Some Disgruntled Ghosts In The Press Box

By Buddy Martin

Shock And Awe For Some Of My Deceased Sports Writer Pals.

Photo by Buddy Martin

What would Dan Jenkins say?

Editor’s note: The column below contains ghosts. Every writer in it is dead, and the dialogue is invented in their voices. They showed up for the free hot dogs and were not consulted or compensated. The numbers are real, and the citations are attached. ESPN had no role in this column, which is why it reads this way.

I ran into a couple of old pals of mine in the press box the other day, and they were in shock and disbelief over what’s happening to their favorite game: college football.

Don’t ask how I did it. You saw Field of Dreams? When you’ve sat in as many press boxes as I have, the dead ones show up for the free hot dogs. Dan Jenkins had a stool by the window. Blackie Sherrod was nursing something brown. And in the corner, glaring at a fresh yellow legal pad as if it owed him money, sat Furman Bisher.

“Twenty-four teams,” Bisher said, without turning around. “They announced it Monday. Twenty-four. I’ve seen smaller fields at a Pensacola dog track.”

“Be fair, Furman,” Sherrod said. “Power Four champs get automatic bids, one for the best of the Group of Six, and the committee picks the other 19.”

“Nineteen at-large. In my day, at-large meant a fugitive.”

Dan stirred his drink. “I said I’d take a playoff of eight to 16 teams, if they did it right. Twenty-four is what a network orders when it’s spending somebody else’s money. That’s not a bracket, that’s a mall. And the sign over the door says OPEN LATE.”

Then came the part that set Bisher off for good. The SEC’s 2026 title game will be its last. Thirty years of Atlanta in December — grown men in Georgia and Florida colors threatening each other over a chicken biscuit — and it’s gone. Buried by a television contract.

“For inventory,” Bisher said. “They didn’t even have the manners to lie about it. The game is ‘inventory’ now. That’s what the dairy calls the cows, right up until the truck backs up.”

And there’s the whole rotten deal in one sentence. ESPN is paying roughly $1.7 billion over five years for the extra games, on top of the $7.8 billion it already owes, keeping exclusive rights through 2031-32.

A billion and a half to take the only sport where every Saturday mattered and run it through a Vegas blender until it tastes like everything else on the menu.

“Here’s the arithmetic nobody in Bristol will say out loud,” Dan said. “They sold the last Saturday in November for about two million dollars a school. A billion here, a billion there, and the presidents of our great universities handed over the whole harvest for the price of a used bass boat.

“If a booster did that to an athletic department, they’d ban him from the stadium and torch his parking spot.”

“Understand the architecture,” Sherrod said. “The network doesn’t broadcast the game. The network IS the game. The commissioner answers to the coach answers to the athletic director answers to the man with the airtime, and every last one of them is auditioning for a gig in Bristol. ESPN didn’t invent college football — it discovered it, the way Cortés discovered the Americas. With lawyers and smallpox.”

“They’ll have a 24-hour show announcing the 25th team next,” Dan said. “Then 32. Then they’ll legalize UT-Pan American and give the Sun Belt a superdelegate. When it’s a 48-team bracket in the year 2045, they’ll respond by adding four more teams and a second selection show sponsored by a sportsbook — and the sportsbook will have better ethics, because at least the sportsbook admits it’s farming you.”

And the suits don’t even pretend anymore. The man who runs the playoff said out loud that the fans aren’t in favor of expansion, then announced they’d move forward anyway. Printed it. Distributed it. That’s the most honest sentence in the sport’s history and the most contemptuous, both at once. It’s the ticket-seller telling you the train’s leaving whether you bought a ticket or not — and he’s right, because they also bought the train.

Then Pope, who covered the first 47 Super Bowls and has seen every species of hype God ever made, weighed in from the cheap seats.

“I watched that network start as four hours of Australian rules football and a tractor pull,” he said. “Now they own the whole harvest. The polls, the rankings, the rumor mill, the coach’s show, the recruiting coverage. When one outfit owns the game and the commentary on the game, that’s not coverage, son. That’s a company store, and the fans are the sharecroppers. They do the work, they pay the seed money, and the network takes the crop.”

“They’ll cover the outrage over the thing they built,” Dan said. “They’ll run a four-hour pregame show with eleven people shouting over each other like a Waffle House at 2 a.m., and one of the eleven will ask, with a straight face, ‘Has expansion gone too far?’ That’s not journalism, that’s an arsonist selling smoke detectors.”

And here’s the part that curdles the gravy. A 9-3 (maybe an 8-4) team now has a real shot at the bracket — top eight seeds get byes, 16 of the 23 games on campus, and the regular season now opens in Week Zero and ends Thanksgiving weekend. They didn’t just double the playoff. They reached into September and pulled a Saturday out of the ground like a tick off a bird dog.

Losing used to mean something. You lost to Georgia, you spent Sunday in the pew asking the Lord for help, and by Monday you’d have sold your truck for one more Saturday.

Now a loss is a speed bump with a title sponsor, the regular season has the suspense of a church directory, and “making the playoff” is a participation trophy with a point spread. And the Rose Bowl — the Rose Bowl, the one thing in this sport that used to outrank the weather — is now a quarterfinal. A vending machine with a parade.

Then a ghost in a Dawgs windbreaker, holding a can of Vienna sausages, stuck his head in the door. Lewis Grizzard had one question: “Does Georgia Tech get in? If they win the ACC.?

“Then the ACC needs to be investigated. I’m dead and I’m still not safe. I’ll haunt the selection committee. I’ll haunt the camera selection committee.”

It was about then that Fred Russell came shuffling in, practical joker to the end, carrying a beat-up book with his own name on the cover: Bury Me in an Old Press Box. He didn’t smile. Russell smiled at everything. Not this.

“Son,” he said, and he was looking straight at me, “there’s a burial plot in every old press box in the South — Nashville, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Gainesville — reserved for writers who protected the game. Twelve thousand columns I wrote. Not one of them said ‘yes sir, take the money.’”

“We’ve taken a vote,” Bisher announced, and he read it off the legal pad like a death warrant. “Your bones are banned. You will not be buried in an old press box. You’ll be planted in a stadium club, next to the sushi station, under a flat screen playing a documentary about a contract. Cremated, if you’re lucky, and poured into a fountain in Bristol, Connecticut, where the game went to die and the money went to count itself.”

“Not the fountain,” Sherrod said. “Have mercy.”

“Fix it, Buddy,” Dan said. “Or at least raise hell about it in print until they do. That’s all we ever had, and it was enough.”

So here’s the promise, and I’ll make it to you same as I made it to them. I’ll write the column. Every week if I have to, with the pigeons, the paint-stripping coffee, and $9.5 billion worth of witnesses. Because a man who covers this game owes it one honest complaint a week, same as he owes the Lord — and right now the Lord’s the only one left who isn’t selling commercials.

The stool by the window stays open, Furman. Bring your own typewriter. Somebody has to keep the record straight — and somebody has to watch the network, because the network sure as hell isn’t watching itself.