My Final Word Until My Next One
By Aaron Nagler on May 20, 2009 with 12 Comments
Bedard is actually pretty fair in his take on our back and forth yesterday in his Packers Daily Briefing today. I will point out three things.
First, Greg writes:
What you have to understand about Nagler is he’s basically pushed all his chips to the center of the table on the 3-4 defense. That’s fine. I actually think the defense will work…I just don’t know whether it will be too late for ‘09 and there are many people not getting any younger on this team.
For the record, I don’t think the defense we’ll see the Packers running this season will be anything close to a traditional 3-4. I think we’ll see a healthy dose of four man fronts, especially on 3rd Downs. But I stand by my prediction that this is a 10 win team.
Secondly:
Sorry, Aaron, but the whole “the Packers had eight defensive coordinators the previous two seasons so McCarthy had to keep the defensive scheme when he was hired or else the players surely would have revolted” is the dumbest argument I have ever heard. Really.
Yes, you have a clean slate when you’re first hired, but you also have to face those players everyday. I’m sure not ripping up the defensive playbook yet again earned him some goodwill in the locker room.
Nowhere do I say McCarthy HAD to keep any scheme or coach. But I can understand where McCarthy might have been coming from had that been his reasoning. It’s one thing to look back three years after the fact while typing on our keyboards, passing judgement. It’s quite another to be handed the actual circumstance with all it’s moving parts.
Finally, there’s this gem:
Related to this, if you feel like chatting or arguing or whatever about the Packers, come visit us on Twitter.
Greg proceeds to link to his Twitter account. His own. As in singular. Not the JS account. Visit ‘us’ on Twitter? Is this the ‘Royal We’ Greg? Whatever you say, your majesty… 
Filed Under: 3-4 defense • Cheesehead TV • Wisconsin Media
Aaron, good rebuttal.
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The only issue I have with Bedard is that he gets paid for his exaggerations, embellishments and error-prone reports.
(not to mention his lack of insight)
He needs to be called out when the Pack finishes atop the North Division in 2009 at 12-4 & has a top-ten defense.
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But will you do it ??
Oh my GOD Woody… will I DO IT? I will crow until his ears bleed.
Woody, you’re kidding, right? Bedard has done a nice job taking Cliff’s place in the Journal-Sentinel rotation. And he does a good job keeping pace with McGinn too. I thought the paper would really suffer when Christl left, but Bedard has capably filled in. “Lack of insight” and “error-prone reports”? Not a fair criticism.
I agree MC. I think Bedard does a good job of keeping his posts light and fun to read. While keeping the average Packers fan up to date on current events. It is just unfortunate that the d-bags who post there can’t do the same thing.
Bedard is a try-hard guy. I admire is effort, but he has some pretty big shoes to fill….
I think it is much harder than we think for newspaper columnists to be good bloggers, which is what they are doing to help save their existance. Pelissero and Bedard are each experimenting with this whole idea of being the Twitterish-mouthpiece of the media, which is pretty much uncharted territory. They try to be funny, offbeat, opinionated, and trendy, and that’s not what they were trained to do in journalism school. In fact, if you ask me, most journalists have an ego about their own intelligence and writing, and so it makes it much harder for them to take criticism without resorting to bickering or making fun of the criticism.
Some of you would be wise to expand your reading to other teams’ beat writers instead of restricting yourselves to the ‘local product’. You will find out that standards of writing vary wildly.
Sure, Bedard is ‘great’ as long as you keep the comparisons in-state.
Woody — who, for instance? Woody Paige??
Our JSOnline guys are extremely good. Especially McGinn. Perhaps Rick Gosselin from The Dallas Morning News is in the same stratosphere as McGinn with his special teams rankings, and perhaps Joel Buchsbaum , when he was still alive and writing for PFW, could stand in that class too.
Silverstein and Bedard may not be in McGinn’s “elite” group, but they are very good too. I agree that their peers in the Press Gazette, et al, are sort of non-entities, and that’s too bad. But I’ve worked in the newsrooms of three big-city newspapers outside of Wisconsin, and I can tell you for a fact that the attention to detail provided by the JSOnline guys is stellar. Some of the NBA beat writers I have encountered in the work environment should shadow McGinn around for a couple of years to re-learn the importance of their craft.
Packers fans are lucky to have the JSOnline crew.
MC – Could not agree more. I deal with guys who’s stuff is on the front pages of the NYT, the WSJ, the Wa Po, etc. Bedard is every bit as good a reporter. He doesn’t own the beat the way McGinn does, butthe guys been at it for a little over two years and he’s already light years ahead of the entire GBPG crew.
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Now that said, Woody is right, there is some stellar beat reporting going on in other cities. But I think McGinn, Spoon and Bedard can take the Pepsi Challenge with any of them…
Aaron, the beat reporters (at least seem) to get scooped by someone in the national media on *every major story*. The JS beat reporters are left writing fluff pieces (yawn) and quasi-op-eds.
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To that end, McGinn seems to be the only one that has the breadth of knowlege and sense of history to consistently write opinion (or quasi-opinion) pieces that are worth reading. The other doods think Bill Bellichick invented the NFL, oblong shaped balls, and the forward pass. No sense of history. No sense of context.
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For a recent example, I was very surprised to find out last week that the **Patriots** and the **Steelers** figured out that you have to let free agents sign with other teams to have sustained success. No sense of history. No sense of context.
DDD – there’s probably a fairly good reason why local beat writers get scooped by the Peter Kings and Chris Mortensens. Those national guys do a decent job, sure, and I don’t want to say they write fluff because they don’t, but their stories are written for mass appeal and mass consumption, and thus, they tend not to be as hyper-critical in their approach as McGinn, Christl, etc. That endears King and Mort and company to the Favres, the Sapps, the Mannings, etc, and they can have a working “friendship” with some of the league’s big names.
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McGinn and the gone-but-not-forgotten Cliff C were only interested in gleaning as much information as they could from a player, a game, etc. They had a specific audience in mind and their material wasn’t generalized for mass appeal. Thus, their access to the Favres and the Vicks and their handlers is probably nil. I would venture to say that a large number of Packers players over the years probably hold McGinn and Christl in utter contempt.
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And somebody like Favre isn’t going to text message Christl or McGinn with his latest shenanigans. He’ll do that with King while setting up a golf date for the both of them.
Peter King? Seriously? You’re kidding, right?
Triple-D is right, McGinn is certainly up there and has the contacts and tenure to back it up. Bedard still needs to keep better notes so he doesn’t soil his own shoes, at this point. There are some rather good Reporters on the other rags inside Wisconsin. JS doesn’t have a monoploy on anything. And, they are more politically correct than they actually need to be.
Take it from an early 70’s guy, being politically INcorrect shows more sav-vy and guts. What was it Twain said about everyone all being in agreement? Watch out now!