@The Oracle of the Athens Banner Herald: We will try to get the stories in whenever we can, but unfortunately we have significantly earlier - and less-flexible - deadlines than in the past and we have to cut off games at some point. In the case of Saturday's game (which had a 7 p.m. start), it ended about 15 minutes after our cutoff point. Even then, it's at least another 10-15 minutes at best before I get something from the Associated Press in terms of a three-paragraph story and a box score. I dragged my feet waiting for it hoping to get it in the paper, but I believe it was somewhere in the eighth inning when my time ran out and I had to send the page to the press.

As for running the box scores a day late, we try to catch up as space permits, but we also have very tight sections and are trying to cram in as much as we can that's from that day, too.

@nocount: He was given the jacket twice. First, it was done on television in Butler Cabin immedeately after he came off the course. About 15 minutes later, he was given it again - pictured above - outside on the course where there were many more people.

@Tenndawg: And when you win the Masters and use the forum to say that belief is more important to you than golf, I will write about it in the same way.

@Tenndawg: He spent a lot of time talking about how his family and religion were much more important to him than golf all week and did so on live national television after winning and then again in the news conferences, so I think it's relevant to mention at least passingly that he already had the two things he said were more important than golf.

Had he been saying his family and ice cream were the only things that really mattered to him all week, I promise I would have touted that as it's not in any way an expression of how much I like his relgious views or favorite ice cream flavor. It's just Bubba's story.

[quote][b]BAMAfaninAthens[/b] - Coach Bowden just said practically the same thing I said in a earlier post.
[/quote]

He did say he has become a "laptop operator" since retiring from coaching and that he reads a lot more news and keeps up with more teams and coaches than he used to. Maybe...

@theold33: I trimmed the video for time's sake (it was about 15 or 20 minutes long), but at one point he mentioned that he had similar problems and faced the same criticisms at FSU and said something along the lines of, "Any of you ever hear of Free Shoes University?" He has some humility about it, and certainly I think it's an interesting point he makes that Georgia may be getting caught up in trouble more only because it's more proactive in testing.

I will prefer to live in denial, thankyouverymuch.

Rick Bragg is about an eloquent a writer as you'll ever read whether he's writing about the South or not.

[quote][b]BoogittyBoogitty[/b] - The problem isnt the amount of pay. The problem is associating the pay with the return on investment. We are paying >$2,800,000 for a mediocre SEC team. Are we getting a good return on the investment? Could the athletic program make more money if we paid someone else $2,800,000 to make us a championship team? Does anyone really believe we will have a championship team over the next 3 years? Is >$2,800,000 a good price for mediocrity? Everyone knows the answers are obvious. UGA will be a mediocre team for the next three years and everyone will be asking the same questions three years from now. Boooooring.
UGA gets the best in state talent with no in state competition. Florida has 3 schools that compete for talent, Alabama has 2 schools that compete for talent, Tennessee has 2 teams that compete for talent....
Georgia can be mediocre no matter WHO is the coach. For 2.8 Million we need better results!
THESE are the questions that need to be asked. [/quote]

Who do you recommend for the job?

[quote][b]BoogittyBoogitty[/b] -
Well it definitely isn't Richt. You bring in a young coach (like Richt was when he was brought in), and give pay raises based on performance. Bobo has a better chance of being a head coach and taking the team further for less money. Once you get results that justify a raise, then give the raise. Just like any other business. Bring someone in to take the team further or choose to stay mediocre forever. The choice has been made. Stay mediocre for three more years....
Another Ho-Hum three years. Not good, but not bad. Yawn [/quote]

I didn't necessarily mean it was Richt. I just see a very simplified version of the AD's job to maintain a successful football coach like this: You've got two main options at this point.

1. Stick with a guy who, for the most part, has had consistently winning seasons and hope he takes that one big step to the final level (BCS title game, or at least a premier BCS bowl). I realize there's a point where your patience will wear out waiting for that next step.

2. Take a gamble on a cheaper (code for unproven or damaged) coach. There's a small chance he'll take that big next step, but there's also a good chance the program will go into a nosedive.

So hedging (pun intended) bets in this case seems to be conservatively done by accepting winning seasons by forgoing the roll of the dice you take when looking for a cheaper coach.

[quote][b]BoogittyBoogitty[/b] - Imagine how much revenue the school could make if they brought in another coach who is paid $1,000,000,000 less per year and can take Georgia to the BCS Bowl? [/quote]

Even if you're lucky enough to find a coach who can get you to a BCS bowl for that salary, he'll be headed out in a year or two to a school that will pay him that $1M more. Then you're back to square one.

[quote][b]King Minos[/b] - "So if the athletic department can profit $9.2 million, largely off of Richt and his team's success, why not further invest in that with the assumption that continued success leads to continued revenue growth? I'm far from an economics expert, but that seems to be what the market demands when it comes to coaches."
I'd take the money!
There are highly paid and well-known U.GA. administrators who tell us, however, with a straight face that Richt's salary does not come from "academic funds," and that the Georgia Athletic Association and the Georgia Bulldogs are not, financially, a part of U.GA. I'd say they are lying, and I'd take that to the bank. If UGA wants to pay a football coach that kind of money, fine; but at least be honest about it and admit that's the way UGA allocates its education dollar and spending on the football team does indeed reduce spending on say, the physics department; furthermore, not one dime of the "profits" garnered by the dawgs are private dollars; they are public dollars all the way!
[/quote]

The UGA Athletic Association is, in fact, a legally separate, private, non-profit entity.

It gets about $3 million a year in student fees, and actually gives back more than that each year to the school (which, I suppose, may trickle down to the physics department). It's also worth noting the UGA student fee is the smallest per student - $53 per student per semester - among the state's four four-year universities.

Here's a link to a story by our reporter Lee Shearer in which he offers up some more details on this topic: http://onlineathens.com/stories/070111/uga_851120127.shtml

@guitar picker:
@crazy8golfer:

Here's my take on that: http://onlineathens.com/blog-post/chris-white/2012-03-12/richts-salary-a...

@Acspirit: I'll fix that. Looks like the Associated Press' photo caption misidentified him. Lockett is a player on Whitefield Academy.

I knew I'd find relevant, levelheaded discussion here.

[quote][b]crowell_is_king1[/b] - @butseriously: neither does ESPN or any other media outlet announce things of that nature until more info is gathered. Im glad ACS is here, in fact they are playing a GREAT GAME RIGHT now. back and forth with about 4 minutes, hope they can pull it out. but this is about LINK and recruiting. i just hope the GHSA gets him, thats all
[/quote]

The point of my column wasn't that I was sure Wildgoose was not recruited. I know well enough that people are capable of any devious act you can imagine. If some evidence came out tomorrow, you wouldn't find me living in denial.

My point was that no one has offered up any proof whatsoever that he was. Our reporting didn't shake anything out that indicated that, either. And by not putting the school on probation, it appears apparent to me that the issue they uncovered was a pretty minor one.

@bobbidiboo: It was me.

I thought it was a cheap shot at someone's appearance. Athletics are the great equalizer, so there's no need for that sort of judgement, especially when it comes to women athletes struggling for the same respect as their male counterparts.

@butseriously: No worries.

I think that account of events is correct.

And I agree, it seems ACS and Wildgoose were punished for something they didn't do on purpose. I think the GHSA found the missing paperwork and decided it had to stick to its own rules, even if they seemed harsh for something like a missing bit of paperwork.

It's hard to know much more than that, though. ACS and the GHSA are private organizations, so when maybe a public records request would have shed more light on a similar issue with a public school, it did no good here. Certainly the company that coordinated the foreign exchange student didn't want to talk to our reporter. And the GHSA and Ralph Swearngin were about as forthcoming as they could be expected to be. Their first priority is on protecting kids, and so they don't want to delve into someone's personal case with the media. That's fair in my eyes.

I doubt the GHSA wanted to find something; they probably just stumbled across it while reviewing the case. I can't imagine why they would want to make more work for themselves, and it's been my experience through covering high school sports that they generally like to give schools and athletes all the opportunities they can to compete. I've had to sit in the hallway during GHSA meetings while schools and athletes go before the executive committee to ask for appeals, and judging by the amount of time they take, they give them a fair shake. With something like 400 high schools, though, they've got to stick to their rules or it could pretty quickly degrade into chaos.

That's just my take on it. We tried to be fair to the issue, and I think we were. ACS came out on the wrong side of a GHSA rule, and the court of public opinion was quite harsh about it, regardless of whose fault it was.

@butseriously: I understand the point you and @purplerain make about the photo.

(And I like to respond just because I like engaging with people, helping them see how we make decisions and getting suggestions from them. A lot of readers seem to think reporters and editors hide in an office somewhere, and maybe they did before I got into this field or in other places, but I like to be accessible.)

When it comes to photos, we look to see if they illustrate the game. In this case, a shot's getting blocked in a game that was won on last-second free throws, so it was illustrative of the last game. We saw it as a good shot of two players competing for a basket in a close game, and I think the photo falls within the realm of what we usually publish for a basketball game.

As for the Wildgoose coverage, I've heard a lot about that since the fall. The Athens Christian fans think we blew it out of proportion (I don't agree) and there are others who think we didn't investigate enough or weren't harsh enough (I don't agree).

I was actually looking through our Wildgoose coverage last week searching for something else in our archive, and my opinion on it didn't change. It wasn't good news for Wildgoose and Athens Christian, but it was fair coverage - something the higher-ups at ACS admitted to us several times.

I believe we did four large stories on Wildgoose - the first was a Player of the Week story where the reporter came across some info about his background. The second was a story about the school sending in its info to the GHSA for review of the case. The third came on the GHSA announced the team would have to forfeit some victories, and the last story came when he transferred.

In between those pivotal points in the story, there were a couple of very short (100 or 200 words or so) updates saying the school expected the GHSA to hand down a ruling the next week or that ACS had chosen to sit Wildgoose during the investigation. Our then-preps writer even wrote a column saying how bad he felt for Wildgoose being stuck in this situation by no fault of his own and another column lamenting that it was a terrible fall because there had been so much negative news, including deaths in the preseason, the Wildgoose controversy and some reclassification drama.

The reason it was publicized in the first place was that it was about one of the best athletes from one of the area's best and most-covered teams. After that, we were fair to Athens Christian's side of the story each step of the way. We gave them a forum to explain how it happened, which they said was a paperwork error on the outside agency's end.

When comparing the Wildgoose coverage to the coverage of the basketball team, I'd wager it's more about reader perception than the way we've played it. Wildgoose had a four front-page full stories. The ACS basketball team has had two players of the week with center-pieced front-page photos this season, had games covered than any other local team (I added these up the the other day) and had several color game photos run (more than any other local team). Each and every one of those ACS basketball stories has been presented high on our website if not as the top story, too. So in all, the ACS basketball team has had more stories and photos than Wildgoose; I just can't control what people find interesting or gossip about.

@purplerain: Which portion of the site were you looking for the prep sports stories on? On the main sports page, it rotates only the last couple days' stories - preps and otherwise - so they don't always stay there long for obvious space reasons. If you look at those little tags above the story headlines and click the one that says "PREPS," it will take you to all the archived prep stories in order. Or you could just go to http://onlineathens.com/sports/prep.

If something's looking old our outdated, let me know. We spend a lot of time on the website each day, and it's as important to us as the printed paper.

As for the search, I believe the default is to search for what the search engine determines is its relevancy rather than publication date. So when I'm searching for something, like I did last night for those links, I just searched for "Athens Christian" and changed the field below the search bar to "Sort by newest to oldest." Hopefully that makes your searching easier in the future.

[quote][b]purplerain[/b] - What a way to present a hometown team to the world by waiting to the last minute to highlight a team going to the state championship representing the Classic City and printing a picture of a player getting blocked. It would be nice to celebrate positive things in Athens. Go Eagles!!!!
[/quote]

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like our coverage.

For what it's worth, it's standard to run a preview story like this in the paper the morning of a game. They'll play in the state quarterfinals Saturday, and that's the day this will appear in print.

And we've also given them quite a bit of coverage leading up to this with a prominent mention of their advancement at each step. We covered their game on Wednesday and this appeared online Friday evening. I think that leaves only one day (Monday) so far this week they haven't been mentioned or covered on our front page or prominently featured on our website.

Feb. 17: "Resop rescues Eagles in Region 8-A semis" - http://onlineathens.com/sports/prep/2012-02-17/resop-rescues-eagles-regi...

Feb. 19: "Prep Roundup: Jackson, McWhorter help Eagles claim region title" - http://onlineathens.com/sports/prep/2012-02-18/prep-roundup-jackson-mcwh...

Feb. 25: "Athens Christian boys basketball team edges Hancock Central in overtime" - http://onlineathens.com/sports/prep/2012-02-25/athens-christian-boys-bas...

Feb. 29: "Resop's last-second free throws clinch second-round victory for Eagles" - http://onlineathens.com/sports/prep/2012-02-29/resops-ast-second-free-th...

March 3, of course, gets this preview story we're commenting on.

As for the photo, we just try to use strong action photos, and we thought that was a good one. It's nothing for anyone to be embarrassed about; it's two athletes competing for the ball.

@Slingblade Karl: We would have loved to get some results in but we never heard from any of the participating local swim coaches. In fact, I think only one swim coach has sent in results, and she did so only once this season.

We're planning to put together something to preview the state meet later this week, so look for that on probably Thursday or Friday.

@MrGiveMeSomeFunky: I'll take the credit for this one. I was typing in the scores last night and misread a 2 as a 7 in someone else's handwriting, and Commerce's score was listed first, so I never doubted it they had lost and I was seeing the score incorrectly. It's been corrected and we'll run a correction in print, too.

The other time you mentioned was a week or two ago when an intern in his first night helping take calls from coaches got the teams reversed. We corrected that one, too. In both cases, regrettable mistakes on our part.

I don't usually chime in on this stuff, but I don't think poaching recruits is shady when it comes to college football recruiting. Every coach does it. Ask any D-I recruit if people still call him after he's publicly verbally committed and he'll say yes. Sure, the number of calls goes down and teams who figured they were on the edge will stop. But coaches will call kids committed to other schools up until the morning of signing day. A couple years ago I covered a kid in a different town who, on the day before NSD, had a head coach talk him out of his nearly year-long commitment to another SEC school. This happens everywhere, but maybe the Big Ten coaches aren't used to someone as aggressive or as good at it as as Meyer.

@wfmcgee: I just looked up that story and it was a good read. Thanks for that recommendation.