Overdone deal

Most people who get into the sports media business do so with dreams of making a big name for themselves by breaking big stories.

There just aren't many kids, fresh out of college, who aspire to cover American Legion games for the Podunk Press for the rest of their lives. They want to climb as high as possible, see their name in lights.

Nothing at all wrong with thinking big. But the coverage of this expansion mess has provided yet another example that being on the big media stage isn't always what it's cracked up to be. It's dangerous and slippery, and when you fall on your face millions of people are watching.

Was talking with a friend of mine over the weekend. He covers the SEC for a living, and does a darn good job of it. But he's done his best to stay the heck out of the frenzy that's unfolded over the last several days.

Some say the conference landscape is destined to become the wild, wild West. If so, the media will be the traveling carnival attraction -- freak shows and all.

Doug Gottlieb has already been blasted enough, so no need to pile on him for his reporting. Same with Joe Schad, who breathlessly reported last summer that the Big 12 was dead ... a few hours before the Big 12 announced its solidarity.

Matt Hayes of The Sporting News has built a lot of credibility over the years, so you tended to believe him when he blasted other outlets who reported the SEC presidents were to meet yesterday. Then the meeting took place, and, well...

Stewart Mandel of SI.com is known for being thoughtful and measured, yet he seemed to completely overreact in reaction to the SEC's statement by saying the SEC had "PASSED" on Texas A&M.

Used to be, reporters and layers of editors put hours' worth of thought and scrutiny into what they published. Now it's a bunch of thinking out loud, and as Andy Staples of SI.com says that's a dangerous dynamic on big stories.

The problem with the speed at which information travels in this era is that everything has to mean something immediately. In the Twitter age, we must be able to consume information, process it and explain what it means in the grand scheme of things within seconds. In the world of Internet journalism, it also helps if we can just as quickly declare each event to be either the best or worst thing that has ever happened.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't always hand us news in byte-sized chunks. Sometimes, an issue requires more time to resolve itself than our social media-addled attention spans are willing to give.

Tony Barnhart, otherwise known as Mistuh College Football, had it right the other day when he illustrated the perils of following a story as unwieldy as conference realignment:

The problem with a story like this is that you can be 100 percent right at breakfast and then 100 percent wrong by dinner.

Or like a weatherman saying DONE DEAL about a storm that's headed your way.

In fairness, these national reporters have difficult jobs. They are charged with covering a bunch of schools when they're not at these schools on a daily basis. They're supposed to make a few calls and break news on beats that already feature cut-throat competition among news outlets that tirelessly cover these schools 365 days a year.

When you add in all the different motivations of supposed "highly placed sources," you see how so much of this stuff can be so wrong.

You see how the big dreams of big names and big stories can end up being a big nightmare.

LW