A couple weeks back, I threw a Hail Mary email to the team in charge of Kennesaw State football’s media relations to find out if a path existed for this website to get a press credential next season. I don’t know if I’ll get a response this time around, or if I even deserve one (probably not). By the letter of the law, Hoot State doesn’t employ any professional journalists, which seems to be a dealbreaker from my experience. Fair enough if that’s still the policy.
Like every great negotiator, I also tossed in a preemptive counter offer that would be a much worse deal for me: I’d be willing to write for KSU Owls dot com for free instead and try to do similar stories in-house. Access doesn’t make or break what we’re doing here, but that added legitimacy of being in the room and asking questions would without a doubt improve the end product. To me, the URL is the least important aspect if they'd be willing to give me a shot one way or the other. I would become a suit in one second flat if they asked me to write some Parliament Profiles.
None of this is driven by profit, anyway. There’s an infinite number of better ways to earn money than blogging about Kennesaw State football. That much I know. Depending on your perspective, the lack of “professionalism” might be a net positive. There’s no profit-obsessed publisher demanding to scale back KSU content, no editor to send me to a different one of the three G6 programs I cover, and no guiding principles other than curiosity and love of the game. Like I mentioned to the staff in my email, every time I sit down to write something at real sicko hours of the night, my goal is to create the sort of Owls website I’d want to read.
No hard feelings either way, because this unprofessional website’s already locked in the lab preparing for football season. Earlier this week, we hit the 100-day mark in the countdown to kickoff and started a galaxy-brained series idea: Let’s attempt to write something every day of the countdown that matches up with each player’s roster number.
In case you missed the first three posts:
As much as I enjoyed the painstaking process of putting together a handful of way-too-detailed position previews last year, numbers don’t lie on the backend of the website. The average time spent for visitors revealed that almost none of the people who click the longer stories spent any sort of time reading them. Unless they are superhuman, the average person might read a sentence or two and then fully check out. If an Owls preview is posted in the woods and nobody’s there to read it, how will anyone find obscure takes buried deep into a 3K word post?
We’re going to tighten it up this year by writing shorter posts more often. Outlining the players and potential stories that interest me, that comes out to like 50 posts between now and kickoff. That probably won’t happen exactly as planned. This website just works better with some semblance of structure. Think of it like a scripted drive where the coordinator might get distracted midway through and go get a beer at the concession stand.
Some posts will still go quite long. Lack of an editor means I can’t help myself sometimes. Some days, especially as the season gets closer and more timely topics emerge, the player might just get a quick mention at the beginning or end. A few Owls, like #95 Connor Coxwell today, will end up folded into a more comprehensive piece later on if/when the players around them on the roster fit into a broader theme worth writing about.
As always, thank you for subscribing to Hoot State. My DMs are always open for anyone who wants to correct an error or tell me I don’t know ball.
Roster countdown: #95 Connor Coxwell
6’5”, 245 | DE | Freshman | North Gwinnett HS
“Connor Coxwell is a big human being who is able to disrupt the pass, disrupt the run, and constantly put pressure on the quarterback.”
Pittsburgh, Memphis, App. State, and more were in the mix for the three-star DE, ranked in the 247 Composite as the #161 overall edge prospect in the nation. Five of Kennesaw State’s 2026 opponents offered Coxwell, who visited for the Arkansas State game last season. His KSU recruitment played out a bit under-the-radar, with a public commitment the night before making it official on the early signing day in December.
Coxwell will enroll this summer (probably this weekend, tbh) after finishing up his North Gwinnett career on the basketball court. That’s fitting, because I’m working on a story about how Coxwell, Zakir Abdul-Salaam, and the rest of the Owls’ young DL mirror Antoine Pettway’s roster-building strategy over at the Convocation Center.
More to come later this week.
