It’s Halloween. At Ohio University, that is a very big deal. For me, not so much. I am feeling thoroughly under the weathere — and that’s saying something seeing that is 45 degrees, windy, raining and, just generally nasty.
I’m supposed to go to a party tonight. Truth be told, I feel so crappy I just want to rip my eyeballs out. I just want to sit at home in my Huskies sweatpants (the most COMFORTABLE, warm, soft sweats in the world!) and watch the USC-Oregon game.
Even if I don’t go to the party, it won’t be all relaxation and football, though. Instead, it will be “coding,” “inputting,” reading journals and putting together some notes for one of the three papers I have (at most) three weeks to finish! And very honestly, I need to recover.
My sports-fan friends will like this… Two of the three papers I am writing have to do with coverage of college football and basketball scandals.
In my “content analysis” class, I have taken seven high-profile college football and basketball scandals and am analyzing the coverage from the local newspaper as compared with the ESPN.com’s. I’m “coding” each story for bias (and what kind of bias there might be) or balance. It’s actually a pretty awesome project, but it’s ridiculously tedious. Seven major scandals and the subsequent coverage — can you imagine how many stories that is? I actually had to cut it down to three weeks of coverage (the day the story broke and the following three weeks.) As it stands, that is still pushing 300 stories. Whew!
The other paper I have to write is for my “Research Methods” class. If you haven’t filled out my survey for this class, please do! (This survey) For this class, I’m trying to gauge what fans think of the coverage of scandals and how they view the local and national coverage of them. Pretty interesting so far.
But all the compiling, analyzing, etc. isn’t a piece of cake… at least the Huskies and Steelers have bye weeks at the same time so I can concentrate!
Janey, I don’t have anything to say about last week’s Huskies-Ducks game other than those games are going to continue to look like that until UW has some REAL SPEED on its defense. The Ducks offense is predicated on speed and one-on-one matchups. That means if the defense misses any tackles, Oregon is gone for a big play. Huskies fans (and those who report on the Huskies) have watched this happen year after year. The only fix to that ailment is speed and efficiency. The Huskies are better, but they aren’t much faster yet. They have now lost four of the last five games and need to kick it in gear against UCLA. I think it’s unbelievable that people are giving Sark a hard time… my goodness. ALREADY?! Remember what last year felt like? Guess not…
Also, all the talk of Jake Locker going pro? Jake is a supreme athlete, but he isn’t a great quarterback by any stretch of the imagination. He’d be making a mistake.
OK, now, really… I have to take some medicine and get back to the Baylor basketball scandal of 2003. Eesh… Be thankful, Huskies fans. Your former coach only got caught in an NCAA basketball pool. 😉
P.S. — I can’t wait to get in those sweats!
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