Welcome to the new Split Zone Duo

We're on Substack now. Here's what that means.

Welcome to the new Split Zone Duo 

We’re Steven Godfrey, Richard Johnson, and Alex Kirshner. Here’s a bit about us. After covering the sport professionally together for the better part of a decade, we started this college football podcast in the bleak days of the fall of 2020, and since then, the response from our audience has not only changed our lives but also convinced us to make a go at turning our show into a sustainable small business. 

Godfrey now writes about the sport for the Washington Post. Richard is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated. And Alex covers football and business topics for a long list of publications, but this is where we come together to dive into the sport we love, alongside an audience that has given us the dream of talking about it for a living. For the past three years, the most important ingredient in that process has been a loyal paying subscriber base of nearly 5,000 of our listeners who have gotten premium episodes on Patreon. We’ve set out to give them a different kind of college football podcast, one that obsesses about the ins and outs of the sport and gets into teams and details that most media covering the sport do not. 

We’ve made the move to Substack because the tools on this platform will allow us to do more and better work for the audience that has put so much trust in us. Substack is built for journalism and media, and we’re going to make quick use of its gadgets: In addition to frequent subscriber-only podcasts, we’re also rolling out a regular college football newsletter, where we’ll carry the spirit of the podcast over to the written word. We’re looking forward to taking advantage of Substack’s community interaction features, like live chats, and using this place to improve what we do for you. 

If you already know the deal here, thanks so much for joining us on the ride. We’ll work hard to make your subscription the best money you spend every month. Existing subscribers who were with us on Patreon are still signed up here through the end of November, but you will need to update your payment information to stay subscribed beyond that point. It takes just a few seconds to knock that out, with the same email address you’ve been using. The bonus episodes will keep showing up in your email, but they’ll be hosted here, not on Patreon, and on a new private RSS feed that you can set up via an episode email or the “manage subscription” section of your account. Just like below:

And if you’re just meeting us for the first time, or haven’t subscribed yet, welcome! You can sign up for a free subscription to get occasional podcasts and newsletters and stay up to date with what we’re doing, And you can listen to free episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Here we are on Apple and Spotify, for starters. Find us on YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok, too. 

There are lots of good college football podcasts, so we focus on giving you something you won’t get elsewhere. We think about that in a few different ways. But at root, we think college football is best if you eat the whole hog. That means not just focusing on the top few teams or the Playoff race, but looking for interesting stories wherever they might be. That could be at Michigan or at Western Michigan. And it also means not just talking about the games on the field, though we do that a lot, but diving into the nuts and bolts that make this sport the sprawling, beautiful mess it is. We like to report on how it all comes together.

We’re really excited for this next phase of our show. Thank you for being part of it. 

Godfrey, Richard, and Alex