SEC Digital Site Gives Average Football Fan Lots to Watch at All Hours

While the Southeastern Conference in August issued press coverage edicts that only irked the biggest players in the regional and national media game, and then backed down off its enriched high horse, the league might have been better served by better educating the media on its fabulous digital Web site.

It's SECdigitalnetwork.com.

Yes, the SEC talked it up in Hoover, Ala., at the SEC Media Days in late July, where the usual SEC columnists and beat writers were already probably bored out of their minds when the subject managed to come up, probably at 8:30 a.m. on the last day. Yes, the SEC also put out a press release or two on it. Untold trees die for nothing these days at the expense of unread press releases.

It's one thing to talk about it, along with the gazillion-dollar ESPN package the SEC arranged, to a glazed-eyed media; it's another to see it operate right on your computer. And maybe more people both in the media, and the readers of that media, would have been more in tuned to it had the SEC not ruined its own good will by trying to make coverage rules that more resembled the NFL or the NBA.

When LSU All-America offensive lineman Ciron Blacktold us in late July that the SEC was like a "mini-NFL" he probably didn't realize just how deep that assessment went. With its new list of media regulations in August, the SEC appeared to see itself as as a mini-professional football league, with pro franchises, and the protection that it believed ought to go with those franchises and to the league's product. So out came legalese copied directly from pro leagues -- you know, you're heard it for years and years on broadcasts: "any reproduction, use or other transmission of this event without the expressed written permission of [insert league] is strictly probihited."

For a few weeks, until The Associated Press Sports Editors, Gannett News Service and a few big media players stood up to the SEC's original wishes, the league apparently believed it would be able to maintain control over newspaper and Internet photos after a period of time, blog content on the Internet, Twitter (fans and media), brief game highlights, video interviews from the locker rooms and the like. Finally, after two rewrites and sitdowns between the agencies, the media requirements were pared down to pretty much what they'd always been.

The SEC folks had tried to explain it was all about protecting their's and their partners' investment in the SEC product, and since ESPN and CBS have thrown billions at the league, the big money was talking big. Factor in that large newspapers are dying all over and their content is moving to the Internet. We've already been there now for two years at arkansassports360.com, and no question the SEC folks realized that the next generation will be getting most of its media and entertainment through computers and a fiber-optic line.

Those of us with media Web sites know we can't DVR ESPN's game broadcast and rebroadcast it here, nor would we want to. We're not going to carry extended digital highlights. Our blogs aren't going to be running play-by-play of the live action, as if substituting for the live radio or TV call of the game. It couldn't be done anyway and the game be covered well. Nobody on the Web is doing anything that will take the eyes and ears off ESPN or CBS while the live event is going anyway -- unless, of course, Arkansas fans would rather tune in to their own broadcast and hear Chuck Barrett rather than Verne Lunquist or Mike Patrick on the play-by-play. And the SEC would have protected the university's investment and broadcast partner, as well, with its original nine-page edict on coverage.

But right up until game time Sept. 5, the first full day of SEC football, we were only hearing about the media vs. the SEC.