A week ago, UF football coach Urban Meyer went on a rampage and nearly crippled a reporter.
OK, not really, but for all the attention the story got, he might as well have.
Meyer’s public dressing-down of the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeremy Fowler is well-known, but seven days later, there are still some fuzzy edges to the story. A closer look at the incident shows how a conversation between a coach and reporter becomes national news — and how nearly everyone involved is to blame: Meyer, sports information staffers, reporters, Fowler and the Sentinel.
Last Monday, receiver Deonte Thompson made his infamous “real quarterback” statement comparing John Brantley to Tim Tebow.
He wasn’t asked to clarify it, but to me, it’s clear he meant “traditional” by “real.”
No matter your interpretation, that doesn’t meet the standard required to classify the quote as a “rip job” of Tebow, but that’s how Fowler wrote it on his blog later that day.
Fowler edited the post a few hours later, removing the suggestive rip-job line, but in a business where it’s a race to be the first to publish and blogs and tweets are viewed by readers right away, it’s enough to affect opinions.
Fowler’s later-edited sentence couldn’t have been solely responsible, but the quote soon blew up into a national story, and Meyer started yelling.
The most obvious mistake was by Meyer, who was wrong and unprofessional to handle things the way he did.
But another is UF’s current interview policy, which restricts access to group question sessions and is monitored by sports information staff. Players rarely say anything the least bit interesting, and if they do, they probably won’t appear for interviews anytime soon, making it a bigger deal when someone speaks up.
The next mistake was shutting off interviews Wednesday as punishment for Thompson’s comments going viral. Give a group of reporters nothing to report on except for Meyer yelling, and that’s what they’re going to write about.
The situation got awkward fast for Fowler, who declined comment for this story. No reporter aims to be the center of the story, especially in this kind of situation, but that’s where he landed.
A “Jeremy Fowler” tag even had to be added to Fowler’s blog, Swamp Things, for filing purposes, certainly not something Fowler or any reporter aspires to require.
Fowler is a genuinely nice guy and a distinguished alligatorSports alum, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t make mistakes, and other members of the media need to take some responsibility for this going as far as it did.
But they won’t.
You won’t hear TV and radio hosts apologize for not bothering to get the full context of the quote, and you won’t hear the Sentinel or other news outlets publicly admit they made a mistake.
Sentinel Sports Topics Manager Tim Stephens said in a statement, “Jeremy Fowler’s story was accurate and presented in context. Urban Meyer’s outburst, directed at Jeremy, was unwarranted and will not deter our efforts to report on University of Florida sports.”
The first part of Stephens’ statement is correct, if you change that first “was” to an “is.” As I mentioned before, the original blog post did call Thompson’s quote a rip job.
Now — it is frequently linked to as proof that Fowler did nothing wrong — it reads fairly. But it didn’t always, and I don’t see why the paper wouldn’t be transparent about edits.
The day of the incident, another change was made. The line, “[Meyer] was coming to play better defense than he can coach in honor of Thompson,” was cut without mention. That can be taken either as a slight to Meyer’s ability to coach defense or to say Meyer was about to seriously D up. Without clarification, we don’t know.
And that’s the mistake that reporters who ran with the Thompson quote made — they didn’t try to find out what he meant.
A few days before Thompson spoke, one player hinted that he wasn’t satisfied with a coach last season. When a reporter — Fowler — did his due diligence and asked a follow-up for clarification, the interview was ended by a UF staffer. This isn’t uncommon, as any controversial topics normally draw one of the Three-T’s (trainer, tutoring, treatment) as reasons to cut off the questions.
This flare-up wasn’t really handled well by anyone involved, but it’s time for everyone to move on and get back to their respective jobs: catching (and sometimes dropping) passes, writing stories, setting up interviews and coaching football.
But hopefully this can be a learning experience.
If not, Meyer might actually cripple the next reporter.
