About That Charlie Weis Article...

Let me just say here at the outset that I don't know whether I want to actually link this article, for your sake, RCTers... Here we have about 5000 words on a national website, yet I doubt many of you, if any, will learn anything about Kansas Football. I guess with that warning having been said I feel a bit better about posting the link (by all means, don't feel obligated to read it if you have read KUSports or this site regularly since his hiring), so here goes nothing: And this...

Okay, well if you chose to read that I hope you got something of value for your 6-20 minutes (Yeah, that's a huge variation, but I don't know how fast people read). Anyway, let's look at the information used to craft this article: There's a quote from Weis' hiring, from his August 7th State-of-the-Program address, an offhand quote by Weis about the weather, a non-quote from a scout about his job and then an endorsement of Weis, the "pile of crap" comment, a paragraph that is actually a new interview with Weis after those comments (!!!) but sadly one in which no new ground is covered... etc etc etc.

I guess what I'm trying to understand is why in the world this article was published now. As it stands there is legitimately a total of three paragraphs, all at the very end of the column, that prevent this from having been run in July after Pile-of-Crapgate. It's as if the writer, despite having mentioned that he visited campus and interviewed Weis, was simply not given any exceptional access and instead decided to write a Wikipedia article on Weis' career with a Marquel Combs addendum and some free space for a Florida newspaper writer to take shots at Weis' time there.

There's not any new information to make this a must-read for KU fans, so it must be for a national audience... If that's the case, why in the world publish this after a Kansas win in week one? Maybe the author is worried that if Kansas wins at Rice on Saturday he will no-longer be able to publish the article with the tone he imagined? This doesn't really make sense to me, he could just wait until the Big 12 slate, if KU is losing this article likely looks better with a tortured genius tone than it does coming off of a win. However, if they are WINNING somehow, he can take what was ultimately a blip-on-the-radar article and change the tone to be one of Weis leading the program back to respectability, the type of article that's always of much more interest to a national audience. I feel like the author or the editors got jumpy and rather than waiting and evaluating the actual results of the season they decided to go ahead with their narrative, one that's been published again and again since the Weis hire. I find it hard to see this as anything but a misfire from what I consider to be one of the best sites for sportswriting on the internet on the occasions they're actually writing about sports.

I'd love to hear the takes of those of you who took the time to read it in the comments. (After writing this I saw that some of you talked about this on the 9/10 links, so I apologize if this is yesterday's news, but this is my take.)