At 4:13 a.m. ET on Jan. 5, a little-known Twitter account going by the name of Trilly Donovan posted that then-Texas coach Chris Beard would be fired later that day. About 10 hours later, national reporters began tweeting out the news of Beard’s dismissal.
That wouldn’t be the first — or last — of Trilly Donovan’s scoops. Though few noticed, he broke the news of Tulsa’s interest in Eric Konkol in March 2020. He also had the ACC/Big Ten Challenge coming to an end. It was nearly a year into the account’s existence when he broke the Beard news, and he had around only 300 followers at the time. But by the time the transfer portal started humming in April, Trilly Donovan had gained a reputation as one of college basketball’s most trusted news breakers. He has over 24,500 followers on the platform now known as X, and fans fervently await his dispatches on recruiting and coaching moves.
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“He’s pretty accurate,” Kansas State coach Jerome Tang said. “It’s like he’s sitting in people’s staff meetings.”
All of which raises the obvious question: Who the heck is Trilly Donovan?
I tried to solve the mystery myself and even got him to agree to an interview. Once given a phone number, I could surely crack the case. One problem: He had ground rules. It had to be over Zoom, he wasn’t turning on his camera and I had to promise not to share the audio.
Trilly did provide the following biographical info: He works in college basketball, he’s 32, married, no kids and lives somewhere out East. That’s the extent of what he’ll reveal. Even in an interview setting, he will not say his first name. He will say he’s not an agent. He’s not a reporter. He’s not a coach. And …
“I’m not Billy Donovan,” he said, laughing. (But he grew up a Donovan-era Florida fan.)
Donovan can confirm.
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Donovan, the former Florida Gators and current Chicago Bulls coach. “Certainly I’m not doing it, I’ll tell you that. I appreciate him being a fan of me.”
Inside the college basketball ecosystem, trying to nail down Trilly’s identity has become a parlor game. Names are thrown out in group chats and on social media and on podcasts. But the plugged-in masked man has managed to stay anonymous.
The account started in February 2022 fairly innocently and never with the intention to become what it is now. The man behind Trilly Donovan said he’s always been a huge college hoops fan and is in a group chat with three other buddies involved in the sport. His original intention was to post some fun obscure stats and “point out nuances that maybe a casual college basketball fan wouldn’t catch.” That’s what it was at first, with ridiculous tweets like this one that celebrated Arizona walk-on Grant Weitman for his “trillions” — the Mark Titus-created term for putting up zeroes in every box score category except minutes and the motivation behind the “Trilly” in Trilly Donovan.
Grant Weitman from @ArizonaMBB is your 2021-2022 National King of the Trill!
Grant notched a trillion in 11 of the 15 games he appeared in. His 11 trillions was the most of any player in the country this season. pic.twitter.com/12YzPt6Jt7
— Trilly Donovan (@trillydonovan) March 14, 2022
The account went on in obscurity for months like that. Then the group chat would be discussing gossip that wasn’t public yet. “All of us are sort of in a position where we’re privy to some information that the general public doesn’t have,” he said. They’d eventually see tweets from insiders like Jon Rothstein and Jeff Goodman related to their conversations, and …
“Eventually, it got to the point where I was like, all right, well, I’m just gonna start putting this stuff out there,” Trilly said.
His first scoop was that Konkol, then the coach at Louisiana Tech, was in the mix at Tulsa. Trilly realized no one had floated Konkol’s name, so he took a swing.
Tulsa has expressed interest in Louisiana Tech head coach Eric Konkol, per sources.
Konkol was a student assistant with the Golden Hurricane in 2000 when they won the NIT.
Konkol is 153-75 in 7 seasons in Ruston. The Bulldogs have won 20 games in 6 of the 7 years he’s been HC.
— Trilly Donovan (@trillydonovan) March 20, 2022
Lo and behold, Konkol got the job the next day. And Konkol has no idea how Trilly got the scoop. “Trust me, I was trying to keep it quiet,” Konkol said. “I’m never really one to talk to anybody.”
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That tweet didn’t gain much traction — zero likes and retweets — but these days his posts spread quickly and are followed closely by coaches, reporters and fans.
For good reason too. For instance:
Here’s a semi-realistic hypothetical for you:
Ed Cooley to GeorgetownRick Pitino to St. John’sKim English to ProvidenceTobin Anderson or Kimani Young to IonaTony Skinn to George Mason
— Trilly Donovan (@trillydonovan) March 17, 2023
Check, check, check, check and check.
He’s become so regarded for his scoops that if you’re looking for insider info, you’ll probably end up sliding in his DMs. That was the case for ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, who wanted to know if his alma mater Maryland had a real shot at Hunter Dickinson.
“It’s very niche. But if you are a college basketball person, you care about information, I think by now you know that name, right?” Van Pelt said. “At first I see him pop up but I just blew it off because I thought this is just some Bozo that wants to be a fake name, like a Fake Woj, but then you realize, oh, no, this is spot on over and over again. The thing I would ask Trilly is for what? Like, you, obviously can’t tweet the stuff you know from an account where people would find out you’re actually putting it out there. I never know what’s the end game. What do you get out of it?”
Trilly’s response: “I think it’s just fun. It’s something I enjoy doing. It’s almost like an escape from reality sort of. And it’s been really cool just connecting with people in a different way, talking to people that you never would talk to in your day-to-day life.”
Trilly only follows 199 people; his growth happened organically. He first noticed his follower count growing when he posted a video of a dog running onto the court during a George Washington game in December. He’d been watching the GW-American game on ESPN Plus — proof he really is a college hoops super fan — saw the dog, recorded it and posted. The tweet went viral with bigger college hoops accounts retweeting. His original video has 1.4 million views.
He also had this gem that gained some traction:
I am pleased to present the best names in college basketball.
First Team All-Name TeamPoohpha Warakulnukroh (UCF)Legends Stamps (Florida A&M)Supreme Cook (Fairfield)Churchill Bounds (Canisius)Freds Pauls Bagatskis (Georgia Tech) pic.twitter.com/2h7L0J6Vd9
— Trilly Donovan (@trillydonovan) October 27, 2022
“Something that I love about Trilly is that the account, until it became popular, really seemed to be run by someone who was really in the nitty gritty of the college basketball community,” said Evan Miyakawa, a college basketball analytics guru who runs EvanMiya.com. Miyakawa is one of several in the college basketball community who have interacted through Twitter DMs with Trilly. “It seemed like someone who was really plugged in with what was going on on a national landscape, was really intrigued by all the finer details that only college basketball nerds really care about and was interacting with a lot of the accounts that I really love and respect. Accounts that kind of nerd out on college basketball stuff.”
What Trilly has really become known for now is his transfer portal scoops. Portal news dominates the offseason, and no one seems to be more knowledgeable of everything that’s happening in the portal. He’s tactful in his delivery. Rather than say where a player will be attending school, he puts out a meme of that school to give fans a clue that something is coming.
His favorite is the Rick Pitino fist pump, which he’s used frequently in the last few months since Pitino brought on 11 new players.
“The limit does not exist.” – Rick Pitino, probably. pic.twitter.com/gXuejl2HVH
— Trilly Donovan (@trillydonovan) July 19, 2023
“I’m so excited to watch St. John’s basketball this year, and I have absolutely zero connection to St. John’s basketball,” Trilly said. “But those people have gotten me so fired up to watch Rick Pitino at Madison Square Garden. I just can’t wait.”
The only real controversy Trilly has caused was a tweet about former North Carolina guard Caleb Love, who committed to Michigan as a transfer in the spring. Trilly had heard for several weeks that there might be some issues with Love’s credits transferring, which he knew had happened with another player the year before. He kept hearing about it from different sources, giving him the confidence to raise the question about Love’s future in a May 4 tweet. Trilly ended the tweet with: “Stay tuned!”
A day later Love tweeted, “Yes, I will play for Michigan next year! Stay tuned! Go Blue.”
The back-and-forth made the news, with one writer at SI.com referencing “Trilly Donovan, whoever the hell that is.” The writer went on to declare that “Michigan fans need not worry about Love’s status as a Wolverine.”
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Two weeks later, Love decommitted from Michigan. He’s now at Arizona.
“Dunking on people on the internet is all fun and games,” Trilly said. “I don’t love dunking on the kids. I don’t love that moment for me, personally, but obviously it kind of helped this account kind of explode after that.”
Trilly isn’t always right, but he’s batting a pretty good percentage and his ability to take some swings that reporters cannot — or will not — take for one reason or another gives him his own lane. When Stadium and Field of 68 analyst Jeff Goodman, for instance, was asked if he’s envious of Trilly’s ability to speculate earlier than he might feel comfortable doing so, Goodman responded: “Hell, yeah. I wish I could do that, but I can’t.”
Trilly said he used to be more carefree in what he’d post, but now that he has a following, everything he posts now is “double-verified.”
Goodman said many people have asked if he is Trilly. I’ve met Goodman, who has a very distinct voice, countless times. The man who said via Zoom that he is Trilly sounds nothing like Jeff Goodman.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never met Trilly in person. He says he’s never met anyone whom he has direct messaged on Twitter/X. That includes Goodman, Van Pelt and former Marquette/Indiana/Georgia coach Tom Crean.
“I enjoy him,” Crean said. “I enjoy the person. I don’t know much about him at all. I do think Trilly is in athletics. I get the feeling that he’s obviously spent a lot of time in Florida if he’s not there now. But other than that, I don’t really ask. I think it’s great business for him with what he’s doing. And because obviously, anybody can say what they want, he is in the know, right? I mean, they are — I should say they, we don’t know if it’s a he — they are in the know. There’s no doubt about that.”
The man claiming to be Trilly during our Zoom interview said initially the Twitter account was a group effort, but he’s now the lone person running it. What do the other people in his group do in college basketball? He will only say that there’s a “little bit of everything in there.”
I’m not certain that he’s telling the truth when I try to get more details on his role is in college basketball. Shoe guy? No, he says. NBA scout? No. Grassroots basketball? No. Search firm? Nope.
Some friends have suggested to me that he is former recruiting insider and current Oklahoma City Thunder scout Corey Evans, who is around the same age Trilly claims to be. But the voice on the other end of the Zoom definitely isn’t Evans. It wouldn’t make much sense for him to be a media member, because why would he give scoops away without receiving any credit? Recruiting insider Andrew Slater is probably most commonly accused of being the man behind Trilly, a fact the two have had some fun with.
https://t.co/e1HqrSRb7e pic.twitter.com/FbdWztJFwQ
— 𝒜𝓃𝒹𝓇ℯ𝓌 𝒮𝓁𝒶𝓉ℯ𝓇 (@Andrew__Slater) July 22, 2023
I’ve also met Slater, so he’s out, unless he’s hired an actor to play Trilly. (And I don’t think I’m being catfished.)
“I’m the most honest burner account you’re ever gonna find,” he said.
Trilly says he is not on any other social media platform except for a dormant Instagram account. He considered joining Threads, but since platforms in the Mark Zuckerberg universe pull contacts from your phone, he worried that his identity would be revealed.
Crean believes Trilly could profit off his ability to break news and his insights. Trilly has gone all-in on continuing to get scoops, even purchasing a blue check mark on Twitter last month so he could send unlimited direct messages.
“It’s weirdly gotten easier to chase stuff,” he said. “I’d start with something that I heard and then reach out to a bunch of people and see if they’ve heard it. And then that led to other conversations with other people and then you’re building all these relationships with people that you never normally would have access to. And it’s turned into this sort of community thing where, you know, everyone’s just trying to help you out and keep you ahead of the game with stuff.”
It’s not hard to imagine, as Crean suggested, that Trilly could eventually turn this into a side hustle. He just launched a website — Burnerball.com — but he says never plans to charge readers or reveal his identity.
“I gotta be careful,” he said. “Because it’s one of those things where it’s not like nothing’s gonna incriminate me or anything like that. A lot of this is just about keeping it anonymous. Keeping the mystique behind it is important. So I don’t know if I can really get into exactly what I do, but I’m in a position and all of the people involved are in a position where we’re able to get some information before some other people. And that’s probably all I’ll say about that.”
And so he remains anonymous, which isn’t easy considering how many in the college basketball community have tried to figure out who this guy could be.
Speculation really ramped up when the Field of 68 podcast discussed his possible identity and put up a poll. “I’d pay some money to find out who he is right now,” Goodman said. “I think a bunch of us would kick in some money to find out who he is.”
Trilly loved the response by some of his fans, who made it clear they prefer to stay in the dark. Eventually a mantra was born in the replies anytime someone speculated about his identity: “We are all Trilly Donovan.”
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty)
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO
