Answer Wednesday! (Part 2)
Even more answers to more questions.
Q: Sam Gilbert said:
What do you consider to be the individual strengths and weaknesses of the current running backs on the roster?
A: Stafon Johnson's strengths are experience and his ability to go downfield. C.J. Gable's are experience, blocking and stability. Joe McKnight's is the ability to make a big play. Marc Tyler's is his power and pass-catching. Johnson and Gable's weakness is consistency. McKnight's is fumbling and making enough big plays to justify being an every down back. Tyler's is inexperience.
Q: osezno said:
With all his headline grabbing odd comments, violations and picking fights I'm starting to wonder. Is Lane Kiffin a genius or idiot?
A: He is who he is. What's interesting is he was the same way at USC but no one paid attention because he was an assistant coach and, let's face it, the SEC gets way more media coverage than the Pac-10, even at USC.
Crazy Lane is getting all the headlines because Scott is correct. The SEC gets way more media attention than the Pac-10.
Part of that is the obsession the old Confederacy has with college athletics. During my 4 long years in stuck in the Deep South, I was amazed by the attention college athletics receives. Folks have written long papers on this topic, but it suffices to point out that professional sports is a new phenomenon in the Old Confederacy. Atlanta has had a baseball team for 40 years, football about the same time, with a less than successful b-ball franchise. Other than the Miami Dolphins, the Tampa Bay Bucs and the Saints, pro sports only began expanding/relocating to the Old South in the last 10 to 15 years. Meanwhile the older Northern Cities have had a strong pro sports culture for over 100 years.
Thus, in the South, you have a columnist from Mobile, Alabama demanding that a coach in Knoxville, Tennessee be fired, or the largest newspaper in Atlanta, Georgia, aggressively covering the recruiting wars in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, yet the Mobile columnist isn't writing about the Tennessee Titans playoff loos and demanding that Jeff Fisher be hired, and the AJC isn't following the New Orleans Hornets. College football, like NASCAR, acts as a signifier that identifies Southern Culture, such as it exists. Pro sports, with it's leagues run from New York City, are too homogenized, too mercenary, too infused with Yankee values to supplant southern college sports.
Imagine Bill Plaschke writing about Mike Bellotti's vacillating on when to step down as UO head coach. And the Seattle Times epic series on UW Huskies football under Neuheisel was virtually ignored by the LA media, and any attention paid to it related almost solely to Neuheisel's recent hire by UCLA.
LA hasn't had pro sports for very long, but when teams relocated here, they did so in a big way and were successful early on. Add to the fact the LA grew with the arrival of people from the older eastern industrial cities with an established professional sports culture, and success of these franchises was virtually guaranteed.
That UCLA and USC athletics can compete for attention with LA's pro franchises goes back to the days when LA had no pro sports franchises. This makes LA unique in that neither New York nor Chicago (as well as Boston, or Philly, or Houston, or Dallas) is home to one major NCAA athletic powerhouse, let alone two. And, in LA, USC and UCLA exists in the media as peers with the Lakers and the Dodgers. In New York and Chicago, coverage of college sports is consigned to the "college sports" ghetto of the paper/web site/11:00 o'clock news. In L.A., USC and UCLA often grabs headline and/or leads the evening sports report even when someone isn't being fired or a championship is not in balance. In this way, with it's unique balance of pro and college sports, L.A. does rule.
Scott,
Thanks for the solid answers.
Desmo,
Thanks for sharing your insight, good stuff.
Desmo needs a blog. Besides having access to PIs and deep sports knowledge, Señor Desmo could be counted on to officiate blog contests with the upmost integrity. Fight On Desmo!
Nice thesis but it's full of holes. Professional sports are a relatively new phenomena in the West also. Could it be that the pro leagues were loath to move out of the East and Midwest? Also the LA Times broke the UW football scandal over a thousand miles away. That's certainly a lot farther away than Knoxville is from Mobile.