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History of TBS
RaceBannon
Member, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 106,013 
https://si.com/college-football/2019/03/07/recruiting-rivals-247-sites-rankings-business
The model for Rivals, the original college sports subscription network, was created amid crisis. Jim Heckman's marriage to the daughter of legendary Washington coach Don James went up in flames right around the time his business, Sports Washington magazine, collapsed. Having married into Husky football royalty, Heckman had been making a solid living with the magazine and other ventures, including a 900 number he set up to provide recruiting information to callers. He was riding that wave of success in 1992 when accusations began to roll in that he had paid recruits and players and influenced their decision-making. (Heckman told reporters at the time that he had made a small donation to the program in order to secure season tickets.) Heckman denied any boosterism and maintained that he’d simply been providing advice when he told players the reasons they should sign with his father-in-law’s program. The Pac-10 didn’t buy it; the conference leaned on Washington, and the school banned Heckman and several others from contact with the athletics department until 1996.
His business upended, Heckman retreated—sort of. By the mid-1990s, a burgeoning interest in recruiting had taken hold on the servers of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. Fans could dial up and access information about the teenagers their favorite teams were targeting, though there wasn’t much money in it for the information brokers. Other enterprising fans, like Grinolds, were launching sites of their own, on servers that proved ill-equipped to handle their web traffic. Heckman, who’d had success earlier in the decade by uniting the owners of 900 numbers to bargain for a greater profit share, thought the same thing could apply to these sites. He wanted to link them and create a colossus that would be able to bring in meaningful ad revenue. “We started getting pressure from the people that were doing the servers, because we had such high traffic volume,” Grinolds says. “And then Jim came to us and wanted us to join him in his venture, that was going to be Rivals.com. … We were getting pressure because they wanted to boot us off their server. We were the highest non-porn traffic on their servers.”
The model for Rivals, the original college sports subscription network, was created amid crisis. Jim Heckman's marriage to the daughter of legendary Washington coach Don James went up in flames right around the time his business, Sports Washington magazine, collapsed. Having married into Husky football royalty, Heckman had been making a solid living with the magazine and other ventures, including a 900 number he set up to provide recruiting information to callers. He was riding that wave of success in 1992 when accusations began to roll in that he had paid recruits and players and influenced their decision-making. (Heckman told reporters at the time that he had made a small donation to the program in order to secure season tickets.) Heckman denied any boosterism and maintained that he’d simply been providing advice when he told players the reasons they should sign with his father-in-law’s program. The Pac-10 didn’t buy it; the conference leaned on Washington, and the school banned Heckman and several others from contact with the athletics department until 1996.
His business upended, Heckman retreated—sort of. By the mid-1990s, a burgeoning interest in recruiting had taken hold on the servers of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. Fans could dial up and access information about the teenagers their favorite teams were targeting, though there wasn’t much money in it for the information brokers. Other enterprising fans, like Grinolds, were launching sites of their own, on servers that proved ill-equipped to handle their web traffic. Heckman, who’d had success earlier in the decade by uniting the owners of 900 numbers to bargain for a greater profit share, thought the same thing could apply to these sites. He wanted to link them and create a colossus that would be able to bring in meaningful ad revenue. “We started getting pressure from the people that were doing the servers, because we had such high traffic volume,” Grinolds says. “And then Jim came to us and wanted us to join him in his venture, that was going to be Rivals.com. … We were getting pressure because they wanted to boot us off their server. We were the highest non-porn traffic on their servers.”
Comments
Kim Grinolds, co-founder of Dawgman.com, the successful University of Washington site that launched in 1997 and is now under the 247 umbrella, puts it plainly: “We should have died two or three times.”
Depends on whether you account for PMs from Boobs.
A friend told me about it...