Welcome to Bimbo Coles' Escape Room

I've spent the last four months talking to people with Substacks so, inevitably, here I am.

I’m a compulsive rule follower, and Substack says the first thing I should do is introduce myself, so here goes nothing.

My name is Andy Elrick and I’m an Assistant Professor of Sports Communication at Marist University (not college anymore) in Poughkeepsie, New York, also known to sports fans as the place Rik Smits went. I am also the director of Marist’s Center for Sports Communication, which is one of our Centers for Research and Engagement, the best known of which is the Marist Poll. We bring speakers to campus, run workshops, organize social events and generally help students get as much contact as possible with “the industry” in which they hope to make careers.

Before I did what I do now I worked for over 20 years in sports media, first at ESPN and later at College Sports Television, FIBA Europe and finally at CBS Sports Network, where I was the Coordinating Producer of Daily Shows for a bunch of years. If you’re interested in knowing more of this type of info you can go to the website of my production company, which has no clients, and is very much just an online portfolio.

This is all downstream from just generally being a degenerate sports dweeb. I like trading cards (baseball and basketball mostly), collecting jerseys and thinking about guys whenever possible. Some of my favorite guys to think about, besides Bimbo Coles, are Mike Bielecki, Rance Mulliniks and Bill Curley/Danya Abrams.

But right now, I am an academic and of the many things hanging over my head, the most daunting is a chapter for an upcoming academic guide to sports podcasting. I’ve never written a book chapter before, and though the research process has been a blast (mostly because I got to talk to a whole bunch of people I really like and respect) there’s a lot of “data” to be analyzed and about 6,000 words between me and taking a deep breath.

My approach to academic writing—a dissertation and a whole bunch of seminar papers so far—has been a sort of carrot and stick deal. The stick is the kind of interminable prose anyone who has engaged with philosophical or academic texts will be all too familiar with, larded with citations and references to (often purposely opaque) philosophical theories. The carrot is the part where I just get to tell stories, little bits of narrative non-fiction about fandoms or the life of a sports media producer. In order to get through the former, I have to promise myself the later.

That’s what Bimbo Coles’ Escape Room is all about.

If you were hoping it was actually going to be a blog focused on the 14-year NBA veteran’s small business—which I imagine would be located between an Outback Steakhouse and a laundromat in a suburban Atlanta strip mall—I’m sorry to have disappointed you. As far as I can tell, Mr. Coles is not currently operating an escape room, but the good news is that I am both open to any franchising opportunities he might be interested in partnering on, and would be more than happy for this project to, if not revolve around exactly, certainly be sympathetic to providing as much Bimbo Coles content as you care to consume.

What I actually hope to do here is write for fun, about the weird bits of sports and media, and sports media related detritus floating around in my brain. Everyday I am talking to students about both what I know about sports media and what I don’t. In this weeks classes, for instance, I solicited students favorite social media follows, sports or otherwise. What I got was a list of content creators and handles, many of which my calcifying brain is simply not equipped to deal with like FlightReacts, Slushy Noobz and KOT4Q. These are internet personalities and social media accounts that they could talk about all day, but that I have literally never heard of. When I find out what Slushy Noobz is, I will report back (note: Just got back from class and they are two Canadian guys who do ‘shrooms, play Roblox basketball and make some muckbang content).

I like to podcast too, so you might see a bit of that here. I currently…mmm host might be too strong a word…what I think of as a parody of a soccer podcast with my buddies at QPR NYC. QPR stands for Queens Park Rangers, a second division English football club that ruins most of my Saturdays between August and May, and NYC stands for, well, New York City, duh. Back in 2017 we began meeting at a bar in midtown manhattan to watch games, simultaneously starting a chat to keep everyone informed on times and locations of meet ups. Seven years on the chat is still going. I downloaded and printed it out once and the PDF was over 26,000 pages long. The conceit of the show is that we talk about on the pod what we talk about in the chat which, thank god, is not just QPR. Our other obsessions include Eric Adams, Serbian mixed grille (and food more generally), music, politics and film. We do bits, play games, we remember lads. There are morning zoo style audio drops. It’s fun.

For now this is all free content. I don’t know much about the substack economy, but I feel it would be unwise, and possibly irresponsible, to place Bimbo Coles content behind a paywall at this time.

Welcome and enjoy.