SI up next for layoffs

Congrats to the father of triplets and an all-around good guy:

Golf Channel bolstered its editorial team, adding former Sports Illustrated journalist Damon Hack as well as ESPN host Ryan Burr. Hack will serve as a "Golf Channel Insider" for the network's news programming, including Morning Drive and Golf Central and will contribute a senior writer for GolfChannel.com.

 

That should be rather concerning to SI. NFL is America's Pastime, yeah - but you have to make more a dent in CFB than that. But SI's had one pretty pedestrian news guy on that beat for 15 years, seemingly, and Staples, who's very good, still comes off as a Dan Wetzel Lite too often. Granted, last year was one right up Wetzel's wheelhouse.

Yahoo is way ahead on CFB with Forde in the mix. ESPN squanders its huge advantage and now it's found a way to run off Feldman and Forde, but it still has its share of good stuff. CBS has Dodd, and he's pretty good on the realignment/business stuff and now Feldman. SI's behind all three. Funny thing is, Staples knows football more than any of them.

 

Interesting list. While I would wholeheartedly support giving Hoffer the back page, the front page and any other pages he desired, I do think Phil Taylor has done a good job with Point After. I'd put him somewhere in my top 10.

(By the way, is Hoffer still on staff? I know his byline appears from time to time, but I was under the impression that he's sort of an emeritus, part-time contributor, like Deford, McCallum and Rushin.)

Also: no Tim Layden? The guy does a lot (NFL, horse racing, track and field, skiing) and does it superbly, in my opinion.

 

Lee Jenkins is really good - the guy covers everything.

Ballard and Price are incredible because you might not know anything about who or what they are writing about going in - and may not want to know anything - but they write stories that most frequently make me want to know who wrote them.

And I think Gary Smith is great - you buckle your seatbelt when you see his byline because you know what is coming.

Glad to hear about Hack.

 

I agree with this and think that the collective abilities of the staff are immense. And I think it says a lot about the internet age that the biggest star is King, who is the least talented writer on the staff.

 

Alma, Andy Staples is terrific and wildly underused, at least in the print product. I'd take him over Stewart Mandel, Austin Murphy and the other Sports Illustrated college football reporters any day. The notion that he's a poor man's Dan Wetzel seems off to me because Wetzel does much more than college football and Staples is more inside-the-game. Wetzel focuses on the biggest stories.

Quakes, I'm OK with Phil Taylor, though I preferred when he was switching off with Joe Posnanski or Chris Ballard and Selena Roberts. I have no idea what Richard Hoffer's current position is, but I think he's one of the best 10 or so writers SI has ever had. And he never gets put on that level when lists are made. And Tim Layden is, to me, about as good as you'd expect the Big Game Story guy for SI to be, but his stories rarely connect with me because they all seem dated and predictable.

DanOregon, I hold Gary Smith to a standard of his own. He's not what he was in the 1990s or 2000s. The last really affecting piece he wrote, to me, was his feature on the Team Hoyt.

 

Agreed on Smith. Haven't read his latest yet, and sometimes I notice "him" too much in the stories - like he's grabbing the reader by the lapels and saying "this is important" and I tend to prefer a gentler touch to allow the reader to discover that it is important on their own. But every writer should read at least three Smith stories and try mimicking his style at least once (as an exercise) to understand how a writer can elevate a story.

 

Gary Smith's last one was no great shakes. Interesting premise - why don't athletes stand up for more causes? - but the story itself doesn't really build upon the premise and, frankly, the slant of it was just plain liberal.

 

Wetzel does indeed do that, but his prodigious output is such that he was matching a guy like Staples toe-to-toe on the CFB scandals last year - he was smack dab in the middle of the Miami one, of course -and he often has the opinion as Staples, only with precision and authority. Staples, at least online, veered off into Wetzel territory a lot, sounded more like an echo chamber than the guy leading the brigade, and got away from the deep-in-the-game stuff he writes best.

In the mag, yeah, I saw more Mandel on CFB than anyone else.

 

Sure, but Andy Staples was writing about much more than the scandals. He wrote one memorable piece on Vanderbilt recruiting that stands out as the best signing day story I read this year.

 

I've been getting inundated by SI with renew my subscription notices to the point of annoyance given that my subscription does not run out until January 2013.

I always prefer to wait as the rates get better closer to the deadline.