Doug Samuels
Doug Samuels oversees content at FootballScoop and covers the coaching side of football, focusing on how decisions about staffing, rules and strategy shape coaches’ day-to-day reality. He writes primarily for a coaching audience, tracking moves and policies that touch the profession from the NFL and major college programs down through Division II, Division III and the high school ranks. His coverage stands out for its mix of breaking coaching news, long-running coordinator and interview trackers, and clinic-style pieces that translate scheme and philosophy into practical language. He brings an active high school head coach’s perspective to his editorial work, which keeps his reporting grounded in what coaches actually need from information and analysis.
Coaching changes and coordinator trackers
Staffing movement is the backbone of Samuels’ work, and he devotes significant space to documenting how coaching careers evolve across levels and leagues.
He regularly covers in-season changes, including situations where a head coach makes a mid-game coordinator change, such as Jim Mora relieving Tyson Summers of defensive duties during an Oregon State game. His reporting on program relaunches includes pieces on schools like Stillman bringing back a former Coach of the Year for a second stint as they restart their football operations.
He follows the expansion of new professional leagues closely, writing on the appointment of figures such as Kevin Sumlin, Rick Neuheisel and AJ McCarron as head coaches of new UFL teams. These stories focus on opportunity, career trajectory and how staff decisions signal a program’s strategic direction.
Beyond individual moves, Samuels builds and maintains detailed trackers that aggregate coordinator changes and interview activity over an entire cycle.
His FBS Offensive and Defensive Coordinator Tracker series covers multiple seasons and gives a centralized view of who is calling plays and running defenses across the subdivision. He has also produced NFL head coach and general manager interview trackers, laying out which candidates are in the mix for high-profile jobs and how searches progress. These database-style pieces differentiate him from a generic beat writer; they function as reference tools for coaches, agents and observers looking to understand the hiring landscape in one place.
Even in shorter news posts, he tends to highlight how a move fits into a broader staffing pattern rather than treating it as isolated transaction.
NIL, rules and officiating disputes
Samuels devotes persistent attention to the regulatory and financial environment coaches operate in, especially as it affects non-Power Five and lower-division programs. He has reported on Division III schools committing six-figure sums to name, image and likeness initiatives, documenting programs that have budgeted roughly $250,000–$300,000 for NIL.
That coverage emphasizes the pressure on coaches at smaller schools to compete in an arms race traditionally associated with higher levels of college football.
He has also followed legislative efforts such as an amendment to the Protect College Sports Act that would cap coaching salaries at $5 million, contrasting that cap with the compensation of the top-paid coaches in the sport. Those stories connect policy language directly to its implications for coaching staffs and recruiting.
Rules enforcement and officiating are recurring subjects. Samuels has detailed how a state high school association moved toward fining programs for kneepad violations, using equipment rules to show how granular compliance issues can impact coaches and players.
He has covered episodes where hundreds of officials in a Midwest city went on strike, forcing game cancellations and reshaping the schedule. His reporting on controversial calls includes pieces on a blown decision that ended a Division III team’s long winning streak and altered playoff implications.
When he covers governance decisions, he tends to frame them through what they mean for coaches’ preparation, risk management and game-day operations rather than treating them as abstract policy debates.
Scheme, analytics and clinic-style content
A distinctive strand of Samuels’ output is clinic-style content that breaks down specific schemes and techniques for coaches. During the Clinic2020 series, he published detailed sessions on topics such as gap-scheme double teams with Rice offensive line coach Sanders Davis, adaptable counter concepts suitable for multiple offenses, and versatile four-play RPO packages from La Salle High School’s offensive coordinator. Other pieces in that series examined man-free coverage adjustments, efficient use of running backs in pass protection, and a unique kickoff approach designed to allow infinite alignments.
These articles are built around coaches explaining their own methods, with Samuels organizing the material so it reads like practical instruction rather than general feature writing.
He also writes on offensive philosophy and game-planning at the college level. His work on Buster Faulkner highlights an offense built on a limited set of run concepts presented through multiple looks, illustrating how simplicity and variation can coexist in a high-powered unit.
He has profiled play callers like Tre Lamb, who compares the job to being a fighter pilot, using those metaphors to draw out how coaches think about sequencing, tempo and risk.
Samuels’ analytics coverage includes pieces on which NFL teams invest most and least in analytics infrastructure, and on coaching matchups such as Jimbo Fisher versus Lane Kiffin where each coach sits on a different side of the analytics adoption curve. In those articles, he links numbers and process to concrete coaching decisions, making data discussion accessible to readers steeped in football but not necessarily in analytics jargon.
Lower divisions, emerging leagues and coach perspectives
Samuels consistently spotlights stories outside the traditional power structure, giving Division II, Division III, FCS and emerging leagues regular coverage. He has written about a prominent Division II program installing new turf with an unusually bold end zone design, tying facility changes to branding and recruiting. His Division III reporting ranges from coordinator hires and promotions - such as a former standout player becoming a coordinator just over a year after his playing career - to a program hiring what he describes as the youngest coordinator in college football. He has covered schools like Azusa Pacific bringing back football with a twist, situating those decisions in the broader trend of programs reassessing their commitment to the sport.
New leagues and non-FBS environments receive similar attention, with coverage of the UFL’s expansion plans into additional states paired with stories on its coaching appointments.
He amplifies coaches’ voices in emotionally charged moments, such as Colby Carthel’s reaction to a hit he called one of the dirtiest plays he has seen in nearly three decades, or veteran FCS head coach Frank Scelfo enjoying his first win over an FBS opponent at a postgame press conference. Across these pieces, Samuels writes in a direct style that foregrounds what coaches say and do, reflecting his own vantage point inside the profession.
The result is a body of work that serves coaches first, but also helps anyone following football understand how the sport’s structures and decisions feel to the people living them every day.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.