Freep in Alabama
With all the attention focused on Alabama after their beat down of Florida, I wonder if their recruiting practices will be delved into a little closer. I know the local papers are probably too intimidated to do anything, but when you are the top dog you get a lot of people looking to take you down. I wouldn't be surprised if Kiffin didn't suggest to someone from the Tennesean that maybe they need to interview some of these kids that got removed for "team violations" or "medical" reasons.
December 8th, 2009 at 10:44 AM ^
is for Saban to take the ND job and RR to take the Alabama job. Rosenberg would buy a house next door to the practice facility and Snyder would be his chauffeur back and forth from the airport.
December 8th, 2009 at 11:05 AM ^
lets keep saban out of nd - we would never beat them
December 8th, 2009 at 12:33 PM ^
Saban's record head-to-head against U of M is 2-3. Clearly "never" is probably too strong a word.
December 8th, 2009 at 11:17 AM ^
The Freep garbage would only happen at Michigan. Here in the South, nothing like that would ever happen. Reporters and journalists know when to keep their mouths shut and when to look the other way regarding local football teams. If Rosenberg pulled that shit down here in Texas, he would have been lynched and his paper would have folded within a month.
December 8th, 2009 at 11:20 AM ^
Because no program in the south has ever cheated their asses off. And counted on rich boosters to pressure the press to help them cover up. Ever.
Southern football is an entirely different animal.
December 8th, 2009 at 11:56 AM ^
Sometimes I don't know if I would rather have it that way up here, or to have someone constantly questioning and keeping our program honest.
As a fan it hurts to see someone say bad things about your team, but from an overall standpoint, it is perhaps for the better to be objective.
December 8th, 2009 at 9:56 PM ^
It's not the media's job to be a lapdog for local sports teams. "Beat Writer" does not mean "Beat off Writer"--constantly offering up a hand, lubrication, and a towel to wipe afterward to coaches of the Big Team.
But we all know the problem is when the opposite approach leads to agenda-driven journalism and shady practices.
Carty's piece was one of the most repugnant, amateurish, and LAZY bits of "reporting" I've ever encountered. I do believe the Rosenberg piece had some teeth--but it came on the heels of an obvious anti-Rodriguez stance Rosie has had from Day One. So Rosie's shit was at least something you could comprehend and get your mind around.
Carty, on the other hand, wrote as if he was auditioning for the National Enquirer. His ad hominem attack on the independent studies professor was embarrassing. His use of a self-admittedly disgruntled source was the stuff of a propagandist. The twice-mentioned "un-named for fear that Michigan would harm their careers" was sickeningly disingenuous because he had others who did reveal their identities--and still worked at Michigan.
Holy shit, I feel the vein popping out on my forehead.
December 8th, 2009 at 12:35 PM ^
I remember being angry when Jim Carty slammed the University Athletic Department with his expose' on education. I called and cancelled my subscription that day and told them why. I never subscribed to the Freep, but I am just amazed that some other media outlet (other than this blog) hasn't slammed Rosenberg for his bias.
MSU athletes do a pre-meditated beat-down of an engineering student and the Freep interviews the parents of the guys doing the beating! What a joke.
December 8th, 2009 at 1:18 PM ^
It was a lot easier to slam Carty because the problems with that series were so easy to point out if you actually went to Michigan. It was a one-day story stretched into 4 or 5 excruciatingly mundane articles with obvious errors, some of which could have been solved by looking at the UM Academic Calendar for 2 seconds. (for example, the whole part about athletes dropping classes late in the semester and having special privilege to do so. yeah, no, it's called a late drop, and almost everyone has done it at one time or another)
With Rosenberg/Snyder, there's a lot of murky things to be proven false that can't be proven as such by any student at the University, or any 3rd party journalist who wants to do a little homework. The University at large is a pretty public place, as it has to be. Athletics, especially the football program, isn't. I have no way of knowing, nor do most journalists, of what goes on in Fort Schembechler unless I have sources who tell me. The Freep, apparently, thought they did.
I found the Carty series to be infinitely more aggravating because, as a student at the University at the time, it was so amazingly amateurish. He certainly had a point with several things, but the realities of being a student at UM contradicted so much of what he was railing on. I knew General Studies majors who weren't athletes. I took independent studies with professors who only had time to meet with me for very small amounts of time. Carty never realized that a 3-hour independent study class didn't actually meet for 3 hours every week.
With the football articles in the Freep, I can't prove these things false, and neither can anybody else on this blog. That's why the NCAA is here to look into it. If the NCAA doesn't find anything, OK, we were all right. But if they do find something, aren't we all going to look dumb...
December 8th, 2009 at 3:06 PM ^
Some cities don't know how to treat their sports teams. Obviously, papers should try to be objective and not act as cheerleaders for the home team, but that doesn't mean crucifying the coaching staff and/or players. A friend of mine who is a lifelong Indians fan was worried about how Boston would treat Manny Ramirez once there, and if the phrase "Manny being Manny" is any indication, the media in Boston was a bit harsher than the Cleveland papers. Of course, you can sum up everything that's wrong with Boston's sports media with two words: Dan Shaughnessy.
Similarly, one thing that concerned many of us when RR took the job at UM is that he would held to a much higher level of scrutiny by the media than he was in WBGV, at least before he left. But the Freep has taken its poor treatment of RR to a new level: not only is it responsible for a freaking NCAA investigation into possible violations that are poorly defined and happen at every school, but it also openly holds UM to a double standard compared to its treatment of MSU. I've never seen such a thing. Possible homerism aside, I wonder if the Chicago Tribune treats the Cubs any different than the White Sox, or if the LA Times treats USC any different than UCLA.
December 8th, 2009 at 4:55 PM ^
You had me until "happen at every school."
Worst defense for rule-breaking ever. I'm not saying we did or didn't do what the Free Press alleges, but if the NCAA does find us guilty of wrong-doing, the fact that "every other school does it" should not EVER be used in defense of Michigan.
Whatever happened to Michigan being different than everyone else? During the 80's, every other school in America had problems with drugs and steroids. Hell, there are entire books written about steroid use at Michigan State. But it didn't happen at Michigan. Why? Because we didn't need to cheat to win. And if it had happened, do you think Bo and our fanbase would be standing in front of our program saying "well, everyone else does it!"? I think not.
Now, that's an extreme example. But I'll be damned if I'm going to stand by and watch as the NCAA is in town investigating Michigan football, and the best defense we can put up is "it happens everywhere." We're Michigan. It's time to stop blaming the Free Press, and time to start expecting that there be not even the faintest question of impropriety in our athletics programs.
December 8th, 2009 at 8:09 PM ^
"Worst defense for rule-breaking ever. I'm not saying we did or didn't do what the Free Press alleges, but if the NCAA does find us guilty of wrong-doing, the fact that "every other school does it" should not EVER be used in defense of Michigan."
This is true, but I wasn't using the "everyone else does it" as a defense. First, the NCAA rule itself is not clearly defined and there is a large gray area when it comes to "voluntary workouts." But the bigger point is that if it goes on everywhere, Michael Rosenberg probably didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere. Maybe someone else initiated contact and tipped him off, but it's very possible that this was the quickest, most obvious way of attacking Rich Rodriguez (and Rosenberg's own alma mater, that piece of shit scumbag). So he goes ahead, finds the disgruntled players, because there are bound to be some, and all of a sudden you have sources to support your story.
We obviously don't know this for sure and I don't wear a tin hat, but the point is that Rosenberg has shown that he doesn't like RR and found the quickest way to build a case against him while using shoddy journalism.