The Sports Judge preserves and revives the editorial work of The Sports Jury — a contributor-driven sports site that ran from roughly 2008 to 2014 — organized by author, with each story's images and view count kept alongside it. What follows is the story of the original publication.
An independent sports-media site, built before the model was obvious
The Sports Jury began in 2008 as a weekly college football poll on the FaceTheJury sports forum (facethejury.com), run by three regulars who met there and couldn't stop debating the games: William Horschak (enigma), Tom Johnson (flyintoofast), and Jacob Colonna (slowflowpro). The poll caught on, and the three decided the idea deserved a home of its own.
What they built was a site for sports fan journalists — a place where any contributor could publish their own articles directly and have them carried by Google News, without waiting on a traditional media gatekeeper. William led the technical side, specializing in the research, design, implementation, and build of the platform itself, engineering it for maximum reach and amplification of the site's content.
As it caught on, The Sports Jury grew well beyond that original trio, bringing on more writers to cover the games, storylines, and debates of the era for a growing online audience.
“Bleacher Report before Bleacher Report.”
The founders describe it as an open platform where sports writers could publish, build a byline, and reach readers without waiting for a traditional media gatekeeper. The contributor model was the core of the site: recruit capable writers, give them a clear editorial lane, and keep the publishing engine running on a steady cadence.
Operating the platform
Running The Sports Jury meant managing a full publishing operation: finding and recruiting writers, coordinating who covered what, keeping an editorial workflow moving, holding a publishing cadence readers could rely on, and administering the site itself — all while growing the audience to roughly 500,000 unique monthly visitors at its peak.
- Writer recruitment and coordination across a distributed contributor roster.
- Editorial workflow — assignments, review, and scheduling from pitch to publish.
- A consistent publishing cadence that kept the site fresh and readers returning.
- Site administration: platform upkeep, publishing tools, and day-to-day operations.
- Audience development — traffic data read month over month, with editorial and growth decisions following what the numbers showed.
Writers & reach
The clearest measure of a contributor platform is what it does for its contributors. Several writers connected to The Sports Jury went on to wider visibility in sports media. In the early 2010s, several had work featured through SportsIllustrated.com — a meaningful marker for an independent site operating outside the established sports-media ecosystem. For the writers, The Sports Jury was a working byline and a proving ground; the model was simple: recruit well, edit consistently, publish reliably, and the platform lifts the people on it.
The launch quickly drew real talent — most notably Ben Dial, who became the site's breakout voice in college football. His SEC coverage and Arkansas Razorbacks writing — headlined by his open “Letter to the Commissioner of the SEC” — struck a nerve and turned into a runaway hit: across 60 articles, Ben amassed more than 9 million views (9,057,100), making him one of the single biggest reasons for the site's success.
Key people of The Sports Jury, LLC
What it taught
The Sports Jury was an early chapter, not the headline — and its value is what it established: working fluency in building and operating things online, earned years before that skill set became widely relevant.
Bylines are preserved as published. Where an original image could not be recovered, a placeholder or generated cover is shown. Archived editorial works are © The Sports Jury, LLC, a now-defunct Wisconsin LLC.