bonwich

I also got a robocall from the coach this afternoon asking me to come to the game.

I'm assuming this came out of the sports marketing group, so as much we criticize, we must also praise.

Report on the "What's a Billiken" lecture?

Cross-posted from a Facebook discussion about the NPR article. h/t Karen Aquadro for the postcard.

Reminder that this is today, complete with an interesting advance from St. Louis Public Radio: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/how-did-billiken-become-saint-louis-universitys-mascot#stream/0

Weren't there two Luc Longley games, and didn't we beatch-slap him both times?

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Quality Is Job 1 has found a soulmate.

The quick release on the outside shots is very cool. The drives and dunks are largely against preppy white boys, so they only prove that he can drive and dunk, not that he's a werewolf.

I didn't realize that. That's utter bullsheet. There's already pretty good statistical evidence that Harry was in the running for the greatest Billiken of all time, at least among those who played a full college career. And if there were a three-point arc and no freshman exemption in Harry's day, he would have been, hands down.

I believe Calipari's level is Dante's Eighth Circle.

Wait, what? He's a 6'8" guard? The second coming of freakin' Harry Rogers!!! (Apologies to the 92% or the board who have absolutely no freakin' idea what I'm talking about. And fabulous memories for the rest of us.)

I'd only skimmed it until you asked, so I went back and read it. If I were his editor, I would have sent it back to him and told him to make clear what his point was. Then again, that would have been in the mid-2000s, when editors could actually send stuff back for more work. Well, and when there even were editors.

This reminded me of something back to close-on-topic that I wanted to say earlier: I, too, didn't see a whole lot wrong with what he wrote. Certainly there's lots of stuff we MBMs naturally disagree with, but it was basically just more feed-the-beast stuff. The paper did, however, commit an egregious violation of its own policy by not crediting the photograph/photo illustration in the print edition.

Good ol' Roy has provided me with a segue to expand upon one of the many Post-Dispatch incompetencies. At the time that I resigned from my 11-year career at the Post-Dispatch, I'd been a subscriber for almost 30 years. All employees got a 50% discount on subscriptions. A few months after my resignation, they stopped delivering. I called and asked why. They said I hadn't paid my bills. After I resigned, I didn't receive a single bill. They're either clever as hell for simply allowing hardcopy subscriptions to fall so far that they can start printing less than six days a week (or the seven that was the case when I quit) -- so that they could justify decreasing print to 2-4 days a week; or they're idiots. I always go with Occam's Razor.

With respect, ACE, you're living in a SLU bubble. I generally resist posting inside information about my time in the newsroom, but I sat immediately next to the sports department. It was pretty well known that I'm a louder-than-most SLU fan. All of my time there, but especially during the Majerus days, I lobbied for better position on the website, more stories, etc. One of the sports staff members who has been derided on this board as far back as I can remember was in fact the single biggest advocate for better SLU coverage. And he would tell me: Hey, get all those people on the SLU board to email Roger (or whoever the sports editor was then). IIRC, I even posted a template or talking points of what y'all should send him. And I suggested you tell any SLU fan you know to join the cause. Didn't happen. Correspondence ticked up a bit, but demonstrated interest in SLU basketball was much, much lower than demonstrated interest in you-know-who basketball. (I have some really interesting side stories about Illinois, but I'll save those for in-person conversations.) In addition, for the kazillionth time, Stu may be the beat writer for SLU, but he does a lot of other stuff. And we've had this discussion before, dating back to Tom T., that if Stu wanted to spend more time on SLU, he could. By the same token, if I had wanted to spend more time on restaurant news, I could have, too, but I have a pretty big family and my kids were in grade school and high school and I kinda liked seeing them. (Plus, inside secret: in the 11 years I worked there, I was never the staff restaurant critic. Chew on that for a while.) Stu is a really bright guy. If he saw benefit to the P-D brand and to his own brand from allocating more of his extremely constrained time to SLU coverage, he would do it. And as dimwitted as many of the editors and marketing folks were, if they'd seen evidence of tangible interest in the Billikens during the recent glory days, they would have increased coverage of the Billikens. Didn't happen.

In part because I consider his wife a friend and because she's a terrific human being, I shall once again stand up against the ridiculous Stu-bashing. (I'd do it for Stu directly, but I can only assess his terrific human beingness by association. Although he has always been very nice to me.) Stu works much more than a full-time job. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, he's doing a very cool long-term research project, which causes some pretty big sacrifices on his part. Making "fan" a job requirement of a beat writer is unethical in the extreme. (I should note that I saw some fabulously unethical things happen at the paper, but in general the grown-ups of my era wouldn't have stooped to this level.) As Metz pointed out, Mi$$ou tends to get its grads covering the program because there are a kazillion Mi$$ou J-school grads. SLU, on the other hand, doesn't even have a J-school. If they had posted Tom T.'s job when he left and required a SLU degree, they could have internally promoted, let's see -- me, Avis and Cleora Hughes, and they could have pushed it by hiring one of the folks who was in night school at SLU Law (Side note: Probably because I don't have one, I've never seen the benefit of a journalism degree, and in fact I think that media outlets being run by journalists has accelerated their decline.) Finally, the main problem with this whole discussion is that no one gives a flying fuok about SLU recruiting, save for people on this board and the occasional AAU coach who might be looking for prey among h.s. underclassmen.

Any number of things have happened while or since I was there that illustrate an utter collapse of standards. A large part of this is the complete impossibility of putting out a "good" (by old-fart standards) product with no copy editors, an average age that's rapidly approaching 25 and resulting obliteration of institutional memory, and succumbing (they had not much choice) to the "feed the beast" approach to journalism. Plus a significant portion of management has simply come up through the ranks of "classic" journalism (and at least a few are incompetent), so they don't even know what they don't know. Clear enough?

This is (and has been for a long time) an impossibility.

FYI. Doesn't say whether it's being led by the renowned expert Professor SignGuy.

So we're adding a home-and-home with the University of New Hampshire?

It makes perfect sense. Online content is "feed the beast." Just gotta keep posting stuff. The parallel in my world is that I'll post an item about a new restaurant, and three or four other local food publications will post almost exactly the same item and attribute the original break to me. (At least in my world, however, the other publications will do something to add to the story.)

If libel on social media were able to be litigated, we would no longer have a civil courts system.

*Latsch