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All right, I like Oklahoma in this game.
That isn’t to say I’m rooting for the Sooners.
Not allowed.
But I think OU wins.
Between Kentucky’s pressure and Oklahoma’s size advantage, it is neither that has me believing this is the Sooners’ night. I just think Kentucky won the game they came here to win already two nights ago against Nebraska. I’ve been watching sports a long time and while I don’t have the training (or the patience) to coach the games, I believe I understand greater forces at work. It’s not because Danielle Robinson will handle the pressure or UK won’t handle OUs size. It’s because, in their gut, the Wildcats believe they’ve come far enough. The Sooners are in a different boat. They’ve been there and want to go back. They will be crushed if they lose. The Wildcats, not so much.
They’re introducing the players right now.
Enjoy.

Just a disclaimer in the name of not counting chickens before they hatch.

It could be that Kentucky is the team the Sooners least hoped to play Tuesday. Because the Oklahoma women had already played Nebraska, already knew in its bones what it would take to beat Nebraska after arguably giving the game away to the Huskers at Lloyd Noble Center. And now, all that thinking about what it might be like the second time around with Nebraska must be drained and replaced anew with thoughts about a team the Sooners never could have thought they’d end up playing.

But, disclaimer aside, it sure seems like everything is setting up right for OU.

By beating Nebraska, Kentucky has already won the game nobody thought it would win. That can’t happen to Oklahoma until the Final Four. And now, all OU must do to reach another Final Four is beat the No. 5 seed at the Kansas City Regional. If the Wildcats are living on borrowed time, it will end Tuesday. If they’ve been underappreciated all season, it’s still no guarantee the Sooners don’t end the Wildcats’ season.

For the record, OU beat Notre Dame despite shooting 42.9 percent (the same thing Notre Dame shot) and committing 21 turnovers to the Irish’s 14. The Sooners played very well and answered every challenge against the Irish, but they can still play a much cleaner and error-free game.

If I had to put my life on it, I’d choose OU.

But I just cover the games.

KANSAS CITY — It’s been such a long time since I updated this blog, I think … it should be accompanied by Boston’s “Long Time.”  Come on, you know the song.

Anyway, here we are in the media room of Sprint Center, which looks a whole lot like the Ford Center once you’re inside. Across the street is the Kansas City Star. The building even looks new, like some architect had to win the design job. Imagine, a newspaper that at least appears to be in the midst of good times. Of course, The Transcript is paying my way to cover the Oklahoma women, so there must be some money still to be made in the news game.

I like the Sooner’s chances today. They tip in about 100 minutes against Notre Dame, which has already beaten OU once this season and, yet, there’s nothing too scary about the Irish. Here is my prediction. If OU shoots 45 percent overall and 30 percent from 3-point land, it will win. If the Sooners don’t hit those numbers, well, who knows? But the one thing you can’t count on with OU is its shooting. Plain and simple, it’s a bad shooting team that sometimes shoots well.

When we’re done here today, I’ll recount it back here on the blog.

Also, now that The Transcript has a new Web site up, and now that I’ve broken the ice to reenter the blogosphere, I’ll be back frequently.

Enjoy the game.

Typically, when I write one of these things, there’s a lot on my mind and it ends up being even longer than most of my columns for the paper. Sometimes, I’ll explain that it’s going to be a short post, and then it isn’t. Today, we’ll see. Whatever, for a change, this is less about the life of a sports editor and more about some of the things we cover. So, as though anybody cares …

The Norman North girls are a good basketball team. That simple fact is a fairly significant piece of sports news in this town. Because it’s been years since they were a good basketball team. A year ago, under first-year coach Jeff Blough, they were much better. But much better does not make good. Because, on a blog, we can talk normal people talk, where good means good. As in, quite good. So, they’re good. They’ve got a shooter, a big three-headed presence in the post and an experienced point guard. Friday, is the Crosstown Clash and North will bring it’s best team into that game in a very long time … but it’s hard to believe that’s enough.

The Norman High girls are good, too. Perhaps really, really good. I don’t know how they lost to Edmond Memorial, but it happened. Coach Matilda Mossman thinks she has the best point guard in the state in Kamra King and she might be right. And backing King up is a squadron of athletes. Only I’m not so sure North doesn’t have better basketball players once you get past the point guard position. The thing about that is this: athleticism makes up for a lot of problems. It also emphasizes the pressure Mossman loves to bring to bear upon opponents. Can North handle NHS’ pressure is the biggest question. I’m not sure it can. And I’ll be shocked if that one key doesn’t have everything to do with that game.

Another good team? The North boys, also unbeaten and, just like the girls, coming off a tourney championship. Just watching them play – most of the time – is evidence coach Butch Roberts really knows how to coach halfcourt offensive basketball. And, when they’re playing well, the T-Wolves look like a group of really sharp players. Dalton Mitchell’s a solid point guard, Patrick Schaefer knows how to score. Jared Beal and Matt Southard are a real problem for a lot of folks in the paint. It’s a team that’s bound to beat some team’s it’s not supposed to beat.

I want to believe in the Norman High boys, but I just don’t know. Jared Boersma might be the best player in town, but the Tigers just turn the ball over too much. It’s true, I’ve only seen them place once, but there’s this frantic quality to their game they’ve got to do something about.

I will say this, though.

As  group, all four teams, NHS and North, boys and girls, they’re playing at the highest level I’ve seen in a long time.

In a day or two, I’ll try to chime in on the two more teams in town. The Sooners, men and women.

Despite the fact that I tend to write blog posts longer than the columns I write for the newspaper I really have to get better about this. I began the blog like a house on fire, yet I’ve retreated from it in recent weeks, snowed under by a job you just can never get ahead of. You can do it quite well, but you can’t get ahead of it. It is the nature of the beast. Or, at least, it is the nature of my beast. I’m sure there are other ways to do it, but one must do it how one must do it. And I, for now, am that one.

As I write this, Oregon just gave its coach a Thursday night Gatorade bath. The Ducks are headed the Rose Bowl and they didn’t even need a crooked replay official to get here. That’s my segway toward football and the latest in the – well, it is the title of the blog – the life of a sports editor.

Had this been like any of the last three years, this would have been one of the busiest weeks of the year, all the result of Oklahoma playing in the Big 12 title game. Had the Sooners reached it for a fourth straight year, that would have been the big play in the paper all week and there’s a good chance we’d be doing a sprung-upon-us special section as a result. Yes, it would have been exciting to go to my sixth such game, but I can live without it. And I can really live without driving to Dallas Saturday only to drive back in the middle of the night. After the parking nightmare I encountered at Jerry Jones’ new stadium for the BYU game, I would have tried to arrive at least three hours before the kick after about three hours in the car, then the game’s bound to last near 4 hours, then you’re working like crazy trying to get everything done by midnight, 12:15 and then your big prize is … another three hours in the car. The only good thing about it is the traffic’s all gone by the time you walk out of the stadium.

But not this year. Instead, we have pivoted toward the winter sports, even while we keep an eye on Sooner football.

That means basketball has arrived in full, even for the high schools, as has wrestling.

For a change, I’ve kind of put myself in charge of high school wrestling, at least the keeping up with it part. Tonight I covered the Sooner women’s 100-67 victory over Texas-Arlington (game starts at 7, by 10:45 I’d written a column – short, 500 words – on how Tiger Woods can’t expect privacy, 550 words on the Sooner win and 300 words of “Postgame Notepad” from the Sooner win; I don’t think even 6 years ago I could produce that much in that kind of time frame, but now it’s just par for the course), and I sent Jeff Johncox to a wrestling shindig at Noble where Norman High, Noble and Southmoore all grappled one another (great word: grappled). Still, I’ll try to keep up with the prep mats, make it to a few events and turn out at least one solid notebook a week on it. We won’t often “be there” for the wrestling but we will “keep up.” Of course, as the season goes along, we’ll (I’ll) get more involved.

A year ago, I covered the OU women as a full-time beat writer while running the department and doing pages three or four times a week. My page responsibilities, because of a slight change in the way we do things, has dropped to twice a week, but now I’m covering more stuff. The OU women, plus the wrestling, plus a few extra columns here and there … like the one I’ll write from the OU men’s Sunday game with Arizona. I’m supposed to be off Sunday but … IT’S OU AND ARIZONA.

One must do it the way one must do it.

Here are the factors at hand.

I really didn’t feel like driving all the way to Lubbock.

The Oklahoma women play a strong TCU team at 2 p.m. Saturday and I cover the Oklahoma women.

Also, there were family considerations, and if I was in Lubbock right now, I wouldn’t be watching over my daughter and friends’ bowling excursion at this precise moment. Or, probably, writing this blog. You know, someday, the whole world will be wireless.

For the last three or four seasons, there have been a select few football games I have not attended. Sometimes it’s a function of my presence needed in the office on Friday night when the game would have required my leaving much earlier, sometimes expense comes into it. Sometimes, like this time, the consideration is a question of value. Cost of going vs. cost of not going, and we’re not talking economics here, or at least not entirely. If Oklahoma was unbeaten, sporting a Heisman Trophy candidate, in line for the Big 12 title game, the sports editor probably has to be in Lubbock Saturday morning even if it means there’s nobody at Lloyd Noble Center Saturday afternoon (or somebody else at LNC; oh, no, overtime!) So there are a lot of factors.

Maybe the moral of the story is winning matters. The more you win, the more you’re covered. Suffer the potentially worst regular season in 11 seasons and even OU football is not immune to some moderate consequences.

Not that I’m any less busy not being there, and here’s sort of the point of all this because it’s always a bit of a dilemma. Basically, we’re going to have the same package we always have in the paper, but you won’t see a (LUBBOCK, Texas — ) dateline next to my column because I’m not there. Nor will I write a column as though I was there. I can, though, react to everything I’ve seen all season and what I will have watched from the game and react to it. Perhaps what I write will be informed by everything else that takes place in college football tomorrow, and that’s happened all season. With luck, it will be insightful, accurate and interesting.

John Shinn, our beat writer, will be there, writing two stories and a notes package, as well as putting the quoteboard together. Meanwhile, each of us will do the MOST IMPORTANT item we always do, I’ll put the NUMBERS together and the COMING UP, none of which are absolutely dependent upon press box entry.

With my being at the basketball game, it’s as though I’m trying hard to be in two places at once, HOWEVER, without ever trying to fool the reader into thinking I actually was. What I absolutely can’t do is represent myself as being on site, because I won’t be for the football game.

Anyway, just another chapter in the life of a sports editor.

I’ve never nailed down exactly how to express what I’m about to take another go at expressing, but maybe that’s the fun of it. Anyway, what’s life without it’s challenges.

Not long ago I wrote the longest blog of all time about some of my run ins with coaches over the years. As for what I’m trying to get across today, if every coach I’ve ever had any kind of a disagreement with understood the points I’m about to make (or better than that, accepted them without argument), I still can’t promise those run-ins would not have occurred, but we might understand each other a lot better.

So, here we go.

Basically, we’re not there for the coaches.

Nor are we there for their team.

Nor are we there for their players.

We are there for THE STORY, which is another way of saying we’re there for THE READERS.

(Of course, we get sideways with our readers all the time, because everybody has their loyalties and occasionally we run afoul of them. On the other hand, I promise you there are any number of interesting stories you’ve read over the years in which you may have thought: nice story; but also in which a coach or administrator might have wished we’d written something else)

For instance, in the story I wrote for this morning’s paper from the Oklahoma-Oklahoma Christian exhibition game …

http://www.normantranscript.com/sports/local_story_315050729.html?keyword=topstory

…  I made the point that the real story of the game was what Abi Olajuwon did, also that, after starting the previous exhibition, she was the last Sooner off the bench, also that Sherri Coale said something that made it appear as though she was sending Olajuwon a message.

See, OU won by 54 and I was writing about some internal team stuff. Now, I happen to think that Sherri understands the give and take between reporter and program better than just about anybody. Also, she remembers when she had to beg for coverage, so she doesn’t take it for granted. She’s one of the easiest people around here to work with. And still, if she got to choose, she might have chosen those covering her game steer clear of the Olajuwon-message-sent angle and just stick with what she did on the floor. Only here’s the thing from where I’m sitting: that’s only a piece of the story. The rest of the story is not only more accurate and complete, but a better read, too. And my bias is always toward the story, not toward what a coach, player or administrator might wish it to be.

That, however, is a very mild example. But that’s not to say a more self-important coach, who is somehow under the impression he/she knows what ought and ought not be reported about his team, still wouldn’t have been furious about it.

I remember when Kelvin Sampson won four straight games by a single point at the end of the 05-06 regular season. At the time, he was talking about all the positives such an accomplishment demonstrated about his team. But some of us weren’t buying it, and instead concentrated on the alarm bells such a streak set off. That a good team doesn’t get trapped in so many consecutive games in which one basket beats it, not at home and not against inferior teams, and by telling the complete story, those reporters were therefore practicing better journalism and giving their readers a better service. And, I guarantee you Sampson hated that element of the coverage. As it turned out, that element was absolutely right. After those four wins, OU lost its last regular season game to Texas, lost its first game of the Big 12 tournament to Nebraska, and its first NCAA tourney game to, of all programs, Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Coaches and journalists are bound to butt heads forever, but it would be nice if the point  could be understood. Trying to restate it one more time: while we come to the games and practices and press conferences, we are still not there as a service to the people playing in those games, running the practices or calling the press conferences. We can’t be. We have to be loyal to the story, and by extension the readers who will read it. We have to think in terms of making them better informed for having turned to us for the story. And that, by definition, will often mean writing a story a coach thinks does his team no good whatsoever, and that he or she has zero control when it comes to controlling the narrative of his or her program. Some people in high places find that a hard thing to do.

Tough.

I guess that’s it.

It’s not rocket science.

Well, unless you’ve got the NASA beat.

LINCOLN, Neb. — Several different topics

1. I don’t know that Nebraska fans are better fans that Oklahoma fans because, in the moment, who knows who’s going crazier for their school. But I know that University of Nebraska athletics has a bigger hold on its public and its state than the Sooners ever will. The Huskers draw for baseball, for volleyball and, though I don’t know, I’ll be they draw for wrestling, too. It’s simply everything. It’s true, there’s no Nebraska State rival. Pretty much, it’s all Huskers. Whenever you’re here, it’s an amazing thing to behold.

2. Lincoln looks like a smaller version of Kansas City.

3. Every college football season is strange. It never goes the way you think it will. It’s never true to form. Yet this season has been its own brand of odd. Texas and Florida may reach the championship game unbeaten, but they don’t scare anybody. If either played Oklahoma right now, the line would be less than a touchdown. I’d started thinking Oregon’s the best team in the country, but the Ducks may lose to Stanford today. They’re losing right now. If there were a 16-team playoff, every line would be razor thin. There’s just no difference between teams this season.

4. I like football on natural grass. At least the Field Turf (or whatever it’s called) used almost everywhere in the conference, is as forgiving as grass. But I really don’t like Nebraska’s two-tone field. Just don’t get it.

That’s it for now. There’s something else I still want to write about coaches, but it can wait.

I’ll try to make this sort of brief, though I can’t imagine I can.

Anyway, whenever I speak to a class, a civic club, anything, this is the topic everybody enjoys the most. Because it’s impossible to do this job for too long without being berated by a coach. It happened to one of our sportswriters, Jeff Johncox, earlier this season for the first time. It was about time.

Basically, he’d highlighted a high school player who had failed to catch two passes, one thrown by his quarterback and one by the opposing quarterback. Both the player could have had and both he missed and it might well have impacted who won. He mentioned it the sense of maybe if this, this, this, this, this and this hadn’t happened, maybe the team he was covering that night would have would have won instead of lost. He wasn’t calling the kid out, he just mentioned it. Well, this kid’s coach didn’t like it, so he got chewed out.

Well, that didn’t exactly happen to me recently, but something did, so I’m writing this.

I have been absolutely berated twice by coaches. By Tim Skinner, who was then the girls basketball coach at Woodward High School (he later became the coach at Norman High School; he is, oddly, the only NHS girls coach not to have won a state title since Sherri Coale built the program to promenance), and Chuck Long, amazingly, after he had left OU as offensive coordinator and taken the job at San Diego State.

I think Skinner just didn’t like what I was writing and Long is kind of a long story. So I’ll tell it.

I’d written some things he didn’t like about Rhett Bomar and he wanted me to stick around after his appearance at Bob Stoops’ weekly press conference one day to talk to me alone. So I waited forever for him for about 45 minutes, after which he told me he didn’t have time, but he’d see me at practice, right? Well, I don’t go to practice very often, though he saw many many times after that moment at other Stoops’ conferences or during after-game media sessions, though he never sought me out. Then I bumped into him after he got the S.D. State job at a Crosstown Clash basketball game and he WENT OFF. I had lauded Kevin Wilson’s play-calling in my column from the Holiday Bowl and used a line that said something like those parts of the Sooner Nation who never cared for Long’s vanilla approach had to love what they were seeing in San Diego. So, he screamed at me for A WHILE. Because I’d always liked him, it bothered me. But I guess I got over it.

Then there’s the case of Kelvin Sampson, who once told me (paraphrasing),  ”Well, I don’t understand your question but what I do understand is you don’t like the way we play basketball and that comes out in your writing.” Well, who did like his style of basketball? Of course, there were other occasions where he was just flippant, petty and nonsensical in the way he’d answer your questions. Really, you just never knew what Kelvin would be like. Often it depended what you’d written last. After a couple years on the beat, you were used to it.

(For the record, I’ve never been upset with the way I’ve been treated by Bob Stoops, Sherri Coale, Jeff Capel, Patty Gasso or Sunny Golloway – though Patty once said “I remember you,” after a pointed question one day I was filling in for Johncox at a softball game; but that’s fine, made me laugh. Once, Martin Smith (track) never called me back. No big deal. Santiago Resterepo’s always been great, especially considering how little coverage volleyball gets. And Jack Spates surprised me this summer when I couldn’t get a comment, working through media relations, for a story over the summer confirming the state of the OU wrestling roster. Still, nothing personal. “No comment” can be a drag, but it’s never personal)

Well, what happened Friday at Midwest City is nothing by comparison to Long, and really to Skinner and Sampson, too. And still, well, what’s a blog for anyway if not stuff like this? No doubt, this is part of “The Life of a Sports Editor.”

Last Friday I was in Midwest City covering Norman High-MWC football, and the one thing I really wanted to know after the game was the status of sophomore running back Donovan Roberts, who left in the first half and did not return. Because Roberts is a home run threat at tailback and his availability for the coming game with Lawton Ike, I thought, was even more important than the fact NHS lost 63-7.

Well, Roberts said he had a hip pointer and was held out as a precaution. Like it was no big deal. So I took that to head coach Greg Nation, who said “He won’t be playing next week. It’s a possible hairline fracture.” Well, now what? Nation’s answer was confusing. It was a POSSIBLE hairline fracture, but he’s absolutely NOT PLAYING? So I went to an assistant coach, Sonny Feexico, told him what I’d heard. He sort of shrugged. Hey, nothing wrong with that. In a way, that’s an answer.

But now I was concerned that somehow Nation was talking about somebody other than Roberts. NHS is dealing with a bunch of injuries, so who knows. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. So I went back to Nation. And when I asked him a second time, he said this: “I don’t know, that’s what the doctors told me. He might have a torn ACL for all I know.”

He’d lost 63-7, he might have thought he was answering the same question a second time. I get that his patience was short. On the other hand, he had to know he was on the record, his lack of patience was itself a telling part of the story of the game and NHS’ injury problems. Then Nation said this to me, without my having asked him a question: “Boy, when you asked me about Greg Offenburger, that really threw me. I can’t believe you asked me about Greg Offenburger.” Or something very close to that.

About 5 minutes earlier, after he’d told me about all their injury problems, he ticked off some of the names of the fallen. When I heard Offenburger’s name, I asked what position he played. So that’s what that was about. I didn’t know what position Offenburger played. I knew he was one of the Tigers’ best defenders, and if I’d given it 10 seconds of thought, I also knew he was either a defensive end or a linebacker. But I asked the question so I’d know for sure, to write an accurate story. Whatever, Nation was aghast that I didn’t know, like I’m supposed to have his two-deep on insta-recall.

Well, when he said to me “Boy, when you asked me about Greg Offenburger, that really threw me. I can’t believe you asked me about Greg Offenburger,” it made me mad. I could not believe he was taking offense to something like that. The week before and the week before that I’d written about his team in glowing terms after victories over Putnam City and Westmoore. And even in the story I eventually wrote about the MWC game, I wasn’t that hard on the Tigers. Pretty much, I stuck with the injury angle. I could have been, but I wasn’t, because I didn’t think that was the crux of the story. Perhaps if I’d been covering Norman North, I wouldn’t have been so charitable. Hard to know. However, I did run Nation’s entire quote:  ”I don’t know, that’s what the doctors told me. He might have a torn ACL for all I know.”

I have since heard he didn’t like that. And I have since wondered if he doesn’t say what he said about Offenburger, do I save him from himself a little, and cut the quote off at “that’s what the doctors told me.”

I don’t know. It was a great quote.

So I used it.

It’s what I do.

(so much for writing short: 1367 words; longest blog ever)

Perhaps I’ll finally write a book if I can just spend enough time in airport restaurants.

In just this setting, Kansas City International, a place called Tequilera (although more like icedtealiera for me), I can pound out the words. And KCI gets extra credit for free internet. So, the flight still a couple hours away, the trip is looking up. But too much of it’s sucked already.

Really, it’s all about one thing, but I’ll get to it.

Thought I wrote a good column from the game:

www.normantranscript.com/sports/local_story_298021519

So that’s always nice.

Even won about 20/hr playing poker at Harrah’s after the game (almost 4 hours).

But the day was already shot.

I backed into somebody ’s car leaving the KCI Fairfield Inn. And not just anybody’s car, but that of the hotel manager. And there are so many things about that. Like maybe only the hotel manager would have parked up against a curb, up against a median within the parking lot, just far enough away from my car for me not to notice anything out of the ordinary, yet right in the line of where I’d back up, just as long as I assumed there would be no car in a place WHERE NO CAR IS SUPPOSED TO BE.

If that’s hard to follow, here’s the point.

Her car was not in a parking space. I looked at the place where it happened like three more times before I checked out and every time my only thought is, WHAT WAS THAT CAR DOING THERE. And still, when one car’s stationary and the other’s moving, you know who’s fault it is.

Mine.

BUT IF I’D PARKED ANYWHERE ELSE OR CHECKED IN AFTER INSTEAD OF BEFORE THE GAME, NONE OF IT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. GRRRRRR.

So, the object now is to eat the cost of slightly higher premiums (I assume) for the next three years, while staying out of wrecks for another 22 years.

Then, my weekend almost become so much worse.

Driving back to my hotel, about to get on the highway coming back from Harrah’s, I see a Burger King on the far side of the street and I want an Angry Whopper (spicy, very good). So I pass the ramp and look for a place to make a U-turn. Not the next intersection. Maybe the next one. Oops, no U-turn. I know, I’ll turn left into this closed business and come back out and head back to Burger King.

Oh, no.

Police lights.

“What’d I do”

“You turned left where no left turn is posted.”

I told him I turned left because I couldn’t make a U-turn. Apparently, there were two signs.

Eventually, he let me go, but not before saying this.

“I do have one question for you? How much have you been drinking?”

I relished my answer.

“Zero.”

“What, do you not drink at all?”

“I drink occasionally,” I told him, “but not tonight.”

“Well, I don’t smell it on you, but your eyes are bloodshot.”

At that point I offered to get out of the car and walk the line for him.

He asked me what time I got up that morning. I told him 6, to catch a plan, on 3 hours of sleep, which happened to be about 21 hours earlier.

So that was finally that.

What a trip.

At least I enjoyed this lunch I’ve just finished.