Do Not Pay Attention To The Bleacher Report
I was just going to let this go, but then Dr. Saturday had to go and bring it up:
According to a very plausible though not at all confirmed first draft of Tommy Tuberville's exit from the Plains on Bleacher Report, Rane (rather than the much-loathed busybody Bobby Lowder, who notoriously orchestrated the JetGate scandal of 2003) is also the booster who set the dominoes in motion after the Iron Bowl.
I've seen this post pop up on a message board or two, but on the good Doctor's site? Say it ain't so.
First of all, that kooky conspiracy theory is obviously wrong to anyone who's read the contract. The key passage:
The night Alabama drilled Auburn 36-0, a prominent Auburn booster (not the usual bank-owning one but one who sells pressure-treated wood and wears a yellow hat) made a phone call. This may have been a $5.1 million phone call.
Since he knows most of the SEC coaches on a first-name basis and shoots ads with many of them, he has their personal private phone numbers. So he calls Houston Nutt over in Mississippi and asks what it might take to have Houston change his address again to Auburn.
Supposedly this triggers a "non-interference clause" in Tuberville's contract, puts Auburn on the hook for a lot of money, and precipitates the Jimmy Sexton-engineered firing/hiring double play. Except this theory relies on a rogue booster making an unauthorized phone call to Houston Nutt and the clause in Tuberville's contract reads like so:
Unless notice has been given by Coach to Auburn of his termination of this Agreement, neither the President nor the Athletic Director of Auburn or any person or entity acting at or under their express authority shall discuss or negotiate directly or indirectly Auburn's prospective employment of any other person as Head Football Coach of Auburn without notice to Coach.
IE: unless someone actually in the Auburn athletic department signed off on this call, this clause has not been violated. Rane is a trustee, but he is not the President, AD, or someone working at or under their authority, and certainly not their express authority. The theory is full of crap from the word go.
Which should be no surprise because it's post on the Bleacher Report, where absolutely anyone can post absolutely anything. This feels like a curmudgeonly complaint more suited to an elderly guy wearing a hat that says "press," I know, but I've seen this from time to time on message boards and other blogs: idiot writes something idiotic on the Bleacher Report, someone takes it more seriously than they should under the assumption that whoever posted it is some sort of professional or, you know, writer. (The mere fact that people can't immediately tell the difference between the dreck on the Bleacher Report and your average MSM columnist is perhaps the most damning criticism you can offer of MSM columnists.)
The Bleacher Report is an amorphous shifting population of people, all of whom seem incapable of dressing themselves. This differs from blogs, because Dr. Saturday is Dr. Saturday and EDSBS is EDSBS and MGoBlog is MGoBlog. Blogs build credibility over time. The Bleacher Report gets it from some nice software, I guess.
That doesn't mean anything on it is worth paying attention to. This hot rumor's source is this guy…
Larry lives with his wife, son and Pug [sic] (Baccardi [sic] the Wonder Dog)... [sic] He's a moderator at WWW.rollcrimsontide.com [sic] and a member of the rowdy bunch [sic] at [email protected] [sic], [sic](where the motto is "Wear [sic] a Cup [sic]"). He served several terms as a director in the Red Elephant Club and loves to meet with the Crimson Tide coaches and administrators. His Bama years were from 1976 to 1981 during the back to back National Championship [sic] years!
…who is not only a diehard Alabama fan but one who thinks [email protected] is, like, a coherent thing you can say. And has named his dog "Baccardi [sic] the Wonder Dog." And hasn't even read Tuberville's contract. And got this theory from emails and message boards. Under no circumstances should this man be taken seriously.
With the freedom that comes on a platform where anyone can post anything comes the chore of wading through the crap, of discerning good content from bad. Here's a primary heuristic: ignore the Bleacher Report.
December 17th, 2008 at 4:41 PM ^
December 17th, 2008 at 8:10 PM ^
December 18th, 2008 at 9:30 AM ^
December 18th, 2008 at 9:40 AM ^
December 18th, 2008 at 11:52 AM ^
February 20th, 2010 at 11:55 AM ^
February 20th, 2010 at 11:56 AM ^
The mere fact that people can't immediately tell the difference between the dreck on the Bleacher Report and your average MSM columnist is perhaps the most damning criticism you can offer of MSM columnists.could be substituted for "blogger" and be just as applicable. You can't just decry the bottom of the barrel for print as the fault of the medium any more than you can count the creme de la creme of blogging (in which I include yourself, Voox, Kurt Mensching, et al.) as the norm for all sports blogs. And let's be fair, anyone could start a sports blog. A couple buddies of mine got drunk at a Superbowl party, had a drunk conversation about David Wright watching the game with Howard Johnson, and within the week there was a blog about how David Wright should grow a mustache. Technically, I could have a blogspot up in 5 minutes this afternoon and say anything I want to. I also can post a diary on your blog, and until a moderator finds it, all of your readers could be misled into whatever rabbit hole I chose. And they would believe it, because I've spent, what, two years on this site? Because I wrote "The Decimated Defense" series? All you've got holding me down is that I have made "Misopogon" my Internet-wide handle and wouldn't want to damage my own credibility. But I have the same power that any guy with 20 MGoPoints has. At least some of the a-holes who grace the sports pages of the local papers had to go through a tough process to earn their writing positions. The reason it seems to us that so many slipped through the cracks is because we're way way way more discerning than the general populace. The bulk of MGoBlog readers are. That's why they're here in the first place, because we're the uber-nutsoid fans who will put uber-nutsoid time into being aware of our team. Crappy columnists didn't appear because it suddenly became easy to be a sports columnist, but because these media found there was more money in crappy annoyance journalism than in analysis, that glib answers that agreed with preconceived notions were a bigger market than a long explanation. If there's a fundamental flaw in the medium itself, then, it's that they must appeal to the widest possible audience, whereas a blog can target a much smaller group. This is very true:
With the freedom that comes on a platform where anyone can post anything comes the chore of wading through the crap, of discerning good content from bad. Here's a primary heuristic: ignore the Bleacher Report.But what's the next heuristic? The way a blog earns credibility, as you pointed out, is by consistently providing good information, over an extended period of time. In that regard, I think print actually has a head start, since at least a ton of money has been put on the line every time something is published. Under that paradigm, you must admit that MSM probably knows what it's doing as to maximizing its market, and providing the goods that their market desires. Therefore, I would say that if people don't know the difference between the Bleacher Report and MSM, that says less about MSM than it does about people.
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