Raw: My 100% Grade-A, Unfiltered, Inside Look at Sports by Colin Cowherd

Author:Colin Cowherd [Cowherd, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2015-10-13T07:00:00+00:00

MEMO TO COACHES: DID YOU EVER IMPROVE AT ANYTHING WHEN SOMEBODY YELLED AT YOU?

THE SOUTHERN ILLUSION

YOU HEAR COMMENTATORS AND COACHES and executives say it all the time:

Nothing is permanent but change.

Everyone nods listlessly at this banal half-truth. Yep, the sports world is in constant flux: offensive lines change, owners change—even Kobe Bryant’s shot selection changes occasionally—and there’s a reason for that. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be something that exists in the actual world.

But I have to say there is one grand constant in the world of sports: fan paranoia.

There’s nothing more durable than the skeptical and conspiratorial who see devious machinations at work behind even the most innocent happenings. And there’s nothing harder to kill than the assumption that any dynasty in any sport in any region is the result of a powerful, sinister force that creates and controls the variables that allow the dynasty to exist and flourish.

Superior intelligence? Nah. Smart scouting? Please. Determined recruiting or shrewd management? Hell, no. Stocky men wearing dark glasses and whispering in public—those are the guys who make it happen. They’ve got motives and secrets. It’s like the Watergate scandal: follow the money.

When ESPN created the SEC Network, which broadcasts football, baseball, basketball, and other sports featuring Southeastern Conference schools, something broke loose inside the sports-paranoia industrial complex. From the day of the announcement, any positive comment about the conference was viewed as commercially driven propaganda. What else are they gonna say, right? It was not only money driven but also targeted specifically to minimize the conferences with which ESPN has no television contract.

It didn’t matter that ESPN has a contract with every league not named the NHL. It didn’t matter that CBS has been viewed as “the Home of the SEC” for more than a decade. It didn’t matter that ESPN broadcasters, me included, had heaped praise on the SEC long before the SEC Network was a twinkle in President John Skipper’s eye.

It was the perfect storm. The combination of SEC football dominance, the inaugural year of the wholly subjective college football playoff, and the launch of the SEC Network created a category 5 storm of sports insecurity. The conference had won eight of nine national titles, produced the most first-round picks, and posted the best bowl record over a ten-year stretch. But none of that mattered.

The SEC was going to dominate because ESPN said so. The scheme to promote SEC dominance was hatched in a room (underground bunker?) at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. It didn’t matter that precisely zero of the twelve members of the playoff committee had ever been employed by us. It didn’t matter that each of the committee members was uniquely successful and qualified, completely unlikely to risk personal integrity and a lifetime reputation just to see Georgia make the playoff over Oregon or TCU.

I decided to investigate. I called the three most well-connected agents to get an inside view of the process. These three represent nearly every one of the fifty highest-paid college coaches, working

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