Was All or Nothing's filming a distraction?
I've been enjoying All or Nothing. Well-produced, humanizing, and for a Michigan supporter, like a sugar rush of additional fandom.
But with the amount of exposure, filming, etc. I have to imagine that this would cause someone to switch up a normal routine - especially for a college student and double especially for a student-athlete. Is it possible that having a film crew was a distraction for a team chock-full of youth?
For those of you who have been part of a type of filming/docu-style work like this, whether as part of a sports team or not - I'd like to hear your experiences and whether it was a disruption - or just a minor blip. Given that athletes, coaches, etc. are already heavily followed with an established public image, I'm hypothesizing that the answer is "eh, probably not a ton."
(N.B. I'm not suggesting that this is the prime reason for the season being iffy. It's whether, in hindsight, it was worth the tradeoff.)
Thoughts?
April 13th, 2018 at 12:15 AM ^
FWIW, someone asked Mike McCray if it was a distraction. He said it was not. You forget the camera's are even around.
No. We had a dissapointing season due to below average quarterback.
April 12th, 2018 at 10:03 PM ^
Very true. Pretty much, the offense ineptitude lead to a season losing to teams we shouldn't have.
It wasn't the qb's. It was the line, and freshmen receivers, combined with a new passing coordinator. That's the real answer, but not many people seem able to grasp that.
April 13th, 2018 at 10:11 AM ^
everything you said was right, but there was also bad QB play on top of that. Really it was a huge cluster from everyone. Play calling was also questionable at times.
April 13th, 2018 at 10:49 AM ^
of this played into the poor season. Bad QB play. Bad OL play. Bad coaching. Poor execution. But the fact that all of these factors came together at once in such a cluster-F in the same season is evidence for the Amazon series being a distraction, not mutually exclusive reasons why the Amazon series had no effect on the performance of the team.
You have Wilton Speight eating dinner with a camera man filming his conversation with his girlfriend, and people don't think that is a distraction? You have players discussing, on camera, the dynamics of the QB competition, and people don't think that is a distraction? You have true freshman having their interactions and actions filmed by a documentary crew the moment they step on campus. And people don't think that is a distraction?
The Amazon series was a terrible idea. It was a "way out over their skis" idea. I did not like it from the moment I heard about it. The only good thing about the Amazon series is that it is not happening again next year.
April 13th, 2018 at 11:48 AM ^
I agree almost entirely.
I watched the entire series and it was painful. I saw zero benefit to doing this. Zero benefit to the university, zero to recruiting, zero to the kids, zero to the coaches, zero to the Harbaugh family, and a giganitic negative for giving our rivals a bunch of meme footage of our players crying on the sidelines.
Nothing against the kids and they all played along just fine, definitely a group of excellent young men. But I can't believe a camera crew sat across a Red Lobster and filmed Rashan and his mother having that conversation. We did not need to see that. Somebody tell me why any of us would need to eavesdrop on that.
A bad distraction. Stupid idea I hope they never do again with Michigan. Go put a camera in everyone's face in Columbus, South Bend or East Lansing next time.
April 13th, 2018 at 11:50 AM ^
In my estimation, the "bad" qb play from Speight was caused almost completely by freshmen receivers not knowing what they're doing, and the line being unable to keep him clean. Those are two massive hurdles to overcome, I don't care who the qb is.
Now toss in a new passing coordinator, new route trees, etc, and you have our 2017 season.
April 12th, 2018 at 11:39 PM ^
The offensive line wasn't great Perkis. I'll give you that. However, in both of those situations I'm going to side with the offensive line. Both Speight and Peters didn't know what the hell they were doing in the pocket when there was an ounce of pressure most of the time. I'm not going to type a long paragraph as many of you are probably glad and I shouldn't have to. Any of us that know the game of football, know that those two injuries are more on the quarterback than the o-line. Many of you don't get it and you never will. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's how you gain an edge in something. You keep the idiot know it alls out and thinking they have a grasp. Many of you on this blog never played football. If you did, you probably sucked or didn't play with other talent so you'll never understand shit.
April 12th, 2018 at 11:53 PM ^
No that wasn't his fault, him being terrible before that was though.
In fairness to Speight he didn't lose any games last year but to your point it sure looked like he would have based on the way he was playing since the loss at Iowa.
April 12th, 2018 at 11:55 PM ^
April 12th, 2018 at 10:10 PM ^
Oh come on. It was definitely a distraction. Can you ever see someone like Saban doing this?
I enjoyed the documentary, but looking at it objectively it just seems like a very odd thing to do unless you're trying to promote the program for recruiting purposes.
I don't see how people can think that having a camera in your face 24/7 even in your vulnerable moments is just something you get used to...
April 12th, 2018 at 11:36 PM ^
He didn't do it for a season, but definitely did it during a week of fall camp...
Saban risks the NCAA finding out about a slew of recruiting/other ncaa violations whenever he allows a non-program camera crew on site.
So, no, one week every decade is probably the best he is going to muster up, but let's not conflate the two situations and determine that Saban is probably doing it right.
I don't know why anyone would believe that anyone had a camera in their face 24/7...
Do you really think they had a crew following Rashan Gary around for four months, for example?
April 12th, 2018 at 10:08 PM ^
Good to hear from someone who has a lot of daily life documentary experience
April 12th, 2018 at 11:18 PM ^
April 12th, 2018 at 10:03 PM ^
Disagree. Cameras are not 'in your face' - ever heard of zoom? These aren't the camcorders you have at home...
They also weren't there "all the time."
April 13th, 2018 at 11:51 AM ^
Did you watch it?
April 12th, 2018 at 11:49 PM ^
April 13th, 2018 at 12:05 AM ^
April 13th, 2018 at 10:56 AM ^
I've had a glimpse of that as one (small) cog in a long filming documentary. My time on the bachelorette was intense! Nah, just kidding, it was some actual life and death stuff, the Ken Burns Emperor of all Maladies cancer documentary (http://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all-maladies/). I didn't make the final cut (so good luck judging me) because the thing they wanted to include I kindly asked them not to film. It was a discussion about a very sick patient and I knew that a.)the filming would influence the discussion becuase b.)we knew that their family would eventually see the footage.
Did the filming cause Michigan to lose games? Probably not. Did it change the way people behaved when the cameras were rolling. Yup, certainly. I'm guessing they didn't feel as empowered to ask not to be filmed due to any number of different factors.
Otherwise, probably not.
April 12th, 2018 at 10:33 PM ^
It was written in the agreement that if the players didn't want something specific filmed, they could ask Amazon to shut off the cameras. There are at least 40 other things that rank above a documentary as things that tanked last year.
April 12th, 2018 at 10:20 PM ^
See, that's the thing. "if the players didn't want something specific filmed, they could ask Amazon to shut off the cameras.".
That is not a normal, run of the mill thing that 99% of the world has to do on a daily basis. We don't have to ask someone following us around with a camera to take a conversation "off the record". That, in itself, is occupying a (albeit small) bit of mental energy that can distract someone away from the myriad other things a student-athlete has to confront.
April 12th, 2018 at 10:40 PM ^
Well, they weren't with every player every day...
You presume that top tier college football players are not used to having cameras around at any given time in the practice facilities. Programs take a lot of internal video, there are lots of coaches/spectator types around, and these aren't press corps camera+mikes on boompoles.
As far as recordings off the field, It's my understanding this didn't happen very often, especially given how many players are on the team.
If we want to talk about distractions I can think of some things that appear to have been much larger distractions that have been removed. The weekly combines and the no set starters mode for one, causing players to slack off in weight training for a few days each week prior, etc.
I'm not weighing this against other factors that contributed to a disappointing season.
The one factor that this "distraction" would affect is whether players were worried about their perception that caused them some degree of social, um, "adjustment" when they knew that cameras were around.
These guys are under incredible pressure - more than most of us will ever experience. And suddenly, they wonder if how they let loose (in whatever way) is going to be recorded/perceived incorrectly.
yeah. haven't done shit all week!