FGE413
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I would disagree with any characterization of him as a good writer. He was a very average sports columnist, and those guys are dime a dozen.
His biggest mistake was attempting to leverage Bountygate coverage into a national gig. As the "local" guy, he was getting attention from national outlets and bending over backwards to tell them what they wanted to hear. Now, let me be clear, I'm not saying he should carry water for the team or blindly defend him. That's not the job of the media. But his issue was he went too far the other direction and was trying to throw the organization under the bus because that was the bigger story. And in the process, there was a very real "I'm going to get an ESPN gig if I do this right!" element to it all. It all felt very calculated. And it failed. So then he was stuck in a place where he had just spent months burying the team, his readership despised him, and his gamble on upward mobility crashed and burned.
I don't personally have any animosity towards the guy, but his tenure here is a shining of example of reach exceeding grasp and misreading a situation horribly.
The funny thing was even though it was transparent during Bountygate that he was jockeying for an ESPN gig by carrying Goodell's water...it was Mike Triplett, who wrote far better, more nuanced, less one-sided articles about Bountygate, who ended up getting the ESPN gig.