Policy on coaching search reporting
Saturday evening I made a short post about how we’ll handle reporting on the coaching search on this site moving forward. Some of the wild conclusions drawn by posters here were so outlandish that I felt it necessary to address it further.
Moving forward all
coaching search reportingby staff members of this site will be presented by me, or will at the very least go through me first. What that means is before we come to the board with a news item or even a rumor on
this singular topic, that content will be scrubbed first. We’ll compare it against each other’s info first, and where necessary we will check it further with other sources. That means that some things we hear may not make it to the board, but that’s the price of being as clear and as accurate as possible
on this topic.
I’m doing this in response to numerous complaints recently about inconsistencies in the reporting here. Some of those complaints were meritless because they referred to content that wasn’t at all contradictory. An example of such a complaint occurred Saturday when Tom Beaver made a post about how things between Michigan and Jim Harbaugh were progressing towards consummation (not his words verbatim… that’s a paraphrase on my part). Meanwhile, after Harbaugh corresponded directly with one of my sources earlier Saturday and indicated he hadn’t made up his mind yet on whether he would stay in the pros or go back to Michigan, and how his focus was on the job at hand… I posted that. Now those two statements aren’t at all contradictory, but when posted separately they could be interpreted as such. And they were. By many.
Had that information been presented together those misinterpretations could have been avoided. Changing how we handle reporting
of this topicwill keep that from happening in the future. It will also allow us to steer clear of instances where contradictory information really
isposted. And unfortunately we’ve had that happen a few times too many lately. An example of running smack dab into that issue occurred earlier this week.
I received a number of complaints about the site in the aftermath of rampant rumors that a 10 year 80 million dollar offer (or one similarly exorbitant) had been extended to Harbaugh. On this site we had posts that both lent credence to the possibility and that outright refuted it. Readers were appropriately critical of that, and it’s that type of disconnect that is the most damaging. Those are the types of errors that we simply have to avoid. And we will. We will do that by refining reporting
on this topicin the ways that I outlined above.
I felt it necessary to keep you the reader informed about the decision. It seemed to me that many of you would wonder why you were seeing fewer rumor type posts
on this topicfrom Tom, or coaching search reports that were an aggregate of information gathered by the staff here and presented by me. To make that change with no explanation would just lead to too many false conclusions. Turns out being forthright did the same thing... at least with some of you.
In retrospect it was a mistake on my part not to be as thorough then as I’m being now. But the decision itself was NOT a mistake.
On this storyI feel it’s crucial that reporting be as aligned as possible. There are more eyes on this site right now than ever before. It’s better to be second and right than first and wrong. And it certainly will reflect poorly on us if we wind up consistently on different pages
on this topic.
I hope you all find that explanation satisfactory. I hope the absurdities I saw on this board last night about the motives behind this have been put to bed. Absurdities like
- The athletic department saw posts suggesting things were close to being done with Harbaugh and demanded that Tom be silenced because the secret dealings would be compromised.
- No such thing happened. Period!
- A power play is being executed to remove Tom from the site
- If a power play to remove Tom from the site were going to happen it would have been done when I took the site over in May of 2013. In the time since then nothing even remotely resembling a "power play" has taken place. If it had there wouldn't be so many people here with no clue as to the site hierarchy. I've never lorded over anyone around here, never been on a power trip, never acted like amegalomaniac.... and I'm not doing that now.
- Tom has been removed from the site
- That was never stated or even hinted at.
- Tom is being censored
- No. His opinions on the search are fair game. His reports and rumorson this topicwill still show up when he provides them and they’re checked.
To those of you that disagree with this, I’m sorry you feel that way. If this decision somehow makes the site less valuable to you then I’m sorry about that too. On other topics and stories we will remain more lax in our process, but for this story we’re going to have a greater filter.
I’m going to leave this topic open for most of the morning so people can make their opinions heard. After that I’ll lock it and we’ll move on. I ask that you not belabor the point beyond that because it will serve no purpose other than to make things unnecessarily contentious. If you find this policy to be too restrictive for you to continue your patronage without belaboring the point contentiously, I thank you for supporting the site to this point and hope that you’ll find reason to return sometime in the future.
