Derek Dooley, you may recall, used to work for this guy, and has frequently cited said tiny tyrant as a source of inspiration when it came time to formulate his own head-coaching philosophies.
Tennessee, and East Tennessee in particular, is a place full to bursting with the kind of folks who keep rabid raccoons as housepets in cardboard boxes on sagging porches and then have the gall to act shocked when somebody gets bit.
So it should come as no surprise, really, that the reaction of a number of UT beat writers to Dooley's new media policies has fallen along the lines of: "ZOMG we hired a Sabanite and are aghast to discover he's not rill chatty WE AND OUR ACCESS ARE THE STORY HERE GRR." Shut out from covering the bits and bolts of practice, instead we're getting a slew of scorned petticoat-wringing ranging in tone from the passive-aggressive to the outright disdainful.
The loudest squallers, naturally, are the ones based at the Knoxville paper. How-ever: This is the same staff that just discovered this, that was scooped, badly, on the biggest news in their hometown last year by ESPN, so even if they did regain the privileges they crave and have grown used to under previous regimes, there's nothing at all to suggest they'd put it to good use.
I'm in the offseason withdrawal doldrums with the rest of them. I miss the minutiae, too. It's all we have to cling to this time of year. And these guys do have a job to do. But the shock and indignation is unseemly, and the column inches wasted thereon might be better spent, in the case of the KNS, advertising for a Goddamn Copy Editor. That is all.
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