It happens in high school too.
For boys football anyway.
For boys football anyway.
I don't know about Evans, but someone at SI should've been doing some fact checking. Hell's bells, that's why reputable journalistic enterprises have, you know, fact checkers. At the very least, the editors should've been hounding them for confirmation; it is inconceivable that such a major piece could go to print containing as much apparent factual discrepancy as this one does.
"The facts of the matter are that a team of award-winning reporters conducted a 10-month investigation that included on-the-record recorded interviews with 60-plus individual players from the Oklahoma State program. Any attempt to discredit an individual reporter is an attempt to deflect the matter at hand.''
Sounds like CBS defending Dan Rather.Scott Novak from Sports Illustrated:
Sounds like CBS defending Dan Rather.
lol, I was immediately reminded of the wizard of oz. "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
lol, I was immediately reminded of the wizard of oz. "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
Or they are an attempt to direct the public's attention to the asshat behind the curtain pulling the strings. The facts of the matter are that they did not do their due diligence before running their story. It is poorly written, although technically the writing is genius. It is written in such a way that they used multiple player's names interchangeably, so that one would read as if one player said something the other player said or admitted to. They built in their own loopholes for getting out of libel suit. When you quote some one, you use their full name at the beginning or end of the quote, then as that segment of the story continues, you can use their last name. What this article does is use a player's name in one place and then they switch to all last names, never again referring to the correct first name. They have 2 or 3 "Williams" in there, pretty smart to be honest. Also, at no point do they call out any of the boosters by name except for the one that is dead and the one that is not wealthy. He isn't really a booster, he runs the FCA. They made up "facts" about the dead female booster, saying she paid kids hundreds to pick up leaves at her rental properties in Stillwater, which in reality are east of broken bow.
Misdirection, allegations and slight of hand writing. Classic yellow journalism. What a disgrace.
If you check you will find that Thayer Evans is NOT a writer on the staff of SI.
He is an independent writer/contractor.
What I think happened is this:
Thayer Evans created the concept of the story, conducted the interviews, transcribed the interviews into a hodgepodge of anecdotal stories favorable to his objective(while ignoring anecdotal stories unfavorable to his objective) and then he sold that crap to SI.
SI put Dohrmann's name on it to make it sound credible without any fact checking at all, not even a pretense, and published it.
Now, do I think it's all crap, lock stock and barrel? NO
Do some college players get paid by boosters? sure.
Do some college players get do-nothing jobs? sure.
That probably happens at every top-30 school in the country.
Do boosters, or coaches, hand out envelopes of cash to players in the locker room, in front of a 100 other witnesses?
Does that happen on the plane back in front of dozens of other witnesses?
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