Welcome to The Grove Report

Today, Sports Illustrated launches The Grove Report, SI's hub for all things Ole Miss. So who are we, where did we come from and what brought us to Oxford, Mississippi? Fair questions.

Photo by Nathanael Gabler

Launching a sports website in the midst of a global pandemic that has resulted in the lack of all live sports kind of seems like a silly, utopian endeavor, right? 

Agreed.

But that's what we're doing, and thus welcome to The Grove Report. 

Beginning in this very moment, this page will be Sports Illustrated's hub for all things Ole Miss. So sure, I could just begin writing Rebel content out of the blue – and you will find that content on this site – but instead of just diving head first into a pool that seems to have been drained of all water, I thought best to introduce both myself and the goal here at The Grove Report. 

The man behind this column is named Nate Gabler (you can find me online @nategabler). As to who I am, that will follow in coming paragraphs, but I figured ya'll care more about what this site will look like. 

I hate half-assing things.

I probably drove my bosses at Sports Illustrated up a wall dealing with putting this site together. They wanted to call it "Rebels Central," and with all due respect, I thought that name was trash.

Instead of just rolling with a well below average name, I cracked a few beers with a friend and took a dry erase marker to a window for four hours. (cool thing, windows work as dry-erase boards). Eventually, I had emailed about 13 ideas of better names to SI higher-ups. At that point, they were probably questioning bringing me on.

Some of those ideas would have required royalty fees and others were shot down. The Grove Report stuck. The site header was originally red; I wanted powder blue. They compromised with the darker blue that it is now (even I know when to stop fighting and take my small victories).

This website is going to attempt to be different.

Of course, there's going to be a lot of football content, a lot of baseball content and a lot of basketball content. That's what Rebel fans want, and that's what I want to write. But I'm going to try to spin it a little differently. 

There will be no sugar coating anything. I have an analytical background. That sort of spin is going to dictate a lot of this coverage. At the same time, I have experiences in film study, having taken scouting classes taught by NFL Network's Louis Riddick and Jerry Angelo, among others. When football inevitably comes back, there's going to be a bunch of film content. 

This all gets back to the goal of producing content that you can't find anywhere else. 

Benito Jones (95) was legitimately unblockable for #OleMiss on Saturday. Set the tone for that defensive front early.

Great use of the quick hands in the pass rush and pure physicality on the run stuff from these three plays pic.twitter.com/BoynOkHCrx

— Nathanael Gabler (@nategabler) October 7, 2019

In the most obscure sense of a bizarre word, I'm sports agnostic. 

Writing this column at 11:07 p.m. in my bed in Oxford, Miss., sipping my third gin and tonic of the evening, it's easy to reflect on the fact that I've now called nine different states my home. 

I moved to Oxford in 2018 from Phoenix, Ariz., where I did my Master's Degree in Sports Journalism at Arizona State University. If the concept of a Master's sounds pretentious, I'd be remissed to note that I got my undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt, where I studied Molecular and Cellular Biology. Yup, exactly the degree you expect your local, Ole Miss reporter to have, right? 

Back on the agnostic train, I'm not an Ole Miss fan. I have no ties to the school or to Mississippi before moving here around 19 months ago. Before jumping to Sports Illustrated, I covered the school for the Oxford Eagle. If you care to know where I've lived prior, that would be Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maryland, California, Arizona and now Mississippi, in order.

Personally, I'm a Carolina Panthers and Houston Astros fan. In view of where I write this column hangs an autographed Joe Montana jersey (my dad is a 49ers fan) and a black-and-white still of the Christian Laettner shot over Kentucky in 1992 (this happened before I was born. But if you grow up in North Carolina, you kind of just pick a side. I picked Duke, I guess. But it's 2020 now and that was 1998-ish and don't really give a damn anymore).

Childhood Nate with Muddy the Mudcat, mascot of the single-A Carolina Mudcats, back in... who knows, 1998? (Source, my mother)

Sure, I haven't been at this for long. But prior to my arrival in Mississippi, I'd like to think I've had a lot of cool journalistic experiences. During grad school, I covered the Phoenix Suns' rise to the No. 1 pick, following the team through the NBA summer league in Las Vegas.

I have covered the Colorado Rockies during spring training and the Arizona Diamondbacks stories during the 2018 regular season. Before he was the incumbent starting quarterback at Oklahoma, I wrote the first big feature on Spencer Rattler feature. Back then, he was just a kid at a Scottsdale High School. I've covered a Pittsburgh Steelers training camp, and most recently, the Rebels for the past 19 months.

Now, you'll find all that fun stuff at Sports Illustrated. 

My ridiculous, analytically-inclined brain will always produce in that regard. If you want to know what sort of content I'll be gearing towards here, I'd quickly point you towards two stories: one on Lane Kiffin's approach to analytics and one on why you should never, ever bunt. That's just how my brain works.

All this said, three years ago, I took a massive risk, one that directly results in me sitting in the position I'm currently in.

So how did I get to Mississippi? Since childhood, I always thought I would go to medical school. Upon graduation from Vandy, I moved to San Francisco. There, I worked in pharmaceutical chemistry lab while also studying for the MCAT on the side. 

The more I applied to medical school, the more I realized I didn't want to go to medical school whatsoever. At the time, I was also dealing with some of the most difficult shit I had ever gone through in my personal life. Everything spiraling around me at the time led me to re-evaluate a lot – in particular, my future career. 

Honestly, I hated my job at the time, which is wild considering it sounds so cool in the grand scheme. I was working within the Antibiome of the Wells Lab at UCSF. Broadly, the lab was creating – from scratch – antibodies to be used in cancer research using robotics.

That phrase is essentially absurd. Standard antibody production comes from essentially the slaughtering of rabbits or mice or other animals bred to carry an antibody. The Anitbiome was creating those antibodies from nothing, cutting out the brutality step by using robotics. 

That's pretty dope, right? Well it bored me. The day-to-day drove me crazy. I didn't have eight years of med school in me and I certainly didn't have a career's worth of laboratory research in me.

For those unaware, lab research is a lot of guess work. It's the most productive guess work ever, but it's still guess work. A standard assay (test) may take 90 minutes. 

How did I spend that 90 minutes? Well, graduate students would conduct their own research. Others would go internet shopping or read random articles on Science.com or further their education. Me? I spent a whole summer creating a predictive fantasy football algorithm. (for the record, that algorithm in 2017 correctly would have projected Le'Veon Bell as the top pick in fantasy).

But that's how my brain works.

In replace of medical school, I graciously found myself at one of the best journalism graduate programs in the nation (shoutout the graduate school at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University). Now I'm in Mississippi. 

For the time being, The Grove Report is just me. Is that intimidating? Absolutely, but that's not the long-term goal. In the future, we'd like to bring on a few others to help the site continue to grow.

But for now, in the midst of a viral pandemic, we're still going to be writing and making videos. 

Hopefully by August, we'll be reporting live from football camp.  

You can follow us for future coverage by clicking "Follow" on the top righthand corner of the page. Also, be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @SIRebels and @nategabler.