Bissinger is a douchebag

I love this site as an alum and college sports fan.  Keep up the good work!

On this show, he had decent point to make, but he really took it too far to an extreme to the point where he just sounded silly.  On some level he is right, that blogs are dumbed down and malicious (but his point would have been better served if he had inserted the word "most" in that statement).  I think Leitch's response was dead on when he essentially said "Yeah, sure, some are, but blogs that people actually go on are not that way, to be a serious blogger you have to be professional to get people coming back."

In fact, I would go so far as to say 90% of the blogs I check out arnt worth the 30 seconds it takes to browse them.  That said, I look at blogs like BSD, profootballtalk, bleedinggreen, and beerleaguer EVERYDAY because they are not only well written but are truly written with more passion and KNOWLEDGE than the local paper, written for the casual everyday fan.

In fact after being on this blog, BWI, talking to former players, or however most of us on here get our PSU info, most of us know more about the program, position battles, and recruiting than anyone at ESPN, Sports Illustrated, or a Newspaper could hope to.  

In reality, I think "real" writers (as they like to call themselves) get pissed off because they believe bloggers are simply taking information from them and either block quoting it or disseminating it on their own.  

The reason Leitch was right and Buzz was wrong is because of people like Mike.  

When was the last time we picked up a newspaper or read on ESPN or SI anything positive or productive on a current issue within sport.  We don't, they are just as guilty as anybody else.  In today's fast paced world people feel more involved if they can in fact be apart of the news story or comment on the story, blogging is the best of both worlds. Most, blogs give credable information and then have relatively decent discussions regarding the issue at hand.

Bissinger just needs to realize he's in a business that is fading faster than my hair line.  Nobody is interested in reading a newspaper anymore, it's all about the interent, all access all the time.

That said, the media is totally  hypocritical in the sense that they comb the blogs for material to use in their next interview, news article, tv segment, etc.

If you eliminated Blogs, the so-called "journalist" would be working a lot harder to generate stories.

Here is my theory on blogs......almost everybody has a computer.  People who wouldn't buy a newspaper buy computers.  So you have everybody from Harvard Grad on down to Trailer Park Zeke spending time reading the stuff on the internet.  The pro of the situation is that more people are reading a lot more.  The con is that people don't read very critically and are so overwhelmed with information they don't feel its possible or necessary or even up to them to confirm the accuracy of the information.  We have all rec'd emails from somebody we know about Baraq Obama or Bill Clinton or whomever that challenges us to click on the link to the snopes if we don't believe what we are reading.  If you click on it, you see that challenge was a bluff and that snopes has debunked 80% of what was written in the email.  Unfortunately, much like the NFL draft, everything has to be done yesterday.  Consequently, how "busy" everyone is provides the out people need to be responsible.  Its only a blog, or I don't have all day to find out the truth.  Its like a battle of he said she saids....one site says so and so is a rapist and another site says they aren't so who do you believe.  At the end of the day, the reader probably tends to believe whatever side of the story supports their "belief" and throws their hands up in the air.  Let's face it, unlike a major publication, bloggers are only responsible to whomever it is they want to be responsible.  That's not a knock.  As Mike has pointed out, there are some fine bloggers with tons of integrity, but I see where this guy in the Costas discussion is coming from.  Before computers, I would read my hometown newspaper.  Now I can read everyones hometown newspaper.  Now people who were never forced to think for themselves because they only had one avenue (local news and newspaper) for their information have unlimited avenues and most people don't know how to handle and/or process that information reliably.  JMHO.

Last year after App. State defeated Michigan, a writer (don't remember the name) on the msnbc.com sports site wrote an article about how Michigan should be ashamed for that loss.  The irony was, his argument for that shame was not so much that they loss the game, but because they loss the game as the number 5 ranked team in the nation.  Somehow it eluded him that Michigan did not declare themselves the number 5 team in the nation, they were ranked by the media as the number 5 team in the nation.  So somebody explain why every sportswriter in America wasn't ashamed for essentially exposing to every college football fan that they are essentially frauds.

As last season went on it got "wackier".  Why?  Because everytime the media brought someone to the top of the heap, they showed that they didn't really deserve to be there.  How did sportswriters respond to that?  They blamed the teams for being frauds.  Never mind that these guys cast the votes because they are "experts" on the game.  Never mind that there are the ones that, prior to a highly-ranked teams loss, they made a proclamation and then spent weeks writing puff articles essentially congratulating themselves for seeing all of the abilities those teams possessed because they are such students of the game that they have insights that none of the rest of us could possibly possess.  When it was shown that they had no clue what they were talking about, it wasn't their fault.

And at the end of the season, the whole mess that had become college football 2007 was a mess not because of how these voters couldn't see who was the best if they were bit in the ass by them.  It was because of all of the flaws of the BCS system.  No argument, determining college football's national champion leaves a lot to be desired.  But sportswriters, their voting and their "analysis" drives that system.  When it fails they have a lot of nerve to wash their hands of the problem and start to point fingers.  Naturally, they can't say the problem is the fact that their idiots, but to continuously defelct they continually deflect the blame.  Therein is why they lose their credibility, and then to make matters worse, they blame their loss of credibility on outside forces.

I think we should all send messages to the major sports outlets with an offer that would go something like this:

"I would like to offer my services to your organization as a(n) {insert your favorte sport here} analyst.  I am not an expert in this sport, nor do I have any crentials in this area to offer, however, based on the content I see consistently published by your outlet, that does not appear to be a qualification.

"If this offer would be of any interest to you, I would happily do it for half the salary you currently pay your highest-paid analysts.  It is my sincere hope that you are able to see this as the cost-reduction opportunity that it truly is, however I should point out that if at some point you want me to know what the hell I'm talking about . . . well that'll cost you extra."