Guess Who is Next?

The layoffs within the sports media have not reached the publicists. Yet. The forward-thinking organizations are taking a hard look at staffing, but I'm not sure they are seeing the whole picture.

The days of a five, six, seven person staff of SIDs is drawing to a close. Not because BCS sized institutions don't need that many people. Far from it. The hard reality is that they need more staff.

What they don't need, are more SIDs.

That's a hard sentence to write, but it is true. Traditionally, specialty among SIDs was related to sport knowledge. High profile sports needed people with deep skill and knowledge base within the sport. And staffs were built around the football SID, the basketball SID, the primary Olympic sport SID, the multi-sport SID and the rest of the staff that worked sports as a training ground for moving up the ladder.

Some will argue you cannot compare the football SID to the softball SID, but until two or three years ago, tell me how they were different? Those out there who are pros -- seriously -- what is different in these job tasks:

Create a media guide, set up the press area, write press notes, do stats, write a game story, keep the records and host the media at home and road events.

Same job, the only real differences were scale and risk. Obviously, an inexperienced young media relations person cannot survive as the football contact for a bowl-bound team. That's the risk part.

That staffing system worked in the past because there was a matching component of media. College newspapers, stringers and low man on the roster covered those Olympic sports.

The tree has fallen in the woods. No one is there to hear it; or in the case of virtually every college or university "minor" sport, no one has a job anymore to cover it. At some universities, there isn't anyone to cover the "major" sports.

As athletic directors rush mindlessly toward cutting media guides and media outlets slash beat reporters, go back to that list of things the SID did in the past.

Kind of grim, isn't it?