Dave In Champaign wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
This is total bullshit, but credulous halfwits will embrace it because they think it will help their teams win.
Bernstein spent half of today's show torching this particular strawman, and it drove me nuts (yarr). No one at Halas Hall thinks this is going to make the Bears better on the field; it's just a way of managing the flow of information and preventing that great bugaboo of modern NFL coaches: the dread DISTRACTIONS. Ridiculous, but not harmful. The problem is that everyone's laboring under this delusion that media and fans are entitled to a level of proprietary information that would be laughable in any other industry. This is precisely why Bernstein's arguments against this policy are so flaccid.
How does this make the Bears better? How does it make them worse?
We're not talking about national security, here--it's just football! Great, then John Fox isn't compelled by some moral imperative to ensure that Zach Zaidman's mash notes are more detailed.
Let's play a little game. Think about the sneering disdain and utter lack of professionalism with which Dan Bernstein comports himself on a daily basis. Think about your average Bears Monday caller speculating as to how many touchdowns LeBron would score if he played tight end. Now tell me with a straight face that either of these two people are entitled to know where Pernell McPhee is lining up.
I just see this needless training camp coverage as part of the elaborate dance between teams and media. The Score furnishes hours upon hours of Bears training camp talk through the summer, which keeps the Bears top-of-mind while the Cubs and White Sox are playing actual games and trying to make the postseason, which ultimately helps the Bears (and hurts those of us *wave* who don't give a fuck about the Bears anymore). Are people
entitled to know what players are doing? No, probably not, but talking about entitlement and proprietary information doesn't feel right when the practices are open to the public anyway. So people, if they don't mind the schlep down to Kankakee's weird twin brother, can watch practice for themselves and find out where Pernell McPhee is lining up, but Zach Zaidman can't tell everyone else about it? It'd be like seeing a Steely Dan tribute band for free in a public park and then when someone asks you if they played "Aja," you say you can't tell them because the ASCAP foot soldiers will have you killed. I know it's annoying when Dan gets all huffy about the rights of the media (just imagine if beat reporters were told about this 30 minutes late and couldn't pick up their kids from school!), but this is just the kind of Maginot Line that the modern NFL would institute: a perfunctory nod to weird coaches and their obsession with secret Football Information, while hordes of bloated dopes in bootleg Urlacher jerseys see everything they're doing anyway.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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