But Libit, who wears a cropped haircut and an unmistakable swagger, is proudly unsentimental.

“Pro sports fans are ready for someone to disappoint them,” he said. “The college sports fan, by contrast, feels a mission to defend on every count against all evidence.”

Grammer, for one, praised his faraway rival.

“People who think he’s agenda-driven; I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong,” Grammer said. “But I also don’t necessarily know that that’s wrong.”

NM Fishbowl was born of disillusionment and opportunity. Libit, a New Mexico native, grew up a “Lobos basketball geek,” he said, and his first job in journalism was an internship at the sports desk of an Albuquerque newspaper. But he fell out of love, he said, as he grew wise to what he characterized as college sports’ inherent corruption.

A University of Wisconsin graduate who has lived in Milwaukee, Washington and Chicago in a career that included writing for Politico and CNBC.com, Libit started more closely monitoring Lobos athletics in 2013, when he began frequently visiting his parents in New Mexico after his mother was found to have A.L.S. It is difficult not to notice emotional undercurrents to Libit’s choice, which he did not dispute: His father died in 2014 and his mother early last year; both were huge Lobos fans.

After the presidential election last year, armed with public-records laws and a growing inventory of anonymous sources, Libit started his site out of his apartment as what is effectively his new full-time job. (An inheritance gave him some financial means.) He named it in an ironic reference to a complaint from the former Lobos basketball coach Dave Bliss, later disgraced in a 2000s scandal at Baylor, who called Albuquerque an overly inquisitive “fishbowl.”

“Like the scrutiny was so intense,” Libit said, mocking the remark.

The roots of Libit’s cynicism reach down to a 2004 profile he wrote of the basketball coach Bruce Pearl for Milwaukee Magazine. It was standard fluff, Libit recalled, “a little bit maudlin and silly, in that Mitch Albom way.”

Years later, in 2011, Libit revisited Pearl in an article for Deadspin, with further reporting revealing Pearl as not quite the saint Libit had portrayed years earlier. At the time, Pearl, then at Tennessee, had just been fired amid new rumors about N.C.A.A. recruiting violations. (Pearl is now the head coach at Auburn, one of the programs implicated in the college basketball bribery scandal revealed last month.)