Whit's Hits

Years ago, during the era of College Kickoff and the live postgame shows on Sun Sports, I advanced what I called the ‘Big Five Theory.’

The argument was this: based on the level of high school talent in this state, the enrollment of the schools in question, the alumni bases, the financial commitments, and a host of other factors, there would come a day when the University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida would be able to compete with the so-called ‘Big Three’ of Florida, Florida State, and Miami on a regular basis on the football field.  To me, it was inevitable.

I was alternately ridiculed and hailed for this theory; Mike Bianchi still loves to harass me about it, while my friends over at the College Football Resource blog milked it for as much content as I did.

As UCF prepares to play Miami this weekend, I’m struck by how much has changed since I first advanced that Big Five theory.  At one point, my colleague Brady Ackerman declared the Big Five to be dead, “not because of anything UCF or South Florida did, but because Miami and Florida State killed it.”  Brady made that comment right after Miami had been humiliated by Virginia in the Hurricanes’ final game at the Orange Bowl, and Florida State had just lost to Virginia Tech for the first time in the Bobby Bowden era.  It was the apex of a very bad period for Miami and Florida State football, and Brady was right at the time that he said it—November, 2007.

One month later, Miami Northwestern would hammer Orlando Boone 41-0 for the Class 6A state championship at the Citrus Bowl.  It was the final high school game for Jacory Harris, Sean Spence, Marcus Forston, Aldarius Johnson, Ben Jones, Tommy Streeter, and Kendal Thompkins—the so-called “Northwestern Seven” who had all committed to play for Randy Shannon at the University of Miami.

One month after perhaps the most embarassing loss in program history—getting shut out 48-0 in the final game at the Orange Bowl—Miami’s coaching staff could watch on live television as the Northwestern kids celebrated on a field 230 miles to the north.  Rarely can you pinpoint the precise moment and location of a turnaround, but that’s about as close as you can get.  That recruiting class, which included not just the Northwestern players but future stars like Travis Benjamin of Glades Central and Brandon Harris of Miami Washington, would prove to be the tipping point of Miami football under Shannon.

But on that weekend in November of ‘07, the one where Miami lost to UVA and Florida State lost to Virginia Tech, nobody could have predicted that.

It was November 10th, to be exact.  A few hours before the ‘Canes got waxed by Virginia, UCF beat UAB on the road to improve to 7-3 on the year.  The win over the Blazers ended up being game #4 of a seven-game winning streak that included the Conference USA Championship Game—the Knights’ first title in the conference.  That ‘07 season was also the first year of the new on-campus Bright House Networks Stadium at UCF, a building that proved to be a house of horrors for opponents—save for an electrifying 35-32 loss to Texas in the home opener, the Knights didn’t lose on Bright House turf all season.

So.  If you had asked at the end of the 2007 season—heck, if you had asked on the night of November 10th—which program, Miami or UCF, had the higher upside, what would your answer have been?  And with the two schools playing each other this weekend, what’s your answer now?

Funny game, this college football.

While UCF struggles to play its way into a “Big Five,” Florida State seems bent on playing its way out.  Never mind the home loss to South Florida—as I have written in this space before, USF made it a “Big Four” during that same ‘07 season when they went on the road for a night game at Auburn and won.  The Bulls have been as high as 2nd in the BCS, have appeared in four straight bowl games, and now have a win against a Big Three school. 

It’s over.  USF is in.

Don’t believe it?  Florida State’s record since that November 10, 2007 loss to Virginia Tech: 12-10.  A winning team, but barely.  Miami is 11-9 over the same span, but seemingly on the upswing.  UCF is 10-11 since that date, with a 4-8 season last year.

Florida, since 11/10/07: 20 wins, two losses (the Capital One Bowl at the end of the ‘07 season against Michigan, and the Tebow Promise loss to Ole Miss last year).  USF, as of this writing (before their Thursday night tilt with 8th-ranked Cincinnati), has gone 15-6 over the same span.

Big Two?  Big One?  Hard to say these days.

The bigger question—to whom is Saturday’s UCF-Miami game more important, the Knights or the Hurricanes?  UCF needs a signature win against a Big Three opponent in much the same way USF needed its win this year over Florida State—although, as the numbers bear out, South Florida had arguably arrived on the big stage well before that victory in Tallahassee this fall.  Miami, on the other hand, cannot afford a letdown against a Conference USA squad, not after rebuilding the credibility of the program as quickly as they’ve done in the first five games of the season.  Call this one a draw, in terms of who needs it more.

And regardless of outcome, mark the date.

Ever been this close to a great idea?  Read on.

“The reasonable criticism [of sports blogs] is of the tone of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse.”

So sayeth Bob Costas, and so it shall be done. Wait, was that mean-spirited?

If you haven’t watched it yet, the recent episode of ‘Costas Now’ that focused on the blogosphere is worth a few minutes. Specifically—and this is the part that everyone is talking about—you need to watch the exchange between Will Leitch of Deadspin and Buzz Bissinger, author of ‘Friday Night Lights.’

Bissinger, who attended Penn and Harvard and therefore immediately earns my distrust (I went to Cornell, and yes, that was a gratuitous potshot), leaps off the top rope immediately and never stops swinging. Draw your own conclusions from the video, but I liked what Jerry Greene wrote in the Orlando Sentinel this weekend:

“Buzz committed virtual hari-kari—and took with him everyone that has problems with the excessive and worthless nature of the worst of blogging. Wrote Leitch almost immediately afterward on Deadspin: “We just watched a man immolate on national television. To have piled on the carnage would have been discourteous.”

Buzz later admitted he “subsumed the valid points” he was trying to make.”

Immolate: to kill as a sacrifice; to kill (oneself) by fire; to destroy.

Subsume: to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one; to bring (a case, instance, etc.) under a rule; to take up into a more inclusive classification.

The first one I get; Bissinger went down in flames. I drew the same conclusion.

The second one took me a moment, but I believe that Bissinger is admitting that his naive hyperfocus on one small aspect of the Deadspin blog—the admittedly snarky comments from readers—crippled his ability to objectively criticize the concept of blogging.

Leading off his counter-argument with “I think you’re full of s**t” didn’t help much.

What did this exchange accomplish? Let’s take me as one example.

First, I read Deadspin for the first time, and thought it was pretty damn funny.

Second, I continued my long and proud tradition of never watching a single episode of ‘Friday Night Lights’ on TV—only now I have the added benefit of believing the show’s creator to be cranky, arrogant, hopelessly out of touch, and generally despicable.  Which, I predict, will not compel me to change my mind about the TV show or rush out to buy one of Bissinger’s many other works.

Nice work, Buzz!  And it only took you 10 minutes!

What he did, of course, was completely and totally legitimize Will Leitch, Deadspin, and by extension, every other blog out there that attempts to accurately capture the attitude of the fan.  He accomplished this by hating them.

Not ‘hating on them,’ playa, but simply ‘hating them.’  Because, Grasshopper, the opposite of love is not hate.  The opposite of love is indifference.

If one truly considers something completely devoid of any lovable characteristics, one simply doesn’t give a crap and ignores said thing.  If, however, one recognizes this nebulous ‘thing’ as a threat—if one views the ‘thing’ as potentially dangerous, and therefore worthy of concern and respect, even as a target—then one chooses to expend energy on this ‘thing.’  And that energy, class, is hate.

You have to care about something to hate it.  Bissinger cares about blogs, because they are (in his mind) a threat to traditional media, an affront to true journalists like himself who attended Phillips Andover and wrote a book about high school football in Texas that got so many people so pissed off that he was unable to set foot in Odessa for several years.  That, you see, is REAL writing.  Simply pissing off the guy who went to Andover doesn’t count, I guess.  Anyway, he hates the blogs.  Which means he feels threatened by them.

Should he be?

Yeah, probably.  You’ll read this one hundred times in the aftermath of the Leitch visit to Costas Now—if you haven’t already in the aftermath of Costas himself making that galactically stupid ‘high-tech place for idiots’ comment several weeks earlier—but the upshot is this:

The whole blog thing?  It’s not going away.  That horse, as I have written before, is well out of the barn.  Those who ‘get it’ will be those who ride the wave, as most major newspapers around the country already understand.  Those who don’t get it will be those who feel threatened by it, those who, to be frank, are pissed off that their own hard work, education, and experience counts for nothing in the court of public opinion.

Because isn’t that what this really comes down to?  People like Bissinger are appalled at the mere suggestion that some schmoe who didn’t go to Andover, Penn, and Harvard could actually produce something in print that could rival the great classically-trained sportswriters of our time.  No, wait—what he’s really tweaked about is that more people might choose to read it. 

It’s the ultimate exercise in free press, this blog thing.  You read what you find entertaining, not what you’re told is “great writing.”  That scares the living you-know-what out of people like Bissinger and Costas, who admittedly worked very, very hard to get where they are today.  But they’re finding that reputation and resume’ only counts for so much.

So in the absence of career-threatening tirades on television, what should they be doing?

Like we used to say in the gym—if you don’t like my trash-talking, beat me.

Work harder, Buzz.  If the blogospheric (loving that word right now) audience is so important to you, as it appears to be, then show us something.  Be more entertaining than Deadspin.  Be funnier than Every Day Should Be Saturday.  Be sharper than Bill Simmons.  Go ahead, do it.  Do it, and we’ll read your stuff.

You CAN do that, can’t you?