Sports Media Review by Jonathan Weiler

10:51:16 PM EST
Just wanted to let you all no that Sports Media Review is moving to a typepad based URL:

http://sportsmediareview.typepad.com

I am in the process of moving the content from here over there - working from the present backwards, I am in early December, and will be doing this over the next several days. I will be posting new content at the new home beginning tomorrow, however.

I hope you like it over there.


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11:34:41 PM EST
I won't keep doing this, but tonight's topic on ESPN's "Top Five Reasons You Can't Blame..." features Bobby Knight and tries to make the case for why you can't blame him for his outbursts. "Top Five Reasons" doesn't really mean that you can't blame him for his outburts, at least not entirely. What they mean to suggest is that he should not be judged entirely by his outbursts.

As always, the show devotes the first ten minutes or so to reminding the audience why the subject of the show is treated with disdain in the first place - whether it's Bill Buckner for his error, Chris Webber for his timeout, Kobe for his strained relationship with Shaq or Knight for his bad acts. So, on tonight's show, those bad acts received a full airing.

OK, on to the top five reasons to give Knight a break, with brief commentary after each:

5) West Point's "culture of discipline turned Knight into a Martinet." I mentioned last night that the show often has to reach to find five reasons for whatever they're defending. Consider this a reach. And then some. The notion that West Point made Knight is ludicrous. Had he been a cadet there - perhaps a case could be made. But, Knight simply coached there. And, by all accounts, was a tough son-of-a-gun from his first day on campus. Silly.

4) "scared straight" - that Knight intimidates his players into going to class and staying out of a trouble. Knight has a great record in this regard, but as I've discussed before, other coaches have had similar success without the physical contact. Still, this is a point worth debating, at the least.

3) He wins. Fair enough. Though, again, other guys win without the shenanigans, and Knight's record over the past decade is not great.

2) Blame it on Indiana. They repeatedly indulged his temper, letting him getting away with murder because of his success on the court. After Knight won his third national championship in 1987 (a truly fabulous job of coaching with a very thin team), the athletic department turned over almost total control to of the program to Knight. This is a fair point, actually, and I would add that only after the Neil Reed choking incident circulated on videotape in 2000, and only in the wake of five seasons of less than stellar performances by his team leading up to 2000, did Indiana finally crack down. IU showed little spine or integrity in their handling of Knight.

1) "we love the show" - Knight's humor, bluster, and entertainment value keep us coming back for more. Hard to argue with this one.

OK - enough about Coach Knight.

As a follow-up to my Saban post, one more quick note on Nick Saban. Mike Francesa responded to an angry caller today - a Dolphins fan - by saying that, yes, Saban is liar, but he's not the first and won't be the last and that this is the nature of the business - coaches are going to keep moving, and they're going to keep misrepresenting their intentions. Francesa also chastised Dolphins' owner Wayne Huizenga - saying he never should have raided LSU to get Saban in the first place and that the recent turn of events represents Huzienga's come-uppance. Francesa's on target here.

One final note - I will write more about this in a future column - about Stephen A.s Quite Frankly. I know the show's ratings are weak, and other corners of the blogosphere are down on Stephen A. for his loud-mouthed shtick. And, he can be grating. But, Smith is doing something really interesting on his show. He has long made an issue of the under-representation of African Americans in sports journalism, and especially among the nation's sports opinion columnists. In light of that reality, he's decided to make his show a platform for what he considers to be some of the talented African American sports writers in America, making several of them regular commentators on his show. Rob Parker, Roy S. Johnson and the social commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson are among the regulars who bring alot to the discussion. Furthermore, Smith is not afraid to call his panelists on their points of view. One consequence of his style is that the more simplistic formulations about race are typically challenged, making for an unusual phenonemon on mainstream television: African Americans debating one another about race (and other issues of social significance). As an aside, another Smith favorite is Steve Malzberg, a (white) right-wing talk radio host and contributor to the popular conservative website, Newsmax.com. Smith's commitment to a discussion in which everybody's point of view will be subjected to scrutiny is clear and impressive.

I have no inside information on ESPN's level of commitment to Quite Frankly, but there is no doubt that Smith is providing a forum for discussion - both in terms of content and, more significantly, participants - that is unique in major sports media.




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10:38:57 PM EST

Well, they’re thrilled in Tuscaloosa. The front sports screen of the Tuscaloosa News announces in big bold letters: “Saban has landed…and Tide fans are ecstatic.” The website also announces that a special edition of the paper is ON NEWSTANDS NOW!

And, in an article penned prior to Saban’s decision to return to the college coaching ranks, the News’ Cecil Hurt suggests that autonomy could be a key reason why Saban would take the ‘Bama offer:

“Then there are issues that would fall under the general heading of “control." Again, no one is being specific, but it’s expected that Saban could expect a similar situation at Alabama to the one he worked under at LSU.

Here is how his agent, Jimmy Sexton (who was not available for comment on Saturday) addressed that issue in a 2004 interview with the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

“The one thing people fail to realize is that with the way money has increased in college football, when you are a head coach in college football, you are your own boss," Sexton said at the time. “Yeah, there’s an athletic director and a president. Not to take anything away from those guys because (LSU AD) Skip Bertman and (LSU chancellor) Mark Emmert are great people to work for at LSU, but they don’t really bother Nick Saban. They let him run the program. He is the CEO, he is the personnel director, he is the head coach."

And, the money itself is not bad, as Saban’s reported 8-year, $32 million dollar deal makes him the highest paid coach in college football. According to Len Pasquarelli, the money (which could rise to $40 million) was the main motivation for Saban to jump the Dolphins’ ship:

“Money talks, of course, and it always will. An eight-year contract at $32 million fully guaranteed, and with the ability to earn an additional $700,000-$800,000 annually in bowl game and national title incentives, which ESPN.com has reported as Saban's deal at Alabama, doesn't just talk. It screams.

In terms of guaranteed money, that's nearly $20 million more than Saban would have banked had he stayed with the Dolphins.

Colleges could always offer coaching candidates more in terms of a more benign lifestyle, shorter hours, a less grinding existence, tenure, security and organizational control. Now that college programs can be so competitive financially, there won't be so many coaches casting covetous glances at the NFL.”

Pasquarelli doesn’t see anything wrong with Saban’s decision to bolt. After all, nothing in his five year contract with the Dolphins precluded such a move and, Pasquarelli says, Saban warned Dolphins’ owner Wayne Huizenga two years ago that he might eventually get the itch to return to college coaching.

Dan Le Batard, of the Miami Herald, emphatically disagrees.  To put it mildly. 

Le Batard writes:

“The punctuation on the Nick Saban Error is greasy and greedy. You know what he was as Dolphins coach? A failure. A loser. A gasbag. And one of the worst investments Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga has ever made. He was less of a success than Dave Wannstedt and more of a traitor than Ricky Williams. There has been very little in franchise history that came with more expectations and fewer results than this hypocrite who at the end avoided the hard questions one last time.

Talk like a warrior. Behave like a weasel.

Maybe Saban would be better off in college. Because, in the pros the last few days, he has looked like a complete and utter amateur.

He will be remembered in these parts as a quitter and a liar. He leaves the franchise in last place, with what used to be his good name somehow far lower than that. And for this he'll get a $25 million raise and more job security in Alabama. Makes you wonder what USC's Pete Carroll or Ohio State's Jim Tressel are worth, doesn't it?

Larry Coker, a decent man, gets fired for his one championship. Saban, a duplicitous one, gets the most lucrative job in college football.

Saban could have fixed his reputation today if he had that mental toughness he is always sermonizing about. We have the meandering spiel memorized by now. About ''competitive character'' and ''overcoming adversity'' and blah, blah, blah. You preach it, Nick. But you don't live it. Not when it's easier to run away and hide.” 

As I’ve discussed before, there is a double standard in sports coverage when it comes to the question of money as a motivating factor: athletes are held to a higher standard than coaches and owners, more readily attacked for chasing the almighty dollar than are non-players. In a variation on this theme, while calling a Bobby Knight game recently, Dick Vitale was complaining about exemptions to the transfer rules that allow players to switch schools and play immediately under certain circumstances. Vitale regards this as unfair, since coaches might groom a player for three years, only to fail to reap the benefits of their hard work if the player leaves for another school. Of course, coaches leave contracts and switch schools all the time. But again, unlike players, they are not expected to be loyal to something other than their own well-being. Le Batard is attuned to this issue, and sounds off on it in relation to Saban:

“Remember how mad you were when Williams retired? Well, he wasn't cheating on you. He wasn't grabbing for more money. His body hurt from a beating, and he wanted to rest. What Saban has done is a more traitorous act -- the most traitorous act in the history of the franchise. He's leaving simply because he couldn't handle a hard job on the sidelines of a game in which he asks others to be violent. He gave up, in other words.” 

Le Batard also wonders whether Huizenga will go after Saban with the “cutthroat zeal” with which he tried to recoup some of the money he’d paid out to Williams. Le Batard’s pissed, but he goes a little overboard when he says that Saban made Huzienga look like a “public fool” and that:

 “Huizenga has given this man everything he has wanted -- given him more than any NFL owner anywhere has given any other coach. He deserves better than this. He deserves better than Saban leaving him to answer the hard questions today.” 

It should be recalled that Huzienga, one-time owner of the Marlins and still owner of pro player stadium, has subjected the Marlins to the worst lease deal of any team in Major League baseball. The Marlins play in a tough baseball market anyway, but Huizenga’s own cutthroat greed is one reason why they languish financially. In other words, it’s a tough sell to ask readers to pity a slash-and-burn billionaire who himself isn’t above playing every angle to earn another buck.

From a somewhat more detached perspective, MSNBC’s Mike Celizic says: 

“If I’m Nick Saban, I take the Alabama job. It’s not a tough call, either, not for someone like Saban who is confident of his ability to produce a winner. He can either deal with the ebb and flow of fortune in the salary-capped NFL, or he can be the man who restored a great football program to the glory it last knew under the legend that was Bear Bryant.”

But, Celizic adds, there is a cost, given how Saban’s conducted himself:

 “The only downside — with the alumni and boosters promising to come up with as much as $40 million to insure the prosperity of the Saban clan — is that with Saban taking the job, he’ll always be known as a lying weasel, a condition that will pass nationally in a couple of weeks but will endure for as long as he lives in Miami.

The charge will be true, and there’s no sense trying to sugar-coat it. Saban spent the last two months of the NFL season telling Miami and the world that coaching the Dolphins was the only job he wanted and he intended to be there for as long as the team kept sending him paychecks.”

One question in my mind is this: is Saban (or any coach) worth it? There’s little doubt that Saban knows what he’s doing at the college level. But, $32-40 million is a lot of money. And, the Tuscaloosa News has some interesting data on the revenues generated by ‘Bama football. Christopher Walsh begins by pointing out that in the National Championship game alone, the combined payout is $34 million. Of course, that’s money that OSU and Florida will split with the other teams in their conferences and “With nine SEC teams receiving bowl invitations, including two in the Bowl Championship Series, the conference is already on target to exceed last year’s record $116.1 million payout under its revenue-sharing plan.”               

Overall, according to data Walsh presents, total ‘Bama football revenues in 2005 were $62.3 million, and net revenues clocked in at $12.5 million. This made the Tide program the fifth most profitable in America in 2005, behind only Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas.

These figures make one thing clear: ‘Bama certainly doesn’t need to spend this much money on a coach, when its football program is bringing in so much cash and so much of its revenue is generated by the mere fact that it plays in the SEC – not for financial reasons anyway. There will be some financial benefit to greater success on the field,  but it’s doubtful that the success will yield additional revenues in excess of the difference between what Saban makes and Mike Shula made.

In any event, I am guessing Saban will live with being called a weasel by guys like Le Batard. He may be one, but in the world of big-time athletics, college and pro, Saban’s wading in a stream that’s full of ‘em.

 

 

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10:51:43 PM EST

A Few Items:

  1)      from the DVR backlog on my TV set, ESPN’s “Top Five Reasons You Can’t Blame…” covered the issue of paying NCAA athletes. Specifically, ESPN offered five reasons why you can’t blame the NCAA for not paying them. “You Can’t Blame…” is a hit or miss show, but one of its virtues is that it often covers substantive issues and its primary goal is not so much to resolve an argument as to add to it. The five reasons for not blaming the NCAA on the issue of athletes’ pay are as follows:

5) Title IX makes it impossible. If athletes from revenue sports (essentially, men’s basketball and football, with some exceptions) received pay, the threat of law suit would hang over the NCAA.

4) Paying athletes would only escalate what is already a disturbing arms race among major programs for the services of top high school athletes

3) There’s no Donald Fehr or similar figure to organize effectively and agitate for the rights of NCAA athletes.

2) The college presidents, not the NCAA itself, have all the power.

1) The athletes are getting paid, in the form of a free education, which host Brian Kenney described as “priceless.” And, in concrete dollar terms, the average annual cost of an education at a public institution is $12,000 and at a private institution, $30,000.

Five and four seem like reasonable arguments to me. Number three is silly – an opportunity to repeat the shibboleth that Donald Fehr alone controls baseball (one talking head described Fehr as personally canceling the World Series – it was, unquestionably, a mutual affair between him and Selig), while missing the larger point: the NCAA would never accept recognizing college scholarship athletes as legitimately subject to collective bargaining. Whether they should, or not, is a matter of debate, but the lack of leverage of NCAA athletes vis-a-vis the universities, conferences, and the NCAA itself is itself a product of the structure of college athletics, which the NCAA controls far more decisively than the athletes. </>

Number two strikes me as one of those arguments that, while technically correct, fails to address the key issues – whose interests does the NCAA, practically speaking, represent – the conferences, universities and athletic departments – or the athletes? I think it’s pretty clear the answer is not the latter.

Number one is really just a re-statement of one side of the debate as if it’s a definitive answer to the debate. It’s certainly true that, looked at from one perspective, the provision of a full scholarship to attend college is a great gift which could pay a lifetime of dividends regardless of whether an athlete progresses to the next level of his sport. But, from another perspective, it’s peanuts compared to what the universities, especially at the elite athletic schools where the big-time sports are generating enormous revenues. And, this disparity – between the cost of a scholarship on the one hand, to the amount of money that the sports’ stakeholders are reaping on the other hand – is only becoming more obvious. The $40 million dollar contract that Alabama is currently dangling in front of Nick Saban highlights that disparity. Furthermore, given the questionable commitment of many of the major programs to their athletes’ education, the isn’t-a-free-education-great argument sounds more like political spin than a substantive argument.  

As I said, ESPN’s “Top Five Reasons…” is not trying to resolve an argument, so much as add fuel to a fire, and I respect the spirit in which the show is produced. It happens that they don’t always have five good reasons for whatever they’re arguing.

Anyway, it’s good fodder for sports junkies.

  2)      Speaking of sports junkies, The Washington Post is doing an in-depth series on what went wrong with the Redskins’ season, with two six-screen feature articles and numerous other supporting pieces on the debacle that was the 2006 season. DC is a football-insane town. I lived there from 1987-1989, and I can imagine only one other city in America being as singularly obsessed with its pro football team as Washington – Denver. When I lived in DC, the Sunday night local news led off with the Redskins (and this, recall, is the nation’s capitol, where, presumably, other significant happenings merit attention by the news media). Norm Chad, whom most of you would know as the color commentator on ESPN poker broadcasts, was then a sports media columnist for the Washington Post. Chad was a funny and gifted writer and one column I will never forget was his assessment of the ten different weekly television shows devoted to Redskins football. That’s right – ten. Every week. Before the advent of 1000-channel cable television, satellite, the internet, etc. </> <>Football is, of course, big everywhere these days, but I still believe there is no more fanatical football city in America than DC (notwithstanding the arrival of a major league baseball team a couple of years ago), and the Post’s Watergate-like expose of what’s gone wrong this year – one of the six-screen articles is devoted exclusively to the strained relationship between Joe Gibbs and his hand-picked offensive coordinator Al Saunders - is a reflection of that fanaticism.

3)      At the risk of dividing the attention of my vast audience, there a new website – sports media watch. It focuses more on ratings and media trends, but also tackles substantive issues, particularly related to race and media coverage, and it’s well-written and informative. For example, here’s today’s post on the murder of Broncos’ cornerback Darrent Williams – titled “Murder, Hip-Hop and Hypocrisy.”

It's worth checking out.

 

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10:11:05 PM EST
Since I am reeling from Michigan's spanking at the hands of USC tonight, I'll just pass along some highly recommended reading: a column from February 2006 by Bill Simmons, titled "First Annual Atrocious GM Summit," in which Simmons imagines himself moderating a panel discussion of the worst GMs in the NBA, as they pat each other on the back while recounting their idiotic exploits. The Wall Street Journal, in a year-end retrospective, deemed this piece one of the top two sports journalism pieces of 2006.

There appears to be growing dissatisfaction with Simmons in the sports blogosphere, a sense that his shtick is getting old. But, this column is a masterpiece: a brilliant combination of humor and killer analysis. Depressingly, from the standpoint of a Knicks' fan, it prominently features not only Isiah (whom the conferees declare is, indeed, the worst of the worst), but his predecessor, Scott Layden.

In any event, Simmons "dream panel" included:

" Philadelphia's Billy King; former Raptors GM Rob Babcock; Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak; former Knicks GM Scott Layden; former Cavs GM Jim Paxson; Minnesota's Kevin McHale; former Orlando GM John Weisbrod; and, of course, Isiah Thomas of the New York Knicks. Sadly, Wes Unseld was unable to make it after he accidentally traded his first-class Delta Airlines ticket to Houston for three Southwest Airlines tickets to Atlanta.

(Note: We were going to invite Elgin Baylor, but he was ruled ineligible for the discussion after pulling off the Cassell-Jaric and Radmanovic-Wilcox heists. That's not the Elgin we once knew and loved. Come back to us, Elg.)"

It's a long piece, but this "exchange" down toward the bottom, between Simmons, Thomas and Layden is too good not to reproduce here:

Simmons: Scott Layden, you were really a pioneer of sorts in terms of screwing up cap space and taking on terrible contracts.

Layden: Why thank you.

Simmons: You traded for cap-killers like Glen Rice, Luc Longley, Travis Knight, Shandon Anderson and Howard Eisley. You gave Allan Houston $100 million when he couldn't have gotten more than $71 million anywhere else. You gave Charlie Ward $28 million. You traded Marcus Camby and a lottery pick that could have been Amare Stoudamire for Antonio McDyess and his bum knee. By the time you got canned, they were a lottery team. Looking back, did you go overboard? Were you too incompetent?

Layden: Oh, absolutely. There's an art to being an atrocious GM -- you can't just destroy a team without leaving any semblance of hope. By the time I got fired, we had one of the highest payrolls in the league and no real assets other than Houston and Sprewell, who weren't even All-Stars. So Knicks fans were depressed, but even worse, they couldn't look at the team and say, "Well, this guy's a name, and we have this guy, and maybe we can trade this guy … " All the hope had been beaten out of them.

To me, that's the beauty of what Isiah has been able to pull off. Casual hoops fans can look at the Knicks' roster and say, "Wow, we have Marbury, Eddy Curry and Jalen Rose?!" Diehard fans can look at the roster and say, "This is just crazy enough that it might work," or "Maybe we can package some of these guys for a superstar." So there's a little bit of hope there, even if it's misguided, ridiculous and inane. When I was there? No hope whatsoever. And that was my biggest mistake.

Simmons: So you like what Isiah has done?

Layden: Hell, yeah. Take the Francis trade, if it happens: Logically, it makes no sense because Francis and Marbury are the same player -- expensive, shoot-first point guards with huge entourages and attitude problems who have never won anything. Even if you're getting Francis for nothing, it still makes no sense on paper.

For example, let's say you spent $3,000 on a living room sofa two years ago that you didn't really like. To make the sofa stand out a little less, you bought a leather chair for $2,200 that doesn't match --.

Simmons: Marbury is the sofa and Jamal Crawford is the chair in this case?

Layden: Precisely. And the room still looks bad. So now, you're on Craigslist and you see that someone is selling another $3,000 sofa for $900 that's almost exactly like the sofa you have. And there's no way you would ever want two big, ugly sofas in the same room. It would just look ridiculous. But your mind-set is, "Hey, how can I turn down a $3,000 sofa for $900?" So you buy the sofa and stick it in the room, which is now cluttered with stuff since you also spent another $10,000 on some crummy art, a coffee table with support problems, two giant bookcases that have to be turned sideways, some wobbly end tables and a smashed sculpture that was patched back together with duct tape. But since it's too late to go back, you spend another $5,000 on an interior decorator to make the room work. Well, you know what would happen? He wouldn't be able to make it work. You bought too much crap.

See, this is why Isiah is a genius: He's assembling the basketball version of that nightmare living room, and he has the fans convinced that either the expensive interior decorator -- in this case, Larry Brown -- will be able to make everything work, or he can somehow swap some of that furniture to one of his neighbors for a first-class piece of art. And he's spending an ungodly amount of money! And you never hear rumors that he might get fired! I think it's a tribute to him and his staff. He's the best-ever at being an atrocious GM. He really is.

Thomas: Thank you, Scott, that means a lot.

Simmons: Lemme ask you, Isiah -- the one red flag seems to be that you're spending an alarming amount of money. Just this year alone, you have a $123 million payroll for 15 wins. When the luxury tax kicks in, you will have shelled out nearly $200 million for a 25-win team. Doesn't fiscal responsibility matter here?

(There's a beat, and then everyone laughs.)

As a friend of mine likes to say: cruel...but fair.

Enjoy.


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10:09:48 AM EST
Once it took hold - there was no stopping it. Following last night's 34-28 Giants' victory, Cindy Brunson and Qadry Ismail were analyzing the game. (I almost put analyzing in quotes, but figured that was too cheap a shot). And, in discussing Eli Manning's performance, they described it as efficient, though Ismail uttered the word with what almost seemed to be an apologetic smile on his face. But, then, subsequent renderings of the game over the next hour or so on ESPNews dropped the trepidation about the word, and simply embraced it. By the time the game was an hour old, Manning's performance had become "very efficient." Throw in a few smatterings of football's new favorite phrase to describe quarterback play - "he did a good job managing the game" - and you get the picture: with his team's season on the line, Eli did a nice job directing his offense to a 34-point output.

To be sure, the story of the night was Tiki, and that was rightly the headline. Tiki may not be a Hall-of-Famer, though he's damn close, but he's now put together one of the most impressive three-season runs in NFL history for a running back and it's remarkable how little attention has been paid to the magnitude of what he's accomplished since the start of the Tom Coughlin era in 2004. But, let's just take a moment to dissect Eli's "efficient" performance.

Manning went 12-for-26. Obviously, that's bad. He threw for 101 yards. That's pathetic. His 3.9 yards per attempt is worse than pathetic. The Giants did convert 8 of 14 third down opportunities, so props to Eli for his performance there, as several came on short passes. He had an interception-free game. But, efficient? Please. His QB rating for the game was under 70. Eli managed very little other than handing the ball off to his star running back had the game of his life, setting a franchise record for rushing yards in a game in the process. This had nothing to do with Eli. Furthermore, I was listening to the game on WFAN's stream, and Giant announcers Bob Papa, Dick Lynch and Dave Jennings called at least three Eli passes that should have been intercepted but were simply dropped by Redskins defenders. That's just luck. At least twice, Manning pulled an Eli special, whereby he responds to a blitz by simply chucking the ball downfield in the general vicinity of Plaxico Burress and praying the ball doesn't get picked off.

Finally, did I mention the Redskins defense? It sucks. They're 30th in the NFL in total yards allowed and, even better, they're dead last in terms of opponents QB efficiency. The QB rating of all of Washington's opponents this year is 97.8. In other words, Joe Gibbs' defense turns every opposing QB into Peyton Manning. Except, apparently, his brother.

To his credit, and since I never give him any, Sean Salisbury had it right last night on ESPN following the game. He said that Eli is, right now, incapable of carrying his team and that, absent Tiki doing so, the Giants will be eliminated quickly from the playoffs. Crediting pitchers with team wins is a flawed way of assessing their performance. Crediting QBs with team wins is even more flawed. The Giants won in spite of their QB last night, not because of him.

And, Happy New Year everyone.



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7:18:00 PM EST

Though Bobby Knight will have to wait a few more days to surpass Dean Smith as the winningest men’s Division I basketball coach, there’s plenty of ground to cover in assessing the coverage. Last night’s game on ESPN, against UNLV was a strange affair. There was great anticipation and hype, naturally enough, and a series of profiles throughout the game highlighting the highs and lows of the General’s career. Unsurprisingly, Dick Vitale is an unabashed booster, and his play-by-play sidekick, Dan Schulman, did his best to play along.

Too much attention is paid to Knight’s slip-ups over the years for ESPN to ignore those altogether, so ESPN made the obligatory nod to the 1985 chair-throwing and other famous hits. But, the company line appeared clear enough – to celebrate Knight’s greatness as he stood on the verge of the all-time record.

The night began with Schulman exclaiming about Knight that “they love him here in Lubbock just as they loved him in Bloomington” and Vitale asserting, early in the game, “you may not have liked, you might not have liked some of his actions, but he’s certainly one of the great coaches of all  time.” Vitale included Knight in a category that includes the likes Scotty Bowman, Vince Lombardi, Casey Stengel, Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp.

Knight’s stature among the all-time great coaches is not in dispute (though I will add a caveat to that below). Harder to assess is how his extraordinary accomplishments on the court should be measured against his numerous transgressions on and off the court.

Vitale’s approach, repeated throughout last night’s telecast was a variation on the following:

“Are there some negatives – yes? But there are so many positives in his record.”

In a typical comment, after ESPN had interviewed a retired colonel who played for Knight at Army in the 1960s and praised Knight for preparinghis players for battle in Vietnam by the way he coached, Vitale exclaimed:

“They loved wearing that uniform because they, ultimately, really represent all of us.”

Vitale noted numerous times during the telecast that though Knight has made mistakes, we’ve all made mistakes. And, Schulman, perhaps self-conscious about the degree to which the broadcast was hyping Knight, said to Vitale during one exchange: “I am not trying to set you up here (of course not, Dan) but, would you say that most of his players would have positive feelings about Knight?”

Here Vitale threw a bit of a curveball, responding that some of the players who left early, or transferred would have a different view, but ultimately noting that: “those that stayed the four years, yes, [the vast majority] have positive feelings. If you sit down and study all the positives and the negatives, it’s not even close…”

Schulman also suggested that a lot of the legendary coaches had legendary tempers – but Vitale could only come up with one name - Woody Hayes. And, notably, of the three coaches to whom Knight is most often compared – Smith, Wooden and Rupp – the former two had such completely different styles, and such an absence of the sorts of transgressions that have been commonplace in Knight’s career, that a direct comparison of their missteps would shed very poor light on the General.

In a second-half set-piece about Knight’s fiery temper, the Schulman voice over concluded: “whether you like Bob Knight or not, you know exactly who he is.” This is obviously meant as a good thing, but I confess that having lived in NC much of the last 17 years, I find that particular “compliment” of dubious value, since it was routinely applied to Jesse Helms, a deeply bigoted and horrible man who had an insidious impact on public policy in the United States.

While Schulman and Vitale were obviously rooting for history to be made, it did occur to them at some point in the second half that a Red Raiders loss only meant that ESPN got to hype another otherwise meaningless early season game, this one on New Year’s day between Tech and New Mexico. This realization seemed to considerably lift their spirits.

Leaving aside ESPN’s coverage, there’s been a slew of commentary on Knight. As John Feinstein said in his column today (to which I’ll return), the pieces can typically be divided into two camps:

“It is always the same whenever Bob Knight is in the news. It doesn't matter if he is making news by setting the all-time record for victories as a men's college coach (or failing to do so as he did last night) or snapping a player's chin or having a fight with a college chancellor at a salad bar.

The defenders line up on one side and recite chapter and verse on The Good Knight: brilliant coach; turns boys into men; graduates most of his players; has never come close to breaking an NCAA rule; a principled man in a business frequently lacking in principles.

Everything they say is accurate.

Then the detractors line up on the other side with their arguments about The Bad Knight: he's a bully; he emotionally abuses everyone around him, most notably his players; he's not nearly as loyal to friends as he claims to be; he's never admitted to being wrong about anything.

Everything they say is also accurate.”

Actually, many articles include both sides, before weighing on which side is weightier. For example, Ian O’Connor, of FOX sports.com gives Knight the following props:

“At the top, let's cover the standard Knight disclaimers in the name of fair play. His teams have never been on NCAA probation, and his program has pumped money into the school library, charities and the Boys & Girls Club. Knight makes certain his players go to class. His school's website boasts that nearly 98 percent of his four-year players have gotten degrees. He has visited nursing homes and shelters for abused women. He has come to the aid of Landon Turner, a member of his 1981 championship team who would be paralyzed in a car wreck.

Knight also stands as a fundamental genius. To watch him work a drill is to wish your son or daughter could find a coach or professor so dedicated to his or her craft.”

But, for O’Connor, the sins outweigh the good deeds and, ultimately, the result is that Knight has trashed his own legacy. After rehearsing the familiar litany of Knight misdeeds, O’Connor concludes his piece by recounting a conversation with a one-time victim of Knight’s temper:

“When it became clear that Knight was about to become the new sheriff in Lubbock, I called the police officer whom Knight struck in Puerto Rico during the 1979 Pan Am Games.

Jose Silva Guilfu said Knight broke his jaw after he insisted the coach vacate a practice court for the waiting Brazilian women's team. Knight left Puerto Rico and was convicted in absentia to a six-month jail term he never served.

"I don't hate Bobby Knight," Silva Guilfu told me then. "I do believe in God and I know something will happen to make him pay for what he did to me.

"He's received some punishment already. People know all about his conduct."

Yes, people know all about his conduct as the General prepares to march into history as the winningest college basketball coach of them all. Bobby Knight spit fire at everyone in his path, and ended up burning down his own legacy.”

In a similar vein, Pat Forde of ESPN.com believes that even Knight’s record-setting win will be tainted by the fact that it’s not happening from the Indiana bench:

“Knight, who is now tied with Dean Smith at 879 victories, likely will become the winningest coach in Division I men's college basketball annals during the Red Raiders' ongoing four-game home stand. In hope that people actually will show up to see Knight enter the record books, Tech has been offering $8.80 general admission seats to the four games at United Spirit Arena. And if you buy a lower-level ticket to those games, you can get one upper-level general admission seat for free.

It's not an easy sell. Texas Tech averaged 6,707 fans in its 15,000-seat arena for four of its early home games this season (attendance for Sam Houston State was not listed) before pulling in 11,561 for the record-tying game against Bucknell this past Saturday.

This is the bed Bob Knight made for himself: He'll make history at an out-of-the-way school with no men's basketball heritage in a football state, in front of a house that very well could be less than full. He'll make history in exile, in effect.

Not exactly the moment of glory this could have been.

If it had happened at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind., there would be no need for sales promotions to fill seats. And it could have happened at Assembly Hall, if ... “

Forde then writes a hypothetical article, one that should have been written about Knight, had his penchant for ultimately self-destructive behavior not taken him away from the place that made him a legend. That would-be paean to Knight concludes:

“Now he can finish his career in a perfect spot: in a state where basketball is a religion and Knight is its high priest.”

In today’s Washington Post, John Feinstein also sees Knight’s career trajectory as a tragic indictment of his self-destructiveness. For Feinstein, Knight has already had his Woody Hayes moment:

“Here though, as Shakespeare would say (and Knight has read Shakespeare), is the rub: Knight believes, as do his defenders, that life works this way: If you commit five good deeds on Monday, you are excused from any bad deed you might commit on Tuesday. Knight believes that because he plays by the rules, because most of his players graduate and because he's gone out of his way to help friends in need, it was okay to grab Neil Reed by the neck and okay to stuff an LSU fan into a garbage can and it wasn't wrong to toss a potted plant over the head of an elderly secretary and it wasn't such a big deal to send that chair spinning across the court -- not to mention all of the other misdeeds and missteps through the years.

Knight's philosophy of life basically comes down to this: If I help a little old lady across the street for 10 straight days, but then yell a profanity at her for walking too slowly on the 11th day when I'm running late, I should be excused because I was nice to her the first 10 days.”

“The question that is asked most often about Knight is whether he will have an ending similar to Woody Hayes, another of his mentors.

The sad truth is this: He's already had it. Knight can talk all he wants about how happy he is in Lubbock cobbling together good teams at Texas Tech, a place where basketball will never be as important as spring football. He can talk about how much he likes the people there and how little he misses Indiana.

It simply isn't true. Knight belongs in Indiana. It is where he should have broken the record and finished his career. Imagine Wooden not finishing his career at UCLA; Smith not coaching at North Carolina; Rupp at Kentucky; Krzyzewski at Duke. How is it possible that a man who coached three national champions and an Olympic gold medal-winning team and did so without cheating while graduating his players and standing for all the right things about sports ends up fired?

It can't happen to an icon. Unless he slugs a player on national TV during a bowl game. Or refuses to believe that zero tolerance means zero tolerance for him. It can only happen to someone who simply refuses to understand that, even for icons, there are some rules. Knight never has understood that. Rules have always been for everyone else but not for him.”

In these parts, while Dean Smith has been his usual magnanimous self about the impending surpassing of his record, others have not been so pleased. Here’s Barry Jacobs, the longtime ACC area basketball writer (and local Chapel Hill politician) on the meaning of Knight passing Smith:

 “Maybe this won't be as bad as we thought.

Maybe there will be sufficient respect shown for Dean Smith, and what he achieved at North Carolina and the way he achieved it. Maybe this will be less a glorification of a bully and a boor and more a celebration of a coach and of coaching, a paean to sound fundamentals, clean recruiting, fearsome defense, motion offense, and a systematic approach to teaching the game of basketball.

Maybe we will see Bob (or is it Bobby?) Knight smile instead of snarl, acknowledge instead of attack, express humility instead of hostility when he passes Smith as the man with the most wins as a major-college coach.

Maybe.

The best we can do is work toward ambivalence, a grudging acceptance of this shift in the coaching pecking order.

In part, this reflects our admiration and respect for Dean Smith and the way in which he did things.

Unlike Kentucky's Adolph Rupp, the man he surpassed in career wins in 1997, Smith coached throughout his career against full-time basketball coaches rather than moonlighting football assistants at schools that did not take basketball seriously.

Unlike Rupp, who was either a racist or did a good impersonation of one, Smith coached with and against black athletes in a more competitive, highly pressurized, nationally scrutinized game. Unlike Rupp -- a fellow Kansas grad and disciple of Hall of Famer Phog Allen -- Smith never got his program on probation.

And, unlike most college coaches of any period, Smith is a man with a social conscience who, while admittedly comfortable in his status, is unafraid to stand for the values and causes in which he believes. We admire that.

In part, our discomfort with Knight's ascendancy reveals our antipathy for the coach exiled to Texas Tech after one too many transgressions at Indiana.

There's no point in cataloguing Knight's periodic acts of violence, abuses of authority, explosions of ill-temper, and arrogant indifference to the leaders of his own university and to the bounds of conduct expected of everyone else.

Suffice it to say, we will forever marvel at parents who knowingly send their children into his care and at leaders of higher education who tolerate his antics because he wins.

Finally, we regret seeing Bob Knight as the preeminent coach because, frankly, we are ACC chauvinists and he traces none of his roots to these parts.”

<fontsize ="3">On this last point, is Knight really the pre-eminent coach, once he passes Smith in the wins column? Feinstein argues that the five greatest college basketball coaches of all time are, in whatever order you choose – Smith, Knight, Coach K, Rupp and Wooden. I wouldn’t argue with that. It’s taken Knight about four seasons longer than Smith to amass the same win total, and Smith’s got a winning percentage about sixty points higher than Knight. Knight’s won three national championships (as has Coach K), versus just two for Smith, and both are dwarfed by Wooden’s national championship total, though Wooden coached in an era when it was possible to monopolize talent in a way that became impossible about the time Wooden retired in 1975. As Jacobs notes above, Rupp also coached under less competitive conditions than Smith, Knight or Coach K, but his four championships place him second all-time.

Knight’s not had the kind of NBA talent that regularly passed through Chapel Hill. Isiah Thomas was, by far his best player ever and no one else really approached him in terms of NBA performance  - compare that to Jordan, Worthy, McAdoo, Carter, Jamison and the endless list of future NBA stars who played for Smith). According to Michael Rosenberg of FOX sports, this makes Knight less than the best recruiter of all time, but it does make him the best coach of all time.

There is one caveat to this discussion (wasn’t that worth the wait?) that I have seen little commentary on: Knight has really faded as a top flight coach over the past decade or more. The last Knight team to make the final four was the 1992 Hoosier edition. The 1993 team, which went 31-4, was the last Knight team to win a conference title. In the five seasons from 1994-95 through 1998-99, Indiana lost at least ten games every season. If you consider that an elite program should - save for the three or so tough games pre-conference games on the schedule - win virtually all of its non-conference games, records like 19-12 or 20-11 just aren’t very good. In fact, nine of the last 11 Bob Knight teams, including four of his five Red Raider teams, have lost at least ten games. Smith, by contrast, lost ten games in a season just four times inhis entire thirty six year career as head coach. Last year’s Tech team went 15-17, the first losing season in Knight’s career, and only three of his five seasons in Lubbock have ended with trips to the Big Dance. Vitale insisted last night that it was “unbelievable” that Knight had managed to take three Texas Tech teams to the NCAAs in the past five seasons. But, this is a preposterously low standard for an all-time great coach trying to get a school from a major conference into a 65-team field. There is simply no comparable stretch of mediocrity in Smith’s career or Coach K’s.

And, to return to the issue raised by Forde and Feinstein, if Knight’s defenders contend that he has had to make do with less than elite talent at a school in a football state, that begs the question of how this all-time great ended up at such a barren basketball outpost.

Leaving aside the off-the-court issues and the controversy, Bob Knight is simply no longer an elite coach though, because of his career accomplishments, he is still treated as one (not unlike Bowden and Paterno). He is an all-time great, but other than padding his win totals, he has not added substantively to his stellar accomplishments in more than a decade.

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8:06:37 PM EST

I am back from vacation, so I’ll be resuming more regular posting.

Over at Sports Law Blog, Howard Wasserman has the following “random prediction for the New Year: George W. Bush will be the next Commissioner of Major League Baseball.”

Wasserman makes the following case:

“Current Commissioner Bud Selig announced earlier this month that he will retire when his contract expires at the end of 2009 (although apparently, back in in 2003 he said the same thing about retiring in 2006, so stay tuned). Bush will be out of a job at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2009. And he will need something to do, since one cannot imagine him monitoring foreign elections and fighting world health battles.

Baseball commissioner always has been a job that has attracted people from politics and public service. Commissioner A.B. "Happy" Chandler served as Kentucky's Governor and U.S. Senator both before and after his term in baseball. Chief Justice Fred Vinson considered resigning from the Supreme Court to take the job after Chandler's term ended in 1951. Names such as Mario Cuomo and George Mitchell have surfaced in the past as potential candidates. And, of course, Bush used to own the Texas Rangers, so he combines a political background with baseball-insider status, which would make him very appealing to the owners.”

Wasserman also notes that Bush apparently expressed interest in the job back in the early 1990s, before Bud Selig led a palace coup against Fay Vincent and became commissioner and Bush decided to run for governor of Texas.

I know Wasserman’s having some fun here, but there are a few reasons why I think such a turn is unlikely.

First, back in the early 1990s, in the shadow of the brief, but high profile commissionership of A. Bartlett Giamatti, it was easier to imagine baseball commissioner as something of a celebrity position. But, given the increasing business stakes in all professional sports, there is more of a premium on having a capable technocrat to guide themajor sports leagues. With ever greater pressure to troll new revenue streams to slake the multi-billion dollar thirst of the owners, it’s important for commissioners to be skilled in labor negotiations, savvy about new business possibilities and new technologies and, it would appear, to be hands-on when it comes to over-seeing those ventures. If we’ve learned anything about President Bush, it’s that he is notably unable or unwilling to give the kind of attention to detail and conscientious monitoring of nitty-gritty policy processes. Unless he were purely a figurehead, he’d be a poor fit for the job based on his temperament and skill sets.

Second, he would be a less than ideal figure head at this point. What Bush might have brought to the office in the early 1990s was a famous name and a reputation as a popular part owner of the Texas Rangers. In other words, to the extent that he had a public profile at that time, it was an innocuous one. In fact, it’s likely that Bush had no negative ratings to speak of in the court of public opinion. If he’s not going to be skilled manager sitting atop a multi-billion dollar enterprise, he would not need to bring a popular profile to the table. This, it can safely be said, Bush no longer has. Yes, he’s now perhaps the most well known person in the world, but he’s also wildly unpopular, and would bring to baseball all sorts of needless controversy and antipathy.

Third, Bush isn’t really a serious baseball person. If he had a detailed knowledge of the business side, or a particular aptitude as a negotiator, as David Stern did when he took over the NBA, Bush’s lack of depth of knowledge of the sport would be less of an issue. But, absent a skill set suited to the position, and as a very unpopular person, the only remaining justification would be if Bush had special knowledge of the game. But, he doesn’t. He’s a fan, and he spent a few years as the public face of the Rangers’ ownership group in the early 1990s, a position which helped facilitate their sweetheart deal with the city of Arlington to build the Ballpark. But, Bush was not meaningfully involved in day-to-day operations and certainly not personnel matters.

In other words, he’d be a poor choice on almost all relevant grounds. Wasserman’s right – it’s hard to imagine Bush devoting himself seriously to the causes that have engaged former Presidents Carter and Clinton, or his own father, for that matter. But, baseball is a serious business requiring a serious and dedicated leader. Bush is not that guy.

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9:59:06 AM EST

I have always counted myself a fan of Selena Roberts, sports columnist for the New York Times. She is one of the most incisive sports opinion writers in the business, and often has a special flare for cutting through the spin and the crap of team executives, NCAA administrators and other sports power brokers.

But, I have criticized her before and her column in the Times today is emblematic of what has gone wrong in some of her recent work. In pursuit of a pithy narrative, Roberts seems determined to shove facts in where they don’t belong, lending the feeling of an odd disconnect between her overall argument and the supporting evidence used to substantiate it. She did this in a piece about Arod this summer and she’s done it again with Tom Coughlin today. (I have some sympathy for Arod. I have none for Coughlin).

Roberts’ contention about Coughlin is that, as the title of her column tells it, there seems to be a “mismatch” between the coach and his team. As is usually true of Roberts, I agree with the premise. And, her piece starts out strong:

“The flashpoint for the hostile witnesses inside Giants Stadium yesterday wasn’t a pantomime offense unable to escape the invisible box of its own territory.

And it wasn’t a Giants defense that allowed the Saints rookie Reggie Bush to reveal how a draft-day decision can recast the outlook of a team and a season (ouch). And it wasn’t the Bermuda Triangle effect on Eli Manning’s accuracy or the lost kick in the kicking game or inept scheme in every phase.

Instead, incongruity pushed them over the edge.

They began a chant of “Fire Coughlin” only after yet another disconnect between the gospel of the coach and the sins of his players. In a span of 13 seconds during the third quarter, before a 30-7 blowout was fully formed, left tackle Bob Whitfield head-butted a Saint just before center Shaun O’Hara threw another to the turf.

Two flags. Two personal fouls. And one reason to wish Tom Coughlin gone.”

My Giants’ fans friends and I have been scratching our heads for three seasons now about how sports media continue to characterize Coughlin, with a straight face, as a disciplinarian, given how many stupid penalties and self-destructive plays emanate from this team every week. The upshot is a team whose total is much less than the sum of its quite talented parts, the ultimate sign of coaching failure.

But, Roberts has a tendency to harp on the same character issues that many sports media types do, and it steers her off track in her assessment of the disconnect:

“[Giants management] hired Arthur Fiedler to conduct VH1’s “Divas Live.” A mismatch from the beginning is in full bloom now. Coughlin is a throwback coach trying to direct a team built to win today that is assembled with self-consumed players fixated on tomorrow.

This Giants’ season has been one endless audition for football’s afterlife. Kicker Jay Feely has been clearing his throat, angling for whatever ESPN gig is in his future. Michael Strahan saves his voice for a paid appearance with WFAN. And while Coughlin stares holes into game films, Tiki Barber has been simultaneously breaking down film of defenses and Matt Lauer.”

The implication, of course, is that the Giants are more interested in their off-the-field careers than their on-field performances. But, singling out Barber, Feely and Strahan here is simply off-target. Tiki has always been singularly dedicated to his fitness and his craft. His performance, since Coughlin arrived in 2004, has been Hall-of-Fame caliber, and his transformation from a talented, but fumble-prone back into a superstar who never fumbles is arguably the single greatest accomplishment of Coughlin’s coaching tenure. Tiki’s post-retirement plans are, of course, well known. But, he’s still having an outstanding season and his public remarks about his coach, concerning game-planning, seem entirely reasonable criticisms, not the products of a preening, self-absorbed “diva.” Likewise, whatever Jay Feely’s off-field interests, he’s been a very competent and professional kicker in his two years in New York. And, all anyone needs to know about Strahan, the team’s best defensive player for a decade is that they win about as often as the Detroit Lions when he’s injured.

In other words, I dare say none of the Giants’ problems this season, or since 2004, are attributable to the three players Roberts has called out here.

Roberts also rehearses a variant on the “inmates-running-the-asylum” theme:

“And yet the Giants’ dire predicament right now wasn’t entirely unforeseen. Remember, Coughlin was greeted in his first spring on the job with an anonymous pack of Giants who alerted the N.F.L. Players Association about his strict guidelines. The players weren’t whining but sending a message to Coughlin: We’re in control.”

In Coughlin’s first season, his rules for showing up on time to meetings became famous: unless you were five minutes early, you were late. And, some Giants did complain that they were not aware of this rule. But, there’s simply been no evidence in Coughlin’s three years in New York, that his team has disobeyed him. What’s striking about the Giants, in fact, is that for all of the complaining, there has been no rebellion of any kind. No off-the-field issues, no open defiance of the coach, no refusal to abide by Coughlin’s strict dress code, meeting rules or anything else. The Giants’ players have not, as a group, staged a coup against Coughlin. We know they can’t stand the guy, but there’s no meaningful sense in which they’ve substituted their own authority for their coach’s authority. Roberts is simply substituting a larger narrative about the contemporary athlete for an accurate assessment of how the Giants’ organization has been running since 2004.

To be fair, part of Roberts’ claim here is that Coughlin cannot relate to his star players – that for his disciplinarian routine to work, he needs a bunch of no-names like he had when Jacksonville was an expansion team:

“These Giants weren’t Coughlin’s Jaguars, a ragtag bunch collected on the fly for an expansion team, but a group with a strong identity.

“We really had a bunch of misfits,” the former Jaguar Jeff Novak said during an interview in March 2004. “There were a bunch of guys who were marginal players who would do anything and everything to make a club. I was one of those players.

“With an established team like Tom has in New York, quite honestly, there are plenty of guys who are good enough that, if they’re not happy with him, they can go find a job someplace else very quickly.”

But, then Roberts follows up with this out-of-place rumination:

“Other jobs,other careers. Everyone is leaving Coughlin — even General Manager Ernie Accorsi, already in retirement mode.

Whitfield said: “Tiki is not coming back; our G.M. is not coming back. We’re all in some bit of vulnerability in this league.”

The fact is that life in the NFL is insecure for all but the best players in the league. And, like most teams, the Giants have some stars and a bunch of non-stars, toiling for non guaranteed contracts and one injury away from the end of their careers. And, Whitfield’s quote directly contradicts the premise of the previous paragraph – that there’s no meaningful insecurity for the Giants and, by implication, no motivation to play hard for a guy like Coughlin. And, it should be noted that the only high profile Giant who has really performed poorly these past few weeks (Strahan’s been injured) is the quarterback, who rates barely a mention in the column, though his lack of development has been, arguably, the single greatest failing of the Coughlin era.

Roberts is right: Coughlin seems to communicate very poorly with his team. But, it’s not because his star players are prima donnas who don’t care about what happens on the field because they’re too busy preening for other careers. And, it’s not because the players have somehow usurped Coughlin’s authority. There’s simply no evidence for that. And, it’s not because, somehow, back-up lineman like Bob Whitfield, forced into a major role because of a season-ending injury to Left Tackle Luke Petitgout, don’t feel the pressure of the unemployment line to get them to play hard.

Not everything that has happened this year is Coughlin’s fault. The team has been, even relative to the harsh standards of the NFL, slaughtered by injuries this year. And, though the Giants have impressive front line talent, the overall talent level, especially on defense, is not great. And, then there’s the historic trade for Eli in 2004, not Coughlin’s responsibility, which may cost the franchise for years to come. But, Coughlin’s own failings are straightforward enough – his inability to coach his team in such a way that they don’t continue to make costly mistakes. There are plenty of stars on teams like the Colts, Chargers and Ravens, and somehow their coaches have found a way to coax efficiency and intelligence out of the performances of those teams’ stars and non-stars alike.

Roberts has gone fishing for a larger moral of the story here – and it just doesn’t fit the facts.

 

 

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8:42:04 PM EST
An article in the New York Times this morning profiles Giants' kicker Jay Feely. Feely, like his more famous teammate Tiki Barber has ambitions well beyond the football field, including the desire to pursue a future career in the media and, perhaps, politics. Feely considers himself a man of strong Christian faith, and I think I can guess what his politics are, though his viewpoint is not made explicit in the Times piece.

In any event, the story mentions that Feely writes a regular blog for NBC.com. I have read a few entries and find it mostly banal. However, Feely does have an interesting post about what he regards as the mutually exploitative relationship between professional athletes and the media.

Feely writes:

"Media member (sic) will tell you that they don't have a vested interest in writing negative stories. That is inherently untrue. The nature of media today is decidedly negative. Most nightly newscasts are filled with crime reports and barely touch on positive human-interest stories. MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, 20/20, and the rest report on decidedly negative stories because that is what generates ratings. When you are driven by bottom line finances you are not unbiased. In Atlanta, when we were marred in a nine-game losing streak and the local media had very little to report on, I witnessed them actively seeking to create controversy when none existed. When I questioned the reporters about it they merely said my editor forced me to write this story. They will often deny culpability in their story by using their editor as a scapegoat or blaming the person who writes the headline. This is where the disdain develops in the athlete. They witness the reporter purposefully skewing their words in a fashion they knew they were not intended to have a greater impact. The athlete witnesses the manipulation of a situation to generate a specific response and he becomes hardened. I am not trying to unburden the athlete from his responsibility to speak carefully, be aware, and control his emotions, but it is also undeniable that the media has a specific agenda."

Especially illuminating here is the dynamic between reporter and editor and how the pressures inherent in that relationship prompt reporters to go fishing for controversy. Reporters, as a rule, never like to acknowledge the ways in which the pressure of their business affects the coverage. Their preferred explanation for the nature of coverage is that events simply happen, and they simply report them, as if neither interpretation, editorial discretion, corporate pressure or personal bias plays any conceivable role in what we, the readers, learn and don't learn.

It's refreshing, and unusual to see someone in a public position puncture the bubble just a bit.


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