A Few Good Men

With social media at absolutly everyone’s fingertips and apparently everyone in the nation getting their PHD’s in exercise science as well as becoming a doctor in the past 3 days, we need someone to get in front of the information. What happened to the players doesn’t strictly lie on the coaches shoulders, the players had a responsibility as well. Every college athlete knows that the weeks after Christmas break are going to be the worst 2-3 weeks of the year. You get your ass kicked and everyone is puking and dehydrated, but its their job to show up ready. There was no need to do 100 squats in 17 minutes. They had a freaking hour, trying to be superman doesnt prove anything, the S&C coaches make sure there is enough of a workout. So you show up ready for practice, you dont sit around over break and do nothing. The kids dad even said in the presser that he did nothing over break! Yes changes need to be made but this was made into something that is honestly not that big of a deal.

that basically said that the university was doing the correct thing by withholding information, and he knew this because he was an attorney. Stupid guy didn’t even realize Jacobi is a lawyer and would know what information the university could disclose. Also, he used called AJ a “blogger” like it was a dirty word. Can’t stand commenters like that.

PV, couldn’t agree more. Iowa’s SID has fallen behind the times and made the university take a broken nose when we would’ve just had a black eye.

I think now, the sharks have found the blood in the water. KF is losing the perception battle and I don’t see a game plan to get it stabilized. In fact, i don’t see a concern that this is even a battle worth winning.

Amen.
 
It’s embarrassing to watch them flail about helplessly like great-grandma trying to program the VCR.

Is it possible that our PR is very similar to most other Universities but since we follow them so closely we are going to have complaints when they don’t tell us everything we want to know exactly when we think we should know it. BHGP covers the Iowa Hawkeyes, I would expect them to want the most current information quickly from the University and perhaps that is the reason why everyone here is so critical. We think we need to know the details of everything that happens as soon as it happens and when we don’t we start the “time has passed them by” argument and start calling everyone incompetent. I just think in a way we are all too close to the situation to evaluate it well. I don’t follow other top programs like Iowa, I don’t know how they do things and don’t know how far we really are behind on this. This situation much like the others is going to take some time to sort itself out, find out what really went wrong. Until that happens i think it is reasonable for them to tell us what they know is fact and leave the speculation to everyone else..

OK go ahead.. tear it apart.

“Iowa football is the 15th most financially successful program in the country, bringing in $81 million per year, and its public relations operation wants to sew some costumes and hold the press conference in the barn with Aunt Jenny.”
Love this. It says it all.

I maintain my opinion from the previous post — calling a press conference featuring these individuals was a monumental error which simply compounded previous errors. And I don’t know where you guys would be without Biff Poggi.

Seriously, why have a press conference knowing that you won’t be giving out any information? Isn’t the whole idea to feed the press enough of your cherrypicked information that they’ll only minimally stray from the script — not to put some woefully underprepared schleps on stage to essentially say “Derrrr”, or if they’re feeling especially verbose, “Hurrrrrrrrrr.”?

Part of the issue is that today, SID’s are more promotional than informational. We see this at Penn State, too. Can’t get ‘em to comment on anything substantive, but they’ll promote the crap out of their selected topics. Which is their right, of course. But it’s hard for the promotional machine to suddenly switch back to the informational machine, which is deadly in today’s media/internet world. People won’t put up with it, and today, people are media. Doesn’t require a press pass.

Calling a press conference for the sole purpose of further obfuscation is monumentally stupid.

they are all sitting around saying, “how’d them rascals get that info on the interwebs so fast? They don’t put them darnfanagling word processers in hospital rooms do they?”

Like immediately. And then go out and spend the cash to get a SID that knows WTF he’s doing.

As a former university employee who worked with the UI media this hits home. The university has all.of the tools to run a damage control dept but they are fragmented wih no clear leadership or chain of command structure with respect to each other. We have several world class recording/broadcast studios/media centers that are all completely isolated from each other. This very much underscores themes about new media, especially in the AD that we’ve been talking about since Ferentz made DJK get off the twitterz.

We have state of the art football and medical facilities, we travel en masse and in style, we spend money like a drunken sailor at banquets, bowl games and other entertaining events.

We took one good step in the direction of new media this past year with the brand new football website, but it’s about goddamn time we have a spin management team who is capable and experienced enough to manufacture and, when necessary, handle damage control.

The football program especially is notorious for keeping things close to the chest on not playing nice with the other side of the river, but the point on image is exactly right. This football team is the national face of the university and I’m sick of our PR looking like fucking amateur hour.

Trying to “control the message” in a free society was always difficult. It’s been getting more and more difficult over the last century and a half with the rise of newspapers, television, and now the internet. So it’s not really surprising to me when a bunch of people with less resources than a giant government entity but (apparently) roughly the same amount of incompetence cause nothing but more trouble for themselves.

I’m sure the media people could have handled this better, but isn’t the issue of “how our PR department reacts to a scandal” of secondary importance to, you know, the scandal? To take an example from another team, the New York Knicks had a terrible string of embarrassing stories (mainly involving Isiah Thomas’ sexual harassment lawsuit) a few years back, and it was all over the national media. ALL OVER. And the Knicks were a laughingstock for a long, long time. Now, whose fault was that? Was it Joe Publicist, who failed to somehow perform super-hypnosis on every reporter in the country and make them ignore a very salacious, news-worthy story, or was it Isiah Thomas, Stephon Marbury, Eddy Curry, and everyone else who did the idiotic things in the first place?

I’m not comparing the two scandals, but just making the point that PR can only do so much. At some point scandals are embarrassing because they are scandals, not because they are presented in a certain way.

Maybe, um, having fewer scandals would be the area where the team should invest more energy?

Yes, please.

The news broke, I’ve been getting little sleep — due to cabin fever, I suspect — I read this and then I just took one of my kids in for an emergency tooth extraction.

So, what does any of this have to do with zombie Freddy Mercury?

really annoyed the fuck out of me in that movie.

(Sorry, almost 200 posts and no one had made that joke yet? Y’all are slacking.)

Gregg Doyle claims via Twitter that a family member of an affected player has a kidney function below 40% and may sever their ties with the program.

Said, “I don’t even care that head coach Kirk Ferentz wasn’t there when it happened. His program, his responsibility. And I am assuming that he did hire the coaches who were there when it happened, so that’s on him, too. He better own it, and he better do something about it, because if 15% of your team is hospitalized with a life-threatening condition, that better cost somebody their job. It’s inexcusable, it should have never happened. And unless you wake up and take responsibility and control of the situation, you could be the guy looking for a new job, Coach.”

Now bloggers are complaining about lack of access just as much as the “old media” always has. Get over feeling so super-important that you have the right to know every detail of everything that happens for your favorite University football team (and its individual players) and your life will be much better.

The people screaming foul here for a “P.R. nightmare” are expecting too much info too quickly, which would also be wrong. As with the Wegher issues, DJK issues, and others that will surely follow, these are individuals with rights that include privacy from certain things, including an onslaught of uninformed questions on their health from Monday Morning Quarterbacks.

Because you can still win games in that fashion.

The thing is though, there are youth either attending or working for the University who DO understand how this stuff works. There’s a college of journalism at Iowa – can’t we make up a bullshit “modern communications consultant” intern position and get an intelligent 20 year old in there to get our directors up to speed on what they need to know?

Do widespread rumors hurt the university and the team? I think they do.
Potential recruits may have seen the ESPN coverage of the 13 players hospitalized.
Before the “drug tests” press conference, I was at a highschool BB game, and everyone was talking about “DJK had an excel spreadsheet with player names and drug orders.”

This fanbase doesn’t have a lot to do in the winter. Everyone will jump all over any facebook or twitter post from a player.

I am ashamed of our fanbase this winter, but the rumors and the speculation they spread were fueled by cryptic press releases.
I think the university can do a better job of faster damage control, wasn’t that the point of this write-up?

Imagine an entire warehouse full of squat racks, weight sleds, strobe lights, and deafening speed metal. They’ve got everything: Squat-Browns (that thing where you do squats until your wiz turns brown), hospital gowns, IV drips, little Pennslyvania Dutch people golfing while wearing hard hats, bizzarre press conferences, and Sally Mason. Every hour there’s a Two Minutes Hate featuring the FitzWizard and Purdue Pete.

and that will make the slow and disjointed Iowa response to this look even worse. I am sad that we cannot ably handle these things. Again, I worked at a University for most of my professional life and it doesn’t have to be this way. But first, you have to adopt a proactive mindset. Iowa just seems old fashioned right now on the media front. The athletic department literally seem surprised by social media, yet I bet all freshmen are oriented to the university via Facebook. It just weird and I really hope some leadership shows up soon. As it is, I think Doyle’s reputation and maybe even his career has been seriously hurt by Iowa’s clunky response—whether that is deserved or not. The whole thing is so botched. Urgh. And none of this accounts for what is looking more and more like some kids who might have some permanent damage to their kidneys.

When I read today that a couple of players are apparently 30-50 pounds heavier today than they were on Monday I put on my parent hat and then kind of lost my shit.

Calling for the head of a guy whose been doing his job well before any of us were born is crazy talk.

Barta, Ferentz or Doyle are the only people in the position to give answers about this situation. Whether they were out of town or not they did not send a representative, so that pretty much shows they don’t want to talk to the press. Don’t know if they are still gathering facts, protecting players privacy, not able to add anything additional to what broke in other social media, etc, but clearly they don’t want to make a comment to the masses at this time. And if that’s the case, what is a SID suppose to do? He’s not in the position to give answers yet he has to make some type of press conference without the presence of any of the guys who could provide the answers and likely know (to an extent) what went down.

BTW, hope you feel proud after taking a classless cheap shot at Bob Brooks for being an old man who hasn’t adapted to social media. That’s just bad karma… what goes around comes around.