The Best Regular Season In Sports? Yeah, And?

By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season

I listened to Stewart Mandel's excellent podcast interview with BCS chief Bill Hancock the other day.

Hancock sounds like a reasonable man and portions of his argument do seem logical if not convincing. Unfortunately, the-rich-white-men-in-suits lawyerspeak and PR puffery prevent NCAA honchos from conceding that the current system is largely flawed. Money and logistics certainly are critical concerns here, but I wish there would be some admission from the establishment that sounds something like, "Yeah, it's definitely far from perfect."

Instead, we get a hat rack on which rests this fabulous party line: "College football has the best regular season in sports."

Tweet

Honestly, I don't disagree with it one bit.

Click to read more ...

Stewart Mandel: A Q&A With Sports Illustrated Writer

One Great Season is marking its one-year anniversary this week with interviews of several sports media personalities. Today's subject is Sports Illustrated college football writer Stewart Mandel. Feel free to suggest future interview subjects by clicking here.

By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season

One Great Season: Which conference's Media Days will you be covering?
Stewart Mandel: The Big Ten, and then the PAC 10 tour event here in New York. In general over the past few years, the conference media days have become less and less useful. They used to be a great opportunity to get some quality time with coaches and players for your preview stories. But the SEC, for example, has become such a circus nowadays. More people are covering it as an event unto itself. I used to go to ACC media days at a country club, and the public didn't even know it was going on. Now, people are live-blogging from every conference's media days. For (national writers) working on trend pieces or features, you can't get anything exclusive so it's not even worth it to go anymore.

Click to read more ...