Is a story like this ever all right?

Hell yes.

 

If Jones really thought he was going to unseat Sam Bradford when he got there, after Bradford just had a season where he threw for 3,121 yards, 36 touchdowns and just eight interceptions, then he really did need a "come-to-Jesus" moment. The writer not only was full of cliches and religious fervor, he did a poor job putting perspective to what Jones faced. Beating out a guy with those stats is not "relatively simple."

I don't mind religious stuff, but this is a guy buying into a story and preaching it.

 

Religious stuff aside, these two paragraphs hit my gag reflex:
"This is just how the world is supposed to work when you're a Jones. Everyone is keeping up with you, not the other way around.

Well, when Jones arrived in Norman he quickly found out that he wasn't in Artesia anymore."

 

I don't mean to rag on the writer, but it's just bad, bad, bad writing. It's everything we're taught not to do.

 

Didn't take much.

 

The story is treacly. A journalist - even a Christian one - has a duty to actually make sense of a speech and ask clarifying questions afterwards. The story actually makes Jones sound cultish, like he can't explain any of the concepts of which he lives. Maybe he can't, I dunno.

Anyway, the story starts in the wrong place. The right place is when he suddenly took over for Bradford. You'll notice the level of bullshit in Landry's testimony goes down considerably once he no longer belabored under the delusion of beating out a Heisman Trophy winner two years older than him for the starting job and actually started playing.

 

Just last week I did a story on a family. The two daughters are the top two players on the girls team, the son is a senior starter for the boys team, the mother is an assistant coach for the girls team and the dad is the bus driver for the team. It's a christian school that plays in class B basketball just like any other school. I did a 15 minute interview will all of them together. That night I get a call from the mom saying she really wanted to say that God makes it all possible and that they would be nothing without God. I put in a six word sentence saying the family credits their faith for their success. That is about what is should be in my mind. If they are really religious and it means a lot to them then mention it in the story. Don't make it the story. The story is still them and not God.

 

lol same

 

The way I see it, the author knows his audience and is catering to it.

 

What happened to the unwritten SJ rule that we don't light up young writers at tiny papers in godforsaken parts of the country?

Constructive criticism, folks.

Local-boy-makes-BCS comes back to his hometown and makes a public appearance at a church. Where he's going to talk about his faith and football. You may or may not get one-on-one access. You've been told to file a 30-inch feature on him. How do you salvage that?

 

I'd write something a lot better than that piece of garbage.

 

You talk to him. Get him to tell you about moments where things changed for him so you can write about those. Talk to his parents about what that first year was like for him, what he talked to them about. Talk to his dad about his development as a player in high school, maybe reasons why he thought he could bump Bradford from the starting gig. You get an inch or so just pointing out how ludicrous the idea was by throwing in what Jones was up against when he got to OU. And you edit yourself instead of turning in a 2,600-word monster.

There are plenty of stories to be told about Landry Jones, and even this one is worth telling. This was just a bad way to tell it.