The AG Interview: David Wasson Returns

As Executive Sports Editor of the Tuscaloosa News, David Wasson covers Alabama sports, follows high school recruiting, and occasionally takes questions from the pajamas media, including yours truly. With his second visit here, Wasson’s karma goes through the roof. If only mine would do the same…

Busy day?
Sitting here listening to Tommy Deas interview [Jaguars DT] Grady Jackson.

He’s still wearing the crown, isn’t he?
It’s hanging from the light on his desk. He threatens to don it at any time.

I suppose we have to pay homage to our new Mythical National Champions…
It is amazing, in this day and time, that a two-loss team from anywhere can be national champs. This year was a doozy, though, and LSU ended up in the right place at the right time.

Was this year an aberration, or the true result of scholarship parity?
Aberration more than parity, though I think they both are factors. I think the main factor is that more and more teams find themselves on TV all season long – something coaches can recruit to. Thus, a coach at, say, Illinois can say “hey, we’ll be on TV!” to a kid to potentially keep them from going elsewhere.

But then, look at Michigan, which went from looking lousy to whooping Florida within the span of a year. Crazy sport.

And now it sounds like Georgia is on the playoff bandwagon. Sour grapes?
Georgia is, and FSU and Florida were last year. A bit of sour grapes, sure, but you gotta admit they have a point. The only sport without a clear-cut champion is Division I college football. I am more and more convinced that, in my lifetime, it’ll never happen.

No upside for the people making the money from bowls.
Right. I was explaining to Mrs. ESE the other night that the majority of presidents will never go for it. Take Alabama for example. They got, what, $1.1 million in Shreveport? Go to a playoff system, and they get squat.

Not only that, but the non-bowl teams in the conference get shafted because of the profit-sharing deal. So Ole Miss and Vandy wouldn’t vote for a playoff, either. Theoretically, there is more money to be made within a playoff – but it is more money for those selected teams.

Guess we can’t expect the college presidents to look at it the way we fanboys do.
Nope. It is huge business. And they would rather shoot themselves than shorten the season to keep it from balloning to 18-20 games for a couple teams. Division II has always had it that way, but that’s because their athletic budgets aren’t as dependent on those huge home games.

Ok, we’ve established a college prez doesnt care whether the national champ is disputed. What about the kids on the field? Is Georgia’s 2nd team left tackle angry he wasn’t in the title game?
Sure he is. As is USC’s backup long snapper. But if there is one thing that really isn’t disputed, it is that the athlete’s opinion doesn’t much matter. College athletics is very much like the pre-Curt Flood MLB.

They may not have gotten a title shot, but Georgia did get to clobber Hawaii on national TV.
That’s true. And apparently the kids like the bowl experience quite a bit. Winning your last game with the nation watching likely doesn’t get old.

Helps your draft status, too.
My draft status could use the help.

And speaking of DJ Hall…
Yep. Good to see he is in the Senior Bowl. I have a feeling he will end up being a quality NFL receiver. He runs good routes, and once he isn’t the focal point of defenses, he can make big plays.

Does history call him Alabama’s greatest receiver, or the guy who couldn’t be bothered to lay it on the line, once his records were secure?
History … I think DJ will be remembered as less than his impressive stats indicate. Kinda like Brodie Croyle, to be honest. Then again, a lot of guys in this recent generation of very good Alabama players will be remembered more in the context of the tumultuous time they played than what they did on the field.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to set passing/receiving records at Alabama, does it?
I have thought that same thing about 15 times in the past five years. Man, Bryant and those guys sure did run the ball a lot, huh?

And thus, the old debate about stats vs. rings commences…
Rings, rings, rings! Dan Marino, to me, isn’t half the quarterback a system guy like Tom Brady.
The Heisman is great, but give me a national championship ring any day. It becomes the first line of your obituary.

Agreed. Sure, Montana was a good QB, but wouldn’t have those 4 rings if he’d played in Houston.
Warren Moon was a great passer. Not a great winner. Thus, not a great quarterback. Jay Barker gets ripped all the time for being a tag-along on the 1992 team. But they won all their games, and he was the leader of the offense that won all its games.

I know you cover all sports, but do things slow down a good bit for you after football season?
Oh no. If anything, it gets busier after the football season dies down. Football season = Fridays and Saturdays. Basketball season is almost all week long for months. When spring hits, and UA is going basketball/spring football/gymnastics/baseball/softball, we work our buns off.
I feel like a traffic cop a lot more from December-June – making sure my guys are in the right places. And pushing them to do more and more online stuff.

You guys continue to expand TideSports, in terms of content and ways to give information. How’s that working out for you?
Really well. Last night, for example, [Christopher] Walsh and [Cecil] Hurt were at the basketball game – with Walsh doing a live blog at courtside. We also had a web videographer and a photographer, so the result is a combination of live analysis, traditional print story and photographer, and five videos.

We want folks to hit the site in the morning at work, and keep them there for a while. Also, we continue to post more and more stuff during the day, to keep people coming back. Also, with interaction via web chats and our forums, we want it to be more of a conversation with our readers. It is moving along nicely.

Do your readers increasingly feel they are helping shape the story, instead of just absorbing whats offered?
Yes. They love talking with us about all kinds of stuff. It both is distracting and time-consuming to work that way, but my ADD-addled mind is able to keep up. Feeling like you have a stake in what is happening is empowering. We work for our readers, after all.

Do you think sports journalists are having an easier time making this shift than so-called ‘hard news’ guys?
Great question. Yes, partially because we are used to a quick turnaround on what we do. If my guys had all day to write a story, they would go insane. They are used to cranking out something of quality in 30 minutes. Speeding up the pace via multimedia web ideas fits nicely into that.

I’m sure the nature of sports lends itself to that more than, say, a presidential campaign that lasts months.
Yes, but the instant analysis age of television with these campaigns demands news when there isn’t much of any. It downgrades the value of news, to me. I think that, often, we dissect news and parcel it out online little by little, to keep people like me with feeble brains interested.
I sit here from time to time and go “you know, there just isn’t much going on.” It quickly subsides, but those are glorious times.

Then some damned blogger shows up to play Cub Reporter…
No offense to present company, but I still don’t buy the “blogs kill traditional media” argument. Sure, Drudge has reshaped media. But he is one of a billion.

Look, I completely agree. in fact, we go out of our way to note we don’t break stories here. We comment on Alabama football, and on the media coverage of it.
Even people that claim to “break stories” aren’t nearly as accurate or timely as traditional media.

We saw that over and over again last year at this time.
Every doofus with a computer, a login and a brother’s best friend’s sister’s father-in-law at UA had Steve Spurrier coming here. 

Yeah, but you gotta admit that was a fun week.
I’d rather have been at NorthRiver Yacht Club playing golf than calling NorthRiver about someone else playing golf.

You werent on the NORAD site watching flight patterns?
At least in that situation, UA caught on to that game. Mal was under the radar quite a bit. I rip Mal for a lot of things. But he was apparently briefed on how to stay low-profile on that one.
Granted, we knew where he was. But we are good like that.

You guys played that thing cooler than Stuart Scott’s career.
As we talked about before a little bit, I gotta be frank, and say we weren’t quite sure where we were vs. our competition all the time. But we knew we weren’t wrong on anything.

National signing day coming up. looks like a top 5, maybe top 3 class, doesn’t it?
It does. Julio Jones still is pretty mum about his intentions, but Saban and Co. have hit it as hard as anyone could have imagined. They are recruiting everyone, it seems, and it is paying off. Ask Les Miles how good a recruiter Nick Saban is.

How much does this title swing any Louisiana recruits back away from UA and toward LSU?
Hard to say. Each kid is different, of course, but any team that wins it all has a bump in recruiting. And LSU is putting more and more money into facilities. It almost makes up for sub-par head coaching.

You don’t buy the argument that he’s the Head Coach, so he must be pretty good?
In this particular instance, no. 

Well, that’s that.
I think LSU won this year because they were in the perfect place. Last year, they could have won but got coached out of a few wins.

Ok, time to play Comment on the Message Board Rumor©.
Fire away!

Auburn is waiting on/sitting on a PLOI.
Not as dialed in on the Plains, but I doubt it.

Freddie Kitchens to Alabama.
No opening right now for him.

Expect any more moves on the staff?
I would be surprised if any more moved on this year.

Saban is leaving for WV, LSU, NFL, NASCAR or Tuscaloosa County High.
My money is on the WNBA.Or to give the Iditarod a run.

He has mad hops, I hear.
Do we still need a U.S. men’s soccer coach?

…or stays hopping mad, something like that.
Actually, little known fact… Nick Saban doesn’t sleep, he waits.

He does wrestle in Mexico under a mask.
That might explain the disturbing sparseness of hair he’s got going these days. Either that, or the constant needling by us reporters.

I think he’s pretty well got most of you guys trained by now.
Whenever I feel low, I fire up a press conference online and watch the bear poke at the kids through the cage.

Great visual.
It’s even more amusing to watch in person. Walsh gets all riled up about it, too.

As always, great checking in with you.
My pleasure, pal. My pleasure.