Most coaches will avoid reality TV
Remember EDtv? It was a 1999 movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Matthew McConaughey in which a guy agrees to let his life be filmed 24/7 for a reality television show. Seemed like a good idea, but of course it becomes a mess, because loss of privacy will derail a life.
Anyway, I thought of EDtv the other night watching Jon & Kate Plus 8, the reality show about the couple that had twins, then had sextuplets. They signed a deal with The Learning Channel to have their lives filmed for a weekly series. The show once was about raising the kids, but now it’s about Jon and Kate, and Monday night they announced they are splitting up. But the show will go on.
They should have canceled the show and kept the marriage. Instead, they kept the show and canceled the marriage.
And it made me think of football coaches. Not just our locals like Bob Stoops and Mike Gundy, but NFL coaching icons like Bill Belichick and Bill Cowher, and their aversion to the media-explosion age. How they build walls around their organizations and how you can’t really blame them.
Stoops and Gundy have limited access compared to their predecessors, and when you see the train wrecks caused by all the cameras and tape recorders and message boards and web sites in this new century, you understand it.
It makes some media jobs much more difficult. I think back to the early 1980s, and how easy it was to cover college football, how opens it was, and I wonder how in the world we produce as much as we today, which is much more than we did a quarter century ago.
But I also know that coaches have to maintain a tight rein. The new media demands it. Without restrictions, a football team could turn into EDtv.
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Excellent analogy! You should go on Dr. Phil and give marriage and family advice.