Today Fox Sports has added another prominent college football voice to help bolster their coverage of the sport. After signing Bruce Feldman from CBS a few months ago, now longtime Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel is leaving the magazine after over a decade of service to move to Los Angeles. The move was first reported by The Big Lead. Here’s the official confirmation from Fox:
Stewart Mandel, one of the nation’s leading college sports writers, joins FOXSports.com as a senior columnist covering college football and college basketball.
He will make his debut on FOXSports.com in July.
Mandel has spent the previous 15 years at Sports Illustrated, most recently as a senior writer, where he wrote for the magazine and SI.com.
Mandel has covered 15 BCS national championship games and eight Final Fours and published one book — Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy That Reign Over College Football. He’s also won multiple awards in the Football Writers Association of America’s annual contest, including first place for enterprise in 2008.
Before his stint at Sports Illustrated, Mandel worked at ESPN the Magazine, ABC Sports Online and The Cincinnati Enquirer. He’s a Northwestern grad with a degree in journalism.
Mandel’s hire is interesting for two reasons – both for the continued stocking of talent at Fox… and the depreciation of talent at Sports Illustrated.
First from the Sports Illustrated perspective (let’s start with the bad news), it’s another demoralizing loss for the magazine. SI has seen many familiar faces depart in the past couple years, whether it’s due to better opportunities elsewhere or the tightening of their pursestrings. Mandel (Fox) joins the likes of Jimmy Traina (Fox), Jim Trotter (ESPN) among the most recent departures. There’s still some good things happening at SI with The MMQB and Extra Mustard, but one has to really take a long look at what’s happening at Sports Illustrated in losing someone so intrinsically associated with the magazine like Mandel.
On the brighter side, it’s another ambitious hire for Fox Sports. While Fox Sports 1 has gotten all the attention, FoxSports.com has seen significant additions with the likes of Mandel, Feldman, Traina, and Erik Malinowski. Fox has made a shift in their web strategy moving towards a more pop-culture oriented look and feel, but it’s encouraging that they are aggressively pursuing top writers.
Perhaps more intriguing, Fox Sports seems to be particularly targeting prominent college football voices. It’s no secret that Fox College Saturday was a failure on the TV side and couldn’t reach an audience, but perhaps Fox can gain some equity with fans online and then look to slowly transfer that audience to television, where they can look to make more of an impact.
[Fox]
Comments are closed.