COMMENTARY —
We are in the midst of that annual overhyped event that takes over much of the Riverchase Galleria. It is time once again for Southeastern Conference Football Media Days.
My Dear Sainted Mother, who is generally wise to the ways of the news media, asks me without fail every year: “Why do you go to this thing?”
My response is usually along the line of, “Because it’s there,” or more precisely, “Because it’s here,” as in nearby Hoover. This year I have a better excuse: I’m shooting photos for some of our sister newspapers, as well as covering it for the NJN.
But more importantly, football is a Really Big Deal to our readers. And for three days, the Wynfrey Hotel is the center of the college football universe, where everyone who’s someone in the game — and a lot of folks who aren’t — are gathered.
This year, we’re here to see the two new shooters, Missouri and Texas A&M. We know how folks from the Lone Star State brag about how everything is bigger and badder there, but they may have another think coming after the Aggies’ Media Days debut Tuesday. As for Mizzou — well, they may just soil themselves.
Those of us who actually work in the sports media, or what passes for such these days, will once again crack wise about the hordes of credentials holders who are really just fans in thin disguise, and somehow conned the SEC media staff that they run some sort of football blog. They’re easy to spot, like the guy wearing the elephant head during Nick Saban’s Q&A session. (And we wonder why he holds the press with such scorn.)
The conference issued credentials to more than 1,100 people this year. The ever-sardonic Paul Finebaum estimates about 100 of them actually work for a legitimate media outlet. I think he may be a bit high, especially with all the layoffs in our business lately.
It’s all a far cry from the event’s humble beginnings, when a pack of hard-boiled sportswriters would pack into an old Corvair chartered airplane for something called the Skywriters Tour.
From the mid-1960s until 1983, about three dozen or so writers — they didn’t call them journalists back then — would hop from campus to campus, interviewing coaches, watching practices and then partying into the night, often with those same coaches. The stories about some of the biggest coaching names of the SEC, including Bear Bryant, and the Skywriters Tour are legendary, and seem to grow bigger as some of the participants get older.
It was a different era then. The level of distrust between coaches and media was not what it is now. Writers often gave a well-lubricated wink and a nod to actions that the NCAA would frown upon today, to say the least. And of course, it was well before all-sports cable channels like ESPN, as well as the Internet and its insatiable appetite for every morsel of news and rumor.
Today’s SEC Media Days reflects those changes. The whole thing is shown live on one of the ESPN channels — don’t ask which, I’ve lost count of them all — and countless sports-radio booths line the hallway from the Wynfrey lobby to the Galleria entrance.
And most of us are there because it’s there, and we have to be there because everyone is there.
Even if there’s no “there” there.
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