Welcome to Year 4 of The I-5 Corridor

A few thoughts as we head into a season of opportunity.

EUGENE — There have been years when I haven’t been ready to ride that escalator up to the suite level of Autzen Stadium for Oregon’s media day. 

You wait all year for summer in this state, then it gets here and one moment you’re on the green at Heron Lakes — or at a campsite in the Wallowas or floating down the Sandy — and the next you’re right back in football season. 

Football season is all-consuming as an Oregon sportswriter. It’s the straw that stirs the drink in this business. It means a lot of drives down to Eugene, a lot of late hours and a fair amount of stress when competing against local and national outlets on coverage of one of college football's premier programs.  

It’s a bear. And that first day of fall camp often feels like a 5 a.m. alarm clock before a workout. You want to hit snooze — but once you’re awake and the muscles start to loosen up, you’re glad you’re there.¹

Strangely enough, heading to my 11th Oregon media day, I was, to continue the metaphor, up before the rooster crowed. 

Yes, Oregon has a big season coming up. The Ducks will be a preseason top-five team. Dillon Gabriel is one of the favorites to win the Heisman. And everything Oregon does here in 2024 will be put under the microscope that comes with the program’s move to the Big Ten. Now in my second decade of coverage on this beat, I can say there hasn’t been a season with this much anticipation since Year 1 for me, with Marcus Mariota and the Ducks on the precipice of history in 2014.

Yes, the football will be good. I’m excited for that. But after seeing a bunch of familiar faces at Autzen on Monday, and after talking to a bunch of players about their lives, and after a drive home back to Portland where my reporter brain churned through the list of stories I get to tell this August, I was hit by a pretty strong sense of gratitude.

That doesn’t usually show up this early in the season.

But, to be frank, I thought the Corridor was dead in the water back in January. I lost my part-time job right before Christmas, just as a storybook Oregon season came to a crashing halt.² That was quite the one-two punch heading into an offseason where August never seemed so far away.

I needed help.

You guys rallied.

When I went all-in with The I-5 Corridor 2.0, January unexpectedly turned into my best-selling month yet. As The Corridor expanded its coverage to include features on the Portland Timbers and Thorns during the spring and summer, this became the first football offseason where the site gained subscribers instead of just treading water.

That, of course, only happens if the stories are good. And I really think we’ve told some bangers over the last seven months, from my profile of Phil Neville, to Shane Hoffmann’s work on the college basketball beat, to the fact that I managed to get Andrew Greif published in these hallowed pages.

This last year has felt as close to the vision I had for The I-5 Corridor when I conceived this thing back in July of 2021, and it still drives me every time I get a message from a subscriber like this one:

Or this one:

Or this one:

Which brings us back to football. By the start of the summer, it became pretty clear that we would get to the fall camp finish/start line. And as we rolled out a few football stories in July, I was pleasantly surprised by how they performed with training camp still a month away.

Maybe there was something to this Big Ten hype, I thought, before a 26-minute sitdown with Dan Lanning earlier this month confirmed it. My ensuing story, 'The rabbit has the gun': Dan Lanning on Oregon's rise, Kirby Smart and Phil Knight's treasure chest, has become The I-5 Corridor’s most-read and best-selling story in this site’s three-year history.

Back in January, I figured I’d be completely running on fumes if I even got to media day. Instead, I showed up with momentum and could actually relate to Lanning when he was asked about what he’s most excited about for this year.

“Just the opportunity, right?” Lanning said. “Really, the opportunity to put our best foot forward. These guys have worked really hard this offseason and we’re all anxious to step on the field for a Saturday, but I know our guys don’t take for granted the work that that requires.”

Getting to Year 4 of The I-5 Corridor took more hard work than any of the years before. I’m glad we’re all still here, because there’s a whole lot of opportunity that awaits.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for supporting.

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor

Hoffmann and Alger covering soccer. Who woulda thunk it?

YOU’RE INVITED:

We’ll be hosting a Corridor Club Zoom meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 21 at 7 p.m. This one is welcome to all paid subscribers. Stop by for a chat with me and some friends about the upcoming football season.

1. Or so I’ve heard.

2. That Michael Penix Jr. has cost me a fair amount of subscriptions the last two years.