No one does Media Days like the SEC
Published 6:30 am Sunday, July 10, 2016
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Do not be fooled by this week’s shenanigans.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">In the coming days, your faithful servant here will be enthusiastically reporting from Hoover, Ala., along with 1,200 or so other media types of varying persuasions, as the Southeastern Conference officially opens the door on the college football season.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It’s quite a show, all right — it is of such vital importance to the South’s well-being that it almost needs Roman numerals, but it instead goes by the more mundane “SEC Media Days 2016.”</span>
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<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Football is here!</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">There will be plenty of shiny helmets scattered about, all the league’s familiar faces, legions of fans at the bottom of the famous escalator queuing up waiting to mug for TV cameras or maybe snag their coach’s autograph on the way out.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It certainly has a game-day feel and electricity to it, complete with police escorts every whichaway, flashing lights getting coaches and players back and forth to the nearby private-jet-setter airport.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">You can almost hear the whistle to signal the kickoff.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But don’t fall for it.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It does not — repeat, NOT — mean that football is just around the corner.</span>
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<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">False alarm.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The real football season is still eight weeks away and, for that matter, it’s still roughly a month before any of these lads even start practicing in the August heat.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Yet it’s easy to get caught up in the moment.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">At the end of four hectic days, with trumpets and great fanfare, the conference will announce the media’s official pick (usually wrong) to win the SEC (Alabama), and then — unless I miss my guess —there’s still more than seven weeks before any real football.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The SEC just likes to tease you. This conference convenes and offers about 2,746 media opportunities before the other power conferences get out of bed.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">The SEC has it down to an art form. It’s a well-oiled assembly line where coaches and players are herded through five or six interview stations, including the grand ballroom where us brave print writers reside, and there’s always an option at the end to oblige any of the 30 or so talk-show setups downstairs on radio row.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It takes four days to get ’er done, whereas most other conferences host a handful of media and rush through it in a day or two and go home.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But this is the SEC. This is SEC football. It’s that important.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">For four days the luxury hotel in the upscale Birmingham suburb is ground zero for the college football world.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">So what will happen?</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Probably not much.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But it is the SEC, and they’ll try to oblige the football fix needed to tide you over until September.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">As somewhat a veteran of these wars, it has been my experience that the key is to keep steering the dialogue away from actual football — leastways, the Xs and most of the Os, the newcomers to watch and mundane personnel matters like how South Carolina’s battle at left tackle is proceeding.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It’s just way, way too early to get a headache over such silliness.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Better to dive headfirst in coaching feuds, fan rivalries, players’ off-field mischief, hot seats, SEC pride, disrespect and slights, Big 10 bashing, he said/she said and whether the nation really cries out for more cowbell.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But for the love of everything holy, let us pray that “satellite camps” have used up their 15 minutes of fame and will go peacefully into that good night.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">We want — nay, we demand — entertainment, i.e., stories and columns that write themselves.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">So where art thou, where have you gone, Steve Spurrier?</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">With the Head Ball Coach’s retirement, somebody has to take up the slack, provide the quick needles and the subtle jabs that have always been the must-see act of this festival.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Best guess is Arkansas’ Bret Bielema, with a different style act, but who, like the HBC, seemingly can bring down the house without really trying.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Otherwise, at some point Nick Saban will lecture the media, and he will probably be right.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Les Miles, if we can keep him from filibustering through the depth chart, will provide the Miles family summer vacation update, which always sounds like it should be made into a movie.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Half the media and all the professional stenographers will give up and demand an interpreter for Miles’ session.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">There will be three newcomer coaches, although South Carolina’s Will Muschamp is a retread, only two years removed from Florida.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Kirby Smart of Georgia and Barry Odom at Missouri will be making their first appearances.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Nobody is expecting anything like the mack-daddy of all Media Days debuts, back in 2010 when Robbie Caldwell actually made people wake up and pay attention to Vanderbilt, mostly with folksy tales of his former life working in the artificial insemination wing of a turkey farm.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Forget football. That’s the kind of insight we need this week (even if Caldwell only lasted one year).</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">We need a story to take on legs, like the year it came to light that one, single coach kept Tim Tebow from being the unanimous preseason choice as quarterback on the All-SEC team.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It was deemed scandalous at the time, and the media was hot on the trail, to the point coaches were soon opening their remarks with the line “It wasn’t me — I voted for Tebow.”</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It had a delicious ending when the last of 12 coaches, Spurrier, mustered up great gobs of chagrin to confess to the slight of his old school while insisting, aw shucks, it was just a monumental oversight.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">That same year the second biggest story, hatched on radio row, had Tebow proclaiming his virginity.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But what this year really needs is a rock star like Johnny “Football” Manziel, preferably, as was Manziel, fresh off breaking curfew at and getting kicked out of the Manning Passing Academy.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Now, that was a full-blown circus.</span>
<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But stay tuned. It might be a fun week.</span>
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<p class="p1">Follow Scooter Hobbs on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/ScooterAmPress"><span class="s1">twitter.com/ScooterAmPress</span></a>
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