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With college football programs in dire need of tens of millions more dollars to pay players, a paradigm shift is coalescing in how press reporters will be covering their teams.
There will be no more press boxes filled with pear-bellied beat reporters who stuff themselves with scrambled eggs and bacon strips from university-paid-for buffets before the game and stockpile stacks of macadamia nut trade show cookies at halftime.
The press boxes are being converted to skybox seats for dozens of .001 percenters to eat eggs and bacon and fork over millions of dollars for those prime seats to pay to retain and acquire more talented players, win more games, and enrich institutions of higher learning all across America.
The reporters will cover the games from their poorly lit and crammed basements, stocked with fast food in mini-refrigerators, and file their game summaries from there without ever setting foot in the stadiums. A clean, unemotional, arms-length relationship is needed to produce objective football information.
“An era in college football press relations has dawned,” said Colin College, lead coordinator of NCAA press policies. “No need anymore for reporters in press boxes. We need more guys firing out blogs from their basements and opening up space for people with real money to spend on our football players. College football is trailblazing what will become a national moment where press people will blog stories from their basements and not go to any games.”
In this new media world, coaches will change their schedules. Instead of the typical post-game press conference, two hours before kick-off they will Zoom call with the basement-dwellers and tell them all the things that will go wrong during the game.
Reporters will get their landfill of coaches’ predictions of how many turnovers the coach expects the team to make, how many yards in penalties the team will accumulate, how many times the defensive backs won’t bat down touchdown passes, and how many points the team will lose by.
This way all the negative information will be out in the open so there will be no need for a post-game press conference on Zoom to rehash all that went wrong. Why do this twice in one day? Let the fans cry once then get on with their Saturdays trimming the hedges and going to get their toenails clipped.
What got me thinking about this profound change – truly a watershed commentary on where the societal media complex is headed — is a post-game press conference after Wake Forest got annihilated by NC State last Fall in football. Guzzle this rawness:
“I apologize to our fans and students,” said the coach, Dave Clawson. “It was just an awful performance. We were flat. And that’s 100 percent on me. I’ve got to do some soul-searching. It was basically non-competitive. It’s my job to field a more competitive team. Right now we’ve lost our way. Our offense is broken. It’s ugly right now.”
As I swallowed this Kool-Aid, I wondered if there had ever been a more gloomy press conference. When Nixon resigned? When the Roman Empire fall? When the Olympic team dodged questions on why Caitlin Clark was not chosen to be on it? When Shakespeare announced what his plays “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” were really all about?
There is one word that encapsulates the presser’s tone: nadir. The word means the lowest, the deepest abyss.
I give Clawson credit for being honest and saying the sorry season was his responsibility. I hope he doesn’t have to come out and be so vulnerable this season.
But if he does, at least he’ll get it all out of the way before kickoff so the reporters can forage around in their own stuffed mini-refrigerators sooner.
Just from a dollars and cents mindset, it strikes me as prudent to give those press seats to big donors. It’s also expeditious and downright courteous for coaches to lay out all the eye sores we’re all going to see beforehand.
I say fork over to us the bad news earlier in the day so we all can emotionally process, have a Root Beer as comfort food, and sleep more soundly with our sleep apnea machines purring through the dark night.
This new and massive industrial “restructuring” will be more economical and efficient and we are a society that has proven time and again we crave those things as evidenced by the Five Dollar Footlong and electric car. Most importantly, paying the players more money means Wake will have a better chance of winning more games, and there’s nothing we care about more than that except Sammy Sportface.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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