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.
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:
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.
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.
Had dinner with my mom tonight. She was in town and this was the first time she’s had the opportunity to see my part of campus. We ate Italian and almost closed that place down, and then she got the nickel tour of my office and the newsroom and our department.
She got to meet most of the editorial staff and watched them wrestle with the thorny issue of the day for a tiny bit.
I walked her around and showed her our Wall of Fame and the old newspapers framed in the classrooms. She remembers this and that — and she’s welcome for my not tipping off her age by historical allusion.
She didn’t remember anything from the 1925 paper, of course.
Sadly I remember most of the front pages we display, too. Our students would remember one, but even that only vaguely.
I sat in one of our classrooms and we watched the beginning of the Arab Spring streamed from the BBC. Hard to put a web stream in a frame, unfortunately.
Things to read … because you could print these out and frame them, I guess.
Perhaps houses are like people, after all. They are born, pass through their youngling years, stand in middle age, receive the patina of age, and when it is willed, die – in spite of words like “best” and “progress,” the latter so often ill-defined.
Yesterday we walked through the grounds of the Kilby house on Woodstock Avenue. It was drizzling and in the distance the fine old Georgian house stood before us, its dark green shutters closed, the red brick veiled in mist. And like a trick of the mind it was only as if someone were merely away for a while. Soon there would be returnings; it would all be as it was before–twenty years and more.
The past is a still-life, a moment caught in time: We are 10, perhaps nine, a speck in a fading day. The high-back wicker chairs are on the terrace front. The men are talking. They are talking rather excitedly, it seems to us a child, of the Scouts, the price of cotton, unfair freight rates, political frailties. When will the South recover? They ask. How? When will it EVER recover? And over the pines there is red in the sky and we, a shadow, vaguely listen, for time stretched out forever then, and this was only an afternoon, one late afternoon in a series of noons and afternoons and nights, sitting and listening and watching the sky grow red above the pines.
She had a way about writing about being in a room without being too much in the room. That’s a great compliment for a writer.
More than 600,000 veterans — 10% of all the Veterans Affairs patients — continue to wait a month or more for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.
The VA has made some progress in dealing with the backlog of cases that forced former secretary Eric Shinseki to retire early this year. For instance, the VA substantially cut the overall number of worst-case scenarios for veterans — those who had waited more than four months for an appointment. That figure dropped from 120,000 in May to 23,000 in October. Much of that improvement occurred because patients received care from private providers.
Campaigns like those from Wired, InStyle and Teen Vogue are attractive to advertisers looking for new ways to connect with audiences, said Mr. Shlachter at DigitasLBi. “To breakthrough in the media ecosystem today requires a myriad of tactics,” he added.
But there are also risks involved. A tin-eared brand showing up in a publishers’ social feed might turn off followers. That’s why, for instance, Wired tapped influencers for the Victorinox campaign and InStyle enlists its own staff to create Instagram and Snapchat content for advertisers. “Above all, no matter what you’re doing, be authentic and true to your brand as well as the audience,” Mr. Shlachter said.
USA TODAY announces the launch of The Buzz, a mobile app that delivers customized news to the digital-first generation of students across the country. A first-of-its kind, The Buzz reinvents campus news by offering college students access to targeted and relevant information, incorporating national, world and personalized campus news into one, easy-to-use mobile interface. Content will be specifically gathered from USA TODAY and USA TODAY College, as well as individual college papers. Future product integration will include content from Gannett’s U.S. Community Publishing newspapers and user-generated content.
The Buzz is the mobile extension of USA TODAY’s celebrated Collegiate Readership Program — which originated at Penn State in 1997 and is now present at over 350 campuses — combining USA TODAY’s rich tradition of delivering news and information on the national and local level with the inclusion of a robust digital product. Designed and tailored specifically for each individual school, The Buzz app lets readers search their national, regional, and campus news – most of which is student written, tapping into more than 3,000 USA TODAY College contributors – by topic areas such as news, sports, tech and opinion.
Winter is coming, and months early. But we were warned. Our friendly neighborhood meteorologists and our bombastic national media chicken littles have been trying to get our attention about it for days. I haven’t doubted the forecasts, but it would be hard to believe based simply on your observation.
It was beautiful today. Chamber of commerce weather doesn’t do it justice. Someone struck a Faustian deal for the conditions we enjoyed today and at least one end of that ill-considered deal was upheld. This might be the end of our peak fall.
(It usually lasts about three days to a week.)
Knowing that it would be the last pleasant day for a while — there are models that suggest we won’t be warm again the rest of the month — I went out for a run this evening. I’ve never been on the trail across the street from campus, but I figured out a way to do a little extra and make it a 10K.
I finished up in darkness, on a part of the path where I couldn’t see my feet. Fortunately no ankles were twisted. But I did run through sections where it was remarkably cooler here than it was there. This wasn’t just my perception, I had to run through it twice. It was like being in a canyon where the temperature drops 10 degrees simply based on the terrain. Only I wasn’t in a canyon. More like a tunnel. An office building sealed off the big road artery, woods were on the opposite side and there was a strong tree canopy overhead.
But it was a fine run. I even did some intervals.
Intervals at the end of a six-mile jog. I do not know what is happening.
Things to read … so you’ll know what is happening.
Happy Veterans Day, indeed, and thank you to my many family members and friends who have served or continue to do so. All four of my grandmother’s brothers served. That whole family is full of camo, olive drab and a sprinkling of Air Force blue. I have had the good fortune to be friends with Marine reservists, Army veterans and active duty personnel and I read a lot. All of that tells me only this, the sacrifice others make through hardship, deprivation and loss are things that the rest of us will have difficulty ever knowing. And we’re definitely blessed in what we don’t know; but perhaps we shortchange all of those between us and that by not having a better understanding.
I had the great privilege of seeing these Marines graduate a few years ago:
A friend shared this link today and it is a reminder that it isn’t just the serviceman or servicewoman who is given a sacrifice: A Marine’s Parents’ Story
And, as I said on Twitter this evening, every war is different, indeed every person’s war is different. But if you read nothing else after the story above, I encourage you to read Ernie Pyle’s A long thin line of personal anguish:
Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out – one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.
Here are torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits and jumbled heaps of lifebelts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
That line, for a reason I have never been able to explain, punches me, hard, every time. That entire column, like so much of Pyle’s war work, gets right to the heart of what it is to be in a hard time.
David Turnley had so much to say on the matter of street shooting and his experiences of so many decades of work, and I was so overloaded with joy and the relevant information he brought to the table based on real experience from a career as a humanitarian and war photographer, that it was hard to capture everything he was saying, but some important things he shared with us did manage to stick with me.
The task force says radio is “perpetually declared to be a dying medium” but nevertheless attracts dedicated listeners and commercial and public support. The organizers believe radio’s history is a chronicle of our country’s culture and a potential trove for historical researchers, but that much of it is “untapped” because of radio’s live nature and problems of accessibility to content.
Almost every day there’s something in the bygone ether that I wish I could find online. We’ve become great archivists as amateurs, but if you think about the decades of important work that might have disappeared …
TV stations will one day get a large percentage of their breaking news video from viewers, predicted Rebecca Campbell, president and CEO of the Disney ABC Television Station group.
Speaking Friday in a keynote interview at LiveTV:LA, Campbell said producing local TV news is an increasingly interactive affair, with producers using social media to alert followers to breaking news, and viewers shooting video and sending it to newsrooms.
ABC stations are promoting the trend, Campbell added. “Many of our stations brand themselves as ‘Eyewitness News’ and they’ve begun encouraging viewers to become an eyewitness and send in video when they see news,” she said.
The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.
In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.
“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”
Carole Hinders at her modest, cash-only Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, Iowa. Last year tax agents seized her funds.Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime RequiredOCT. 25, 2014
Mr. Connelly was talking about a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government, without ever securing a conviction or even filing a criminal charge, to seize property suspected of having ties to crime.
Now that a crucial section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been replaced by a new $6.4 billion span, nobody needs it anymore — nobody except about 800 birds who call the decrepit, 78-year-old segment home.
The double-crested cormorants – protected, though not endangered – have nested along the bridge for decades, and have so far shown no interest in relocating to the shiny new section that replaced the eastern section of the famed bridge. Officials have tried pricey decoys, bird recordings and even specially-made nests installed underneath the new span to lure them roughly 100 feet next door. The effort to demolish the old section, damaged 25 years ago in the massive Loma Prieta earthquake, is being held up by the birds’ unwillingness to move, and critics, who say the delays could cost taxpayers $33 million, are crying fowl.
The first two comments I see on that story?:
Gee I wonder how some moonshiners from Alabama would handle this technical problem? LOL
I guarantee you that Alabama moonshiners would handle it with a lot more logic and common sense than the Californians are handling the problem. By the way, I am not from Alabama so here is no bias on my part.
A few scare shells would probably do the job. Just like the ultimate removal of their preferred structure.
Hey, they’ve already built the birds a replacement home.
We haven’t enjoyed the Things to Read section here in several days, which means I have a backlog of links for you to enjoy. This works well for content today, which has otherwise been spent almost entirely doing necessary but generally uninteresting things. I’ve got about two dozen more interesting items to share, promise.
(If you’re here for the sappy stuff, there first installment is next. There’s another great one at the end of the post.)
First, the Lauren Hill video package by Tom Rinaldi:
(T)hroughout the game, televised live by FoxSports Ohio, she never seemed to stop smiling. She had a noticeable glow and bounce in her step while on the court.
During an in-game interview on FoxSports, she quickly corrected a broadcaster who referred to the game as her last, saying it was her first college game. Hill told reporters after the game she hoped to be well enough to try to play again.
Hays and Koskinen said they found Hill genuinely inspiring and not a subject of pity.
“She is just the most upbeat person despite what she’s going through,” Koskinen said. “Her smile lights up a room. She wants to hug you every chance she gets. You can’t help but want to hug her back and smile. She’s someone I will truly admire the rest of my life.”
The teams dined together Saturday night at the Firehouse Grill in Cincinnati, and the Terriers were nervous about meeting Hill.
“What do we say to her?” Hiram players asked their coach.
Before long, the teams were laughing together, crying, and laughing some more.
Breakfast, shower, shave, mirror. Almost a year. He is 56 now. He looks at the scars across his face, around his ear, along his upper chest and right arm. He gets dressed and goes outside to his truck, and there’s the fence that he somehow managed to climb even though he was bleeding, and there’s the field he staggered across to a rutted road where he was found.
This is how most days begin for Creigh Deeds, a father who had a son with mental illness, who struggled to understand him, tried to get help for him, and was ultimately left alone to deal with him, and who now looks over at the barn where he had so suddenly dropped the feed bucket.
“I lost a tooth over there somewhere, a gold tooth,” he says, shaking his head a little, and then he goes to work.
An armed security guard who was on an elevator with President Obama had not been convicted of a felony, as previously reported, according to two people briefed on the incident.
The man, who worked for a private security contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was removed from the president’s elevator during his Sept. 16 visit to Atlanta. The man was questioned by Secret Service agents after he did not comply with a request from agents that he stop recording images of the president with a camera.
Agents became concerned that the private contractor might be a risk to the president because of his behavior; others who later ran a background check on the guard discovered some prior arrests in his history.
[…]
The guard was terminated the day of the presidential visit to the CDC — when his supervisor at the security contracting firm arrived to find agents questioning the guard, he told him to turn over his gun on the spot.
The Obama administration’s Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State.
Moderate rebels who had been armed and trained by the United States either surrendered or defected to the extremists as the Jabhat al-Nusra group, affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through the towns and villages the moderates controlled in the northern province of Idlib, in what appeared to be a concerted push to vanquish the moderate Free Syrian Army, according to rebel commanders, activists and analysts.
Other moderate fighters were on the run, headed for the Turkish border as the extremists closed in, heralding a significant defeat for the rebel forces Washington had been counting on as a bulwark against the Islamic State.
The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.
Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.
If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.
If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.
CNN, covering the pressing Internet “news,” Internet lusts after new mugshot guy. If we get to a point where we call this news, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Better than calling content like that “culture.” Already it is filed under “living,” which should always be noted with something just above derision.
It’s Election Day in America. What with candidates vying for control and issues that need deciding, voters may find themselves confused about where they stand. Thankfully, some very savvy media designers have come up with delightful tools for understanding the election and its outcomes.
I love campaign tic tocks. This is the first one I’ve found from the midterms, there are some very interesting presidential critiques in there as well, the sort of thing you don’t often see about a sitting president. Battle for the Senate: How the GOP did it defies excerpting, but check it out if you’re interested in campaign news.
Which is as decent a transition as any toward the more media-based material. This video is titled College journalist disarms police confrontation and is worth watching:
Rice University launched a free Advanced Placement biology course Monday on a Web site overseen by two other elite schools, a potentially significant milestone for a movement that aims to bring college-level courses to high school students.
[…]
Sometimes students pay to take AP classes from online providers. Advertised tuition for such classes ranges from $75 to more than $500.
“Our program you can take for free,” said Reid Whitaker, executive director of the Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship at Rice. “This is a comprehensive program. Free resources. That’s a game changer.”
You’d think that has to impact the AP business model.
YouTube’s challenge is to replicate this fandom offline, beyond the teens and tweens who roved the halls of VidCon. The site is already rolling out billboard and video advertising campaigns to expand their stars’ reach, and to make them more than just Internet famous.
When I wandered just a few steps outside and spoke to food vendors or hotel employees, I found no one had heard of stars like Meghan Tonjes or Tyler Oakley—the kind who drew crowds inside the convention center.
For VidCon attendees who grew up with YouTube, the distinction between “YouTube famous” and “famous famous” may be meaningless.
No one ever said “Ed Sullivan famous.” The modifier is merely a diminishing agent. Ultimately you don’t see that person at the airport and say “Oh, she’s only YouTube famous never mind.” You know of her or don’t. You can see that entire thread here.
Wondering why you’re not finding great success with your alumni social media marketing? Well, wonder no more because we’ve done some digging, and figured out just how you can revamp your social media behavior for the betterment of all. In this blog, we’ve broken down your alumni into three groups based on age and interest because a variety of alumni means a variety of tactics for social media inclusion. The results may not be what you would expect (and if they are, Bravo!). Take what we have to show you today and stop wasting your time. Start creating impactful relationships with your alumni via social media.
Every few minutes, a new buzzword rips through the business world, skids, gets a few quick books written on it, and ends up in a pile of tired terms next to “synergy.” Today, one of the biggest corporate buzzwords is “storytelling.” Marketers are obsessed with storytelling, and conference panels on the subject lately have fewer empty seats than a Bieber concert.
[…]
Good stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.
I saw this elderly gentleman dining by himself, with an old picture of a lady in front of him. I though maybe I could brighten his day by talking to him.
As I had assumed, she was his wife. But I didn’t expect such an interesting story. They met when they were both 17. They dated briefly, then lost contact when he went to war and her family moved. But he said he thought about her the entire war. After his return, he decided to look for her. He searched for her for 10 years and never dated anyone. People told him he was crazy, to which he replied “I am. Crazy in love”. On a trip to California, he went to a barber shop. He told the barber how he had been searching for a girl for ten years. The barber went to his phone and called his daughter in. It was her! She had also been searching for him and never dated either.
