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Pat Sullivan resigns as Samford coach

Pat Sullivan, Samford’s winningest football coach, the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn, announced today he is stepping down and putting away his whistle. He played in the NFL, coached at Auburn and UAB and was the head man at TCU. He’s also a wonderfully kind and thoughtful Southern gentleman.

I wrote a little profile about him a few years ago for a now defunct magazine. We reprinted it at The War Eagle Reader:

Sullivan was relaxed in his office, which still feels new. There are framed portraits waiting to be put on the walls. He works out of the handsome new field house at Seibert Stadium on the Samford campus, not too far from where he attended high school. This is home. He looks upon the stops in his career with gratitude, but he’s happy to be here.

“It’s been very special to me. My father came to school here. He played on the first (then named Howard College) football team. He was struggling with cancer about the time I got the job. It was special to be able to come here,” Sullivan remembers.

Bringing in the Auburn-great was the start of a significant chapter in Samford sports history. The Bulldogs soon joined the Southern Conference and now lines up against schools like Chattanooga, The Citadel and Appalachian State.

“It’s where I wanted to come and try to do something that you could be proud of. We changed conferences. We’ve built up our facilities. We’ve really raised our level. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made tremendous strides. I’m excited about our future and where we’re headed. It’s just taken a little while to get there,” Sullivan said.

And in that space between here and there, Sullivan is content.

What didn’t make it into that profile is my second-favorite Pat Sullivan story. At the time we were about to sit down there was a mild controversy going on in college football and he felt adamantly about not discussing that issue. It wasn’t in the plans for my profile anyway, but I said “Coach, I’m not going to ask about that. I’m an Auburn man.”

And, to one of those men who personifies that concept, that answer was good enough.

My favorite Pat Sullivan story came later that fall. I had one of his football players, a starter, in a class I was teaching. One day I let them out a few minutes early and the football player stayed behind. I asked him if he needed anything and he said no.

“Coach said ‘If you’re class doesn’t end until 5, I don’t want to see you out here before 5.'”

The man is about so much more than football. Always has been. He’s been a great asset to Samford and he’s talked, since he signed on there at the end of 2006, how fortunate he was to be there, and how well treated he was by everyone. Pat Sullivan is a Southern gentleman, mentor to young people and, also, a football coach.

Here’s a video from his 2011 trip to coach Samford at Auburn:

Sullivan’s statue outside Jordan-Hare:

The second winningest coach at Samford? A guy who also coached at Auburn: Terry Bowden. And he looked impossibly young in 1988:

He’s about 31 there, ready to start his second year on the job and feeling good about what was ahead. He’d gone 9-1 in his first campaign, but he and his staff had a setback in 1988. The braintrust:

Tony Ierulli is on the Carson-Newman staff today. Both Engle and Armstrong share names with legendary coaches, so they are difficult to find today. Bob Stinchcomb is the athletics director at a Georgia prep school. Todd Stroud is back with Bowden today at Akron. Jack Hines has had stops at West Virginia, Florida State, Samford, Auburn and Clemson and is now a defensive coordinator for a Georgia high school team. Jeff Bowden’s career has followed his famous brother and his even more famous father. Jeff, these days, is also at Akron.

Mark Howard and Benny Fairbanks are in the wind. I found a Vic Colley, but I’m not sure if it is the right man. Colin Hutto, I think, is at a private high school in Tennessee these days. John Harper played receiver at Samford. No idea where he is today.

The last guy on the coaching staff you might have heard of:

Jimbo Fisher played one year at Samford, that 9-1 season from 1987. He had a cup of coffee in professional football — but said he was too small — and came back to be an assistant at Samford.

He’s spent a great deal of time following Bowdens too, of course. Jimbo and both Bowdens coached at Samford, not bad for the tiny school on the side of a hill. Things have changed a lot here, all over campus, as we’re learning through these quarter-century old newspaper clips. A lot has changed over in the football program, too, much for the better. A lot of it because of Pat Sullivan.

Alabama / Auburn / football / history / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Nov 14

Students were doing what with email?

There is this giant filing cabinet drawer sitting in one corner of my office. I rescued it some time back from a nearby room. That office space was once the home of Entre Nous, the Samford yearbook. When they moved elsewhere it seemed to become a storage space, mostly forgotten. Finally someone came along and made plans to use it for another department and we were kindly asked to move all of our old stuff out of that room.

So I moved all of our old journalism department things and all of our old newspaper things out of there. It was a multi-day process and helped proved where my time goes.

Anyway, one of the things I discovered in there was this giant drawer of newspaper clippings. Instead of moving it to another storage space I just put it in my space because the clips would be fun and because this joker was heavy.

And now I am going through some of the clips. This was in a folder titled “Computers.” I’ll just leave this here for you to note the dates yourself.

From November of 1979:

From September of 1987:

From December of 1987:

Also from December 1987:

And you could apparently check your email in March of 1988:

I love two tidbits in that last story:

“Students often find creative ways to send messages to friends. Charles Dunlap, a pharmacy major from Tullahoma, Tenn., sometimes sends graphics and computer art through the system.

[…]

Although most students feel positive about the use of E-mail, some have expressed complaints that communicating electronically causes some people to avoid one-on-one communication.

So some things are the same, no matter your connection speeds, eh?

The people writing those stories, or pictured in the photographs, are ministers, educators and work in the software industry. Our alumni turn up in all manner of interesting places.

Things to read … because reading takes you to interesting places.

There is this football game this weekend, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Here are three stories looking back on last year’s game. Each has their own merit. One of them is mine. I present them to you in order of importance:

Jon Solomon’s Remembering “Kick Six”

My piece, The Iron Bowl

Thomas Lake’s Looking back at historic Iron Bowl a year later

Solomon’s piece is the one I’d excerpt, but it defies excerpting. If you read one sports piece today, that should be it. It is simply one of the best non-sports-masquerading-as-sports stories you’re likely to read this year. Superb copy. High marks, Jon Solomon, high marks.

Here are a few quick journalism and PR links:

Will be sharing this in class next week, 7 ways to ensure your press release won’t get covered

I wish I had more places to share this, Visual journalism: Virtual reality graphics technology

A one-page photo essay from 2013, still worth seeing, if only for shots 23 and 36, On the Border

One to make you mad, Social worker charged with smoking crack while driving on I-65 with child in car

And three really nice stories to end on. The first one has an aww, an oops and a neighbors-helping-neighbors theme. The second one is a superbly touching kindness of strangers tale and the last one is part of the great Gabby Giffords comeback.

Sheriff’s dive team recovers engagement ring dropped in Noccalula Falls

Former newspaper vendor Charles Graham receives the birthday surprise of a lifetime

Gabby Giffords completes 11-mile bike ride

That sounds like a great ride to me.

Have a nice one today and come back for more tomorrow.

Auburn / football / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
22
Nov 14

Samford at Auburn

Slept in. Rode my bike around campus, which was very quiet. I watched the Minnesota at Nebraska game, which was the only early game that sounded promising. It was a good one, too.

If only I’d known about that Wake Forest-Virginia Tech game, though, right?

Got out to the tailgate in time for a late lunch. Visited with friends and then we all made our way in to see the game. It got off to a slow start, but briefly gave us an amazing stat:

As the second half began I realized that one of our Samford students was sitting behind me:

I’ve had him in class and he worked for me for two years and now there is right behind me in a stadium. What are the odds? 1:87,450.

Auburn won, of course, but Samford looked good and fought hard throughout. This is the second time I’ve been fortunate enough to see them play one another in football. It doesn’t happen all of the time, of course, but it is a special treat to see.

football / video / weekend — Comments Off
15
Nov 14

South! Alabama

You can’t get tired of these stories, I won’t let you get tired of these kinds of stories. This one has a cute addition to it. South Alabama’s football team signed a kid, Colby Sawyer, and name dropped Alabama and Auburn.

When you’re out-recruiting the Tide and Tigers, good things happen. As you’ll see in this video, the Jaguars are bowl eligible:

South Alabama is bowl eligible for the first time in just their second year in Division I. Some bowl better pick up this program.

Update: How awesome is this? They named Sawyer player of the week.

Pardon me, I have to go put on my Jags shirt.

family / football / Friday / journalism / links / Pie Day / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
7
Nov 14

No wonder my links look so old

Class today. Sore today. Friday today.

I talked about online journalism in class today. I tried to distill the history of the thing into 40 minutes. So I only covered 20 years. My favorite slides included a picture of Kenneth Starr and the text “Starr bypasses the press & distributes a major political document online first — A new relationship between politicians & the public.”

Ahh, the Starr report.

Here’s your trivia for next year. The word hypertext turns 50 next February. Fifty!

There’s another slide that says something like ““Journalism is now a smaller part of the information mix. Advertising works differently online and advertisers may not need journalism as they once did.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. I can’t get to all of that in one class.

Got home to see the in-laws, which was expected. They’ve come to visit for the weekend. This is not a bad thing. They are lovely people. He’s retired and working and she’s an RN. Their daughter took them out to a program about town this afternoon, so I was actually there when they got back in.

We set out for dinner, had barbecue and learned the local high school team found themselves with a 4th and goal from way back. Two incompletions, a 12-yard sack and three penalties for 32 yards forced a punt from their own 46-yard line with 45 seconds remaining. The home team lost by four points in the first round of the playoffs.

A kid who is a junior cried on one team and kids who are seniors on the other team are very happy. We drove by the stadium to see the crowd, but it wasn’t that big, considering. We also let the folks listen to the accents on the high school football broadcasts. We could hear at least four games — down from the regular season numbers. Some of those accents are thicker than others, probably owing to how far in the woods someone is. Sometimes, apparently, you have to be from around here to pick up what was just said. It is pretty amusing.

Things to read … because one of these things will be amusing.

And here it is now, 11 Complaints That WPEC Photog Should Have Included In His Viral Resignation Email:

Perhaps you’ve read the resignation email sent this week by a photographer at West Palm Beach CBS affiliate WPEC. Vince Norman didn’t last three months on the job, informing the bosses that “I have reached the limit of what I’m willing to put up with.” My word. What did they do to him?

Here are the inhumane conditions this poor kid was subjected to, as he described in his email.

From a now legendary videographer to a legendary photographer, Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won’t look back:

Robert Frank is 90 years old on Sunday. The great pioneer and iconoclast has become a survivor, celebrated and revered, but still resolutely an outsider. One thing we can be sure of: he won’t be looking back.

“The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old,” he told me without a trace of regret in 2004, when I visited him at his spartan apartment in Bleecker Street, New York, where a single bread roll and a mobile phone the size of a brick sat forlornly on the kitchen table. “There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, ‘why should we remember anything?’ There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.”

Here are some astronomically important photographs, Rosetta Spacecraft Sees the ‘Dark Side’ of a Comet . And you can expect more from Rosetta in the coming days, too.

That is the question, no? How to Win Anyone’s Attention:

The average person now consumes twelve hours of media, checks their phone close to 110 times and sees an estimated 5,000 marketing messages each day. When most of us also regularly put in 8+ hours on the job, it’s no wonder our collective attention span is more taxed than ever.

[…]

As a marketer or advertiser, all this is also a reality check and constant reminder about how precious attention has become. If you’re thinking about what this means for your marketing efforts, or you’re producing a lot of quality content but struggling to get noticed, here are four principles you can apply to win anyone’s attention.

This piece is running at a slight angle to that, For Millennials, the End of the TV Viewing Party:

To be sure, the notion that the television may go the way of the Sony Walkman may sound like hyperbole. Some 34.5 million flat-screen televisions were shipped in the United States last year alone, according to figures compiled by IHS Technology, a global market research company — a substantial number, even if sales are down 13.75 percent, from 40 million, since 2010.

Yet by another, more geek-futurist view, it seems easy to start their obituary, even as manufacturers race to keep up to speed by churning out web-enabled smart TVs. The smartphone age has been cruel to devices that perform only one function.

I’m thinking I should perhaps rename things around here “Multiple.” The other day I pointed to a story that hints at the need to consider your multiple audiences on multiple platforms with a unified theme. A week before I offered you an essay with this basic premise: In many companies, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question, “What business am I in?” The answer seemed obvious to me, you’re in multiple businesses. That is the adaptation that technology is offering you — pretty much in every field.

In local news:

Alabama’s rate of uninsured children is falling, beating national trend

Patience pays off in Magic City’s bid for Senior Games

Alabama Power Foundation gives university’s largest research gift

In different ways and for different reasons, those are all big deals.

Finally, a slideshow. I link to Mobile is eating the world because I think Benedict Evans is saying something I’m saying, only more eloquently. He’s arguing that, essentially, you don’t need to define the future of technology and the future of mobile, because they are the same. Technology, he says, is now outgrowing the tech industry.

The first inkling of that I got was when we saw the mobile data outpacing the adaptable — and amazingly fast, rapid-fire — world wide web on growth and standards. To Evans, a strategic consumer technology analyst, this comes down to the availability of tech. (If I understand him correctly, that is.) Those are issues of supply and logistics and resources and global wealth — in the macro sense. This is not, then, the technological singularity. That comes later.

I wonder if that happens on a Friday.

It might. The odds aren’t terrible — one in seven, I’d say — but it isn’t happening tonight.