Always Check The Source

Blogs have become an integral way in which many people get their information. As a blogger I think that's a wonderful thing. Nowadays just about anyone can add their voice to just about any conversation about any topic with a blog. That means that more people are being heard and more opinions are being voiced.

But blogs can also be tricky at times. Because blogs tend to blend opinion with fact a lot of the time its hard to actually separate the two. That's made doubly hard when the blogger doesn't go out of their way to make a clear distinction themselves. For that reason its always important that when there are source links to the information the blogger is writing about included in the post or that can be found with search engines that lead you to the source material, readers should ALWAYS check it out for themselves. Its not necessarily that the blogger is trying to trick or mislead their audience, but at times they will allow their personal feelings or how they interpret the source material to color their posts. And that can in turn give their readers a much different impression of what happened or what was said than they would have had themselves when exposed to the same information.

Now obviously this isn't coming out of the blue. Here's the deal, for two weeks now there have been posts about different Buccaneers who went on Total Access after the games and I don't think either post accurately captured what they said. Geno Hayes was on and the impression given was that he was defensive about the notion that our defense played soft against the New Orleans Saints. Well here is the link to that interview.

Geno on Total Access

Did Geno say the defense didn't play soft? Absolutely he did. But it was in the context of explaining what DID happen. And if you read my blog posts I pretty much agree with him that the problem was more about guys not being in their gaps and being on the details than it was about anybody getting pushed around aside from Roy Miller. But what's more important is the interview in full. Not only was Geno NOT defensive, he repeatedly accepted responsibility about their poor performance and repeatedly promised that it would get fixed. And that includes when angry callers were getting after him pretty good. He had every opportunity to get defensive or act offended but I didn't hear any of that in the interview.

Did you?

The second incident is a post that inferred that Jeremy Zuttah said that the Bucs were running a lot of zone plays in the first half against the Rams but that at halftime they made adjustments and stopped running zones and started running other plays.

Well here's the link to that interview.


Zuttah on Total Access

On this one there really is no grey area. Zuttah tells Dave Moore repeatedly that there weren't ANY halftime adjustments and that guys just played better in the second half and were more on the details. And the truth is if you watched the game more than once you would notice that we didn't run the zone plays any less in the second half than we did in the first half. Overall the game plan was better because in BOTH halves we went more with power Os, ISOs and split bellies than we had in previous weeks and in BOTH halves we didn't run as much zone as we had in previous games.

Now the quote attributed him, which was accurate, was about how the Bucs prepared during the week to play the Rams. They decided BEFORE the game to add a little more to the running game to give them a better chance of success. One of those additions was the running play I drew up last week that the Saints ran so well on us and that the Carolina Panthers copied from them where the tight end bows outside to get the end up the field and then the fullback comes and kicks him out. They ran it and had some success with it which was good to see.

Let me say this, I am calling this out because I think its starting to become a recurring problem and people may be getting the wrong impression about some things that are being said.  Also I'm calig it out because I keep getting asked questions about what I see as erroneous impressions people have based on those posts. But by no means does that mean I'm perfect or exempt. You should ABSOLUTELY click on every source link I put in any blog post to keep me honest and if there isn't a source link you should be googling or binging or whatever to make sure you get to form your own impression about what I'm speaking on. And while my focus today is on blogs, the same applies for online editions of print media as well.

NOBODY is perfect and we can all subconsciously interject our own prejudices into any story without meaning to. That's why its on you as the reader not to ever just take anything for granted. It doesn't matter if it's your favorite blogger or someone you hate, if there is source material out there do yourself a favor and expose yourself to it for your own piece of mind.

By the way, for all Bucs fans you should note that all of the shows like Total Access, Coach Morris' show, and Gerald McCoy's show that air on 620 are also archived on Buccaneers.com so if you miss them you can go back and listen to them. So if there is every a quote that arises out of one of those shows that you want to check you can always do so.