Back To The Future

One of Auburn's questions was answered Saturday night, at least as well as such a thing could be answered against a Louisiana-Monroe: you can have a power running game from "the spread." Running the ball was not a problem. Brad Lester, Ben Tate and newcomer Eric Smith were all able to move the ball on the ground, amassing over 300 rushing yards on the night. Passing, on the other hand...

The first (okay, first and a half) version of the Tony Franklin offense looked an awful lot like the last crippled couple of years of the Al Borges offense: lots of screens with no blocking support, nobody getting open for longer balls, and thus an inability to... wait for it... spread the field. Now, tell me, what hasn't changed here? (*COUGH* "inside receivers" coach *COUGH*). Third and long conversions were, to polite, not good.

As Tommy Tuberville noted at halftime, the much-ballyhooed feature of this offense to speed up the game's tempo was missing in action Saturday night. Kodi Burns rarely threw down the field, and the one time he did attempt a long pass, it bounced off the hands of the receiver. Talk about deja-vu. Chris Todd's standard play was to check about a receiver and a half and then try to scramble. News flash--he's not a scrambler. Teach him to step up in the pocket and/or get rid of the ball. It didn't help either quarterback that pass protection--against LAMO, mind you, not LSU--was downright awful in the first half, something Franklin noted in a Quentin-Riggins-reported chewing out of the rest of the offensive staff at halftime. Said chewing did seem to help; protection was notably better in the second half.

Let's hope we've seen the last of alternating series for the quarterbacks. That's fine for A-Day (and what was this opener, if not a glorified A-Day?), but it's not going to fly against the rest of the schedule. Pick one, preferably Burns. Leave him in, and let him establish something. It's very telling to me that the one time Todd looked good was in the Tigers' last scoring drive, after Burns had left the game and Todd was able to stay in for several series by default (Burns turned out to have a laceration on his leg, and should be fine). The long pass to Rod Smith and follow-up baseline dart to Slaughter were easily Todd's best plays of the night.

On the other side of the ball, it's hard to criticize a shutout that opens with a defensive touchdown. Antonio Coleman has inherited not only Quentin Groves' position (which Coleman actually won and didn't give up midway through last season), but also the miasma of fear generated by Auburn's weakside defensive end over the last several seasons. Jerraud Powers had a couple of outstanding pass breakups, and the hit of the night came courtesy of freshman DB Neiko Thorpe, midway through the fourth quarter.

The kicking game was something of a mixed bag. I think I'm safe in saying that nobody knew what to make of preseason all-SEC punter Ryan Shoemaker losing his position to Clinton Durst, a guy who'd never played football before Saturday night. That impression was enhanced when Durst shanked a punt in the middle of the game, but that flub didn't keep Durst from racking up a decent 43-yard average on seven kicks, with one 58-yard boomer. Robert Dunn's punt return for a touchdown was obviously a great run--but then Dunn reminded everybody why he drives us all up the wall by losing yardage on his next reception. AU's kickoff coverage is still depressingly bad.

So, a first game, a warmup. As such things go, it wasn't great, but it could have been a whole lot worse. With a solid defense and the running game still there, there's reason for optimism going forward, but let's be honest here: Auburn was emphatically not ready to play anybody much better than LAMO on Saturday.

Disclaimer: this is not by any stretch a prediction. But. Four years ago, I wrote this about an Auburn opening against... LAMO:

On the one hand, you've got a workmanlike shutout of (let's face it) one of the worst football teams in the country. To their great credit, Louisiana Monroe's players didn't show a lot of give-up on Saturday, but they also didn't show a whole lot of ability. Auburn substituted all the way into the scout team by the fourth quarter, and the closest LA-MO ever got to scoring was a couple of missed field goals. On the other hand...

Look, it's obvious that the AU coaches went into this game intending to show future opponents absolutely nothing of use, and it's safe to say that they succeeded. "Vanilla" doesn't begin to describe the blandness of the formations and plays displayed on Saturday. Try "tasteless and odorless," or maybe "invisible."

... With that understood, there are still worries. Either La-Mo's defensive line has gotten a lot better since last October (entirely possible; they were big and quick, easily the best-looking athletes as a group that the Indians fielded), or Hugh Nall still has a lot of work to do up front. Run blocking was hit-and-miss (sometimes literally), and pass blocking was downright bad a lot of the time. And don't get me started on the reappearance of last year's bugaboo, the dreaded slanting defenders. More than once, a friend sitting nearby said, "It's a good thing they suck, or we'd be in trouble."

I would also be remiss if I didn't admit that Jason Campbell's play was not encouraging. Whether by habit, design, or just happenstance, Campbell is still locking in on his first guy and not seeing open receivers down the field, he's throwing behind the receiver too often, and his two turnovers were flat-out awful, the kind of stuff you expect from a freshman, not a fifth-year senior.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

Now, once again--not a prediction, or anything remotely like it. I'm not expecting, anticipating, or even wildly dreaming about a 2004-ish run for this team. But it's still comforting, in an odd and nostalgic kind of way, that the best Auburn season in recent history also started against LAMO, and not with a bang, but with a "What the--?"

New And Improved

FTB's new look (and the old look, for that matter) is courtesy of my old bud Lein Shory, who learns how to do this stuff so I don't have to. It also helps that he has actual artistic talent and taste--again, so I don't have to. If you're in need of site design, drop me a line, and I'll be glad to pass it on to him.

Thanks, Lein. Great job, as usual.

Benediction

Geoffrey Norman:

We were supposed to be talking politics but we couldn't help ourselves. It was hot. It is always hot in the black belt of Alabama in the middle of August, and it feels like it will be hot for all eternity. So we talked about sports for some relief.

"You know," the man said wearily, "I just can't wait until they kick it off again. I mean, I feel like if I can just make it for another two or three weeks, then they'll be playing football again and then everything will be okay."

Hallelujah, Amen.

Exodus: Jay Mariotti

Wow:

In a bombshell announcement in the world of sports journalism, star columnist Jay Mariotti has abruptly resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Sun-Times says Mariotti left to "pursue other opportunities."

But Mariotti told the Chicago Tribune he decided to quit after covering the Olympics in Beijing because newspapers are in serious trouble, and he did not want to go down with the ship.

"I'm a competitor and I get the sense this marketplace doesn't compete," he said in the Tribune story. "Everyone is hanging on for dear life at both papers.

"To see what has happened in this business. … I don't want to go down with it."

Mariotti said he plans to pursue opportunities on the Web, and continue his regular appearances as a panelist on ESPN's "Around the Horn."

Fair Warning

Blogging is liable to be very light for the next week or so--even by my standards. All apologies; the circumstances are quite beyond my control. I'll certainly be making every effort to get some preseason stuff up between now and the first SEC game next Thursday, but I can't promise anything at all at this point.

Fortunately, things will be back to normal by the time the season actually kicks off...

Yowza

Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham News weighs in on Alabama coach Nick "I'm not going to be the Alabama coach" Saban, this week's Forbes cover boy. This might be the most brutal thing I've ever read in that paper about a not-days-away-from-being-fired UAT coach, and Scarbinsky doesn't have to do much more than recite the cold facts:

Nick Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's lost four of his last five games.

Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's one game over .500 at his current job.

Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who hasn't had a winning regular season in three years.

... and it gets (a lot) tougher from there. Read the whole thing.

Scarbinsky probably ought to have a bomb-sniffing dog check out his car before he drives home tonight. This one isn't going to go over so well with all the Kool-Aid drinkers in Bamaham--which certainly includes a massive crimson cheering section at the Bamaham News...

Fumble

Oh, great. The SEC just announced that we're stuck with Can't Broadcast Sports as the conference's broadcast TV partner for another fifteen years.

How wonderful. Fifteen years of lousy kickoff times, terrible announcers, and a commercial every ten seconds. Whoo-pee.

And I don't care how big the check is--FIFTEEN YEARS?!? Live sports are one of the only things left on broadcast TV that are DVR-proof, meaning they're only going to get more valuable as advertising dollars for "regular" television dry up. How much future money just got taken off the table by over-committing to such a long term deal?

Dumb move, Slive. Next thing you know, the SEC will commit to a 50-year deal with the Three Idiots Named Dave...

Chris Bertelli in Sacramento, CA...

... you owe me a beer.

(For the rest of you, check out Chris's email, as read on the air by Ivan Maisel in the last minute or so of the August 6, 2008 ESPN College Football Podcast.)

Simpson Pepper, RIP

Simpson Pepper, who was Alabama's stadium announcer during the 1970's, 80's, and 90's, and who also worked Legion Field games for UAB in this decade, died yesterday at age 79.

I feel quite safe in assuming that Pepper was decidely not on Auburn's side, but he was from the "old school" of PA guys who took pride in being absolute professionals on the mike, much like Auburn's own recently-retired Carl Stephens. There are too many schools in the SEC today (LSU, Georgia and Florida, I'm talking to you) whose stadium announcers could learn a lot from the examples of Pepper and Stephens.

Speaking for myself, I will always remember (and not a little fondly) hearing Pepper make the familiar call: "Time out for... Alabamaaaaaa."

RIP.

Exodus: Tony Barnhart

Following up on last week's post regarding the ongoing exodus of top talent from newspapers comes today's news that the only remaining reason to read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is on his way out the door. Per several online reports, Tony Barnhart has accepted a "voluntary" buyout and will leave the paper.

Barnhart, a near-universal pick as the best college football reporter in the country, will certainly have a new job (hopefully in the new media) before the ink is dry on his buyout check, if not sooner. As far as I'm concerned, this completes the AJC's descent into irrelevance (an impression confirmed by the realization that Terence Moore and Mark Bradley are apparently staying on).

Christmas In August For EDSBS

From UGASports.com:

Long snapper Jeff Henson and backup safety Donavon Baldwin were suspended indefinitely Saturday night by Georgia head coach Mark Richt for unrelated incidents.

Henson was arrested by Athens-Clarke County police early Saturday morning for public defecation and public intoxication, while Baldwin, a backup safety, was involved in an altercation outside a downtown Athens bar.

After all, housetraining problems are inevitable with young Dawgs. Over to you, Orson...

Regarding "The Spread"...

I've been asked more than a few times over this excruciatingly-long off-season what I think about "the spread" coming to Auburn. I really haven't been able to answer that question (certainly not well) in a few words, so here are more than a few:

I still think the world of Al Borges. Anybody who doesn't appreciate what he did for Auburn has completely forgotten the night-and-day difference between the AU offense in 2003 as compared to 2004 and 2005. Everybody forgets today that Auburn didn't just light up the league in the undefeated '04 season, but also led the SEC in offense the following year--and that was with Brandon Cox under center. I still don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with Borges' offense--at least nothing that three or four NFL-caliber wide receivers wouldn't have fixed. And that, of course, was the rub.

Obviously, things changed dramatically in 2006, when Auburn fell way back in the offensive standings, and again in 2007, when the Tigers darn near hit rock bottom on that side of the ball. While it's reasonable to think some of the difference was due to the natural progression of defensive coaches on the other teams getting more familiar with Borges's schemes, I think it's clear that losing Anthony Mix, Devin Aromashodu and Ben Obiwankenobi after '05 and Courtney Taylor after '06 was what really spelled doom for the Gulf Coast Offense.

All four of those guys are on NFL rosters today, and with all due respect to the wideouts on the current AU roster, we have not seen their like since. And it's showed. The Tigers lost nearly a thousand yards of total offense from '05 to '06. Once defenses knew there wasn't much of a deep threat, they could close down to a 30-yard box from the line of scrimmage, and Cox was turned into a punching bag as a result (and although nobody ever talks about it on the record, I think it's safe to assume that Cox's health problems were at the very least not helped by the poundings he took on the field).

Why did AU get in such a hole at receiver? The easy answer is that wideout recruiting fell off, but why that happened is a little more complicated. In an age of high school kids putting a premium on early playing time, it had to be hard to recruit new receivers as long as the "big four" still had eligibility. It wouldn't surprise me if the luxury of having those four guys around also made the staff somewhat complacent (there it is again, the one great flaw of the Tuberville era) when it came to signing newcomers at the position: "Hell, we'll get some next year."

Making things worse, once the positions did open up, prospects watching Auburn games no longer saw an offense they wanted to play in. WIthout a dependable passing game, Auburn fell back out of necessity to a power running attack, and I've yet to meet a top receiver who relishes the idea of spending most of his games as a blocker. That feedback loop continued to the point where the Tigers rarely cracked three touchdowns against SEC competition.

As good as Borges is when he has the right tools, continuing to use an offense built around players you don't have is a losing proposition. We'd already seen what happened to Auburn when Terry Bowden decided to insert the 1990's Florida State offense in a team that didn't have 1990's Florida State players at the "skill positions."

So, something had to change. If the players weren't going to change (and they weren't, certainly not in the short term), the offense had to, and making things harder, it had to change in a way that enticed more players of the kind Auburn didn't have to sign up. Whether the shift from Borges' pro-style attack to Tony Franklin's much-lauded "spread" was the right change or not... well, like they say, that's why they play the games. We'll see.

I'll be the first to confess that I have never been an fan of "the spread," at least not "the spread" as lazy sportswriters tend to use the term. I didn't like it when Bowden went five-wide and threw on most downs in 1995-98. These days we'd recognize that offense as a close relative to Texas Tech or Hawaii. That kind of imbalance is a recipe for two or three disasters a year in the SEC. I also still don't care for Urban Meyer's offense, which is just a gussied-up version of the Single Wing with more receivers; ditto for Rich Rodriguez's version at West Virginia. In the end, both are really just the option run out of the shotgun.

That said, I am comforted by Franklin's insistence that he intends to run a balanced attack out of his shotgun formations. I'm as dedicated a fan of the running game as any SEC fan anywhere, but history tells us that while you can't win if you can't run, you also can't win big unless you have balance.

There hasn't been a great Auburn team since the Bo Jackson-led Wishbone squad of 1983 that was not also a balanced offensive team. Indeed, the great strength of Borges' great run in 2004-05 (and Bowden's in 1993-94, for that matter) was the unpredictability of an offense that could either run or pass in almost any situation.

If Auburn can get back to that, things on the Plains will be just fine. If not... but there it is again: that's why they play the games.

Tony^2

Tony Barnhart interviews Auburn's Tony Franklin today. A highlight:

The spread is a formation, not an offense: "Some people spread the field to run it, like West Virginia. Others spread the field to pass it, like Texas Tech. It’s what you do after you spread the field that defines your offense. We spread it to figure out what is going to work in any particular game and then we just do that. At Troy we basically ran it half the time and threw it half the time. We just always took what the defense was giving us. (Note: Troy rolled up 488 yards in a 44-34 loss to Georgia last November). Our plan at Auburn is to throw first and run second but if we find a running play that works, we’re going to do that. I’m not hung up on who gets the ball and how we do it. I just want to score points."

Read the whole thing.

Exodus

Daily newspapers used to be important things. Before television, they were the primary way most sports fans found out who won or lost games, who was in contention, who was on the outs. Even in the TV age, the daily paper was your connection to your team(s), and the only means of reading up on box scores, or standings, or the real mainstay of sports writing, opinion columns. For most of my soon-to-be-forty years, whether you liked it or not, you had to buy the paper if you wanted to know what was going on.

All that started to change, of course, something over a decade ago. The internet unleashed news and sports writing from the grasp of printing press and TV station owners, and put the ability to reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other people in the hands of just about anybody with a computer. While the blogging revolution was going on, the web also revealed who the most important employees of a given newspaper really were: not the columnists with lifetime sinecures, not the beat reporters with one eye on the AP wire, but rather the little old ladies downstairs who took the orders for want-ads. While online news and sports sites thrive and grow more profitable by the year, newspapers are in a fiscal nosedive as advertisers and subscribers alike take their attention and business elsewhere.

All of which brings us to 2008, and a fascinating exodus that's occurring just under the radar in the sportswriting world. As print newspapers become less and less relevant (and far less profitable), more and more top talents are jumping off the sinking ship to ply their trades online. In blog parlance, it's called "taking the Boeing," a phrase coined by uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds when ace political writer Mickey Kaus agreed to bring his hugely-popular Kausfiles blog under the Slate.com umbrella (Slate being owned by Microsoft, which shares its home city of Seattle with aircraft behemoth Boeing--it's a stretch as a joke, but it works).

Around these parts, Neal McCready left the Mobile Press-Register to become the feature writer for Rivals.com's Ole Miss site around the beginning of 2008. I'd said for years that McCready pretty obviously would be a lot happier if he were covering Mississippi instead of Auburn and Alabama, and by all indications (including an acidic and very funny kiss-off email that was widely forwarded around), Neal finally agreed. He's clearly having a ball in his new job, and good for him.

That said, I was stunned when Phillip Marshall "took the Boeing," or rather the SI ESPN Shuttle a month or so ago. Marshall has newspaper ink running in his veins; his father Benny was a legendary sports editor at the Birmingham News, and Marshall himself has been a major figure in the Alabama media for most of my own lifetime. He was easily the best sports editor, reporter and writer the Montgomery Advertiser has had in the last 30 years, and in his more recent gig as the Auburn beat writer for the Huntsville Times, he won the state's top award for sports writing in both of the last two years. But Marshall walked away from the Times in June to set up shop in a brand-new Sports Illustrated ESPN-affiliated AU news and blog site, Auburn Undercover (which I must say has a dumb name, but great content).

The exodus is not limited to Alabama's papers. Fort Worth Star-Telegram living legend Wendell Barnhouse recently hung up his newspaper spurs to become the Big 12 Conference's online reporter. Under less voluntary circumstances, Jay Christensen (who wrote the blurb about Barnhouse linked just above), was recently axed thanks to the floundering LA Times' efforts at cost cutting. Christensen's previously-anonymous blog The Wizard of Odds was (and is) among the very best college football sites out there, and I'm betting that Jay will go a lot farther online than he would have in the stratified world of big-newspaper sportswriting.

Even when people don't leave their big-media home bases, they're finding more readers by going online. For my money, the best two college football writers in the country are Tony Barnhart of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Ivan Maisel of ESPN. Barnhart's online-only AJC blog is far more timely and interesting than almost anything that gets printed in the actual paper, and Maisel's work scarcely ever sees physical print at all these days; the vast majority of his stuff is online-only at ESPN.com.

All of which makes one wonder how far all this is going to go. The market is proving that small outfits concentrating on a single team or school or sport can do quite well; there are three full-time all-Auburn news and message board sites running right now (full disclosure, with several friends of mine working in various jobs), and they're all making money. Sports sites with broader appeal are also doing fine, and all the proof you need of that is Orson Spencer Mellencamp's recent taking-of-the-Boeing to become a feature writer with the Sporting News.

Readers are leaving newspapers far faster than the better writers. I remember hearing my dad gripe about the state of the Montgomery Advertiser about a decade ago. Gannett had bought out what was up until that point the best paper in the state, and their low salaries and Mickey Mouse editorial template quickly ran off everybody with any smidgen of talent. "What can you do?" he asked me rhetorically. "You have to get a paper, and even this garbage is the best one around here."

Now Dad has an iBook with a wireless hookup, and every newspaper in the world is as close as his end table. He used to get three daily papers while I was growing up; now he gets one, and I'll bet you he won't renew it the next time a bill arrives.

As a lot of people who worked for secure local monopolies pre-web are learning, my dad is hardly unique.

"Home Of The Linebacker Bullies"

I wasn't planning to post about the arrest of Alabama running-back-turned-linebacker Jimmy Johns today. Johns is charged with multiple felony counts of cocaine distribution and narcotics posession, and had apparently been dealing coke on the UAT campus for quite a while.

One could make the point that Johns' pharmaceutical operation was not exactly a state secret--there has been chatter about it on message boards for quite a while now--but, I do make it a point not to blog unless I have a point to bring up that hasn't been covered elsewhere. Since I didn't have much to add that hasn't been in the Big Media stories already (and the arrest has already been lampooned by Orson Spencer Mellencamp better than I would have managed), I didn't see the point.

And then I heard about Jimmy Johns Pitbulls, the Home of the Linebacker Bullies. Go ahead, have a look for yourself, it's at the carefully-disguised URL of jimmyjohnspitbulls.com (I'll post up saved screen shots later in case it suddenly disappears).

The page is not very old, at least in its current form. According to WHOIS, the URL was created on March 6, 2008 (incidentally just before Alabama's spring practice sessions began), and it only has a few hundred hits as of this afternoon.

Even if we set aside the multiple unsavory connections one might draw regarding an accused cocaine dealer who raises pit bulls on the side, the website itself raises questions about Johns' activities as a breeder, and especially as a breeder who used pictures of himself in an Alabama uniform as well as specific references to his status as an Alabama player in his advertising.

While college atheletes are allowed to have jobs (under highly-regulated circumstances) and are also allowed to be self-employed, NCAA Bylaw 12.4.4 states,

A student-athlete may establish his or her own business, provided the student-athlete's name, photograph, appearance or athletics reputation are not used to promote the business.

In addition, Bylaw 12.5.2.1 states,

After becoming a student-athlete, an individual shall not be eligible for participation in intercollegiate athletics if the individual:

(a) Accepts any remuneration for or permits the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind; or

(b) Receives remuneration for endorsing a commercial product or service through the individual's use of such product or service.

If it's correct that the website ("Home Of The Linebacker Bullies") is only a few months old, eligibility is not really an issue here. The site was created last March, and Johns hasn't participated in a football game between then and today, when he was kicked off the Alabama team. However, it's worth asking how long Johns had been acting as a pitbull breeder, and whether he actually did the breeding himself, or simply hired out his name and (relative) fame to somebody else in return for renumeration. Between playing football, going to college, and allegedly being a one-man pharmaceutical entrepreneur on Alabama's famously coke-laden campus, I do have to wonder where the guy found the time to "take care of [dogs] better than most do their children."

It's also worth asking what the Alabama compliance and coaching staffs knew about Johns' numerous extracurricular activities. As I said earlier, it was not exactly a surprise to hear that Johns had been arrested on drug charges. If Joe Fan, based on nothing more than internet chatter, had a pretty good idea what Johns was up to in his spare time, what about his coaches and teammates, and the support staff in Tuscaloosa?

I doubt anybody in the Alabama media is going to go around asking those questions; the purpose of most of the sports departments in the state is to blow smoke up the collective hindquarters of the "Tide Nation." Other than the obligatory editorial tut-tutting over the tenth player arrest in Nick Saban's 18 months in Tuscaloosa, this story will be over by Saturday as far as the in-state press is concerned.

But there's clearly more to the Johns story than just a 'kid who went wrong.' It'll be interesting to see who else chooses to dig deeper after today's big headlines die down.

UPDATE: Ian Rapoport of the Birmingham News reports on Wednesday that the Jimmy Johns Pitbulls website is for real, and that Johns does indeed have a side business selling dogs.

Gameday For Smart People

While we all slog through the long doldrums between spring practice and the now-far-away next season, this is as good a time as any to post another unabashed plug for ESPN's outstanding College Football Insider podcasts. During the off-season, the podcasts are updated biweekly (they run every weekday during the season itself), and are hosted by ESPN print luminary Ivan Maisel, who's usually joined by the now-iconic Beano Cook.

The podcasts are, without a doubt, the best single piece of college football programming coming out of Bristol these days. They're everything the network's televised coverage should be, but isn't: pithy, information-packed, intelligent, funny, and still thoroughly entertaining. Better yet, there are no coaching failures, bitter has-beens, and hype-mongering homers to gum up the works with corporate-approved nonsense. Best of all, they're free, and available either from ESPN's website or iTunes (just search "ESPN college football podcast" at the iTunes store; a subscription is free). I can't think of a better place to get a quick fix of football during these dreary months of waiting for the first kickoff.

A few weeks back Maisel petitioned listeners to come up with a slogan for the podcasts. I've got the perfect one, but somehow I doubt he'll be able to use it: "Get the College Football Insider Podcast. It's 'Gameday' for smart people."

You Haff My Gwatitude

I somehow missed this when it first came out, but From The Bleachers was named an AJC Staff Pick for "Best Auburn Sites" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a month ago. Very nice, and I thank whomever thanks are due to for the recognition.

In addition, some of you may have noticed that FTB was picked up a while back as one of ten sites recommended by SportsIllustrated.com on their Auburn team page. FTB and AUNews.net are the only blogs so honored, and also the only sites out of the ten not run by large organizations.

So, to the ladies and gents at SI.com, like the man said in "The Kentucky Fried Movie," you haff my gwatitude.

Randy Kennedy: Nick Sucker

Last weekend, Gentry Estes of the Mobile Press-Register posted a short article about a recent Alabama scrimmage to the Register's "Bama Beat" blog. As you might guess from the title, Estes is the Register's Alabama beat writer, and in the post he discussed the frustration of being assigned to write about a scrimmage that he hadn't actually been allowed to watch, and about players and coaches he isn't able to interview:

For the second time in eight days, Alabama simulated game action at Bryant-Denny Stadium without the media (and general public) there to witness it. For the second time, Alabama issued statistics (Yeah, I've got 'em listed below) as to what supposedly transpired. For the second time, Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban was the only one made available to offer his take (Tide players do not address reporters after scrimmages and Saban's assistant coaches, of course, never do).

It can be frustrating. Those of us who cover this team would love to offer the kind of detailed assessments available at basically every other major program. Is that currently an option at Alabama?

No.

It's not that I'm complaining. This operation is Saban's baby. He has had success with his approach in the past. He can (and does) do as he pleases. I'm OK with that, and knew it when I signed on last August.

But in the interest of fairness ... I would like to point out a few things before fans delve too far into statistics and stories about any of Alabama's spring or preseason scrimmages. ...

Without the media present, there is no objective vantage point to the coverage. First off, the information you're receiving is only what Alabama wants you to know. This is not an ideal situation for a journalist who values a balanced account, and it's worth disclosure and a warning to readers: Take it for what it's worth.

Also know that in-house scrimmages are often molded into whatever the coaches want them to be. As I predicted last week on Scott Griffin's radio show, Alabama's offense would fare much better the second time. Lo and behold, they did.

How did I know that? Because I've seen coaches tweak the format to help a struggling unit. The first-team offense is doing poorly? Put them against the third-string defense for a while and see how those numbers turn out. Did that happen here? I don't know. Since I didn't watch the scrimmage, I can't tell you the circumstances behind John Parker Wilson's apparent 200-yard performance or Roy Upchurch's supposed rushing resurgence.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to this: Scrimmages are glorified practices. Fans should digest them that way. They do not tell you much about an upcoming season. They are a hint, but far from the entire picture.

That's not a bad piece, as such things go. As somebody who writes about college football, I think that's pretty interesting stuff, but obviously others may not agree.

Well, scratch that. "Others," allegedly including the highest-paid employee of the state of Alabama, emphatically did not agree. You may have noticed that I didn't link to Estes's post. I didn't because I can't (or rather I couldn't; keep reading). The post inexplicably vanished from the al.com site the Register shares with several other newspapers, and only reappeared yesterday when Register columnist and all-around gadfly Paul Finebaum posted it to his own website.

Finebaum interviewed Register sports editor Randy Kennedy on Wednesday, and among other things asked why the rather mild criticism of Alabama Coach Nick "I am not going to be the Alabama coach" Saban had vanished from Estes's blog. Per a quote at the Capstone Report blog, Kennedy replied,

"We just decided it was more trouble than it was worth…this was not necessarily the battle he wanted to pick with the people who were supposed to be our customers."

Now, that's lame.

Take it from me, you've got to have thick skin if you're going to write about either Alabama or Auburn, and the Estes post didn't even register on the invective scale in that state. If anything, it was a pretty toned-down look at the growing undercurrent of dislike among state sportswriters who have to deal with Saban's trademark petulance.

Pulling such a milquetoast post over alleged public reaction would be bad enough, but according to Montgomery sports radio personality Doug Amos, as quoted from Finebaum's radio show today, the demand to spike Estes's post came from none other than "Flipper" himself. According to Amos, who is also an associate athletic director at Faulkner University (and if my memory serves, a big Alabama fan), a source has told him that the article was yanked after Saban personally called Estes to complain (for the record, Estes is a Georgia graduate who, in his student days, wrote of being "Born and raised a die-hard Crimson Tide fan in Birmingham").

If accurate, that goes beyond lame. If that's true, Kennedy hung a young employee of his out to dry to mollify the hurt feelings of a spoiled-brat football coach who makes more in a month than he and Estes combined make in a year (heck, it's probably more than the entire Register sports staff makes in a year).

Even if it isn't--but given Saban's history of trying to intimidate the media, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is--Kennedy should still be ashamed of himself. What kind of self-respecting journalist spikes an accurate article because his "customers" are complaining? That's the action of a corporate flack, not a reporter. If Kennedy disagreed with Estes, he should have said so, either in a column or a blog post of his own, but going out and trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to flush the column down the memory hole was an act of abject cowardice, and one that goes a long way towards discrediting the Register sports section as being anything resembling responsible journalism.

So, Randy Kennedy, this is your big day. You are now the latest recipient of the FTB Nick Sucker Award.

Wear it in shame.

UPDATE: Estes re-posted the original piece Thursday evening, with the following note:

Two days later, after feeling compelled to respond to numerous comments from readers, the blog was threatening to become a time-consuming distraction to my work as Alabama beat writer for the Press-Register. This was a battle I began to feel would do no good for my newspaper or myself. I wish to be known for objectivity and reporting skills rather than a mere blog that made myself the story. This was heading in an opposite direction from those goals. So I deleted the post. Never at any time did anyone from the University of Alabama request or suggest that I remove the blog entry.

As noted earlier, that's pretty lame stuff. Either you--and if you work for a newspaper, your employer--stand behind what you write or you don't. Since when does any self-respecting reporter or paper care about criticism over an accurate story?

I should note that Estes does not say that nobody at UAT contacted him to complain about the blog entry. Continuing:

After hearing some of what has been said in public forums the past few days and insinuations that have no merit or truth, I now regret the decision to remove the blog post, but not my decision to write it in the first place. So hopefully to clear the air completely, I am now posting the original blog in its entirety.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Postmortem

One more post on l'affaire Muschamp:

First, I am satisfied at this point that "Story Two" as outlined in this post is essentially Muschamp's side of his brief job search, as related by the coach to his own friends. I'm sorry to contradict Phillip Marshall, whose work I hold in the highest regard, but from talking to people inside and outside of the AU athletic department, I now believe the portion of Story Two concerning bowl tickets is essentially accurate. Whether any conflict or misunderstanding or what have you regarding those tickets did or should have contributed to Muschamp's decision is beyond my pay grade (which, considering I don't get paid for this, isn't saying very much).

One thing that is clear to me is that almost nobody has come out of this mess looking good, with the sole and somewhat ironic exception of Tommy Tuberville. If Muschamp really let his emotions get away from him over words he didn't like in his contract and/or a few bowl tickets badly enough to yank up his family and move halfway across the country to take a pay cut, quite frankly he needs to grow up. If, conversely, he simply thought Texas presented a better opportunity and he's using the contract-and-tickets story to semi-privately justify himself, he also needs to grow up. Neither option puts him in a good light, and although I think the guy is a superb young football coach, everybody involved is probably better off with him working somewhere else after all of this.

Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs also moves on with a considerable black eye. At the very least, Jacobs did not shine in displaying managerial skills over the past few days. Even if you accept Jacobs' version of events--namely that Muschamp was upset over language that had been in his contract for over a year--that doesn't excuse Jacobs' failure to defuse the situation when it occurred. If you are the CEO of a multi-million-dollar business who values a key employee enough to make him the highest-paid individual in his job in your market, you damn well ought to do a better job of managing that individual to keep him from leaving for a competitor, albeit a distant one.

Auburn has now lost three very highly-regarded coaches under Jacobs' watch, and while I don't see how he could bear any responsibility for Gene Chizik's departure in early 2005, the same can't be said for either Muschamp or, worse, David Marsh, an alumnus and the most successful college coach in the history of the state of Alabama. Jacobs came into his current job with a widely-held perception that he got it based on who he knew rather than what he had done to earn it. Three years in, he's done little to change that perception.

As noted earlier, about the only person at Auburn who's come out looking better for the experience is Tuberville, who by most accounts put his foot down and told Muschamp to, er, spit or step away from the spittoon after his now-ex-assistant returned to Auburn on Friday, and who appears poised to name a replacement within the next few days. I've heard from a number of observers that Tuberville was not a bit happy to find himself caught in the middle of one of his own agent's infamous coaching shuffles; one can only hope that the head coach will remember how that feels the next time Jimmy Sexton starts floating Tuberville's own name for other jobs--again.

Cause And Effect

"2008 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year."
--FTB, January 2, 2008

That might be the most inadvertently-accurate prediction I've ever made. Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

As everybody reading this likely knows by now, Will Muschamp, Auburn's highly-regarded defensive coordinator, resigned from AU yesterday to take basically the same position at the University of Texas (full disclosure: I attended and earned degrees from both Auburn and UT). Thus far, media reports have been more-or-less limited to straight accounts of the story itself, due in no small part to the speed of Muschamp's job change, as well as the official silence coming out of both Auburn and Austin regarding how and why that changed occurred.

The only point everybody agrees on right now is that this all happened very quickly, and it came as a surprise to just about everyone involved. Beyond that, things devolve quickly into the realm of "chatter." The two leading tales right now (and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive) go like this:

Story One: Back in December, Muschamp interviewed for and by most accounts was offered the head coaching job at Southern Miss. At that point, he went to Tommy Tuberville and basically said that while he'd like to stay at Auburn, a head job was something he'd have a hard time turning down. When asked what it would take to get him to stay at AU, Muschamp allegedly asked for a salary over $400,000 and a two-year guaranteed contract. Auburn agreed, proffering a $850,000 two-year deal, and Mushchamp declined USM's offer.

A few weeks later, Larry MacDuff resigned from Texas, and the ever-active Jimmy Sexton started calling Austin to sell Muschamp as a replacement. According to Story One aficionados, Tuberville thought his staff was settled for the year and was not happy when he found out Sexton had made overtures to Texas, either with or without Muschamp's urging. When Muschamp arrived back in Auburn yesterday after interviewing with Texas, he was told bluntly by Tuberville to either honor his agreement with Auburn or hit the road. At that point Muschamp resigned from AU and accepted the job at UT.

Again, this is not a confirmed account. This is Story One, based on underground chatter over the last 18 hours or so.

The other half of the tales making the rounds comprise Story Two: Prior to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia native Muschamp went to Auburn's ticket manger, Tim Jackson, and asked about extra bowl tickets for his friends and family, only to be told that no extra tickets were available. According to the chatter, Muschamp learned after the bowl that a number of extra tickets had in fact been held back by the ticket office and given to others in the athletic department, but Jackson never mentioned them to Muschamp.

According to Story Two, things got worse when athletic director Jay Jacobs handed Muschamp his new contract, which was supposed to meet the agreement (two years guaranteed at $425,000 per year) outlined in Story One. Either Muschamp or Sexton read through the contract and discovered fine print that gave AU the ability to back out of the term and remaining salary at any time, basically negating the "guaranteed" portion of the agreement. Per the chatter, Muschamp went back to Jacobs to have that clause removed, but Jacobs refused, saying basically, "You're going to leave after next season anyway, so what difference does it make?"

It's no particular secret that Muschamp is something of a hothead, and according to Story Two, the alleged administrative shenanigans with the new contract combined with the ticket incident pushed him over the edge. Per the chatter, he called Sexton on Wednesday with the instructions to "get me out of here." By Thursday he was on a plane to Austin, and on Friday he had a new job.

Once again: this is all based on chatter. It is not confirmed fact.

I will say this: Story Two has a lot of adherents, and a lot of them are in positions to know what they're talking about. There are indications--again, unconfirmed--that Story Two is actually Muschamp's own account of what happened in the last week, as told to his friends.

A few notes:

Tim Jackson is, to say the least, not the most popular figure in the Auburn athletic department. In his defense, Jackson is a guy who has to say "no" to an awful lot of people, and that kind of job just doesn't win you a lot of friends, often through no fault of your own. On the other hand, under Jackson the ticket office has developed a reputation for incompetence, and it has a customer service attitude that might as well have been lifted from the old Lily Tomlin routines about the Phone Company, whose motto was, "We don't care. We don't have to."

There are plenty of Auburn people who've encountered Jackson's often high-handed attitude who can easily sympathize with Muschamp's alleged anger. As an aside, Jay Jacobs was promoted to AD in 2005 after working alongside Jackson in Auburn's ticket priority fundraising office for a number of years.

The one thing I'm sure of is that Tuberville certainly had a "short list" of possible replacements in hand long before all this went down. Muschamp had interviewed for at least three head coaching jobs during December, and very likely would be settling into a big office in Fayetteville right now if Bobby Petrino hadn't made his own snap decision to bolt from the NFL. Auburn should have a new defensive coordinator within a few days, and given Tuberville's track record, he'll probably be a very good coach.

The other fallout from Muschamp's sudden departure, either on the field or within the confines of the Auburn athletic department, is yet to be seen.