The Blogger Who Became One University’s Scold By MARC TRACYOCT. 20, 2017
CHICAGO — Last January, a website called NM Fishbowl published the explosive results of a public-records request for anonymous exit interviews of athletes at the University of New Mexico.
Lobos players, who compete mainly in the Division I Mountain West Conference, said that sports had held them back in their studies. Coaches had mocked female athletes’ weights, they said, and the athletic department provided unsafe transportation to events for lower-profile teams. The football coach Bob Davie, who is credited with righting a losing team, “has no personal relationship with players,” one athlete said.
In the months after its scoop, NM Fishbowl, which bills itself as “Watchdogging the Lobos,” continued to break damaging news about the athletic department. It reported that the state government had placed the department under “enhanced oversight.” It revealed that the university was investigating whether Davie had mistreated players. And it suggested that the former basketball coach Craig Neal had owed his continued employment in part to his friendship with the state’s governor, Susana Martinez.
NM Fishbowl’s credits say the site — apparently created last November — is based in Chicago, not New Mexico, and staffed by one writer: Daniel Libit, a former political reporter. To read his work was to see a gleeful spirit of muckraking, a fondness for 10,000-word posts and a penchant for grandstanding about his legal battles (he has filed two lawsuits seeking records).
At one point, New Mexico Athletic Director Paul Krebs planned a meeting with the university’s athletic council to discuss Libit’s “aggressive nature” — a fact that became public when Libit reported it. Geoff Grammer, The Albuquerque Journal’s chief Lobos reporter, credited Libit with helping to loosen the cap on other scandals, such as the money-losing athletic department’s having paid for a 2015 golf trip to Scotland for Krebs, Neal and athletics donors, a story that a local TV station broke in May. (Krebs soon resigned.)
But not even Krebs’s departure answered the larger questions that many who follow, fund and support New Mexico athletics were asking: Who is Daniel Libit, and what did the University of New Mexico ever do to him?
“I freely grant the strangeness of what I’m doing,” Libit, 34, said in an interview last month in the apartment he shares with his wife overlooking the Chicago River. “I’m in Chicago, and I’m writing about a team that people shouldn’t nationally care about.”
Not everyone is a fan of his work. On Twitter, Libit has sparred with at least one U.N.M. official. (An athletic department spokesman declined to comment for this article.) On Facebook, one Lobos fan told Libit, “If you care about U.N.M., I encourage you to be mindful of the cost of your pursuit of notoriety.”
But Libit, who wears a cropped haircut and an unmistakable swagger, is proudly unsentimental.
“Pro sports fans are ready for someone to disappoint them,” he said. “The college sports fan, by contrast, feels a mission to defend on every count against all evidence.”
Grammer, for one, praised his faraway rival.
“People who think he’s agenda-driven; I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong,” Grammer said. “But I also don’t necessarily know that that’s wrong.”
NM Fishbowl was born of disillusionment and opportunity. Libit, a New Mexico native, grew up a “Lobos basketball geek,” he said, and his first job in journalism was an internship at the sports desk of an Albuquerque newspaper. But he fell out of love, he said, as he grew wise to what he characterized as college sports’ inherent corruption.
A University of Wisconsin graduate who has lived in Milwaukee, Washington and Chicago in a career that included writing for Politico and CNBC.com, Libit started more closely monitoring Lobos athletics in 2013, when he began frequently visiting his parents in New Mexico after his mother was found to have A.L.S. It is difficult not to notice emotional undercurrents to Libit’s choice, which he did not dispute: His father died in 2014 and his mother early last year; both were huge Lobos fans.
After the presidential election last year, armed with public-records laws and a growing inventory of anonymous sources, Libit started his site out of his apartment as what is effectively his new full-time job. (An inheritance gave him some financial means.) He named it in an ironic reference to a complaint from the former Lobos basketball coach Dave Bliss, later disgraced in a 2000s scandal at Baylor, who called Albuquerque an overly inquisitive “fishbowl.”
“Like the scrutiny was so intense,” Libit said, mocking the remark.
The roots of Libit’s cynicism reach down to a 2004 profile he wrote of the basketball coach Bruce Pearl for Milwaukee Magazine. It was standard fluff, Libit recalled, “a little bit maudlin and silly, in that Mitch Albom way.”
Years later, in 2011, Libit revisited Pearl in an article for Deadspin, with further reporting revealing Pearl as not quite the saint Libit had portrayed years earlier. At the time, Pearl, then at Tennessee, had just been fired amid new rumors about N.C.A.A. recruiting violations. (Pearl is now the head coach at Auburn, one of the programs implicated in the college basketball bribery scandal revealed last month.)
The experience helped Libit develop a broader theory of what was wrong with news media coverage of college sports. Reporting on N.C.A.A. rules violations, he argued in a Columbia Journalism Review essay that year, reinforces an unjust system, in which athletes are barred from payment beyond scholarships.
Instead, Libit championed approaching “the ills of college athletics from the less sensational but potentially more fruitful direction of economic justice,” and those words became flesh with NM Fishbowl. A modest example: Last month, NM Fishbowl reported that since 2009 the U.N.M. general budget had contributed more than $4 million toward electricity for its athletic department — a striking contrast with most top programs, which pay for the electricity they use out of their own budgets.
Covering a relatively obscure and shallow-pocketed program, Libit said, actually helps prove his point about treating college sports as a business. “It brings into much starker relief financial mismanagement and the insanity of the tail wagging the dog of the university,” he said. “A million dollars matters at the University of New Mexico. A million dollars doesn’t matter at Ohio State.”
As NM Fishbowl approaches its first anniversary, Libit has no illusions about its potential profitability — many posts on the ad-free site earn only a few thousand readers — but he wonders if he has crafted a model for a traditional news media organization or a nonprofit to follow, perhaps taking dedicated looks at more prominent programs.
“For all the cost-cutting measures and layoffs of local newspapers, there’s still quite a few college sports reporters around the country,” he said. “This is all that’s left to be done.”
B.J. Schecter, a professional-in-residence at Seton Hall University and formerly the editor who oversaw Sports Illustrated’s college sports investigations, said that an expanded NM Fishbowl, or one focused on another program, would not lack for material.
“If I look at college sports,” Schecter said, “I know I can go into just about any program — if I looked hard enough, I could find something.”
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