College football

The Watchdog vs. The (Baylor) Bear

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The Texas Monthly expose on Baylor and Sam Ukwuachu will produce enough troubling questions — for head coach Art Briles and Baylor associate dean Bethany McCraw in particular.

The story, or lack of it, should also trouble sports journalists.  According to reports, the assault happened in October 2013.  The Waco Police Department did not press charges and sent the case to the district attorney for evaluation.  In March 2014, the assistant DA Hilary Laborde decided to move ahead.  On June 25, 2014, a grand jury indicted Ukwuachu, and he was arrested.

This Deadspin article, great work by Diana Moskovitz, provides helpful details, including a copy of the true bill of indictment returned by the grand jury.

This is where things begin to get murky.

As Moskovitz points out, prosecutors’ choice to go the grand jury route does invite questions, because a grand jury process is, by nature and law, more secretive than a public arrest.  When an athlete, or any suspect, is arrested, the accompanying mugshots, and sometimes even “perp walks,” draw attention.

Still, in McLennan County, once someone is indicted, it is publicized.  Supposedly.

The Waco Tribune-Herald posts indictments twice a month to its website, and those indictments remain available for public viewing.  The report of June 25, 2014, indictments, when Ukwuachu was indicted, mentions more than 100 names, and five specifically mention some form of sexual abuse.

Ukwuachu’s name does not appear in this list. Why not? Was the name redacted from the list before it was given to the Waco newspaper?

According to Texas Monthly, when the requested information on Ukwuachu’s indictment and arrest, the received “a letter declaring that all information outside of the Incident Report following Doe’s visit to Hillcrest Hospital the day after her encounter with Ukwuachu was exempt from the law requiring disclosure.”

Still, if that’s the case, under what judgment was Ukwuachu’s name deleted from a public list, and not the rest?  If it’s exempt from “the law requiring disclosure,” why publicize indictments at all?  The 100-plus folks whose arrests were publicized would wish they got the same break as Ukuwuachu.

True, McLennan County DA Abelino Reyna is a 1997 graduate of Baylor Law School. With no specific response on his office’s part, however, the question remains, and is troubling.

It should also be mentioned that the prosecuting DA, LaBorde, also went to Baylor, but that did not stop her from investigating and then prosecuting Ukwuachu

I have reached out to the Waco Tribune-Herald via e-mail.  The McLennan County DA’s office (no e-mail listed) has refused all interview requests.

The first report appeared in the Tribune-Herald on Aug. 5, more than 13 months after the indictments were handed down.  The lag time invites questions, particularly related to the local newspaper’s function as a watchdog.

As any competent sports writer, college or pro, will tell you, the good reporters know how to uncover such information. Whether through strategic Web searches or well-placed sources, they know when players are arrested amazingly soon after it happens and can guide their readers through the court process.

Court-related documents are available online through databases like Scribd, as Moskovitz demonstrated in her article.

But before casting too much blame on the newspaper, realize that no reporter’s system can do everything, and an insular community like Waco is a prime culture to thwart such information gathering.  For whatever reason, the public did not learn of the announcement until twelve days before the trial itself began.

According to the Deadspin article, Judge Matt Johnson did issue a gag order, but that did not happen until Aug. 7 of this year, shortly before the trial began.

As the handling of the Ukwuachu case is discussed, concern will be directed at Baylor personnel, who admitted a player with problems at his previous school.  Dan Wolken rightly took Briles to task in a USA Today column for putting Ukwuachu’s victim, and every female at Baylor, at risk by allowing him to transfer in.

This concern relates closely to constitutional guarantees for open trials.  This right belongs not to the media, but to the public.  Community members have a right to know what is going on in matters that relate to their public safety, and it is the news media’s duty to provide that information.

When information is withheld from the public, as it was in the list of indictments published on the WacoTrib.com website, the system has failed, and citizens deserve to know how and why.

2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and the BCS

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Originally published on Medium.com.  Click here

Hal

Why did college football fans hate the BCS?  Look no further than the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a stop at the Terminator series.  Then glance at Google, Facebook and Amazon.

It might be hard for Millennials to realize, but there was a time when society was pretty scared of computers.  And that fear has morphed into a different kind of suspicion today.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Actually, even before 1968 and the release of 2001, we could go all the way back to the 19th century.  Advances in science began to unravel the mysteries of the universe, undermining religious faith.  A book like Darwin’s Origin of the Species sought to take God even further out of the equation.

Anxiety transitioned from the anti-evolution fundamentalists to the greater society coming out of World War II, as science demonstrated its ability to incinerate entire cities.  The emergence of huge, powerful supercomputers fed off this anxiety as well.

Now we’re ready to revisit Kubrick’s 2001, the film version of Arthur Clarke’s sci-fi short story, “The Sentinel.”  Its climactic tale (spoiler alert) of a computer that learns to kill on its own initiative resonated with a society that was suspicious of the room-filling, soulless supercomputers that were gaining power.

The theme remained popular, even into the 1980s.  The Terminator played off that fear with its dystopic tale of technology having taken over a future society.  A particularly nasty robot, portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, travels back in time to kill the woman who would bear the future human rebellion’s leader.

About the time that movie came out, however, Apple had begun to roll out its original Macintosh personal computers, with IBM close behind.  Suddenly a computer was not some military-industrial complex storm trooper; it was a cute contraption on a desk or table — producing documents, playing games.  Their developers were portrayed less as mad scientists and more as harmless nerds.

Eventually even the Terminator found a heart.  By the second film in 1991, Arnold was as helpful as a desktop, and actually came back from the future to protect the future rebel leader his robot model had tried to kill just a few years before.

But then, those computers were networked together, and again, a fear of their power began to emerge.  As technology progressed, a certain ambivalence set in. We feared that the “ghost in the machine” had the power to travel from terminal to terminal. But we also loved the features of cyber-life.

You had The Net, where Sandra Bullock faces perhaps the first identity theft ever, but you also had You’ve Got Mail, where AOL helped Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan find love in a way they never could face-to-face — or at least since their last romcom.

And along came Google. And its algorithms.

The formula for life decisions changed.  As Google successfully couched its searches in complex formulas related to Web surfing, and other companies applied the process to other areas, that Hal-based uneasiness began to creep in again.

What (or more precisely, who) were these computers that were taking so much control of my life.  When Amazon suggested I check out this book, or Facebook suggested that friend for me, how did they know?  We could reassure ourselves that for every nine rational matches suggested, that tenth would show a cluelessness that only the human touch could rectify.

It was all fine as far as our day-to-day lives and relationships were concerned.  But when it infected college football, well, that did it.

(At this point I should stop and give credit to an excellent panel at the IACS’s 2015 Summit on Communication and Sport.  The panelists — Marcus Paroske, Michigan-Flint; Paul Johnson, Pittsburgh; and Ron Burg, Wake Forest — sparked the thinking here.)

The BCS did something more disruptive than drag that face from our junior high past into our Facebook consciousness.  Its network of computer rankings and human polls played with the dreams and hopes of college football fan bases.  And with only two happy fan bases per season, it was doomed.

A variety of disasters — the 2003 split title, the 2004 Auburn snub, the seemingly annual exclusion of hopeful undefeated teams — enhanced the anger.  The minor tweaks satisfied nobody.

To bring the human element back in (along with bazillions of simoleons in new revenue), the BCS and its computers were declared obsolete. In 2014, the College Football Playoff replaced it, with a selection committee that would meet weekly starting midseason and would issue rankings — but mainly, would be human.

Did they ever act human, in its messiest sense. Sure, there were conflicts of interest, with former coaches and athletic directors rating their own teams, but that’s what happens with people. Per chairman Jeff Long’s descriptions, the system seemed to change from week to week, but hey, they’re not some computer you can program. They’re people. Like us.

In the end, it all seemed to work — and not just because the three games generated huge ratings and massive narratives.  So maybe the four teams that made the playoff also would have been the top four teams using BCS’s formula.  Still, this time, humans had made the decision.  So that made all the difference.

With college football thus secured, and our relationship with technology once more renegotiated, life was better. We could return to our Google searches, and our Facebook relationships, and our Amazon purchases

And let algorithms make the rest of our decisions for us.

Cole Position: Former Auburn center is on the verge of breaking it big in sports media

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First published in The War Eagle Reader.  Find it here.

It’s been said that you shouldn’t find a career — a career should find you.  If that’s the case, opportunity is chasing down Cole Cubelic on many fronts.

The former Auburn football player is on the verge. Through his daily radio show, his appearances on Paul Finebaum, his far-too-sporadic live game broadcasts, his football analysis for al.com, and countless other media pops, Cubelic is increasing both his visibility and his credibility.

Disclosure: I consider Cole a friend, professionally.  We have talked about profession-related issues, and he has been kind enough to include me as a guest on several occasions (including a tribute to Philip Lutzenkirchen that I was honored to participate in).

As the 2014 season finishes, however, even in the face of a major setback (the loss of his Sun Belt gig via the end of the CSS network), Cubelic has as much reason to be optimistic about next season as Muschamp-obsessed Auburn fans do.

Several factors work in his favor.  From Twitter to Finebaum to al.com, he combines solid x’s and o’s (particularly analyzing offensive/defensive line play) with neutrality and an engaging on-air manner that is not Millen-esque hyperactive.

He learned the football side as a center and team captain for Auburn from 1997-2000.  Soon after graduating, he and former teammate Ben Leard started an Auburn pre-game show for a Huntsville station, which led to weekly appearances on WJOX. And the ride started.

Among his most recent high-profile opportunities was to join Paul Finebaum’s panel for a live combination of game analysis and annoying callers during the Iron Bowl.  Former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, Marcus Spears and Booger McFarland also participated.

For all the unknowns going in, Cubelic thinks it worked well.  While national media were, as usual, fascinated with the Tammys and Phyllises, he was impressed with how Finebaum managed a live machine with an excess of moving parts — even when the phone system crashed.

“One thing about Paul is he knows how to delegate: how to get more out of somebody, how to cut someone off,” he said.  ”Maybe there was mystery as far as direction and where the game was going to go, but not about content.”

The broadcast also provided Cubelic with his first visit to the SEC Network studios in Charlotte, and he came away impressed with the technology (“like a kid in Toys R Us”) and grateful for the interaction with other former players turned broadcasters.  ”It was the closest thing to a locker room,” he said.

He was referring to media talk more than locker-room banter, of course.  Even away from sports, Cubelic shows a personal media-centrism that fits his career’s choice. His Twitter followers, along with Birmingham residents, remember how he became an instant on-the-scene reporter during the Birmingham icestorm of late January.

Driving from Huntsville to Auburn, Cubelic found himself caught in Birmingham just as the weather turned Shrek-ugly.  He ended up overnighting as his mother’s house, which allowed him to chronicle from Ground Zero for those two days.

On Instagram and Twitter, garnering hundreds of RTs and “likes,” he provided updates to residents whose family members remained stranded. “You feel obligated to continue to document it, and how you made it from Point A to Point B,” he said.  “It was all real time. I know people would be interested in it.”

Such is Cole’s presence on Twitter that his friends even dared him to tweet his own wedding. Which no one would do. But he did, sort of. As his bride, Katherine, entered, and everyone turned to look, Cole pulled his phone from his tux pocket and snapped a photo into a ready-made tweet and sent it off before anyone knew (including her, or worse, his grandmothers). It was almost the perfect crime. As he recalls, “My sister-in-law saw me and gave me the death stare.”

But of course it’s the TV and radio appearances, not the storm or wedding tweets, that build his reputation, and he is doing just that, according to his former broadcast partner, Joe Davis.

Davis has seen Cubelic grow from more of a smart football approach to a relaxed balance.  “When we start out, we want to be perfect, so we start thinking about how we’re supposed to sound,” Davis said.  ”As time goes on, you realize the importance of being yourself and letting your personality show through.”

For Davis, Cubelic’s sports talk radio experience has helped there. “It’s a rare to have the guy who has the combination of being a game analyst and hosting his own show,” he said.

That show, on Huntsville’s WUMP from 6-10 a.m., gives him yet more valuable on-air experience. Balancing guests, callers and commentaries against the need to fill four hours of airtime is a challenge.  But it gives him the opportunity “to get back in front of a listener base that is already familiar to me,” along with the chance to show his stuff.

Throw in a weekly gig on ESPN Pensacola 101.1, from 1-2 p.m. Tuesdays (his only Auburn-centric project), and it’s obvious Cubelic has his bases covered, along with a few outfield spots.

Yes, he has faced disappointments.  Even with the excess of bowl games, he was not able to pick up an analyst’s gig.  And a 2012 DUI arrest (all charges were dropped) provides sporadic social media harassment.

All that, plus he lacks the name recognition of a former national championship QB or a long-time NFL player.  “For him to get the national opportunity that he deserves, he has to fight that,” Davis said.  ”To get those top-level jobs is going to take people taking a chance on him, more than just him being a name.”

But looking ahead and not behind, Cubelic knows that he is building a portfolio that will provide a solid foundation for the sports media roller coaster ride that has found him.