Hi everybody!
Just last week, I admonished athletics departments nationwide for refusing to cut spending. And later this week, I’ll be on a new episode of Phantom Island where I’ll continue to harp on that very issue. Comes out Friday, I believe.
And while I stand by my argument in both my story and podcast appearance, I also have to shout, “No! Not like this!”
On Monday, Washington State announced a new partnership with a company called FanWord, which drew some pretty intense criticism online.
The deal is for FanWord Assist, a software platform that lets college athletics departments quickly produce game recaps, update player bios, and publish long-form features. How does it speed up the process?
You already know! FanWord provides a custom LLM where staffers can plug in a game’s play-by-play right after it ends and, moments later, have a story out the door.
But while the Cougars got raked for it, they are far from the only university that has adopted the software.
In its press release, Wazzu said that it was joining 250 schools already using FanWord. And on FanWord’s own website, it brags that last season, college sports communicators “generated 30,000 recaps through the platform.”
Thirty thousand! College sports is a bellwether for so much. Who knew it was also the canary for the dead internet?
To be fair, a lot of the criticism online was conflating the job of an athletic department with the job of a media outlet. Those are two different things with two very different goals.
But while watching a webinar about schools adopting FanWord Assist, I gotta say… don’t love it.
Here’s how an associate AD for communications discussed her process after conducting an interview with an athlete.
“There was a point where I was like, ‘What is he even saying? What is the point of this story? I'm not even sure.’ So then I just plugged the interview in, hit generate like three different times, and on the final one I was like, ‘this is the story.’ And then we had a great feature out of it.”
The nicest thing I’ll say is, I’m sure you did think it was great.
While FanWord stresses it isn’t here to take away jobs, in that same webinar, an SID at DePaul made that exact argument.
“It's been a great return on investment,” she said. “It's a lot of stuff that we relied on students for. I work in Chicago, where our students get paid minimum wage, which is, I think, up to $17 an hour. So love our student workers, but it was a great opportunity for us to downsize some costs.”
DePaul, when reached by FOIAball, said that the school did not cut student positions after adopting FanWord. The staffer told me she “could have chosen my words more carefully.”
I have my doubts. Because they also flagged something important: the athletic department’s “student worker compensation pool” hadn’t grown in three years, which forced them to be more selective in how they use student labor when Chicago’s minimum wage went up by a buck. (Read: cut hours, not necessarily positions.)
And like, I get we’ve lost the plot with student-athletes. They aren’t there to learn. Fine by me. But actual students? They are!
If a school can’t find a way to use the students they have, can’t be bothered to fork over an extra $70,000 or whatever a year to pay them all minimum wage, so they can get valuable, on-the-job experience at the school they are paying to attend, how do you even call yourself a school anymore?
That’s just maddening to me.
I do think it’s important to let the CEO of FanWord, Chris Aumueller, defend himself. But that presents me with a problem. I emailed him at about 10:00 a.m. today, and at 5:00 p.m., he responded with 1,000 words. All very thoughtful and reasoned. I read every one. But this newsletter was due in your inbox hours ago. And despite this being a product I love and care about, come on, I don’t have time to pick and choose his most salient points and weave them into a beautifully crafted, coherent narrative.
If only there was a way to quickly summarize and synthesize it all…….
He said he understood the backlash given Washington State’s journalism tradition, but emphasized that FanWord assists with tasks like analyzing stats, transcribing interviews, and drafting content, while communications staff retain control.
He said both large and small athletics departments face heavy workloads, and the tool is intended to give staff time back.
The platform doesn’t publish automatically; schools retain control over reviewing, editing, approving, and publishing content.
He said AI disclosure policies should be set by individual institutions, rather than dictated by FanWord.
He said no institution had told FanWord it eliminated an employee or staff position because of the tool, and it isn’t sold as a staff-reduction product.
He said FanWord did not train or fine-tune an underlying model on journalists’ or universities’ work; it created its own examples based on college athletics writing conventions.
On recap quality, he said the company continually addresses issues through monthly updates.
Huh, that worked better than I thought.
Jokes aside, I do think he gave some understandable answers to some of my questions, so I’m sharing a link to his full response here.
Okay, yes, I used an AI just there. But this newsletter is always written by humans (me), for humans (you).
And for this, I didn’t just summarize a press release. This story involved watching webinars, scrolling through contracts, reading so many recaps of Florida State football, and getting schools on record about their use of AI in athletics’ content.
My paid subscribers fund this work. There is no generate button for a FOIAball story. So support me, a real person, fighting for you, who is also a real person.
According to releases on its website, FanWord has partnered with Baylor, FIU, Florida State, ODU, Tulsa, UConn, USF, and others. I also obtained contracts for Colorado State, Nebraska, Texas Tech, and Virginia Tech. (The service runs around $4,000 a year for most big schools.)
None of the schools have any disclosures about AI-generated content. They may be using it for some sports, but not others. Nebraska told me that while they will use AI-generated content, they haven’t yet.
One school where the content is likely AI-assisted is the University of Tulsa, which was featured in a FanWord case study. The school said in the first six months of the contract, it generated 196 game recaps.
Tulsa said it opted for FanWord in a time of transition, when the department was understaffed. But once Tulsa was “fully staffed, FanWord Assist was already part of the operation. And it stayed that way.”
Funny how these things show up and never go away. It’s why we need to swat them down. From the jump!
And though I can’t be certain what exact words on their website are AI, I found reading about the Golden Hurricane’s hot start to the 2026 season a touch uncanny.
Take a look at the recap of their opening season win against Oklahoma State. The piece alternates between using players' full names and last names. You get, in five references across six sentences, Tulsa’s QB called Baylor Hayes, Baylor Hayes, Hayes, Hayes, Baylor Hayes.
There’s weirdly inconsistent field position references, with the ball spotted on the “OSU 35,” “the OSU33,” and the “Oklahoma St. 8.”
And the sentences don’t roll off your tongue.
“The Tulsa defense got off the field again at 10:10 when Kyran Duhon stopped Ayo Adeyi for no gain on fourth-and-1 at the TLS41, and the offense turned the field position into a 59-yard drive capped by Baylor Hayes' 21-yard touchdown pass to Singleton for a 17-3 lead after Owen Carey's extra point.”
The software seems obsessed with noting where the ball is at the end of the first and third quarter, which I think it clocks as significant. It also loves mentioning successful extra points. In the 24-10 victory, all four PATs got a line about the kicks being good.
But if the writing sucks, I only have myself to blame. In September, FanWord launched an improved LLM, Game Recaps 2.0. It “rebuilt the language layer from the ground up, using hand-selected examples of exceptional college athletics writing to educate our platform about what natural phrasing sounds like in this specific corner of the industry.”
And it offers, “in an age of vapid AI slop, verbs that feel chosen rather than coldly assembled.”
I do feel like this is literally the definition of coldly assembled, but agree to disagree.
My alma mater has a contract with them. They played a thrilling game on Friday. How did it (maybe, Tech didn’t respond to my inquiry) describe Virginia Tech getting the ball back with under four minutes to play and embarking on a 16-play, 62-yard drive to set up a potential game-winning kick?
“The Hokies had a chance to put together a game-winning drive and moved the ball down the field and into position for a field goal that would be the last play of the game.”
Could not have written it better myself. In a way, maybe I did!
My favorite quirk of the software is that it loves to explain how much time each quarter is.
“Back-up quarterback Jaylen Henderson was given the offensive reins to start the fourth quarter, a 15-minute period that saw Liberty rack up 110 of its 379 total offensive yards on the day.”
“The third quarter saw a different story. The third 15-minute period saw a combined 48 total offensive yards.”
I have many more examples, but I also am faced with a dilemma. Any issue I flag here is only gonna get clocked by their team and used to improve their AI and make it less likely we’ll notice it in the future.
It’s a real Catch-22. But now that you know, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble spotting it everywhere.
I’ll see you tomorrow!
Press box via SDI Productions/Getty; AI face via sarayut Thaneerat/Getty
