SoCalHoops Internet Sports News

Rivals.com:  What's Happening & How
To Get In When It's Down--(Apr. 26, 2001)

Rivals is going down. Rivals is staying up.  Rivals is being sold.  Rivals has filed bankruptcy.   Hey, we don't know what the heck is really going on over there, and neither evidently does anyone else.   But we were told that there are NO MORE engineers working for Rivals. At least that's what evidently has been happening there for the past few days.  Sources indicate that when all the former employees at Rivals were informed a few weeks ago that the company would cease operations, that a few dedicated engineers elected to stay on until things got sorted out, keeping the embattled network "on the air" so to speak.  Well, evidently in the past few days, there's been some sort of a power struggle over who these two or three engineers would eventually work for, and as a part of the power struggle, they too walked out.

Previously, as bugs and problems arose on the Rivals network, they would normally be routinely dealt with by a phalanx of engineers.  But without any techies who know how the whole thing works, small problems can quickly spiral into huge website instabilities, and Rivals apparently reached that point yesterday.    The entire "front-page" portion of their network and thus the "front pages" of all of their sites were inaccessible for the past two days.   The network was brought back to life last night, but we have no idea whether that's temporary, permanent, or somewhere in between. 

The Rivals message boards, which is really where everyone communicates on that network anyway, remained accessible.  But unless you had the message boards individually bookmarked, it was impossible to get in.  Now we have no idea how much longer any of the Rivals' message boards will remain open.   So yesterday, we hunted around a bit and tried to find the links to most of the message boards.  It was a daunting task, and we only managed to make it through about 1/3 of the entire network.  But what we found out in the process about Rivals was interesting.  Most of the news has been posted on the various message boards by the "publishers" of the individual sites. 

On the old USF site, someone posted an e-mail purporting to be from "Rivals".   Here's what it said: 

An e-mail from Rivals...."You are undoubtedly aware that the site has been down most of the day. We are continuing to work as hard as we can to fix the problem, and expect to have the site up sometime tomorrow (Thursday). These are difficult circumstances for all of us; we are extremely sorry for the outage and are keenly aware of the importance of keeping the site up while we conclude an agreement to transfer the hosting responsibilities to another entity. We expect to make an announcement in that regard later this week."

Now that wasn't too illuminating, so we hunted around and found more.  On one of the boards, we can't remember which one, we found perhaps the beginning point for any story on what is happening with the Rivals network and what may happen to it in the future. 

"NASHVILLE--April 20, 2001--AllianceSports [AllianceSports.com] announced today that it has executed an agreement to acquire or license certain assets of Rival Networks, Inc., known throughout the internet and sports industries as Rivals.com. Rivals built a network of more than 600 sports-related sites into the stickiest sports site on the Internet, generating up to 30 million daily page views. The agreement covers Rivals.com's trademarks and trade names, marketing materials, and selected hardware, software source code, databases, and content. The transaction also involves certain assets sold by AllianceSports to Rivals.com in January 2000. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both AllianceSports and Rivals.com. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Rivals.com will continue operations of the existing Rivals.com network of sites as arrangements are made for the transition of the Rivals' network to AllianceSports."

Ok, so far so good.  That's pretty interesting stuff.   How are the minions among the "publishers" taking the news?  What are they doing about relocating their sites, staying, going back to independence, or just plain shutting down?  Here's what we discovered from a smattering of Rivals-based sites:

From the Rivals Michigan site's operator:

"After Rivals announced that it was shutting down, we received assurances that our site would stay up -- from the management team retained to sell the company's assets, from the founder of the company who is trying to form a business to keep the network going and from a group of former Rivals employees who are buying Rivals' assets and building a new, but smaller, network.  It appears that the founder, who left Rivals last summer, has the support of the site's engineers. When the decision was made to sell the assets to the former employees, he took the engineers with him, shutting down the front page and premium plus sections of the site. While the message board is still up, we do not know how long this will last. We are working to have a new content location as quickly as possible (possibly tomorrow) and a backup plan for the message board."

From the Michigan State "Spartan Central.com" site:

Trevor Barnes [SpartanCentral publisher] has a bomb shelter built for our message boards in case the apocalypse hits. Go to spartantailgate.com if and when this rivals.com thing ever blows up.  There has been a coup at Rivals.com. The guy who founded Rivals.com - but was later fired - has assembled a crack staff of techies and others. They are in the process of acquiring the assets and trying to make a go of it again. A lot of the other site publishers are sore at the whole rivals.com experience because they got screwed in the premium site project. However, we at Spartan Magazine resisted joining the premium site project because we already had a premium content program of our own, in Spartan Plus email. Thus, we didn't lose any money on the deal, and we aren't sore at rivals.com. Thus we're riding it out for now.  Rivals.com did a lot of work to gain some name recognition for SpartanMag.com and we're sticking with it for a while.  But bookmark the bomb shelter just in case.

From the Syracuse Board publishers:

Jim Heckman, the founder of Rivals, and Alliance Sports are currently fighting over Rival's dead body. Alliance seems to have won, however - things could change. What does that mean for us? Heckman had asked that all of the publishers wait until last Friday before deciding what they wanted to do. Last Friday came, and Alliance announced they had bought up Rival's assets.  The plan is to listen to Alliance Sports, but returning to independence is the most likely outcome. I wouldn't doubt it at all if whoever buys up Rival's assets decides to have someone run this site as is, but under a different name. Good luck to them. The tentative moving day is this Friday. There are scripts set up on two different servers, just incase the first one can't handle the load. Assuming we leave Rivals - please be a little patient with the new servers. It may take a few days to work out the bugs.  And remember - if things get shut off here, use "www.syracusefan.com" as the backup url. If things get shut off without notice, it may take me a little while to set up the forwarding. You may want to bookmark the url linked to below:
SyracuseHoops.com/ SyracuseFan.com
Thanks

From the University of Central Florida Site:

Guys,
While the transition takes place from the old Rivals Network to Alliance Sports, all of the sites were supposed to continue operating as normally. However, all of the employees were laid off when the announcement was made and the 2 engineers being retained to keep the sites going quit last Friday. And now the sites have crashed. Hopefully they will fix things soon-- this is a message I just received from the CEO of Rivals. As far as UCFSports.com goes, I am still considering several options.
==================
You are undoubtedly aware that the site has been down most of the day. We are continuing to work as hard as we can to fix the problem, and expect to
have the site up sometime tomorrow. These are difficult circumstances for all of us; we are extremely sorry for the outage and are keenly aware of the importance of keeping the site up while we conclude an agreement to transfer the hosting responsibilities to another entity. We expect to make an announcement in that regard later this week. Should you have specific questions, please send email to [e-mail deleted]. Thank you for your understanding.
Saul Gamoran
Chief Executive Officer

From the Boston College site, Eagle Action:

Folks, it looks like the Fat Lady is finally singing for Rivals.com. Effective NOW, Eagle Action is ending its relationship with the former Rivals.com network and moving to a new location at: www.allsports.com/ncaa/bostoncollege. Cut and paste the address and be sure to change your bookmarks. At our new site, you'll find stories, message boards, and access to our premium content service -- same stuff, different location.  I think you'll be pleased with the new message boards. And allsports will shortly be announcing a deal which will allow them to match, if not exceed, the access to up-to-date sports text and images which was available via the Rivals site. I apologize for the necessity of making this change, and I look forward to seeing all of you at the new site.
Mike Rutstein. Publisher
Eagle Action

Note: those of you who subscribed to our Premium Plus service through Rivals.com will automatically have their subscriptions transferred to what we now call our Inside Info service, which is accessed through the allsports site. However, when your old PP subscription lapses, you will have to go through the registration procedure for Inside Info. Having done this once, you will then be renewed automatically for as long you want to receive the Inside Info service. We expect the Inside Info service to become operational over the weekend. Please be patient as we sort out the technical details and MANUALLY re-enter all our existing subscribers along with their passwords.

From Idaho Insight:

Over the last year and a half, Andrew and I have had a great deal of enjoyment publishing this site. Many of you have become more than just names on the message board. Neither of us is going to pursue another web address to try to keep this going. If any of you want to try, drop me a line if you want any help or suggestions. I know that you will end up somewhere, and I'll undoubtedly drop by from time to time. Until then, and forever . . . GO VANDALS!!
I. J. Longeteig
Andrew Longeteig
Your Publishers

More to the point, from Temple "OwlScoop.com":

With the dissolution of Rivals.com, this site is now dormant effective April 25, 2001. OwlScoop.com has left the Rivals.com network and can still be reached by entering the URL: HTTP://WWW.OWLSCOOP.COM. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

From Louisville CardinalSports.com:

Our new Louisville SportsReport boards will be located at the locally-based Louisville.com site, hopefully as soon as next week. Actually, we can use the existing Louisville Cardinal Sports forum on the Louisville.com site right now. To do so, you can go to that front page, click on Louisville Forum (under the word EXCHANGE), register as a new user, then post on the Cardinal Sports forum. Guided by LSR's Jason Puckett, we'll start servicing that site, too, but will also keep up with cardinalsports.com as long as it stays up...and NO ONE knows how long that will be. - Our entire new site will be part of the Louisville.com site, and we'll likely also have a presence on Kentucky.com. I may get more news on the national scene at our College Sports Publishers Assoc. convention in Atlanta this weekend. We'll keep you posted. Thanks for hanging in there with us. - Ron Steiner, Editor and Publisher

From the Arkansas State "TribalGrounds.com" site:

We recently relocated this site to TribalGrounds.com.   We were approached by several different groups but felt that returning to our roots as independent site was the best option for this site and the Indian family. Recently AllianceSports has announced it has acquired many of the assets of Rivals. The contracts between Rivals and publishers such as us are non-assignable so this site was not purchased nor did they purchase the right to use the name TribalGrounds, our domain name TribalGrounds.com, our photos or our stories. We have been told that Alliance will accept current Rivals members but we will not seek such membership. Please join us at our new home.

From the Boneyard.com (UConn):

Jim Heckman, the founder of Rivals, and Alliance Sports are currently fighting over Rival's dead body. Alliance seems to have won, however - things could change. What does that mean for us? Heckman had asked that all of the publishers wait until last Friday before deciding what they wanted to do. Last Friday came, and Alliance announced they had bought up Rival's assets.  The plan is to listen to Alliance Sports, but returning to independence is the most likely outcome. I wouldn't doubt it at all if whoever buys up Rival's assets decides to have someone run the uconn site as is, but under a different name. Good luck to them. The tentative moving day is this Friday. There are scripts set up on two different servers, just incase the first one can't handle the load. Assuming we leave Rivals - please be a little patient with the new servers. It may take a few days to work out the bugs. And remember - if things get shut off here, use "the-boneyard.org" as the backup url.

Thanks

From VUSports (Villanova):

Basically, we intend to have a message board up and running immediately upon the shut-down of Rivals. You can find this new message board system at: this location. This new message board will be a "stop-gap" until we find a more permanent solution. Since Peter and I are both very busy through June 1, this stop-gap might be for 60 days or so. Unfortunately, the VUsports.com domain name will not be functional immediately so we are going to provide a somewhat difficult URL. But, don't worry this one will be remain standing! After we get the stop-gap running, Pete and I are going to consider a number of options: * Move back to a pre-Rivals situation where Pete hosts the site from his own server and we develop all the HTML from scratch. This will be very similar to the initial site. * Use a third-party provider to host the site. The look and the feel of the site will likely resemble the intial vusports.com, but Pete and I will not host it. * Partner with other rivals publishers to create a more low-scale rivals type site. There are many great publishers out there and if we join hands, it might create a great site. Whatever the end result, VUsports.com will still be the best site for Villanova Information. Further, we appreciate your patience during this transition period. In the mean-time, please register on the breaking-news database so we can email you with information of breaking news. Again, thanks for your understanding in these matters.

Ok, so there is a general feeling of insecurity.  The network has been down for days at a time right now.  We don't know whether the outtage which occurred this week is indeed temporary, or will turn permanent quickly.  Again, the message board portion of Rivals seems to be a bit more stable than the rest of the site.  We're not software engineering-types, and can't explain why or if that is so, but we do know that if the network goes dead again and you want to find a favorite site, you'll need to have the message board section of the site in question bookmarked, so you can get in "the back door" so to speak.

So we thought we'd help, and at the same time give at least an overview of what is currently happening at some (but by no means all) of the Rivals' college and recruiting websites, whether they are up, down, staying, going, or indifferent to the whole mess.

So we've created a handy little (actually it kept getting larger than we intended) grid below.   If you click on a link below, it may or may not work.  What we've tried to do is provide direct links for those current and soon-to-be-former Rivals sites that were still accessible today,  to keep you all in touch with your favorite sites.   If we've found a link to a new/temporary home, we've listed that too.    We've also listed e-mail addresses of the administrators where we know them, so if you want to find out where their new or temporary sites are, you can just e-mail them directly.    Rivals as we knew it was an interesting experiment while it lasted.  It may not be dead either.  Some or all of the sites may yet resurface as part of a package deal, but with the main site now going down at seemingly more regular intervals, and access to the "stories" part of the Rivals sites sometimes not possible for days at a stretch, we thought you'd enjoy knowing how to get in or where else to go for your "daily fix".   Hope this helps. 

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