Ten Years of Getting the Story Right by Refusing to Cover Just the Game

What the Scoreboard Never Showed

Imagine a publication that launches on a Tuesday in May and, by the end of its first decade, has put a sitting president on a historically Black college campus, placed Serena Williams and Common on television together, and helped Michael Jordan reveal something about himself that the highlights never could. That's not a sports outlet. That's something else — something that took ten years to name properly, and which the industry still hasn't fully caught up to.

Andscape — launched as The Undefeated on May 17, 2016 — marks its tenth anniversary this year with a wave of retrospectives from the people who built it. Reading them back to back, you start to notice something the pieces themselves don't quite say directly: the sport was almost never the subject. It was always the door.

The Knee That Rewrote the Assignment

Jesse Washington, reflecting on his most impactful moments at the publication, points to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee as a pivot point — not just for football, not just for protest, but for how sports journalism itself could be practiced. That image didn't just create a news story. It created permission. Permission to ask what the game was really carrying, what the athlete was really saying, what the stadium was really a stand-in for.

Most sports outlets covered Kaepernick the way they cover an injury report: what does this mean for the season, what does this mean for the team, when does it end? Andscape covered it the way a cultural critic covers a monument being torn down — as a referendum on something much older and much larger than fourth-down decisions. That's not a subtle distinction. That's a fundamentally different job description.

I keep returning to this because it explains everything else in these retrospectives. When you change the job description, you change who you call.

A Different Kind of Rolodex

Sheila Matthews, reflecting on her decade at the publication, lists interviews that would look strange in any traditional sports publication's archive: Vice President Kamala Harris. The cast of The Chi. These aren't halftime interviews. They're not post-game pressers. They're conversations that assume the reader understands, without being told, that the culture surrounding the game is inseparable from the game itself — and often more consequential.

This is where the oral history becomes genuinely instructive. The breadth of names and moments documented across ten years — from journalism to viral social posts to feature films — describes an organization that was never really constrained by the sports section. It was using sports as a coordinate system for something bigger: race, identity, power, memory, aspiration. The athletes were protagonists in a story about America, not statistics in a story about athletics.

What took courage was the bet that the audience was ready for that. That Black readers — the primary audience Andscape was built to speak with and for — didn't need the culture filtered out of their sports coverage. That they had, in fact, been waiting for someone to stop filtering it.

What Gets Built in Ten Years

Jesse Washington describes the staff as "a dream team of journalists," and the oral history bears that out with the ambition of what they actually attempted. Bringing President Barack Obama to North Carolina A&T University is the kind of moment that sounds, in summary, like a logistics achievement. Read in context, it's a statement about where important conversations belong and who deserves to be at the center of them.

That's the thread running through all three of these anniversary pieces: a consistent insistence that the most important conversations about sports happen away from the sport. In the interview, not the press conference. On the HBCU campus, not the network studio. In the television special that puts a tennis legend next to a rapper because the overlap between their worlds is not incidental — it's the whole point of paying attention.

Sports journalism, for most of its history, treated culture as a sidebar. Something to acknowledge briefly before returning to the stats, the standings, the transaction wire. Andscape ran that logic backward and never apologized for it.

Ten years in, the retrospectives read with the quiet confidence of people who were right about something before it was obvious. That's a specific kind of satisfaction — not triumphant, not smug, just settled. They built the thing they said they were going to build. The industry watched, some of it followed, and the conversation about what sports coverage can be is genuinely different now than it was in May of 2016.

That's not an anniversary. That's a track record.