William Correro column

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Superbowl coverage takes second place to bad press

As all the hype intensified leading to the Super Bowl, it never ceased to amaze me how much total baloney any group of purported educated individuals associated with sports reporting could come up with.

I know Brady and Eli are cute – each is his own way of course – but it’s still a football game. Most all of it has very little to do with the game directly and actually, some of the rest has nothing to do with the game either.

“Baloney” (it is a family paper) and “it” refers to the different “pieces” you’ll see on ESPN, CNN, any of the national news, local TV news, the radio and print and on and on. All are trying to find some little snippet for a piece that no one else has thought of doing.

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What really is maddening is how some idiot dressed in a wedding gown at the team press conferences (how in the world did she even get credentials anyway?), yelling proposals for marriage to Brady and Eli and a lot of the other players, got more face time and story copy than someone like Patrick Willis did on an incredible rookie season at San Francisco.

If you listened to most of the questions asked of the players, you saw most were basically worthless and a total waste of time. But then when you have some players doing incredibly stupid things both on and off the field, it’s no wonder I suppose. D.U.I.’s, fights/shootings, assault, abuse is heard about way more than the many good deeds done by those associated with professional football.

And there are many more good things happening than bad I guarantee. Plus the Peyton, Eli and the Manning family commercials show you can succeed beyond any others just being a great person with clean cut looks and virtues.

I haven’t seen too many ads with Pacman Jones; have you? It just shows how a bad few can bring down the whole in any part of the game. My favorite is when the Manning family is touring the ESPN studios.

Back to the general attitude of the sports media these days. If they’d just use some common sense before running some of their junk we’d all be happier.

I always love to watch how the TV networks I work with during the season handle their coverage of a game. They do a superb job of constantly monitoring themselves and are so concerned how the millions watching see the game.

The guys at CBS really do a great job of presenting the best view of the game. A few years ago when the AD and President of the University of Georgia Athens thought it would be better not to call the annual game with Florida in Jacksonville the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” the guys at CBS had already limited references to that.

Those of us who might work it just call it “The Game Formerly Known as The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party”.

If there’s ever a real bad injury, our network partners are all good about not showing the leg snapping or knee turning inside out over and over from a dozen different angles in slow motion.

I would think the whole deal – from the media to player behavior simply boils down to one word: professionalism. You have to be that way to succeed at any endeavor. Next week, we’ll talk about The Big One.