USC bans LA Daily News reporter for 2 weeks for reporting an injury

First Urban, then Saban and now this. I know it's pie-in-the-sky to think something like this would happen, but there's a sad trend of big programs and coaches getting too big for their own britches. Honestly, as a reporter, I'd be raising hell in any one of those press rooms if something like this happened, and not just because the person was a colleague. That's an attack on the profession.

I've always been one of the "You do your job, I'll do mine" types. If a coach wants to tread on any member of the media, he treads on all of them. This kind of crap can't keep going on.

 

Aside from the basic idea that we don't work for them, the schools would do well to brush up on the gambling-influenced creation of the injury report itself. College sports are the most fertile land in American sports for game-fixing, and this secrecy does make it easier for that to happen. A player or even a student manager could make a quick 500 bucks for calling in a tweaked hamstring.

 

It just doesn't work like that anymore. Not once the recruiting sites came along. Their entire model is built on coaches feeding them info on the side about recruiting.

And the business is such now that the fans won't side with the press. They'll side with the coach out of spite for the press.

 

That's true, but neither of those things should be reason for the rest of the accredited media to ignore it. It might be idealistic, but coaches rely on recruiting sites to get that information out for them, too. You'd be surprised at how much of a win-win that is and how dependent coaches become on using that kind of press to get their names out there with other potential recruits. As for who the fans side with, there are much more important issues at play here. For example, not looking like a bunch of wimps at the beck and call of Coach "X."

 

And to think, this happened over an injury report, involving a kicker...

Considering how plugged in Scott Wolf is at USC, injury reports would be really low on my list of concerns about things that might be reported.

Moddy is so right about this. It's absolutely not allowable. Just ridiculous.

 

When I was covering colleges, there was a story out there about the Heisman candidate QB getting in trouble. It wasn't major trouble, but it was enough to usually get a one-game suspension. The coach comes out and goes off on a member of the media over something completely trivial. As soon as that happened, everybody seemed to forget that the bigger story was the possible suspension of the QB. People still wrote about the QB the following day, but it was completely overshadowed by the coach going nuts on a writer.

QB was not suspended.

 

If the fans this is OK, fuck the fans. Put it in print they're letting a game turn them into miserable excuses for citizens and people. Newspapers aren't getting anywhere bending over for everybody. Time for a different tack. Here's what's news and if you don't like it, fuck you.

 

Yeah, forget about just telling, motivating and training a team to just play a better game than the opponent, and win that way.

 

I wonder if this was something that the LADN writer had on his own or found out on his own or the LA Times and ESPNLA didn't report it.

I can't imagine that the Times or ESPN LA would ignore an injury that they knew about.

 

Makes me appreciate Pete Carroll all the more.

Feel badly for USC SID Tim Tessalone. He's a first-class guy, one of the best in the business. I can't believe he'd even ever remotely consider something like this if he didn't have orders from above.