From Heather Dinich at ESPN ACC Blog.
Best case scenario: Florida State and Miami shock both of their respective divisions by making their comebacks earlier than expected. In order for the league to truly be strong again, both of these programs need to climb back to the top.
Translation: The only prayer the ACC has of being great in football is if the football schools like Miami and FSU play like they did 8-10 years ago instead of having these basketball schools such as Wake Forest, North Carolina and whatever Boston College is carrying the load. There might be merit to that since history has proven those schools can sustain success better than most. The issue is, Dinich basically implies the ACC will not be truly competitve depending on the contributions of schools with a less prominent tradition in football. Maybe it is true, maybe not but it would be nice to see it play out and find out instead of declaring that is the case upfront.
This quote also betrays what I think is some pretty obvious bias on Dinich’s part. If you read her blog regularly and by virtue of me running this blog, I do, you can see Dinich favors Miami, FSU, the two Virginia schools, Georgia Tech and Maryland. And when I say favor I am speaking to the depth of what Dinich writes rather than counting posts. For example, UNC gets a limited mention on Friday morning for taking Rutgers behind the woodshed yet over the weekend multiple posts were devoted to Maryland-Cal and Georgia Tech-Virginia Tech. Now one could argue Dinich is playing to her audience based on the idea that fans from the other ACC schools care about football less than the ones I just named(and Clemson). There also merit to the idea these games were simply bigger.
And while those arguments might hold water, you also get the feeling that Dinich has yet to let go of her last job at the Baltimore-Sun. This might explain why Dinich talks about UVa, Maryland and Virginia so much. Dinich also loves talking about Paul Johnson and Georgia Tech even attending the first game down there versus Jacksonville St and ignoring the fact NC State was playing a real school in SCAR. Again, I think the Baltimore-Sun connection has to do with her love for the Yellow Jacket coach since he used to be at Navy in Annapolis, MD. Perhaps she is using previously cultivated relationships to get good information from those schools and throws in Miami and FSU to cover the basis on traditional powers in football. Still, I think a good blogger or journalist is charged with covering a conference of 12 schools should be a little more balanced in their coverage otherwise what’s the point?
Then again, I am running a UNC blog so maybe I am not the best person to talk about bias.
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When I saw your post about how little she wrote about the UNC loss I wanted to do a post about that. Now, with this new story, I am definitely going to do a thread about how a company like ESPN can only afford one (I say ONE) blogger per conference. It makes no sense and even more it makes them look un professional as heck.
We all know that the great thing about bloggers is the buzz they make, imagine when you have one per team the buzz they would make. Instead one per conference makes that the only buzz is the emails about how little she writes about one team or the other.
I want to see when BB team comes, if they have one blogger per conference that should be interesting how well they follow the teams. With the money they spent on any of their studios they could pay for 100′s of bloggers, instead they did it this was and I think it stinks.
Oh well.
AEM
AEM,
Yes. What is more disturbing to me and also more frustrating is they hand the keys of such a job to someone who’s knowledge of the conference seemed limited to me. Some of the rankings she did of stadiums and coaches revealed that lack of depth when it came to understanding the ACC.
I will be interested to see if she is still on the beat for basketball or if they opt for someone else.
Heather Dinich does seem to show her biases a lot. I agree that she gave a lot of coverage to the Maryland-Cal game and VT-GT, a little too much even. However, Cal was (at least we thought they were) a better team than Rutgers, which makes the game a little bit bigger, even if it was played at home for Maryland at noon vs. on the road in primetime.
I think the better example of her bias is simply the lack of coverage of UNC in general this offseason. If you read her blog, there were numerous breakdowns of other teams but only a few on UNC, including one strictly about Marvin Austin.
That said, I think her post today was not saying “this league won’t be good until FSU and Miami dominate.” The idea was that right now the league doesn’t really have an identity, which frankly, it doesn’t in football. It’s not like basketball, where we have an obvious identity in terms of Tobacco Road. The league is still trying to regain the days when FSU was the ACC in football. I think her point is, if FSU and Miami, which are clearly still the name brands of ACC football, can make major marks, it helps the league.
Example, in 2001 when we beat FSU, that was huge. It was talked about everywhere and, at the time, it was seen as a sign that UNC was recovering well under you know who and was on its way to being a good program (Ironic, huh?). That’s because at the time, FSU was still dominant (though in its last throes). Last year when we beat Miami, it was talked about a little bit, but forgotten by the end of the season because Miami sucked.
I think her point is also that if the ACC is to get any respect THIS YEAR, then we need those two teams to step it up. The rest of the country and, particularly, the sports media, are hesitant to acknowledge any teams other than the traditional powers in the conference as quality. Look at Wake. They won the conference two years ago and everyone laughed at it as a sign that the ACC was dead. Only now, after Wake had a respectable showing last year, is the sports media giving them their due.
We do need Miami and FSU to step it up this year so that when something happens like us beating one of them, it makes a bigger mark nationally. We need a win over Miami to be a “Oh man, look at UNC taking out Miami, they’ve finally arrived” reaction. Not a “Carolina beat Miami, but then again, who hasn’t at this point?” reaction.
D,
She is basically saying you need at least one legit top five team or if possible two top 10 teams so you can have a fighting chance in the big bowls. The ACC has a lot of parity right now but everyone is 2nd tier. She is essentially arguing that parity is not all it is cracked up to be if you cannot run on the top tier. You can have a lot of evenly matched teams but two of them need to be studs.
The extension of that is those two studs need to be traditional powers like FSU/Miami. In other words if UNC or Wake or NCSU or even Clemson are you top contenders then the ACC will not be what it needs to be in terms of playing with the big boys.
That is the way I took it…I could very well be wrong.
I’m not sure where Dinich went to college, but think she was the Terps reporter for the Baltimore Sun for several years; woundn’t be surprised if she is a Maryland grad as well.
She’s an Indiana grad, which does give me hope for basketball season, because she might at least know ACC basketball. That said, I don’t want to know what it’s going to be like reading her during the ACC/Big Eleven “Challenge.”
Yes, she did graduate from Indiana so hopefully if she does basketball she will understand the order of things.
I have been more annoyed with her persistent love for Paul Johnson. Going to the GT opener against Jacksonville St seemed odd considering the NCSU-SCAR game going on but she posts a lot about him. I think the Baltimore-Sun connection also has something to do with that.
Yes, the Baltimore Sun is very open in its love for Navy football. Probably because Navy sought to get mentioned anytime they had a chance and probably because Navy has been the only consistent football team in the area for the last four years.
Hopefully she’ll get over that. But with ESPN’s track record of not giving a damn about its analysts having open biases, I doubt it.
It is also difficult to be negative in any way towards the Naval Academy over sports which is seen as rather trivial given the commitment those guys have made after they graduate.
If ESPN only has 1 blogger for the ACC come basketball time, they need to go to Disney and ask for some money, cause to have one person doing 12 teams that can play 2-3 times a week, makes it 24-36 games, at that point all you can do is be a linking blog and definitely nothing more.
Even worst for the Big East, where there is 16 teams. The world leader in sports needs to become a bit more Y2K when it comes to blogging. I think what they need someone like Heather Dinich to do is find good blogs (such as this one) and bring them into the ESPN family and let them go at it.
Imagine being a blog that can get some inside info because you have ESPN backing you? That is what would work well. Making a reporter into a conference blogger is a good way to cover up the fact you don’t really want to invest into it. It is already evident that one person can not keep up with the ACC for football. Come basketball time it is going to be funny (and sad) if there is only one person covering the league once again.
And am I somewhat bitter? Yeah, because having a blog myself if I had the resources and inside info that someone like Dinich does, I would have a lot more to say than she does. Once again… Oh well!
AEM
AEM,
Exactly on point. ESPN was dragged kicking and screaming into the blogosphere. The folks in Bristol dislike bloggers because they upset the media boat and gave me an alternate viewpoint. So ESPN finally decides they need to get into blogging and when they do they basically take mainstream journalists and repackage them with a blog. That is what Dinich is anyway. On top of that, there is no way they cut her loose to do what JP Giglio does in terms of taking shots at various teams.
The bottom line is she does a fairly poor job covering everyone equally and in my opinion she is not that knowledgeable. Maybe she will get better…only time will tell.
Well here is the post I did on the subject. I do not know if I am allowed to post urls here, if not please forgive me and just remove the post.
AEM
http://unc5corners.blogspot.com/2008/09/espn-isnt-world-leader-in-blogging.html