Media days daze

I've always sort of chuckled when watching movies and seen reporters depicted as a pack of raving lunatics, screaming questions at some famous figure and generally behaving like hyenas.

Most of those portrayals of media in group settings seemed like exaggerations, making folks in my industry appear more obnoxious than they are.

But sometimes it's hard to defend people in the news-gathering business. SEC Media Days, and other functions like it, would probably be one of those times.

Actually there's no such thing as "other functions like" SEC Media Days. It is a circus unto itself, and you don't have to actually be there in person to discern that fact.

How about yesterday when a reporter's "question" of Les Miles consisted of: "In my opinion, your defense has been a little bit bland."

Wow. What a clown.

This whole exercise, of coaches traveling hundreds of miles to spend hours upon hours with people they generally detest, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And it goes beyond the reporters asking the actual questions on the scene. Yesterday I decide to flip on ESPN's wall-to-wall coverage of this event and within five seconds I hear one of the studio analysts breathlessly say to the other analyst: "How do you think this coach handled himself on the podium?"

As if how a coach handles himself at a media event in July has ANY relevance to whether a coach is going to win or lose games this fall.

According to an SEC flak, more media are attending this year's SEC media days than have ever attended an SEC title game -- including Nos. 1 vs. 2 matchups. Wow.

The ACC's event, which begins next week, is much tamer and perhaps a little more useful because the coaches sit at individual tables instead of standing at a podium. That generally lends itself to more conversational exchanges and better insight, but you still don't get a whole lot out of it because these days not many coaches say a whole lot.

There's nothing sinister about this whole phenomenon, and the immense consumption with it all is a reflection of the immense consumption with college football in general -- a good thing, given that it keeps me from having to flip burgers for a living.

But man, is some of this stuff absurd.

A few links and thoughts:

-- Terrible news about Devin Coleman's torn achilles. Not only is the kid done for the 2012-13 season, which is a major blow to a team that was counting on him, but this injury is difficult to recover from. Coleman's wheels are one of his strongest attributes, and having bad wheels would affect him more than others.

First Jaron Blossomgame's broken leg, then Adonis Filer's delay on getting into school, and now this. Seems Brad Brownell and Co. just can't catch a break.

-- Terry Don Phillips tells Greg Wallace that scheduled games with Oklahoma State and Ole Miss have been wiped out, casualties of the ACC's move to a nine-game conference schedule.

No surprise here, and it's unfortunate. Phillips gave a pretty telling take on the 9-game thing in late May with this exchange:

TI: If football is so important to the ACC, how did they add the nine-game conference schedule?
PHILLIPS: “I’m not going to get into that. I can’t answer that.”

TI: Was the nine-game ACC schedule voted on?
PHILLIPS: “It was. There were discussions on it. But when it was voted on, there were probably ramifications that weren’t fully discussed.”

-- In Birmingham, Auburn players defend their program's character.

Since capturing the BCS national championship on Jan. 10, 2011, the Auburn football program has won eight games.

And it's had eight players arrested.

They say numbers don't lie, but do they tell the whole truth and nothing but?

Emory Blake has a thought. It's worth hearing and heeding because Blake is one of the more thoughtful college athletes you'll meet.

His advice: Don't generalize, stereo­type or paint with a broad brush.

Don't look at the Auburn football pro­gram through the narrow prism of its off-field troubles and see the next-gen­eration Miami Hurricanes of the 1980s and early '90s. That unflattering comparison, which usually comes from rival fans, bothers the senior wide receiver.

"A whole group of guys, their char­acter shouldn't be questioned because of two or three," Blake said. "Our whole team's not like that. Not to say those guys are even like that. They just made some mistakes. That doesn't make them bad people because every­one makes mistakes. So it does bother me. We're not a group of thugs or any­thing like that."

So the Miami of Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson is not the role model for the Auburn of Gene Chizik?

"No," Blake said. "That's not the image we're looking for."

-- Auburn is flying under the radar, and last year certainly wasn't pretty. But it's easy to forget that a ton of folks were forecasting four wins for them in 2011 and they won eight. Included among that eight was a thrashing of Virginia in the Spicy Chicken Sandwich Bowl.

If the Tigers can reduce mistakes on offense and improve its defense, Chizik will find his team in a lot of close games this season. If he's right, the Tigers can regain the national prominence it lost in 2011.

"It really depends on our first three games," Lutzenkirchen said of a stretch that includes Clemson, Mississippi State and Louisiana-Monroe before a titanic battle on Sept. 22 at home against LSU.

"They'll be really big for us, especially that opener with Clemson. It'll be a real good test for us with our young line and our new coordinators. I think if we escape out of those first three games of the year undefeated, then I think this team has a rally good chance of doing something special this year."

-- And finally, a really nice review of the Danny Ford book from Andrew Moore of Patch.com.

LW