Gregg Doyel is an a**hole

It used to be that sportswriters had to be able to tell people what happened in the game. They needed to be artists at creating word-pictures for the people who could not attend. And, like a good referee, they succeeded when they were in the background, and the event sort of played itself out, without the filter of someone's personality. Nowadays, everybody sees the game, virtually, via television. And so sportswriters have become a combination of movie critic, gossip columnist, and investigative reporter. Most sportswriters today are ill-equipped to perform even one of those tasks. Most sportswriters are ill-equipped to even do the traditional job of describing the event if they had to. Gregg Doyel seems to be the prototypical modern sportswriter. He is a provacateur, and proud to be one, compete with menacing, serious byline photo. Proud, essentially, to say, "I am going to piss you off! And we both know that it's good for my business model if I can piss off as many people as possible and provoke them into clicking on my webpage!" There are still some real sportswriters working today. John Bacon is a good example. John Bacon was on the field at Michigan Stadium last week, following Rich Rodriguez out of the Stadium, walking about five yards behind him, and taking notes. I suspect that at that same moment, Gregg Doyel was sitting on a couch in Cincinnati, eating nachos and flipping channels.