Guess I should have gone to Mark's more than once

Kirk Herbstreit's annual Herbie Awards are out, with a televised special this evening to further expand on some of them. (I'm assuming his ongoing love affair with Mark's US Prime in Gainesville as one of his top five favorite restaurants will not make the cut for that.) Kirk's extremely good at what he does, but there are always a few bones to pick with any list. Jim Tressel and Gene Chizik are on his list of candid coaches. Steve Spurrier is not. In what universe is Tressel considered more candid than Spurrier? Not this one. Also, Ole Miss is "undervalued" because they won't have much value. It's a good primer for the first week - just two more days before I'm covering Southern Miss and South Carolina and the season's underway.

Some people are making a big deal of the fact FSU still has 15 thousand seats available for its opener, the first game of the Jimbo Fisher era. I don't understand how they've been able to sell that many tickets in the first place. Most people have a three day weekend, and they have better things to do than spend it driving back and forth to Tallahassee for an obvious mismatch with Samford. Even if you are willing to consider going to that crapfest, it's not like you're worried about being able to get a ticket. Why pay full price when you know very well there will be tickets available on the street for five bucks? If Doak Campbell still has 15 thousand seats available for BYU in two weeks, which it won't, that's noteworthy. This is just people voting against a garbage game with their wallets.

There aren't many storylines in sports I haven't heard before at this point, but this is a new one to me. Could NFL agents be planning to steer their players away from signing with the Dolphins because they're tired of Drew Rosenhaus stealing their clients who go there? Maybe they're talking about it, but people say lots of stuff in a casual setting that doesn't get followed up on when things are for real. If this was happening with an agent in Nashville, that might be different. Not that many guys specifically want to go there. Tons of players want to be a part of the south Florida scene, and being in an income tax free state is a huge priority when they look at free agency. I don't see how agents are going to be able to steer a client away from the Dolphins if the team's telling the media or friends of the player that they have interest. Hard to buy the concept of a Rosenhaus related embargo being a problem for Miami.

There's still a lot of tension in the media business between those who are a part of old school media and those who have risen to relevance on the web. I don't know what in particular set Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise off yesterday, but he decided to pitch a "the internet is ruining everything" tantrum by intentionally Tweeting out inaccurate news. Apparently this was supposed to show that no one "checks facts or sourcing", even though all followups attributed the "report" to Mike Wise. If Wise had published the same lie in the dead tree edition of the Post, that would have been credited to him as well. It's not hard to understand how modern media works. Whatever venue you're working in - print, broadcast, webpage or Twitter/Facebook - if you put your name on something and are considered a legit reporter, people will relay your information to others quickly. If Wise had started the "rumor" as random guy skinsfan777 on Twitter and then seen it treated as legit news, that might have shown something about the nature of modern media. All this inane stunt showed was that Mike Wise should be punished by his bosses and none of us should regard him as a credible reporter going forward.

There are some terms you should never use to describe yourself. "Edgy" is one of them - if you're a radio host calling yourself edgy and "in your face", it's more likely that you're just an annoying jerk. Such was the case for Marc Benarzyk, who was cut loose by ESPN 1040 in Tampa yesterday. His Twitter feed has been taken offline, but check the "edgy" content left in Google's cache of it. A list of the "top ten douches in sports" and lots of CAPITAL LETTERS FOR NO REASON - now that's edgy! When I heard this guy for the first time, he was ripping the idea of the Bucs taking Percy Harvin because he was a Gator receiver like "Renee" Caldwell. Aside from the incorrect talent assessment (who wants the rookie of the year anyway?) I was embarrassed for the guy that he was still doing schtick Jim Rome was getting punched for in 1995 fourteen years later. Normally I feel bad when a fellow radio host loses their gig. This guy never should have had one in the first place - good riddance.