Puzzle Pieces: Adventures in Student Journalism

"Their offenses have the speed to match the Gators’ defensive athleticism, and they’re talented enough defensively to keep the Gators from scoring every time they have the ball."

Guess what? Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas Tech recruit athletes on defense, too. Mere athleticism hasn’t seemed to help against the Big 12 barrages this year. If anything, the Gators can rest their laurels on great man coverage that has limited the deep ball against every team not coached by Houston Nutt.

"Thankfully, Penn State got out of everyone’s way and lost to Iowa so we could have a proper national championship game rather than the type of one-sided thrashing we’ve seen the past two seasons."

Aww. I thought you liked the “endless possibilities” of the BCS, Karl!

"And as Urban Meyer stood with his arm around his wife, Shelley, with his players reveling in the fact that they had taken over Nashville, he smiled as the band played the fight song."

Say it with me: whiplash. There was about as much connection between those two paragraphs as Barack Obama had to William Ayers. (I promise, I’ll phase out the election humor after this week.)

"It was a smile filled with confidence. A confidence of what is sure to come (a berth in the Southeastern Conference championship game) and what could be (a second national championship in three years)."

I’m not sure you can have a confidence “of” something. Maybe “about” something, and certainly “in” something. But “of” just doesn’t fit.

"January 8, 2009."

Are you crossing your fingers for a digression about the Mayan End of Days, too?

"That’s the day all of that could come true."

Rats. (Also, “all of that could come true” sounds like a slogan the Mouse House would use. Not necessarily the greatest choice for a college newspaper.)

Now, there’s one bad column in a college newspaper.

Big deal.

Hyppolite’s usually a decent writer, and he happened to have this poor effort printed. It’s also understandable that the section would suffer some from the aftereffects of driving home from Nashville and having both time connected to the Internet and time to twiddle the nuts and bolts of the sections dramatically reduced.

But there’s an epidemic of editing errors nationwide as copy desks dwindle, and lazy, mediocre writing is not going to cut it in a shrinking sports journalism market.

I have all the sympathy and respect in the world for the work ethic of the students who write for The Alligator, and, in particular, the sports section. Know that, if you’re currently on staff and reading this, you’ve gotten farther than I have there, and I salute you for that.

It’s when I see writing that I feel I can trump, though, that I wish I’d stuck around.

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