About The Precedent

Most sports coverage tells you what happened. The Precedent tells you why it matters, and where you’ve seen it before.

Every issue goes deeper than the scoreboard. We explore the coaching decisions behind winning cultures, the front office moves that shape franchises for a generation, the business and politics that drive the games we watch, and the moments from sports history that echo surprisingly loudly in today’s headlines.

If you’ve ever watched a coach make a decision and wondered what they were thinking, or seen a contract dispute and felt like you’d seen this movie before, this was written for you.

Three Series, One Subscription

Everything on the site belongs to one of three series.

The Long View is the biweekly article, the historical and strategic deep dives The Precedent was built on.

College Football is the weekly coverage that runs during the season, built around my own ratings.

The Precedent Daily is shorter takes on what’s happening across sports, posted here on the site. Daily posts stay on the website rather than landing in your inbox, so your email stays manageable.

One free subscription brings The Long View and the college football emails straight to you.

Ratings, Standings, and Schedules

Beyond the writing, the site tracks eight leagues. You’ll find my ratings, full standings, and every team’s schedule for college football, the NFL, college basketball, the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NHL, the Premier League, and MLS. It’s all in the menu, organized by sport, and updated daily, so you can check where your team stands any time.

The ratings are my own system. A team’s rating is its winning percentage multiplied by its opponents’ winning percentage. Margin of victory doesn’t count. Only the result does, because a win is a win and a loss is a loss.

What’s in Every Long View Article

Each article starts with a focused deep dive on one topic. History, strategy, business, or whatever deserves more than a hot take that week. Twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words of something worth reading slowly.

The Deeper Dive goes a few hundred words further, with more texture, more context, and more detail than the main article has room for.

For the Curious offers one or two honest recommendations, a book, article, documentary, or podcast related to the topic. No agenda. Just things worth your time.

Worth Watching is two or three sentences pointing you toward something interesting happening in sports right now.

College Football

During the season, two college football emails arrive every week.

Weekend Precedent: College Football arrives Monday morning. It recaps the weekend, talks through the rankings, and closes with Loose Ends, a quick collection of the smaller stories worth knowing about.

Weekend Viewing Guide: College Football arrives Friday morning. It sorts the weekend’s games into viewing windows so you know where to point your remote, and flags the sleeper and the storyline worth your attention.

Both are built around The Precedent Ratings, explained above.

On Video

The Precedent is also on YouTube. Beyond The Precedent is the companion video for each Long View article, and The Precedent: College Football is a weekly video covering the news and the ratings. You can find both on the Precedent Media YouTube channel.

When to Expect It

The Long View publishes every other Thursday morning. The college football emails go out Monday and Friday mornings during the season, The Precedent Daily posts appear on the site through the week, and the videos release in the evening. Consistent, with no filler just to fill a schedule.

What We Cover

The Long View ranges across the NFL, college football, MLB, college basketball, MLS, and the Premier League, and the best story wins regardless of sport. Beyond that, we follow the sports calendar. Right now that means weekly college football coverage, with college basketball and baseball to follow as the seasons turn. The ratings and standings cover all eight leagues year-round.

How The Precedent Is Made

I use AI tools throughout the process, and I’d rather you hear that from me. Grok and Perplexity help with research and finding topics. Claude helps me draft and edit, and helps produce the weekly college football posts from my ratings data and notes.

Some pages, like ratings, standings, schedules, and other numbers-only updates, are generated entirely by AI from my ratings data, with no writing involved. The ratings themselves are my own system, calculated from game results. Anything with real writing in it carries my topics, my angles, and my opinions, and every fact gets checked against a source.

A Note on What This Is

The Precedent has no agenda beyond good sports writing. No hot takes. No outrage. No politics for its own sake. Just a genuine curiosity about how sports works, including the history behind it, the strategy within it, and the business around it.

If that sounds like something you’ve been looking for, you’re in the right place. Subscribing is free.

Written by Bob Sloop.

Follow The Precedent on X at @PrecedentMedia.