Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then.
On page D-16 of the Feb. 7, 1999, print section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a sports story delved into an emerging trend.
Websites dedicated to the hopeful expansion of hyper-local coverage of both powerhouse and featherweight college football programs alike were announcing themselves. They did it by disconnecting landlines, ensuring calls from the grandparents or the neighborhood friend wouldn’t come through and introducing anonymous, sometimes-accurate-often-times-not commentary into the cultural sports zeitgeist.
And with that, the forum that would forever alter how fans of this beloved tribal sport would communicate.
And swear. And cry. And lie. And snoop. And scoop. And enrage. And, perhaps above all else, entice.
The University of Pittsburgh football team’s then-37-year-old recruiting coordinator didn’t exactly pontificate on the surge of the college football message board — he is still, four decades on, a man of few deliberate words.
“We live,” said Curt Cignetti, who all these years later, transformed the sport and just led Indiana to a national championship, “in the information age.”
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So hop in the DeLorean, get ready to gun it to 88 miles per hour and venture back to a time seemingly eons ago to The Information Age (that’s what it was really called, for those of you too young to believe it) and excavate the reasons why the message board system became synonymous with college football, where die-hards have long toggled between recruiting morsels, speculative injury updates, coaching searches and everything in between.
For those who lived it, we salute you, and apologies offered for resurrecting that torturous dial-up internet tone.
“That was a pure time, because in those days, it was a conduit to information,” said Shannon Terry, founder of On3 Sports, who also founded several early college football-specific sites. “The community self-regulated. It was really fun.”
While on a FaceTime call in the On3 offices in Nashville, Tenn., Terry walked from closet to closet looking for the original three servers he kept as a keepsake to the bygone era that eventually evolved into what the corner of college football internet is today. The first server had a name. It was called Rubicon. It hosted Terry’s original site: AllianceSports, which was launched on June 6, 1996, and was later renamed Rivals.
On that summer day 30 years ago, AllianceSports launched its message boards — a place for fans of teams to congregate, share opinions, facts, fiction and sometimes the most detailed of information that sometimes proved to be, believe it or not, true. Together, those who opted to roll with their real names or exist in anonymity gathered to speculate and argue and rile one another up either in the dead of the offseason each spring or as the temperatures dropped each fall and the games became more important than ever.
“It’s pageantry, passion and ownership,” Terry said of why message boards are so specifically college football compared to any other American sport. “College sports — and pro fans may argue — but it has more pageantry. It has the bands and the community feel that go into the event. It is less corporatized. The passion of college sports is unmatched. It’s 365, 24 hours a day and I would defend that all day.”
And?
“And then it’s the ownership,” he said, “yeah, you may own season tickets to a pro team, but dadgummit, if you went to that university, you have some emotional collateral invested. You take all that, put it into a cocktail and it’s awesome.”
It was drive-time call-in radio shows but in your own home at your massive Dell or Gateway or Packard Bell desktop that weighed as much as 50 pounds. The original message boards were hosted by servers and sites either no longer of this world or still technically functional but long forgotten.
To host a website that featured message boards, a computer’s server wasn’t just the pathway to posting — servers were like stadiums hosting games.
Ever heard of the search engine WebCrawler? Or the internet service provider Prodigy? Due to volume and the primitive nature of the providers at the time, sites would easily crash because fans around the world would be trying to catch up on the latest gossip on the boards.
“It was a fistfight at all times,” Terry said.
In order for some publications to go live online, they had to look out of state. Steve Helwagen, who worked at Buckeye Sports Bulletin from 1994 to 2003 covering Ohio State, said in 1996 they outsourced building a website to a mom-and-pop store in Bloomington, Ind. Helwagen, who has been covering Ohio State for 247 Sports since 2003, said message boards as well as the advent of the live chat option well over 25 years ago allowed fans to finally lean further into their own fandom.
“It allowed us to create a special club with a velvet rope,” he said.
(Jonathan Daniel / .)
In 1995, Gene Williams was working for a local law firm in Tallahassee, Fla. An FSU graduate, Williams couldn’t help but wonder how he could find more inside information about the Seminoles. It was FSU’s heyday under legendary coach Bobby Bowden, and Williams would often call 1-900 numbers hosted by self-described recruiting insiders to provide the latest dish on who was visiting where or which recruit was leaning a certain direction.
Williams decided he wanted to utilize his fandom further. He started a website that was soon shut down by the university. Turns out FSUNoles.com was a little too close for the school’s liking. In 1997, he changed the URL to WarChant.com. The site’s popularity grew. Message boards were filled with reports from practice phoned in by bulky old cell phones to be posted. Eventually Williams left his law practice to run the website full time. Its first service provider was a local provider called Nettally.
At their core, college football message boards exist to be an outlet for hype, hope and, perhaps more than anything else, airing of grievances. Williams laughs when remembering how some former FSU assistant coaches would, in the early days of the site, mistake message board posts featuring flummoxed fans railing on play calls or missed recruits for bylined reports and stories.
Message boards can disseminate accurate breaking information but also be the launching off point for falsities. During FSU’s 1999 undefeated national championship season, Williams saw a post about star quarterback Chris Weinke getting into a bar fight in Tallahassee and cutting up his throwing hand. It required fact-checking, so he called the athletic department and Williams overheard laughing in the background. The person chuckling was Weinke.
Thirty years on, Williams said he vividly recalls seeing the start of internet behavior, where some were engaging happily in good faith, while others adopted the kind of sordid behavior so pervasive today.
“They were saying things they’d never say to a person’s face,” he said. “It was social media 1.0.”
Some threads on message boards refuse to go away. One on WarChant.com, now part of the On3 network, was posted on Oct. 17, 2022, about conference realignment and expansion. It still has hot takes posted weekly and has, according to Williams, over 15 million views and over 143,000 replies.
Traditional media coverage of such sites in the 1990s were predictably skeptical and entertaining. In a special print section dedicated to the rise of college football-dedicated websites in the Sept. 27, 1998, version of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, there were stories with headlines like: “Sports writer offers unique media outlet” regarding an AllianceSports writer covering Georgia.
In the Sept. 10, 1999, sports section of The Houston Chronicle, there was an info box printed to guide readers to fan sites for rivals Texas and Texas A&M which read: “By the time you read the newspaper version of this story, a critique and discussion of what was right/wrong about it will have been on the internet for hours.” It listed sites like TexAgs.com and the now-defunct HornsFans.com.
The most popular topics listed in the box for TexAgs.com included:
“How badly t.u. stinks”
“The media’s anti-A&M conspiracy.”
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T”
“The impending national championship.”
As for HornsFans.com:
“The insignificant Texas A&M Aggies.”
College coaches were even more incredulous about what some believed was a fad. Believe it or not, message boards played a direct role in coaches making practices less open to the public, because schemes or player injuries would manage to pop up on message boards somewhere.
“People can put down anything they want on a chat page,” said former Auburn coach Terry Bowden in that 1998 article in the Ledger-Enquirer. “A secret visit to a recruit five years ago now seems to make it on the net within hours.”
In that Post-Gazette story, Cignetti said he would scan websites for tips on recruiting trends, but didn’t venture into the message board realm: “A lot of that isn’t very credible.”
Before Billy Liucci joined TexAgs.com and became the site’s executive editor and long before he became the go-to source for Texas A&M football, he was a student at the school living with A&M football players. His roommates included future Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell and likely future NFL Hall of Fame punter Shane Lechler. Liucci, who graduated in 1998, remembers in his first two years at the school perusing message boards dedicated to A&M and the Big 12 Conference. He, too, would dial 1-900 numbers looking for up-to-date recruiting info.
In 1997, he took over the Maroon & White Report, a print newsletter dedicated to A&M football recruiting coverage. Eventually, he started hosting live chats and did Q&As with fans. He did it in the same house where he lived with Campbell and Lechler, which was next to Kyle Field. While his roommates were always ready to go out and grab a beer or bite to eat, Liucci had to stay put and use his dial-up internet connection to log on because he knew fans would be waiting.
It got so popular that he was finally able to use both the internet and the phone.
“I got a second phone line because of that,” he said.
Landlines are relics of the past. 5G now allows college football message board posters to refresh for updates if they’re on top of a mountain or riding an underground subway. Want to go for a jaunt down a rabbit hole? Simply pull up any message board, start a scroll, buckle up and hold on tight. You’re guaranteed to find something worth your time, whether it’s real or not.
