Three weeks ago, word came out that Scott Rabalais, the veteran LSU beat writer for The Advocate (The Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) was leaving the paper to join an unknown outfit called TigerGumbo.com. At the time, tigergumbo.com was little more than a “coming soon” page. As the football season crept closer and then kicked off, TigerGumbo remained in “coming soon” mode with Rabalais stories just pasted in to the sole page the site seemed to have.
I’ve been checking in (I doubt anybody else is - the momentum of adding Rabalais was lost when the season started without a viable site up) to see when the site might actually “launch”, and apparently it has now.
I think it was better in “coming soon” mode.
The site is befuddling horrible. Just bad. Real bad. Broken links, empty sections, a registration system that apparently has no purpose (and no Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc.) and a hideous design with tons of obnoxious scrolling elements and certain pages that render as black text on an almost-black background (in Firefox, at least). Awesome.
If this was just another stupid site put up by some self-important jackass (like The Wisdom is), I could understand the horribleness. But apparently TigerGumbo is “An Official ESPN Affiliate” that somehow attracted the most recognizable LSU sports writer to work for it. How can it be in such poor shape with football season underway?
I thought it might be fun to figure out what TigerGumbo is all about.
When Rabalais was hired, there was a mention of “Impact Sports” as being behind the site. A little digging turned up a connection between TigerGumbo and similar sites for Alabama and Auburn. And those sites are built-out enough to link them back to a guy in Mississippi named Jamie Sablich. He apparently runs an empire consisting of casino supplies, beverage systems, a cabinet-making shop, a restaurant supply business and a couple of restaurants - including Burger Burger in Biloxi. He also seems to have some kind of technology consulting shop, but there’s no mention of online publishing, college sports or anything of the sort on his sites.
Sablich formed Impact Sports LSU, LLC on August 13 (the Alabama and Auburn LLCs were formed in May, which is also when the domains were created), so I think it’s likely that he launched TigerGumbo based on closing a deal with Rabalais to join up. And, sure, they’ve had little time to ramp up and would probably prefer nobody find them just yet.
But it’s curious that Sablich would land this “ESPN Affiliate” designation for high-profile programs like Alabama, Auburn and LSU on his newly-created sites. All three schools, of course, have really active online communities, so how the casino equipment king of coastal Mississippi ends up with that relationship is a real head-scratcher. None of these sites have approached anything close to critical mass, and ESPN - well, they’re the leader in sports or whatever.
What, exactly, it means to be “An Official ESPN Affiliate” is a bit of an open question as well. If it’s something akin to Yahoo’s Rivals.com, that hasn’t become apparent on ESPN.com yet. There are scattered references online to team-oriented sites and sport-specific sites “becoming an ESPN affiliate”, and there are references to geographic “affiliate” sales across media in ESPN sales propaganda, so maybe it’s just an ad-sales network at this point.
In any case, Sablich was able to secure these affiliate relationships based on something other than having created successful sites for these programs. That just seems odd in the online world where reputations are everything and site loyalty is strong. And for a guy like Rabalais to sign on to work for a then-nonexistent site owned by a guy who had been in the online sports publishing world for three months is also curious. My guess there is he was probably offered early retirement from The Advocate and doesn’t have much to lose here.
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