Insensitive headline?

"Golden Eagles win shootout over Cougars"

The headline on the Sun Herald's website for the USM-Houston story.

The first graph of the story: Southern Miss had gone through an emotional roller-coaster of a week, worrying about the recovery of teammates Martez Smith, Deddrick Jones and Tim Green from their gunshot wounds from a week ago.

Poor taste?

 

Roasted Nuts

 

Headline writer being glib?

 

Poor taste. That's not funny.

 

What she said.

 

I'm curious if that was the headline in the paper or just online. Also, if it was written by a copy editor or an online editor. It seems like a naive thing to do.

 

Probably some clueless person who saw a high-scoring game and said, "Oh, looks like a shootout."

 

Is there even a question that it's an insensitive headline?

 

It's bad, but "shootout" being a pervasive term in our biz, I at least have a minor question about whether the headline writer even made the connection.

 

I sincerely doubt the editor was going for a pun. A choice of words that would be accurate and cliched 999 times out of 1,000, and accurance, cliched and unfortunately timed the 1,000th.

 

USM sticks it to Cougars - better taste this week.
At least nobody could do "Trojans bust Beavers" this year.

 

Ah, the headline fun that can be found in the Dakota Athletic Conference, where three of the eight schools are the Beavers, the Trojans and the Jimmies.