As I’ve tried to humorously note these past few days, the rumor mill is churning out of control. The best example of that is the latest, greatest stunt chronicled by our friends at BGS, entitled “Anatomy of a rumor.”
As someone who tries to comb just about every message board known (and unknown) to Notre Dame fans near and far, I watched this story manifest as the seeds were planted by a bored law school student, sending a completely bogus (but detailed) email to a website called FootballCoachScoop.com.
Without replying to the email or asking any follow-up questions, FootballCoachScoop simply posted the rumor.
Sources tell us that Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick is very interested in talking with Wisconsin Head Coach, Bret Bielema, after the Badgers trip from Hawaii. They are expected to talk Sunday or Monday, according to our sources.
As BGS points out better than I can, the rumor went from a tiny, unknown website, to a slightly larger, and still completely disreputable, website called the Examiner. From their it got picked up by our friends at CFT, and then at ESPN.
(Both CFT and ESPN ran retractions after their were clued into the farce.)
Yet even with the retractions, a rumor is now news. How’s that for the new generation of journalism?
I only bring this up because of the latest news on Bob Stoops. Even though he’s addressed the issue for a good, solid week, the latest story over at the Chicago Sun-Times today regurgitates a week’s worth of Stoops rumors and forced the Oklahoma coach to go on the record again and emphatically state that he won’t be the next football coach at Notre Dame.
“For the third, and hopefully final time, let me again state that I will continue to be the coach at Oklahoma. I appreciate the history and tradition of Notre Dame. I also appreciate the history and tradition of Oklahoma, and I have been part of building that tradition here.
“I work for a wonderful president and athletic director, who have created an incredible work environment at OU. There haven’t been any plans for a meeting or negotiations with Notre Dame and there will not be. Any reporting to that fact is completely erroneous. I will not be the next coach at Notre Dame.”
There you have it. Barring a Saban-like turn of events, Bob Stoops is out as a candidate to replace Charlie Weis as head coach at Notre Dame.
While we have no true idea if Notre Dame actually wanted to bring Stoops in, thanks to the swirling rumors on the internet and the propensity for big media outlets to run with those rumors instead of vetting them, Stoops was backed into a corner and forced to proclaim emphatically that he didn’t want to come to Notre Dame, even if there was mutual interest from both parties.
It sounds like Sun-Times writer Brian Hanley has been on the beat for a while, so there’s a chance that he had some actual scoop with his latest report. But most likely, he cobbled together the same junk that I’ve been reading for the past five days, nothing more than message board speculation and wishful hypothesizing from Irish fans.
(I realize I’ve been posting the same stuff, but I think I’m pretty open about the fact that this is all rumor and innuendo...)
Bottom line, nobody knows for sure whether or not Jack Swarbrick and Bob Stoops have spoken about the job opening at Notre Dame. And that’s exactly the way it should be, even though we’d all like to know.
But thanks to writers like Hanley and an obviously protective group of fans (and media members) at Oklahoma, Stoops has been forced to acknowledge and deny three times any interest in a job that he might actually be interested in, all because he knows a “no comment” would be interpreted as a sure sign of him bolting for South Bend.
The only way we’ll know if Bob Stoops was interested in the Notre Dame job is if he shows up at the press conference introducing him as head coach. Which is probably the way both Swarbrick and Stoops prefer it.
