New at Rivals: Dawgs Won't Hunt

My Monday-morning Rivals.com column for the Homecoming game against Chattanooga has been posted at AuburnSports.com. There honestly wasn't much to say about the UTC game, so I moved right along to the upcoming tilt with Georgia, and addressed an incident from Atlanta radio last Friday:

WCNN-AM 680's Buck Belue and John Kincaid made particular fools of themselves last Friday afternoon. Ex-Georgia handoff artist Belue conducted a one-minute softball interview with John Bond, most of which was dedicated to Belue and Bond talking about how they'd been buddies since childhood. At the end, Belue obligingly tossed Bond a softball about the alleged Bond-Urban Meyer-Dan Mullen phone conversation. Bond denied the call had ever happened and hung up, and then the hosts were off to the races.

Kincaid, who was once described in 680's own advertising as "a token Yankee ass," proceeded to rip Jeffrey Lee, who first broke the Meyer story, as well as Scout's Mark Murphy and 247Sports' Phillip Marshall, who each independently confirmed it, as pathetic bloggers with no "journalistic" credibility. The tirade lasted for quite a while, and got nastier as it went.

I used to know John Kincaid slightly, not long after he first moved to Atlanta. My impression was that he's generally a good guy, but like most guys in radio, he has no off switch, and once he heads down a path, his only settings are "push harder" and "say it louder."

Kincaid is from Philadelphia, and apparently the last decade he's spent in Atlanta didn't result in his learning anything about the sportswriters in his neighboring state.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for trashing Marshall, the dean of Alabama sportswriters. Marshall has a 40-year track record as a reporter for the state's biggest papers and several shelves full of awards for his work. Murphy was reporting on college football for a living when John Kincaid was still in grade school, and this site's own Jeffrey Lee, while a relative newcomer compared to those veterans, is a respected and diligent reporter with no history of chicanery.

Kincaid's current job isn't journalism, it's stirring things up on a radio show, but he has obvious ambitions towards greater things in his business. It's doubtful those greater things are going to be out there if he continues to pull stunts like trashing veteran sportswriters based on the questionable word of his broadcast partner's old jock buddies.

Given the fact that other media organizations, including all three major newspapers in Alabama, have now confirmed Lee's original reporting, Kincaid would be well-served to revisit and revise his ugly remarks from the immediate wake of the Bond interview.

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