Media frenzy, extra week off both ridiculous

I wish I could have heard them.

The conversations between Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle… I wish I could have heard them.

The conversations between Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle Seahawks and NFL writers and their editors this week must have been hilarious.

Can you imagine?

“Okay, so what do you guys have planned for the big media week?” an editor would say.

“Well, boss, we covered the whole Jerome Bettis story last week, so I don’t think we can continue to go down that route,” his writer would respond.

That answer, of course, wouldn’t satisfy the editor. This is Super Bowl week. It’s the biggest week in the entire NFL season. He needs something great and new that’s going to capture the reader’s attention.

“You know, Bill Cowher hasn’t won a big one yet, how about something on him?” he’d continue to ask in hopes of a brilliant idea.

“Ah, boss, we ran that last Tuesday, along with a full feature story on Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren, too,” the writer says.

Stretching for ideas now, the editor would break out into a sweat as he goes through the dozens of stories the paper already put out on the big game in last week’s editions.

“So we’ve written all these stories and still have a whole another week to fill up before the game is even played,” he’d say. “Unbelievable.”

Then it hits him.

“I got it!” he says. “Matt Hasselbeck is bald. Ben Roethlisberger has been letting his hair and beard grow throughout the playoffs. And Troy Polamalu has more hair than the two of them combined.

“How about a feature on that? It’ll be great. Go, hurry, get on it.”

And so it would be, and so it happened in nearly every newspaper covering the Super Bowl over the last two weeks – another feature story on how Polamalu’s hair is ridiculously long.

But what else can you expect when the NFL insists on giving each team two weeks from the conference title games before the Super Bowl.

The Tuesday before the week of the big game is known as “media day,” but by then, everyone covering the game has gone over all they need. They’ve already had a week to do so.

Are they supposed to forget about the game that first week, simply because media day hasn’t taken place yet?

The biggest story on Monday this week was that the Steelers arrived in Detroit a day later than Seattle.

What?

If that’s the biggest story of the day, then the NFL needs to rethink this.

Diehards of football will wait out the insanity of the media for two weeks, but the average fan will forget about it altogether.

Mike Greenberg, of ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” show, stated the other day that he’d never attend another media day. He said he couldn’t even get one football question in because of too many MTV-type media asking nonsense questions.

It makes the game a circus.

Media that never once covered a football game all season now takes it upon itself to find some kind of entertaining story, and it will go at any cost to produce one.

I’m sure it doesn’t help the players, either, who are trying their best to get ready for the biggest game of their life. But until the week doesn’t exist, like it didn’t a couple years ago, it comes with the territory.

Same goes for the actual football reporters, too. When you dish out your sympathy for the players, just keep those guys in mind. They work pretty hard that week to pound out actual football stories.

“So, I thought the Polamalu story turned out well,” the editor says the day after. “I guess you’re ready for the game now, huh?”

“Uh, game’s not for another four days boss,” the writer says.

The editor, in disbelief, wanting to give up on his Super Bowl coverage once and for all, is nearly speechless.

“Damn,” he says.

Alan Smodic is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News, but he won’t use puppets to ask his questions during any press conference. E-mail him at ams85@pitt.edu.