Nashville media: sickening

Conspiracy Theorist alert!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Pulling rank?

"If you have never covered an NFL team"

That is such BS. Vince Young starting is big news. This isn't the same as divulging a game plan. This isn't saying that the Titans were going to have a trick play.

Vince Young was going to start at quarterback. The media knew, but played it off like they didn't know. They were passing bad information on to their readers. That is inexcusable. You are not their to be the team's mouth piece. The writers should have challenged fisher on this account.

At what point are you obligated to play along with the team you cover? You are not a fan of the team. What would you care if the Cowboys got an edge 2 days early to prepare for Young? That is not your concern.

An open practice is much preferable than closed, but not at the expense of news. If someone broke a leg in practice and is out for Sunday's game do you report it?

Ridiculous arguement.

I think the writers are too close to Fisher and should be pulled off the beat. This isn't doing your job, plain and simple.

 

How do you know the writers made that decision and not the editors?

 

Let me toss out another angle to all this stuff about access, etc., especially as covered in the KC Star story.

As bad as player-coach access can be in the NFL, and even with jerks like Bill Parcells and Nick Saban playing god to the media, it is actually worse at many major colleges, especially with the football programs.

Some of these places like Notre Dame, Alabama, Tennessee, etc. have become fortresses that rarely open locker rooms, if at all, and will give media access to players and/or coaches only once or twice during the week, and even then it's only a handful of players (or less) that the schools themselves hand-pick to bring up to the media room. Then you get all of 15-20 minutes in a room with 35 other reporters all clamoring to get their questions answered by 3 or 4 guys who have been coached to be blase and cliche-ish.

As for that deal in Nashville, so what if the Tennessean held a story that registers about a 2 on the Richter scale? Big deal. I keep tabs on about a half-dozen NFL teams, to include the Titans, other than the one in my state, and I sort of assumed that Young would be playing a lot or even starting really soon anyway. For pete's sake, the Titans had just traded away Bill Volek, and recent acquisition Kerry Collins had just pulled something like a 1.5 QB rating. Like, duh, of course Young was going to be starting soon, any day in fact, and not reading about it on the Tennessean web site for a few days means absolutely zilch to me.

For the Tennessean writers to choose NOT to burn a bridge so they can keep it in place for a story that truly is newsbreaking doesn't sem so dumb to me. I guess my rationale has something to do with the big picture. If in my judgment, holding on to the Young-starting story buys me a better chance to, down the road, break a real story such as if and when Jeff Fisher gets canned, or Chris Brown gets traded, or Pacman Jones gets arrested and kicked off the team, or Travis Henry fails another drug test, or Bud Adams sells the Titans, or one of their players comes out of the closet, etc., etc., . . . you get my drift. The Young-starting story pales in comparison to any of those examples in terms of significance.

 

FWIW, I've covered several college programs and not once experienced an open locker room.

 

To use your reasoning. Big deal if Jeff Fisher gets canned. I sort of assumed Fisher would be canned anyway. For Pete's sake, the team stinks.

Your line of thinking is typical, but is really a rationalization for doing what is easiest for you and not what is best for the reader. Since everyone is playing along, how is that going to help you "break" a hypothetical big story down the road?

 

Exactly. What makes you think that going along with this is going to make them come out of their bunkers and volunteer a bigger story down the road? That's like a team that's perennially building for the future. Hey, the future is now. I don't roll over because I might -- emphasis on might, because there's no guarantee -- get something better down the road. This was a big story now. Tell your readers about it. That's what you're there for.

 

I see both sides of this deal, I really do.

But for all of the tough talk I see among those who would take a Death Or Glory stand on their beats as far as their relationship with sources, I haven't seen one of those people cite an example of actually following through with their stance or what the ramifications of that stance is.

I don't say that to be a dick, I'd like to know how it worked for some of you. The good, the bad, all of it. Talk is cheap, how did it work it practice?

 

Good question.

I used to cover a school where we were supposed to have an injury update as soon as possible after the game and something in our capsule before the game.

The trainer was very accomodating. Too accomodating for the coach who told him not to talk to me again.

So every time I saw the trainer I asked him about injuries. He said "No comment" for a whole season. It got to be a joke.

So I would bug the coach about injuries just about every time I saw him. I also asked players themselves. It was more work for me, but I got the info, the coach got to control it as much as he could and the trainer kept his job.

I didn't mind. Helps to remember to talk to guys who are hurt if you can. And my asking the coach all the time drove hom the point that this little distraction was of his own making.

 

I was thinking the same thing...except the tool in question was the person who actually thinks the Super Bowl was fixed because there were a few crappy calls.

I should say tools, actually...ok, end of threadjack....

 

"Fixed" is an extreme, prejudicial term. But there were a minimum of two -- and probably more --
calls in that game which left the Seahawks attempting to scale a very steep slope. Did the
calls cost Seattle the game? Perhaps not. But evenhanded officiating would have certainly
resulted in a closer, even-more-spinetingling game.

 

When you question if the officiating was "legitimate," I take that to mean you are raising the possibility that they were intentionally calling things in the Steelers favor.

If you had just said piss-poor, I wouldn't have had as much of a problem with your statement.

Though I still think the bad calls have been over-rated. The holding call that brought the late pass to the Steelers' one-yard line was legit. Haggans was held. Of course, he was off-sides on the play and the officials missed that, but even if they call it, that's just offsetting penalties, not Seattle ball at the one.

Of course, I'm a Steelers fanboy, so I may be blind on this issue