New venue, same old story lines
Published 5:49 pm Sunday, July 15, 2018
In this file photo, Jimbo Fisher, former Florida State head coach, greets defensive back P.J. Williams. Fisher — now football coach for Texas A&M — is one of several new coaches making their debut.
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When SEC Football Media Days convenes Monday, it will be like somebody rearranged the furniture.
It Just Means More, if you haven’t heard.
No question about that.
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It’s a four-day gorgefest of preseason football — never to be confused with the real thing — when the world’s most powerful conference seems to really enjoy proving true the notion that if it merely whispers the word “football” in a summer vacuum, the shock waves will be felt from sea to shining sea.
It will pay straight-faced token homage to its academic mission the other 51 weeks of the year, but this week the SEC just kind of lays itself bare out there — pure football with no apologies — and lets the region of fans and media prove that it’s absolutely bonkers about college football because, really, in the overall scheme of the universe, what else matters?
That’s the way it always was in Hoover, Alabama, at least, the upscale-Birmingham suburb which has always housed the affair in a big, fancy hotel that somehow had the multi-ballroom space to accommodate virtually every media entity on Earth, not to mention a good portion of the 14 schools’ gawking fans sequestered in the lobby.
It fit very comfortably in what was once a Wynfrey Hotel, now a Hyatt Regency, with very little lost in the name change.
It was obvious the SEC owned the joint. The event and the locale fit like a comfortable glove.
Who knows if it was just a Hoover thing?
Maybe the SEC is tempting fate.
But this year it moves to the heart of downtown Atlanta, supposedly just as an experiment.
If it had to move, my choice would have been the Flora-Bama roadhouse lounge in Orange Beach, Alabama — which seems to be the SEC’s central meeting place — but I didn’t have a vote.
Instead, it will take place in the building that houses the College Football Hall of Fame, just a squib kick away from the lavish Mercedes-Benz Stadium that hosts many of the SEC’s important games that really matter.
Maybe that will be too striking of a reminder that this week is nothing of the sort, that it is merely a garish homage to what all-time SEC Media Days MVP Steve Spurrier used to call the Talking Season.
We shall see. Atlanta is a big enough city that people may have other things to occupy their time and minds.
Mainly, I’d wonder about the escalator situation in the new digs.
The escalator at the Hoover hotel will someday have one of those historical plaques placed on it.
It has always been ground zero for the affair.
It connected the business end of Media Days — the various second-floor ballrooms where coaches and a trio of each team’s players went through the myriad car wash of media— with the lobby below where the civilians are herded to the foot of the escalator and roped off from society.
They jockey for attention by proving they’re the biggest (fill-in-the-blank school) fan on Earth. Mostly they gaze up toward the credential-only top of the escalator, knowing that at some point Nick Saban will appear like the pope descending to mingle in St. Peter’s Square.
Mostly, though, they’d wait, fairly patiently. They’d settle for a Mark Stoops or a Paul Finebaum, but mostly they get one sports writer or radio hack after another heading down.
It had become a parlor game amongst us nondescript media to take that escalator down and to at least look important enough — it’s a gift — to get a handful of fans interested enough to wonder “Hey, look … is thaaaat? … nah, never mind.”
It may be hard to recreate that wholesome, family fun in a different location.
But the conference will give it a shot in Atlanta.
Mostly, these days it seems to be a good excuse for four days of wall-to-wall programming for the SEC Network.
Some fool will probably tell you this marks the unofficial kickoff to the football season. They’d be lying. Don’t be fooled. There will still be several dry weeks before teams even report for practice (which, in itself, is another false alarm).
But it can be fun.
It has become enough of an event that’s its now customary to analyze the top potential story lines in advance.
My experience is that you can’t force Media Days topics. You have to just let SEC Media Days happen organically, let it take on a life of its own, all the while enjoying the fashion show that seemingly becomes a competition between the three players from each school anointed for the journey.
Their attire will be scrutinized as closely as the red carpet for the Academy Awards.
The story lines will take care of themselves.
Sure, the media will do its best on Wednesday to stir up a quarterback hornets nest at Alabama, but Saban is going to have none of it and will probably give somebody a good scolding (which will be breaking news).
There are several new coaches making their debuts, most notably Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M.
Maybe one will surprise us.
As for Ed Orgeron, he’s got some making up to do Monday after bombing last year in his first LSU appearance.
He committed the big sin of filibustering his way through the entire LSU two-deep chart — “We feel good about him …” — which nobody wants to hear in the middle of July.
He needs to be his Cajun self and run with it.
We’ll see.
I just know I miss that escalator already.
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com
