Slive & Gold: The Root of SEC's Troubles

Last week Mike Slive, the Montgomery Burns of the SEC, threatened Lane Kiffin with a suspension and rewrote the SEC policy when it comes to commenting on officiating. All season, Slive has been besieged by officiating errors, coaches sniping at one another, and the continuing onslaught of media coverage having a brand new television contract and two top-ranked teams has brought.

Now, Slive (pictured right) is backed into a corner. Just a few days after Slive announced his new policy on officiating, Urban Meyer teed off on officiating once more, taking a shot at the non-call on a late hit that Georgia delivered to Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

"That should have been a penalty, in my opinion," Meyer said, "Obviously, it should have been. You've got to protect quarterbacks. That's the whole purpose. It's right in front of the referee."

And then, not to be outdone, Lane Kiffin took a swipe at Meyer's comments on officiating. "Urban Meyer? Criticized the officials, wow, that will be interesting," Kiffin said, "We'll see." Not content with a sarcastic aside, Kiffin also commented on the Brandon Spikes situation: "Yeah, I saw it on replay, it was pretty bad ... Obviously he'll discipline his team. Or not."

In 2009, the SEC has been the new king of controversy and virtually every action Commissioner Slive has undertaken has, instead of quelling the uproar, actually increased the feeding frenzy. Of course the ultimate irony of all of the attention being focused on the SEC is this, much of it is self-inflicted, brought on by the increased prominence of SEC football on both ESPN and CBS.

Once those companies ponied up billions to televise the athletic events, minor conflicts suddenly turned into nuclear war, the Bay of Pigs meets SEC football.

The SEC is behind the curve on responding to and preventing stories from spinning out of their control. Why? Because they've got a product with national appeal that is still run like a mom-and-pop store.
Don't believe me? I've been writing for over a year about how the increase in television fees was going to lead to stories that would have otherwise been regional in nature, becoming national. And we've already seen that happen this year, it's the primary reason Kiffin became such a lightning rod, because ESPN needed him to sell their product. And it's worked, SEC football ratings are up across the board, highlighted by a 60 percent spike in UT-Florida ratings after the Kiffin-Meyer tiff.

Controversy increases interest. Conflict, even manufactured conflict, sells. In fact, I'd even argue that controversies over bad officiating probably, paradoxically, lead to more viewers for games. Why? People want to see for themselves just how bad the officiating really is. And once the impression that the officiating is bad exists, it becomes the default assumption the next time a questionable judgment is made.

But this increased media attention has also caught the league and Slive flatfooted. I think the SEC, where regional writers still spend the majority of the time covering individual teams, has been surprised by how quickly statements by coaches have become national news. Same with the officiating controversies. In fact, anyone who has been a fan of SEC football for a decade or more, knows that this season's comments and controversies are no more extraordinary than any in the past 20 or 30 years.

Maybe even less so.

There have always been bad calls that have cost teams games, there have always been coaches looking to gig opponents -- it's what made Steve Spurrier a media darling -- and there have always have been extremely competitive games that magnify the importance of officiating calls. What there hasn't been is a national onslaught of attention surrounding these controversies. It used to be that if Spurrier said something bad about Tennessee or Georgia, it led the local paper, maybe the local news, in the offended jurisdiction and after a day it blew over.

News could only trickle down from the top back then, and if it did trickle down it came to an end quickly on a regional basis. Now? Now, news comes from both directions. It can boil up via fan outrage on blogs, message boards and YouTube, where eventually the national media pick up on the controversies and turn them into stories. Meanwhile, the national media can now take a single sentence and turn it into a blizzard of publicity. Those words have always been there, but in the past the money didn't justify the attention.

In the latter days of the 19th century, the term yellow journalism took flight. Ultimately, it led to William Randolph Hearst helping to start the Spanish-American War, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war," he's supposed to have remarked.


Now SportsCenter furnishes the sports war.

That's a seismic change in the attention being paid to the league. And one the SEC still hasn't caught up to.

I knew we'd reached the tipping point in breathless SEC coverage when ESPN led a telecast with a story about Kiffin firing the strength coach at Tennessee. Really, the strength coach? A man many hardcore Vol fans couldn't even name is being covered by national news?

And the SEC hasn't helped themselves in surfing the onslaught; Slive's every move has added fuel to the fire rather than quelling the blaze.

Don't believe me, let's take a look at some of the hamhanded decisions made by the league just this year.

First, Slive made a big show of reading coaches the riot act after offseason controversies. The idea was that this public haranguing would kill all negative commentary. You can all see how well that worked. Instead of actually changing anything, the story of the fiery talk led newscasts and reinforced the previous statements made by coaches.

Next, the league attempted to restrict media coverage of athletic events with a new media policy that provoked outrage. The idea behind controlling rights was financial, seizing control of video, images, and content would, the league reasoned, make those products more valuable while also allowing them to control more of the stories that ensued. That's why the league also sought to restrict blogger access, as if any of the bloggers driving news coverage actually needed to be present at events to influence public perception. Nevertheless, the league buckled and rescinded many of the restrictions after complaints from long-time media partners.

Finally, once the season commenced, Slive and crew overreacted to bad officiating on judgment calls by throwing part-time officiating crews under the bus and suspending them. This decision opened the floodgates for coaches to comment on officiating mistakes, something that had previously been swept under the league rug. In rapid succession, Bobby Petrino, Lane Kiffin, and Dan Mullen were reprimanded by letter for publicly ripping officiating. Then, not to be outdone, Slive revised the existing rules for coaches to comment on officiating mid-season and threatened coaches with suspensions or, be still my trembling heart, fines should they fail to follow the newly prescribed rules.

What do all of these issues show? The SEC is behind the curve on responding to and preventing stories from spinning out of their control. Why? Because they've got a product with national appeal that is still run like a mom-and-pop store. After all the time they spent courting television partners, they failed to realize how those partners would cover the product they paid so dearly for. A league where everyone loves one another isn't great television. A league where everyone hates one another?

That's compelling television.

Slive, to his credit, is smart, and has done a great deal to clean up the league's image, but what he hasn't done is anticipate new and old media's ability to create national stories out of sentences that would have been, at best, regional dust-ups just 10 years ago. Partly, that's the result of the explosion of the Internet as a news cycle driver, but, mostly, it's a reflection of a hard and fast rule in today's media: if you pay a lot of money to cover a product, all of a sudden that product becomes more newsworthy than it ever has before.

Enter ESPN.

Enter the controversies.

Enter the belated responses.

And now, after a season of futile and belated responses, Slive doesn't have any options left. Will he become the first commissioner in league history to suspend a coach for commenting on, wait for the outrage, a football game? Can he? Does he have the political power to make that move and be backed by everyone? Especially if the coaches are making comments that most SEC fans agree with?

I don't know.

What I do know is that such a move would be unprecedented and draw more negative attention than anything that it helped to solve. But if Slive doesn't act, hasn't he rendered himself impotent, turned himself into the teacher who threatens real punishment but can never deliver that punishment? The SEC Commissioner with no clothes? Paging Montgomery Burns.

Sooner or later making false threats leads to less power than making no threats at all. But, Slive probably knows that. The question is, do the coaches?

And the bigger and more ominous question for Slive and the league he leads is this: in signing that multi-billion dollar television contract did the SEC ultimately bequeath the power of their product to corporations that have different interests than the league? If they did, and I think that's entirely likely, ultimately no matter what Slive does to penalize coaches, he's never going to regain control of the league narrative again.

That's already been sold.