The injuries affecting BYU — Tanner Mangum’s ankle — and Utah — Chase Hansen’s unknown body part — this week, and those programs’ unwillingness to discuss them or disclose anything about them, have underscored the fact that covering college football has changed through the years — and not for the better.
Mangum is scooting around in plain view with a boot on his ankle, and Hansen missed the final series of the BYU game and was absent from at least part of a subsequent practice reporters attended, and yet everyone’s supposed to ignore the limping man behind the curtain and play along with these teams’ see-and-hear-no-evil policies.
After various news outlets — including The Tribune — reported Hansen’s absence, Kyle Whittingham closed all Utes practices going forward. And BYU coaches have looked ridiculous avoiding any comment on Mangum when he’s clearly injured.
And that’s the tip of the restrictive atmosphere.
It’s gotten to the ragged point where beat writers assigned exclusively to report on schools and teams and coaches and players have such limited access and must follow such strict protocol that they darn near have to ask permission from the organizations they cover before they report the news.
It’s blown past restrictive straight to being silly.
And I can hear the blind zealots out there saying, “‘Whaaaaa, whaaaaa, whaaaaa. Poor media members crying about their tough, tough jobs.”
That’s not the issue.
The restrictions in place make some reporters’ jobs easier, the ones who are all compliant and dutiful, simply following the rules and not caring much about giving readers/viewers/listeners the information they deserve. It’s the reporters who take their jobs seriously, the ones who aren’t all sweet-faced and lazy, who are hungry to give their consumers, their customers the news they should have.
Funny thing about that is those same consumers and customers generally are fans of the teams that are covered. And when reporters who are doing their best to provide those fans the information they want protest the increasing restrictions, some of those fans rip the reporters for complaining.
Mangum and Hansen are big deals. One is the Cougars’ quarterback and the other is the quarterback of the Utes’ defense. Their absences are beyond noteworthy. Interested fans should know their status. And paying customers deserve to know who is playing and who isn’t.
It’s reached a stage of such absurdity that when a reporter asked Whittingham about Hansen’s status, the coach was unhappy, issued a terse no comment and, as mentioned, shut down practices to outsiders.
At one juncture, reporters had been told that they not only were not permitted to report on injuries they saw happen during observation periods of practice, but that they were not to ask Whittingham about injuries to players, that they only could take such information if Whittingham brought it up first.
What is this … the freaking Kremlin?
To be fair, Whittingham is not alone in such a policy. Some other schools do likewise. College football does not follow the NFL’s rules that teams must disclose player injuries each week. Some teams do, some don’t. Some leagues dictate that their members let such information be known, others have no commandments, guidelines or suggestions.
Whittingham is a football coach who does not want to give up any perceived advantage or disadvantage he has on account of injured players. On the other hand, most opponents already know when a player is hurt. They have their ways of finding out stuff like that. If the coaches know, the players know, the opponents know, the only ones who may not know are the paying fans, the consumers, the customers, themselves.
It’s not a level playing field out there. Whittingham’s paranoia is environmental. Kalani Sitake’s paranoia stems from Whittingham’s paranoia, who passed it along to his former underling.
For as weird as some of Bronco Mendenhall’s policies were, he was nowhere near as paranoid about disclosing injuries as these two are. Sometimes he talked about them, sometimes he wouldn’t.
When Ty Detmer was asked this week about Mangum’s status, about backup Beau Hoge, about who was getting reps and who wasn’t, he sounded like a contortionist folding himself into a box. He didn’t out and out lie, but he did use deception. When BYU players were asked about their starting quarterback, they danced on the edge of dishonesty by being forced to say: “We don’t know.”
Yes, they do.
The NCAA should come up with a universal stance on injuries and how they are handled by coaches. Every once in a while administrators lean on HIPAA laws as an excuse not to talk about injuries, but that’s a murky gray area. Athletes who are competing on a field in front of 60,000 spectators, with millions more watching on television, can plainly see when a player gets hurt. It’s happening right in front of them. That’s different than a private citizen who falls ill or gets hurt.
Beyond injuries, reporters covering some schools are being herded away from practices, preseason camps, scrimmages, even scrimmages that are made available to fans. In one instance this preseason, while reporters covering BYU were kept under the stands until the last portion of a scrimmage, fans who already had been granted access were in the stands texting out what they saw. Some took videos with their phones, then posted those clips online.
BYU has come to a place where it permits reporters access to Sitake on Mondays then some defensive coaches and players on Tuesday and certain offensive coaches and players on Wednesday. And that’s it.
If a reporter needs to talk to a coach or player, he must go through the school’s sports information office to do so. That might be understandable, protecting college athletes from being barraged by inquiries about this and that and whatever. But when there is breaking news, that rule is too limiting.
Reporters say if they bend or break the rules, their access is restricted even further by school officials — “They can make your job very difficult with requested interviews and things like that,” one reporter said — and perhaps their credential will be taken away. Which is purely an insecure and amateurish move by any school or team. Lane Kiffin tried that once and it did not work out well for him.
Many coaches and sports information staffers are decent people who want to be reasonable. But they also want to keep secrecy on their side, embracing paranoia, giving themselves every perceived advantage to win. They should consider this quote, as offered by the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal in a recent column, words from none other than Vince Lombardi:
“We know everything [opponents] can do and they know everything we can do, so we will both go with our strength. That is, basically, what it must come down to week after week if you are going to win. … The element of surprise may have temporary value … but both of us can be reasonably sure that the other team is not really going to change because only a grossly inferior team should ever depart or deviate from its strength to win.”
Lombardi was both secure and smart. And, yeah, he won a little.
GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.