shameless promotion (2.0), part iv

Editor's Note: As part of my continuing effort to promote my own career as an opinion-crafter and wordsmith, here's this week's column from the St. Clair Times. As today is my fourth wedding anniversary, this is all you're getting from me today. Holla.

Thirst for sport sends us to boring press conferences

Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton
Talking in our beds for a week
The newspeople said
"Say, what're you doing in bed?"
I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace"*


The summer always drags on for the Southern sports fan.

It’s a curious phenomenon, our activity from January until September. Football season ends and we all start talking about more football (when you really think about it, much more time is spent discussing and preparing for football than is spent playing it).

We do have our distractions: basketball, baseball, golf, NASCAR, even (if you’re into it) the Olympics or World Cup soccer. But really, all we’re after is more football.
Which, of course, is why Media Days is always big news. The fact that it’s happening — and it IS happening, as we speak, at the Wynfrey Hotel in Hoover — means football is about to start.

It’s exciting for that reason. And only that reason, really.

Because here’s the thing nobody ever really talks about with Media Days: for the most part, it’s a collection of bland interviews conducted by bored writers and TV personalities with bored athletes and coaches.

And so, with that in mind, I offer you a handful of mundane predictions for things that will absolutely happen (and may have already happened by the time you read this) at SEC Media Days.

• Houston Nutt will talk like a television evangelist. Houston Dale is easily my favorite SEC coach, and only because he talks like someone who went to the Jimmy Swaggart School of Interviewing. If only he could be involved in a high-profile scandal; he’d weep on-air like the cast of “Beaches.”

• More writers will be interested in Vanderbilt than ever before. Most years Vandy is covered with the vigor of a cat taking a swim; this time, around, the ‘Dores’ new coach (whatever his name is) will be a hot commodity.

(Note: It has long been a dream of mine to float my dad’s name for any coaching vacancy, just to see if it might take off on the Web, Delonte West-style. Now that Dad’s openly talking about retirement, we could make it work. Hey, what about that Bruce Heath at USDA? He’s a sleeper!)

• Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and Derek Dooley will all be nice and polite to the press for the entire time they’re there. It will be the final time you’ll see this until next year’s Media Days.

• At least one school’s representative will wear a suit that appears to have come from a homeless person’s wardrobe.

• Les Miles will appear insane and disheveled. Clay Travis will ask him a dumb question that flabbergasts everyone.

• My wife will order me to stop watching. “It’s our anniversary, you doofus.”

Oh well.

* "The Ballad of John and Yoko," 1969