Really enjoyed the first paragraph of Greg's blog

[Jamie]

from Wednesday.

I'm not going to dwell much on the Jim Leavitt coaching-rumors topic, other than to make the caveat to readers that most of the time a newspaper floats names as potential candidates for a vacancy, those names aren't coming from anyone involved in the hiring process. They're usually hot coaches with ties to the school or the area, which make them logical speculative choices to be candidates, but that's really about it. Rod Smith's name was tossed up as a potential head coach at Buffalo last year, and I still don't know where that came from. The Miami Herald actually wrote Tuesday that "at least one Texas radio station" had mentioned Miami assistant Randy Shannon for the Texas defensive coordinator job. That's all it takes these days is a name-drop on an unnamed out-of-state radio station, apparently.

http://blogs.tampabay.com/usf/

Hmmm, wonder where he was going with that first sentence?  8-)

[windbane]

yeah, that's been my thought all along, but it's good that he's getting the publicity without an actual (serious) threat of him leaving like the k-state job was.  

I wonder if real information will come out about who the schools are considering, though.

[bulls96go]

IF cjl cont to grow usf, he will be king and a legend.

[Jamie]

Can you imagine if the coaching rumor mill was around 30 years ago? Imagine how many programs they would have talked about a younger Joe Paterno taking over. And when someone like Darrell Royal or John McKay left Texas and USC, respectively, it would have been absolute chaos in the media trying to fill those jobs.

[HaulingBull Sucks]

Can you imagine if the coaching rumor mill was around 30 years ago?  

What make you think it wasn't around 30 years ago?

[Knight_Light]

Can you imagine if the coaching rumor mill was around 30 years ago?

Job rumor mills (from Emperors & Kings to Coaches and Players) have been around since the beginning of time.

Yeah...nothing went on 30 years ago...no one ever talked about job "rumors". (Are all young kids this dumb in today's world?)

[dabull80]

Yes, but the speed of the internet has changed things.

[Don Toro]

Can you imagine if the coaching rumor mill was around 30 years ago?

Job rumor mills (from Emperors & Kings to Coaches and Players) have been around since the beginning of time.

Yeah...nothing went on 30 years ago...no one ever talked about job "rumors". (Are all young kids this dumb in today's world?)

Of course they talked about rumors 30 years ago. However, back then there was NO internet, No ESPN (and ESPN2,ESPNEWS), No 24hr News Channels, no people spreading rumors 24hrs a day.  I can't turn the TV on w/o having to hear about the latest coaching candidates.  That is the difference, you would hear about it once or twice a day back then.

[Greg Auman]

Information from other media sources is a lot easier to come by. Instead of calling 50 out-of-state papers, a reporter can plug "Jim Leavitt" into Google News and know if anybody's reported anything about him (heck, you can set up alerts so you get an e-mail whenever his name is mentioned within Google's earshot). I can remember in college (pre full-fledged Internet) when Florida was in the process of hiring Billy Donovan, we'd literally call half the papers in West Virginia to see if they'd reported anything new. Forget about 30 years -- it's changed a lot in the last decade. Now I have to go to my Emperors and Kings job posting board.

[Jamie]

Let me know if you find any Emperor positions open. I'll settle for Assistant Emperor if they can offer a relocation package and some good benefits.

Anyway, I think you all got the gist of what I was saying. The "rumor mill" is now 100 times more pervasive than back in the day. Now all it takes is some anonymous hack on a message board typing out his wildest coaching fantasies and some media outlets run with it like it's the truth. This stuff just feeds into people's ridiculous desire for gossip pretending to be news.