Broadcaster Tim Brando thinks there’s a simple reason behind communication breakdown with college coaches

Broadcaster Tim Brando thinks there’s a simple reason behind communication breakdown with college coaches

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Broadcaster Tim Brando thinks there’s a simple reason behind communication breakdown with college coaches
Tim Brando, Kyle Whittingham.
Credit: Henrietta Wildsmith-Imagn Content, Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

Interactions between college footballl coaches and the press don’t always go according to plan.

You need only look back to last week’s baffling scene between Texas coach Steve Sarkisian and ESPN reporters Holly Rowe and Laura Rutledge to see how weird things can get if a coach decides he no longer wants to be the subject of what are usually very tame interviews.

It’s not always this way. Plenty of halftime and postgame interviews go off without a hitch every week, but there’s no denying that the power dynamic between parties has shifted drastically in favor of the coaches over the past two decades.

Broadcaster Tim Brando has been calling college sports for longer than today’s college athletes have been alive. Speaking with Cellini & Dimino of Atlanta’s 680 The Fan, Brando offered an anecdote that laid out just how strained things have gotten between college coaches and the press.

Brando told the show how his production meetings with coaches ahead of broadcasts have shifted over the years. Steve Spurrier would once tell him plays that he was planning to run on the opening drive of the game to give him an idea of what to look for on the call, but in today’s game, coaches are more guarded than ever.

“If you met with Sark, he was great, but he was only going to give you so much. And you knew that,” Brando explained. “Anybody that’s been schooled by Saban, you’re only going to get so much.”

To illustrate his point, Brando brought up a meeting with then-Utah coach Kyle Whittingham from a few years ago. Whittingham had asked Utah’s SID (sports information director) to tell the broadcast crew that he wouldn’t take questions about the team’s quarterback situation, despite the fact that Cam Rising had been atop the depth chart for weeks but not playing. The SID passed that request on to Brando and the rest of the broadcast team, but Brando asked anyways.

“I said, ‘Coach, we’ve got to start with the $100,000,000 question: Tell us about Cam Rising.’ He says, ‘I told her to tell you not to ask that.’ I said, ‘Well coach, that only meant I was going to ask that first. So what the hell are you talking about, telling me that you can’t talk to me about that?'”

From there, Whittingham got “really confrontational.” Brando chalks up the communication breakdown to a simple truth: a lack of respect.

“What has happened is the sports information people used to be respected by their head coaches. And now, they’re not. They all have operations people. The SIDs have to go through the operations guys to get close to the coaches themselves.

“Years ago, we had SIDs that were legends. Tennessee, you had Bud Ford, one of the most respected men in sports information history. Roger Valdiserri at Notre Dame. Paul Manasseh at LSU. I could run through the litany of big names that were SIDs. Then suddenly the schools started to pay less, hire children basically—kids coming right out that had been associates and assistants. And now they’re all scared of the coaches for the most part.”

You don’t need to look very hard to see the disrespect to which Brando is referring. And with plenty of softball interviews available to coaches in today’s media environment, it’s not hard to appear rather accessible while staying guarded against any challenging questions.

SIDs have a hard job, and with the salaries and power that is afforded to college coaches, it’s easy to see why they’d be easy to overrule in today’s game. Still, Brando’s memory is a reminder that a better media environment is possible.

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