USC Trojans wide receiver Makai Lemon (6) reacts after missing a catch in the end zone against the Utah State Aggies during the second quarter at United Airlines Field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Credit: Jonathan Hui-Imagn Images
Arena GroupCollege FootballOnline OutletsSports IllustratedBy Andrew Bucholtz on

An interesting and under-discussed element of the messy transition of Sports Illustrated publishing rights from Arena Group to Minute Media earlier this year was about the FanNation-branded team sites. Around that transition, Arena reportedly demanded at least $50 million for FanNation but didn’t seem to get it.

Despite those demands, Minute kept the FanNation brand after that drama-filled transition and changed it to “On SI.” And they brought over several of the key executives who had led FanNation under Arena. But Arena (which has had a whole lot of questions over its editorial practices in the past) launched its own team sites under its Athlon Sports brand and met with the contractors who worked at those sites, landing some of them.

Now, Saturday saw USC Trojans on SI reporter Bri Amaranthus question if the Athlon USC Trojans site is plagiarizing them, and providing numerous screenshots of three articles with extremely similar language, concepts, rankings, and more.

Those tweets are worth clicking through to see how similar the details are. Interestingly enough, though, most of the articles (by a variety of bylined writers) were still live on Athlon’s USC site as of 4 p.m. ET Saturday. The only one scrubbed at that point is the one on Woody Marks in the first tweet by tagged writer Jake Faigus, who also currently has a locked Twitter/X account.

However, in the two remaining articles, the text is different enough to get past at least some online plagiarism checkers. Scanning the text of the Miller Moss article by Jeff Bilbrey through both PlagiarismDetector and Duplicheckr only detected plagiarism from various places that the article was syndicated to under licensing and with credit, including MSN.com and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Those sites didn’t detect the Trojans on SI article on Moss by Kyron Samuels as a source of plagiarism.

However, a human read of both pieces indicates significant structural similarities. Those range from early reference to the same CBS Sports mock draft by Chris Trapasso (which Bilbrey linked, but Samuels did not) to identical quotes from Michigan DBs coach Lamar Morgan and USC head coach Lincoln Riley. (Neither provides a link for those quotes; perhaps that was at a public press conference, or perhaps one of these writers talked to them without clearly indicating that). And reading those, it is quite easy to get the sense that one is copying the other’s format.

Yes, it’s quite conceivable that both sites decided to write a piece based on the CBS mock. But it’s strange that they went on to use the same two other quotes in the same order and that their overall structure is so similar. (We’re taking Amaranthus’ word for it that Samuels’ piece came first; it bears a Sept. 20 date versus Bilbrey’s Sept. 19 one, but the On SI site doesn’t have a separate “updated” time, so maybe there was an update to it Friday that reset the clock. It would be very odd to call out plagiarism on a piece that came before yours.)

And yes, there are only so many ways to put together words in English. Infinite monkeys and typewriters suggest there are ways to produce similar content without awareness of what else is out there (even if that only produces the blurst of times). But this is at the least worth some questioning, as are the point-for-point power rankings from Bilbrey and On SI’s Cory Pappas.

This has further dimensions beyond even a normal plagiarism dustup thanks to the history of FanNation/OnSI, Minute Media, Arena Group, and SI. We’ll see where it goes from here.

[Bri Amaranthus on X/Twitter]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz