If this was a normal year, next week would be the start of SEC Media Days. The event was scheduled for July 13-16 back in February. The league announced it would go virtual on June 10. Then on June 30, the conference low-key confirmed to news outlets that it wouldn’t be happening on those dates at all.
SECMD officially has been postponed and not canceled. It probably is a bellwether, though.
It’s first and foremost a marketing event, trying to drum up interest in the upcoming season. If there is no season, there’s not much reason to hold a four-day media blitz. If there will be a season, there’s not much reason to go without it. Again, it’s the main way the SEC publicizes itself in the offseason.
The thing is, SEC Media Days is becoming less and less valuable. There have never been so many ways to get information about college football, and the amount is only rising. Even as traditional media experiences cutbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, making a longterm trend more acute, there is still no shortage of people out there trying to cover the sport. Even if it’s just superfans with Twitter feeds, the news gets out there fast.
Media days has also declined in importance in the era of the SEC Network, even as the league’s channel leans on the event for programming inventory in what’s otherwise a slow month. Coaches regularly make appearances on the SECN at other times, and you’re more likely to get good information from any given episode of SEC Film Room than an SECMD session.
Even as programs like Alabama and Georgia restrict media as much as they can get away with, they still participate in SEC Network stuff. They kinda have to since it makes the conference so many millions every year. Their time on there is the tax they have to pay to keep the gravy train rolling.
The golden era of SEC Media Days was back in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Online coverage was really ramping up, the conference was rising to undisputed prominence on the back of its national championship streak, and it had a great mix of personalities.
Steve Spurrier was Steve Spurrier. Les Miles brought his schtick, which, like his brand of football, hadn’t gotten stale yet. Houston Nutt was doing his insane preacher routine. Robbie Caldwell gave the best SECMD presser ever in his year as the interim at Vandy, and then James Franklin blew everyone away with his enthusiasm every year. Derek Dooley would floor everyone with just how weird a dude he is. For a time the two best coaches of the era were there in Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, and the former would at least bring something with his ranting at the media even if the latter was often guarded and not that interesting.
There would be some dead fish personalities like Bobby Petrino and Joker Phillips, but overall it was a formidable lineup. And rockstar players like Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel would demand attention from the players’ side too.
But as more money has come into the conference, the overall culture has become more corporate. There still are a few of the idiosyncratic guys like Ed Orgeron and newbies Mike Leach and Sam Pittman, but purely as an event to garner interest, SECMD has seen a lot of downgrades.
Derek Mason isn’t as compelling as Franklin. Mark Richt’s fatherly/preacherly charm was at least different, but Kirby Smart tries to be Saban but without the flashes of real insight or Pravda-style hidden messages. Jeremy Pruitt is certainly not as, um, interesting as Dooley or Butch Jones. Kevin Sumlin was cool; Jimbo Fisher says 100,000 words of nothing. I’ll bet at this point that even Lane Kiffin will be pretty dull. He saves his best material for social media.
I hope there will be an SEC Media Days, because not having it will signal that there probably won’t be football this fall. Given how out of control the virus is getting across many southern states right now, it’s hard to see football starting on time anyway. I’m not so sure it would be a good idea to play, but emotionally I still want it to happen. No SECMD would be a solid signal that September will come and go without anything happening on the gridiron.
If SECMD does happen, I’ll still treat it like I have the past couple of years. I’ll watch Dan Mullen’s session online. He’s an underrated participant because he actually will let his personality come through at points without it seeming like an act. There are some things he won’t discuss, as is standard for all of them, but he’s not as guarded as his old UF boss. I’ll also catch the clips of the odd or controversial moments too, but otherwise that’ll be it.
The days of it being necessary or even desirable to watch most of the sessions as they happen are long over. It’s not that efficient of an event, and some reporters ask a lot of the same questions to all the coaches. You can tell what story the guy wants to write, but it’s going to be terrible because he’ll ask the kinds of questions that get non-answers or cliches. Plus, you get writers from publications that don’t normally cover the coaches (e.g. a Kentucky beat writer in the Auburn session) posing questions that the local guys know better than to ask because the coach in question never gives a good answer to it.
I don’t have much use for SEC Media Days, but I’ve never wanted to see it happen more.