I started ZAGSBLOG.com at the Herald News in the summer of 2006 after McIntyre had left the paper), McIntyre launched JasonMcInytre.com and began to experiment with putting news and stories up on the site.

McIntyre launched The Big Lead in February 2006 while he was an editor at US Weekly.

He wrote the site anonymously until Sports Illustrated revealed his identity in 2008. SI later named the blog one of the five most influential sports blogs of the decade.

In the spring of 2006, McIntyre interviewed at ESPN The Magazine. He was interested in a writing job, but said the magazine wanted an editor.

Now The Big Lead generates three million monthly pageviews.

“You can’t out-ESPN ESPN, but you can take a different approach,” Russo told The Times. “Jason covers general sports and celebrity with an in-depth focus on sports media. Through good journalism and good luck, The Big Lead has succeeded.”

The Big Lead isn’t the first blog to sell for big bucks. He pointed to TrueHoop and Pro Football Talk as sites that were bought up by mainstream media entities, ESPN and NBC, respectively.

“Certainly I’m not the fist blogger to have this happen to me,” he said. “TrueHoop started like The Big Lead. It was a no-frills NBA blog and ESPN scooped it up a few years back.

“Mike Florio started Pro Football Talk and it got picked up my NBC Sports. It can happen to anybody. It’s going to take a lot of time and energy. You’ve got to put in your time.”

McIntyre, who spends 14-15 hours a day in front of the computer, plans to continue to write The Big Lead and says fans should look for the site to expand and possibly add writers down the line.

“Basically, everything will stay the same,” he said. “We’re keeping the writers, keeping the theme, sports, athletes off the field, sports media. We will continue posting from 8 a.m. to 6ish. We will probably be doing some hiring later in the year.

“Nothing’s really going to change. There will be a few more eyeballs on the site. Now that I don’t own it, there’s some money behind it and they can invest into a redesign, upgrade the mobile capabilities of the site, some neat stuff like that.”

And what about McIntyre’s own life? Will that change a whole lot now that he’s sold the site for seven figures?

“Personally, I don’t see my life changing,” he said. “I doubt it.”

(Photo courtesy Jason McIntyre)

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