Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy’s tirade against a reporter from The Oklahoman who was critical of former starting QB Bobbi Reid is probably the best college coaching meltdown since Dan Hawkins “It’s Division One Football!” rant from last season. He was so mad, that if you didn’t read the whole story you wouldn’t know his team pulled out a great shootout win over Big 12 rival Texas Tech.
Wow! She called him out for being a wimp, coddled and fed chicken. Kinda harsh for a college player but the Newspaper business needs eyeballs too. You can’t let Tiki Barber have all the fun. Of course after such a verbal berating – the columnist has to fight back, right?
A newspaper columnist for The Oklahoman on Tuesday defended her reporting on a story that prompted a tirade by Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy. Jenni Carlson, in a column on the front page, maintained the accuracy of an earlier column critical of the Cowboys’ former starting quarterback.
“I will not stand on the sidelines and allow someone to attack my credibility,” she said.
Carlson’s column Saturday suggested Bobby Reid’s demotion was a result of his attitude more than his ineffective play. It stated that Reid, who lost his starting job two games ago, had not always handled his nerves well and his slow starts put the Cowboys in some early holes, including some they dug out of with Reid “wielding the biggest shovel.”
It also called Reid the “most talented quarterback” on the team and indicated Reid was “nicked in some games and sat it out instead of gutting it out.” Following Oklahoma State’s 49-45 win over Texas Tech, Gundy used his postgame news conference to berate Carlson and left the room without taking questions.
On Saturday, Gundy called three-fourths of the column “fiction.” During Gundy’s news conference Monday, Carlson asked the coach to point out what he thought were factual errors.
The tirade was awesome and it’s great that he wants to defend his players from allegedly shotty reporting. But I wonder if she wasn’t a woman reporter – would have been as loud and forceful with his comments – and if there would have been the same reaction from the gallery. No doubt there’s still a stigma attached to women reporters in sports.
“It just happened because of my feelings for the team and the players and I just felt like it wasn’t the right thing,” Gundy said. “I certainly didn’t do it to receive recognition and I certainly don’t want it to take away from this upcoming game like it unfortunately took away from the last game for the team.”The situation has drawn more attention than the result of the game, which included more than 1,300 yards of offense and Tech’s Graham Harrell throwing for the fourth-highest total in major college football history.
“I thought it was more important that somebody stand up for a player who couldn’t stand up for himself,” Gundy said.
Football Writers Association of America president Mike Griffith called Gundy’s behavior “completely inappropriate” and suggested the matter “could have been handled in a more private and appropriate matter.”
The Association for Women in Sports Media said Monday night that Gundy handled the situation in an “unprofessional manner,” and while he has a right to his opinion “his decision to air his objections in the form of a personal attack shows a lack of respect for all journalists.”
We’ll see how this affects his team going forward. Surely Reid now has all the motivation he needs to prove his doubters wrong. But if he doesn’t, he’s hopefully getting a great education in Stillwater! How ’bout them Cowboys!
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This guy is a classic Larry Coker. He had glory early and has managed to underwhelm ever since. And the only reason he’s still around is because of that 1997 title. Miami came to their senses and fired Coker last season. Michigan could have done the same to Lloyd Carr after being embarassed in their bowl game with USC. But did the (some would say) honorable thing hoping Lloyd would rally and come out smoking this season.
WTF is wrong with Kyle Wright. He has to be the worst QB at Miami in years. Even Ryan Collins, Frank Costa, and Geoff Toretta (Gino’s brother) were better.
While many similar games have been played throughout history, Football as we knew it started out in England at various academic institutions using different rules. Traditionally the foot was used to advance the ball but there were rules where you could catch the ball as well before scoring. At one such school in the city of Rugby, England, the rules were such that you could throw the ball around to teammates before getting tackled. After a while it was decided to standardize the rules under an association, and the 
So what happened? Changes in the game were introduced over time. The rugby scrum became a scrimmage, some of the more dangerous elements were eliminated, and it became legal to throw the ball forward instead of kicking it. Clearly, they were onto something with the throwing because they decided to make the ball slimmer to accommodate slimmer hands, allowed for more substitution (which eventually lead to specialization of players for offense and defense) and introduced all sorts of rules to make it more enticing to throw the ball and less enticing to run or kick. And that’s why football hardly uses the foot anymore. 
Each team can have no more than 11 players on the field at a time. The field is 100 yards long and about 50 yards wide. At each end is what’s called an endzone that’s 10 yards deep. Behind each endzone is a goalpost that’s about 10 yards wide and about 15 feet off the ground. The basic intent of football is to score more points than the other team. A touchdown (running the ball or catching it in the endzone) gives you 6points and a field goal (kicking it through the goal posts) gives you 3. After every touchdown, you can try for an extra point by kicking, or for 2 points by running or passing. Kicking it is almost automatic and is taken for granted. Running or passing is not and is usually saved for only when you’re down at the end of the game. 
Quarterback(QB) – The main guy on offense he calls the plays, directs the team, and distributes the ball. Peyton Manning and Michael Vick are QBs. 
TightEnd (TE) – These guys catch the ball and block. Jeremy Shockey and Antonio Gates are TEs. 
To use the Goliath approach on offense you’d use more tight ends and less receivers. And you’d use your bigger running backs who can take a beating. To use it on defense, you’d have more defensive linemen and linebackers and less defensive backs. 
But there’s always the lightening quick approach, where if you have the faster players, you go for broke and start throwing the ball all over the place trying for a big play. In this case, on offense you’d have more receivers – sometimes as many as 5. On defense, you’d have less DL and LBs and more DBs who can intercept and knock down passes, but not tackle as well. 
The league has 32 teams and the season is 16 games long – spread out over 17 weeks. Why 17? So they can have an extra week of making money.That’s a total of 256 games per season plus 11 playoff games. With a full schedule for the week, there are 14 games on Sunday during the day on CBS and Fox, one Sunday Night game on NBC, and one Monday Night game on ESPN. Sometimes they’ll have games on Thursday, sometimes 2 on Monday, sometimes on Saturday and then of course there’s Thanksgiving. Some of those Thursday games will be on the NFL Network – so make sure you can get it – it’s 212 on DirecTV. Then there’s the Sunday Ticket. 
It really is God’s gift to the football fan. You can watch every game on Sunday live, and on one channel you can watch 4 at a time and there’s one channel where it moves in and out from game to game. Mind you – in order to not get screwed you need to make sure your billing address is not near major CBS or FOX affiliates or within 75 miles of an NFL stadium because if it is they will NOT show any game that’s been blacked out locally and they will NOT show you the game scheduled to be on your local affiliate even though the local station can change the game they’re showing at any time – a major fan watching loophole. 
How does the NFL make money? Well football being once a week doesn’t inundate you with meaningless games during the regular season and gives a chance for the hype machine to work in between games, building intrigue. The NFL teams all split evenly the money they receive from TV rights fees and merchandising. So how do the owners make money? With the stadium.When they can sell tickets for $50 a pop at the cheapest, and $10 to park and $5 for a hot dog and $6 for a beer – it’s easy to make money. The newer stadiums all have luxury boxes – air conditioned rooms with a great view of the field for the corporate big wigs to go chill in and sip brandy (maybe even with Brandy). Those things command a pretty penny and the teams with old stadiums are always looking for ways to scam the town into paying for upgrades and renovations so they can find more revenue streams (you hear that San Diego). They always threaten to leave the town for LA which, remarkably has NO NFL TEAM cuz they just don’t care about football in LA. 
Same thing with Charger fans in LA and Iggles, Giants and Jets fans in central NJ (if any of those teams ever didn’t sell out). 
SUPER BOWL 
It’s not as watched as the World Cup Final, but when you consider that really no other country except Canada has a high profile gridiron football league, getting the worldwide viewership it gets is pretty good. Super Bowl commercials are the most expensive in the US because they’ll get the most attention. It was Apple that announced itself to the world with it’s famous commercial about the Macintosh. And who can forget the Budweiser Frogs or the Bud Bowl.
