Sunday Morning Sidewalk: Life in the Margins

 

It was not lost on me that it was over 60 degrees in Portland today as I walked Fiji.

That detail landed with a little irony, mostly because this was the first time I’ve had a real cold in at least six years and the first time I’ve genuinely felt under the weather in more than a decade. The last time I remember being sick was February of 2020, and even then it amounted to nothing more than a stuffy nose that lasted a day. This one lingered. Heavy head. Scratchy throat. That dull, slowed-down feeling that makes you aware of every step.

But with a dog like Fiji, there really isn’t such a thing as a day off.

We logged more than eight miles today, and that doesn’t include the hour she spent digging like she was trying to uncover lost treasure, or the 90 minutes at the dog park where time dissolves and energy never seems to run out. You show up. You move. You keep pace. Whether you feel great or not.

Somewhere between mile four and mile five, phone buzzing with texts, checking in on what I could from the fields, glancing at updates and notes as they trickled in, my thoughts drifted south.

Eugene.

What does any of this have to do with Oregon football? That’s a fair question.

This weekend’s visitors were impossible not to think about. You couldn’t ask for a better January day to sell a place. Blue skies. Mild temperatures. That deep, almost deceptive green that Oregon wears so effortlessly. It’s the kind of day that doesn’t scream for attention but quietly does the work for you. The kind of day where you don’t need a pitch, the setting handles it.

And it made me think about how often the little things go unnoticed.

When I first dipped a toe into recruiting coverage, it had nothing to do with brand-building or traffic or subscriptions. It was about helping a young man I knew who was battling leukemia. Recruiting was the language. Information was the currency. Access mattered. Context mattered. It wasn’t about stars or rankings so much as understanding pathways and possibilities.

Even before that, I had always followed recruiting a little more closely than most of the people around me at Autzen. Back in the SuperPrep magazine days, flipping pages, circling names, trying to connect dots before anyone else noticed them, recruiting felt like a quiet layer beneath the noise of Saturdays. The game was the headline, but the future was already being written somewhere else.

On fall Saturdays, the passion inside Autzen is unmistakable. It’s loud. It’s emotional. It’s real. But recruiting has always lived just outside that spotlight. Something fans vaguely know matters, but don’t always feel connected to. Commitments happen in December. Visits happen quietly. Relationships are built when the stadium is empty.

I think that disconnect is part of why I felt compelled to bring my voice into the “free” content space when Rivals was acquired by On3 last year.

There will always be a place for premium content. Some of the work we do carries real value and real cost. Travel. Time. Access. Relationships. That doesn’t change. But there’s also something important about meeting people where they are. About explaining why a January visit matters. Why a warm day in Eugene can linger in a recruit’s memory. Why a conversation on a quiet walk across campus might carry more weight than anything said over a loudspeaker on game day.

Recruiting, like so much else, is about accumulation. It’s the steady layering of experiences. The feel of the air. The ease of the environment. The sense that life here might work, not just football.

That’s true in coverage, too.

Not everything needs to be locked behind a gate to be meaningful. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is slow down, notice what’s happening around you, and explain it plainly. Connect the dots. Give context. Help people see what they might otherwise miss.

As Fiji pulled ahead of me on the last stretch home, tail wagging like she hadn’t already run a marathon today, I thought about how much of this sport lives in those margins. The walks. The weather. The quiet weekends in January. The things that don’t trend, but endure.

Those are the things worth paying attention to.

And sometimes, they reveal themselves best when you’re moving forward, even when you don’t feel your best, because there really isn’t a day of rest.