Wednesday, September 12, 2007

This is Why I Rarely Read Jeff Schultz

Georgia didn't lose on Saturday because their receivers can't catch or because they have a ton of youth on both lines and therefore got pushed around by a South Carolina team that has a bevy of veterans in the trenches. No, Georgia lost because Mark Richt doesn't yell enough. Right, because Jim Tressel and Mack Brown, two other coaches who don't scream and yell at their players, have been total failures. Or, if you prefer an NFL example, Bill Walsh had a similar sideline demeanor to Richt and he didn't win anything of note.

I don't know why I'm bothering even bothering to address Schultz's desperate plea for attention. Actually, I do. Schultz's column is emblematic the decline of the sports media. Hell, it is emblematic the decline of much of the media in general. There are plenty of ways to analyze what happened on Saturday that would involve a modicum of technical scrutiny. Schultz eschews all of that in favor of third-rate pop psychology about yelling at players. This approach is no different than College Gameday spending all of its time discussing "motivation" and other totally unquantifiable topics or political writers spending all of their time analyzing "character" instead of spending a moment to discuss real-world policy impacts. I spent about three minutes reading it and was no closer to understanding anything about the game on Saturday than I was when I clicked on the link. The only thing I understood better afterwards was that I was wasting my time reading it.

4 comments:

Daniel said...

Similar Thoughts:
http://bravesandbirds.blogspot.com/

Daniel

Scott said...

I quit on Jeff Schultz back when he spent a whole column ripping Marcus Giles for not being man enough to play up to Schultz's standards one summer. This despite the facts that A) Giles was having a solid year, above average for his position, and B) his wife had just prematurely given birth after an earlier premature daughter of theirs had died. Plenty of writers at the AJC and elsewhere botch their efforts at player evaluation, but simultaneously botching their efforts at being a human being takes something special.

peacedog said...

"Similar Thoughts:
http://bravesandbirds.blogspot.com/"

Break;

MLT said...

what he meant was similar thoughts at:
www.redwhiteblackblue.blogspot.com