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Fall 2017 allegations against unnamed players (aka Situation 2)


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8 minutes ago, 615Billiken said:

So essentially nothing has changed since the initial report of sexual assault allegations against student athletes broke, and yet here we are discussing nothing about nothing.

Exactly.

When we had Situation 1 we had Willie's dad do the circuit of different media outlets. That and everything else about Situation 1 turned out to be one big mess. Playing it close to the chest by all parties seems to be the best strategy. 

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15 minutes ago, tarheelbilliken said:

Exactly.

When we had Situation 1 we had Willie's dad do the circuit of different media outlets. That and everything else about Situation 1 turned out to be one big mess. Playing it close to the chest by all parties seems to be the best strategy. 

-this post screams for pics

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30 minutes ago, ACE said:

You make some good points, but you are way off on this last point. If you are a beat writer for a college basketball team, you have to cover recruiting and you have to use social media if you want to be at all relevant. And the counter argument that our program is not Duke, UNC, etc. to warrant that type of coverage does not fly.  Beat writers of fellow A-10 programs and many lower than SLU, at least provide recruiting tidbits. I'm not expecting a lot of recruiting feature stories in the paper, just share it on social media when a recruit visits campus, etc. He can even simply retweet other sources who report it.

I've been harping on this for a while and gave Stu credit when it appeared he was hearing us. Last year he started tweeting a bit about French and other recruits who would visit campus.  Hopefully that will continue and at minimum he can provide basic recruiting info. If he's not writing content of interest to SLU fans, who is he writing it for?

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.  

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1 hour ago, billiken_roy said:

Spoon balls I agree.   Arguably the two best Cardinal writers in my lifetime were Bob Burnes and Rick Hummel and there was no doubt that they were fans.   

A professional will be able step back when a prospective is needed and honestly a passion for the home team may actually bring out honest view points that a non-fan wouldn't even care about.  

I just don't understand the notion that a writer couldn't be a fan at the same time (so long as he/she doesn't write in a completely biased manner). All it means is that someone is paying a lot of attention to the program and is cranking out regular columns. Sadly it would probably require back to back national championships for the Post to actually care about the Bills enough to hire someone better than Stu Durando. 

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I firmly believe Stu writes about what he's assigned to write about. The percentage of Mizzou alums at the PD sports section is more than significant. To the extent that we live in a SLU bubble (which we do), the Post Dispatch lives in a Mizzou bubble (by definition). If Dave Matter and Stu switched places there would still be far more mizzou stories than slu stories. Good on guys like BenFred for at least making an effort to compensate, but at the end of the day it will take sustained succsss and increased fan support for us to get anywhere close to a level we'd all like in PD sports coverage.

It is a shame that no real Billikens bloggers have caught on at a place like SBNation. That would probably be more useful to us as fans than increased PD coverage.

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-there is a paragraph that has me posting again about this article which I do find a problem for myself – a “fancy-pants soiree”? how is a school like SLU to raise funds to provide opportunities to the student/athletes other than such functions? I find this incredibly stupid and patronizing, every NCAA school tries to raise money, some do it according to NCAA regulations and I hope SLU is in this camp  

-“and there will be the inevitably awkward first exhibition game Nov. 4.” I think you mean the presser after the game, don’t you? or explain how the game will be awkward? You get paid to use words and I don’t think you are using them in a good fashion – but I do hope the presser is awkward, I hope Hochman is there and a player, any player, looks him straight in the eye and says “some of my teammates were involved in an incident that had much more made of it than needed, we are college kids, they had sex with college women, they did nothing that wasn’t consensual and nothing was illegal, according to Title IX they are afforded privacy and we will follow that, we are a team, we stick together, we play for one another, we are united and we expect to have a great season and this is the last we will speak about this. next question.” If he asks a follow up about it, get up and leave.

 

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16 minutes ago, Cowboy said:

-there is a paragraph that has me posting again about this article which I do find a problem for myself – a “fancy-pants soiree”? how is a school like SLU to raise funds to provide opportunities to the student/athletes other than such functions? I find this incredibly stupid and patronizing, every NCAA school tries to raise money, some do it according to NCAA regulations and I hope SLU is in this camp  

-“and there will be the inevitably awkward first exhibition game Nov. 4.” I think you mean the presser after the game, don’t you? or explain how the game will be awkward? You get paid to use words and I don’t think you are using them in a good fashion – but I do hope the presser is awkward, I hope Hochman is there and a player, any player, looks him straight in the eye and says “some of my teammates were involved in an incident that had much more made of it than needed, we are college kids, they had sex with college women, they did nothing that wasn’t consensual and nothing was illegal, according to Title IX they are afforded privacy and we will follow that, we are a team, we stick together, we play for one another, we are united and we expect to have a great season and this is the last we will speak about this. next question.” If he asks a follow up about it, get up and leave.

 

Frank Cusamano and Earl Austin Jr are the ones who know how to cover basketball in general and Billiken Basketball in particular.

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I will join bonwich in defending Stu.   I've met Stu and had long conversations with him.   I think he writes what he is paid to write and I think he does as good as anyone that the post has in covering the team.   Stu is far from the problem on coverage.   Look higher than that.   And those saying the coverage has to remain a neutral perspective then explain the f'ing black and gold pom pom perspective of all things mi$$ouri?

I've given up on the post years ago.   Dropped subscription, deleted my stltoday link.   If someone posts a discussion topic link here on a slow day I might read it but all in all I couldn't care less.   They post isn't worth the time.

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2 hours ago, billiken_roy said:

I will join bonwich in defending Stu.   I've met Stu and had long conversations with him.   I think he writes what he is paid to write and I think he does as good as anyone that the post has in covering the team.   Stu is far from the problem on coverage.   Look higher than that.   And those saying the coverage has to remain a neutral perspective then explain the f'ing black and gold pom pom perspective of all things mi$$ouri?

I've given up on the post years ago.   Dropped subscription, deleted my stltoday link.   If someone posts a discussion topic link here on a slow day I might read it but all in all I couldn't care less.   They post isn't worth the time.

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. ;) 

 

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2 hours ago, billiken_roy said:

I will join bonwich in defending Stu.   I've met Stu and had long conversations with him.   I think he writes what he is paid to write and I think he does as good as anyone that the post has in covering the team.   Stu is far from the problem on coverage.   Look higher than that.   And those saying the coverage has to remain a neutral perspective then explain the f'ing black and gold pom pom perspective of all things mi$$ouri?

I've given up on the post years ago.   Dropped subscription, deleted my stltoday link.   If someone posts a discussion topic link here on a slow day I might read it but all in all I couldn't care less.   They post isn't worth the time.

And Roy, I'll join you and Bonwich. There is indeed bias in the P-D sports department. But the bottom line is, in today's decimated local news business, it's not the paper's job to be a cheerleader and sell tickets for the team. Their job is to deliver news and quasi-entertainment content to meet the marketplace demand. And unfortunately, the University hasn't been successful -- yet -- in building the Billiken basketball brand in a widespread way. Billiken stories at stltoday.com receive only a small fraction of the clicks Mi$$ou does. Thus difficult for the paper to rationalize putting lots of scarce resources behind it. If we can sustain success on the court year after year and market it properly, the brand will grow and the P-D will be forced to dedicate resources.

But it kills me to say that.

The yesteryear approach Bob Burnes at the Globe and Bob Broeg at the Post brought every day was very different. These two guys -- the best executive sports editors this metro has known -- delivered the news, fought each other to get the story first, and usually expressed opinions in their columns fairly... calling it both ways, not going for click-bait. But what we really miss is they were champions of St. Louis, born and raised here, tremendous fans of all St. Louis sports, and used their passion and power to influence the sports scene. The stories could go on and on about the quiet behind the scenes roles they played in countless areas. Recruiting franchises, for example. The Blues. The Hawks in the 50s. Spoke at more rubber chicken banquets in the community than you'd ever believe. Why? They felt it was their duty to make their city a better place to live, an even better sports town. To grow readership. They wore their hearts on their sleeves and were damn proud to do it.

Some might argue they couldn't be objective if they were St. Louis boosters and/or had relationships with franchise owners and athletic departments. But by and large they somehow managed. They rarely were embroiled in controversy because as sports fans, they called it both ways. Ultimately both were huge successes in every which way you'd want to measure it. Personally. Professionally. Historically in the town they called home. They were leaders, not just reporters or columnists or radio guys. One is in Cooperstown, the other nominated and among final four twice. When The Sporting News named St. Louis the best sports city in the country about 15 years ago, after they'd retired or passed away, their names weren't part of the story. Nor should they have been. But the quiet roles they played - over the long term - were important. Obviously, Jack Buck and Bob Hyland at KMOX had an equal hand. The only guy who plays that role today to any extent is Bernie Miklasz.

How nice it would be for the Post to have the budget flexibility -- and more importantly -- feel the same duty to help build St. Louis and the Billikens... and readership. But with the current neutral or even worse, adversarial approach in news reporting, a home office in Iowa, and bombed out newspaper economics, it'll be up to us fans and the University to go it alone. 

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After all the long replies focusing on details and specific experiences, I want to give the short answer....

The writers are not good. I often disagreed with Bernie in general (I did love his appreciation of Rick), but regardless of whether you liked or loathed him, he was undoubtedly talented. I enjoyed reading him  

The new writers are WAY less talented. I remember when people could argue Joe Straus (VCU fandom aside) was a hack. He is just about the new gold standard. 

 

I weep for what what the world has become.  It should not be this hard to find minimally competent people. 

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Oh yeah... back on topic...the Post story today was super balanced and it mentioned (multiple times) that the players may be innocent of punishable infractions (although it was in terribly bad taste and they placed themselves in a compromising position). Either way, the public narrative to non-fans is the situation is murky and not certain. Engaged fans should feel better that even the public narrative is trending the right way. 

I think punishments are unavoidable, but the worst case scenario seems way less likely. I truly have hope the punishment will be commiserate with the "crime".  

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Keep on weeping SLU_Lax, minimally competent people are not only hard to find, but the mass of incompetent people feel highly entitled and victimized by every unexpected (to them) turn of events. This is a rather unstable mix I'm afraid.

As far as the title IX issue, I really do not know what SLU's rules are for this, but many other Universities do not allow legal counsel to be present at the hearings (Xavier specifically forbids it). Be what it may I also cannot see the players walking out of this without sanctions of any kind.

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48 minutes ago, Old guy said:

Keep on weeping SLU_Lax, minimally competent people are not only hard to find, but the mass of incompetent people feel highly entitles and victimized by every unexpected (to them) turn of events. This is a rather unstable mix I'm afraid.

As far as the title IX issue, I really do not know what SLU's rules are for this, but many other Universities do not allow legal counsel to be present at the hearings (Xavier, Wash U). Be what it may I also cannot see the players walking out of this without sanctions of any kind.

Under the new guidelines issued by the DoE, the excused has the right to choose any representative they desire in Title IX cases involving claims of sexual assault.

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9 hours ago, bonwich said:

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. ;) 

 

Maybe 7 or 8 years ago I couldn't get the paper delivered consistently. They would miss me 1 or 2 days a week including Sundays at least once a month. I talked to numerous people including the guy who was supposed to be in charge of deliveries. Nothing changed, I dropped the subscription but they still delivered (though just as inconsistently) for a year and a half. I moved into a new place 2 years ago and never subscribed, they just quit delivering Sundays paper to me 3 months ago. It's no wonder they can't make money

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6 hours ago, SLU_Lax said:

Oh yeah... back on topic...the Post story today was super balanced and it mentioned (multiple times) that the players may be innocent of punishable infractions (although it was in terribly bad taste and they placed themselves in a compromising position). Either way, the public narrative to non-fans is the situation is murky and not certain. Engaged fans should feel better that even the public narrative is trending the right way. 

I think punishments are unavoidable, but the worst case scenario seems way less likely. I truly have hope the punishment will be commiserate with the "crime".  

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.

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9 minutes ago, bonwich said:

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.

Because I appreciate your perspective, I'm curious what you thought of Ortiz's article? 

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17 hours ago, bonwich said:

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.  

None of what you wrote there addressed what I was taking issue with - recruiting coverage. And none of what you wrote would justify Stu NOT covering recruiting on social media. I actually think the SLU coverage in the print P-D has generally been ok. There were even several offseason articles this summer and the coverage during our three-year NCAA Tourney run was quite good.

My issue with Stu was that prior to last year, he seemingly NEVER talked about recruiting until after a recruit signed. I give him credit that last year was the first year he started talking about recruiting visits. Coincidentally, he started doing it right around the time myself and others on this board were whining about him not covering recruiting. ;) Clearly, the evil Commie overlords at the P-D didn't stop Stu from tweeting about Santos, Whaley and others making recruiting visits last year. 

I would suggest you are in a bit of a P-D bubble. Look around the country to how other beat writers from programs similar or worse than SLU cover recruiting. They talk about it a lot. Thankfully, I think Stu has adjusted a bit and recognizes the importance of it. His predecessor Timmerman never did. He was too busy focusing on travel blogs from the road. BTW, did the evil P-D overlords tell Timmerman to do that or did he do it on his own? Since Stu doesn't do it, I suspect Timmerman had some freedom to write about what he wanted to on a blog.

It's a question of covering topics that are relevant to fans of that team. I would suggest recruiting is in the top three for most fans of college sports. To not cover would be crazy. That would be like a writer of pro team not covering free agency or trades.

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1 hour ago, ACE said:

 

I would suggest you are in a bit of a P-D bubble. Look around the country to how other beat writers from programs similar or worse than SLU cover recruiting. They talk about it a lot. Thankfully, I think Stu has adjusted a bit and recognizes the importance of it. His predecessor Timmerman never did. He was too busy focusing on travel blogs from the road. BTW, did the evil P-D overlords tell Timmerman to do that or did he do it on his own? Since Stu doesn't do it, I suspect Timmerman had some freedom to write about what he wanted to on a blog.

 

ACE, this is a tad unfair - let's look at our conference; the only A-10 program that probably dominates their own DMA is VCU. Even within RVA, my Spidey Sense is telling me that even UR plays second fiddle. Does Olean, NY even have a printing press?

Dayton might have a chance considering Thad's departure at OSU and a new game in town in C-bus, but reeling from Archie's departure hurts locally. 

Duquene / Penn State and to a lesser extent, Pitt. 

Fordham - does the NYT Sports Editor even know where Rose Hill is? 

Davidson - the Charlotte Observer doesn't get out to Lake Norman, but I'm sure it has a desk in Durham and Chapel Hill :) the "Steph Curry Watch" is getting old. 

Mason/GeeDub - have to contend with G-town, UVa, etc. 

Umass - Boston Globe doesn't pay for mileage west of the Worcester city limits...

The Philly schools haven't been relevant since Jameer and Delonte. 

URI - The only paper I know near Providence:

Image result for newspaper dumb and dumber

 

 

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11 minutes ago, SLURadioBoy said:

Frank just said that he has been invited to SLU's practice today by Chris May and Brian Kunderman. He will be there with a film crew today and doing interviews. He won't be asking questions about the investigation if they ask him not to.

Smart move by SLU. Get some media exposure, while managing the risk of getting asked a bunch of questions about the investigation.

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54 minutes ago, DeSmetBilliken said:

Smart move by SLU. Get some media exposure, while managing the risk of getting asked a bunch of questions about the investigation.

I was thinking the same thing, but it appears they are opening up to all media and not just Frank.

Unless Jose is referring to Frank's invite as "available to the media."

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