Friday Feedback
April 4, 2014 by Mike CasazzaWelcome to the Friday Feedback, which has a lot of candles to blow out today.
Happy 100th, Charleston Daily Mail! http://t.co/M437AFAAdq
— Charleston DailyMail (@charleywest) April 4, 2014
I don’t want to bore you with the sentiment and the details, but that’s a pretty sweet deal right there. Tip one for your homies if you get a chance tonight.
Newspaper people can be weird about nostalgia and benchmark occasions, but in our trade, longevity is not a guarantee and you can do any one of a number of things to lose your spot or any one of a number of things can happen to take that spot away from you. And didn’t you see that this week, what with a tweet that has people all sorts of fired up and a decision up in Newark that affected a lot of people.
Tom Luicci was awesome at the Star-Ledger. You probably got to know him through his columns about Rutgers and the Big East and you’ve probably heard him on the radio around here. Maybe you even knew his daughter attended WVU. He’s no more, though he’s handling it all with grace and humor you would expect.
True story: I probably only talked to Tom a handful or two of times, but one of those times was a 15- or 20-minute conversation over the phone before the WVU v. Rutgers game in 2009 and, no lie, I learned about all I ever needed to know about the politics of bowl games.
Then there’s Brendan Prunty, nattily clad and just as sharp with his craft. Golf, baseball, college sports, breaking news, whatever. He was just fun to talk to before games at Madison Square Garden or after games in Piscataway. And then you read what he wrote because you had to. He, too, is gone and if you’re looking for a job in newspapers or with a web site, you better hope your resume was in someone’s hands already. He’s getting a job really soon … if he wants one.
Those are two terribly nice guys who were really good at their jobs, so, yeah, don’t mind me for feeling pretty good about our birthday Sunday. Bad things can happen out of the blue, but good things can happen, too, and I’d like to think we’re in the midst of that now at the Daily Mail.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, keep your guard up, please.
Sammy said:
Patterson’s approach appeared to be working wonders early in the year but it’s hard not to watch the Baylor game and think that maybe WVU should be lining up faster. (Among many other issues that day.)
That’s the Extinction Level Event. Coaches reference that game all the time when they talk about what went wrong and when it started last season, and those conversations include some of the pre-snap problems. This is all interesting, of course, until you remember it was freaking Baylor and freaking Baylor made a lot of teams this side of Orlando look Benny Hillish. So you wonder, and understandably, if the explanation is merely justification to make this change popular amid so many changes, if it’s valid or if it’s an overreaction.
Dave Wannstedt:
They just gotta run faster
You joke, but that’s true, and there’s something to be said about keeping things simple enough so that a player can line up and wait for the snap and then just play faster.
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