Of Leaks and Quarterbacks

What might the Obama administration and Ole Miss head coach Houston Nutt have in common? They represent two ends of the social media spectrum, and how the ease of access to world wide communication is changing the way we should think about our daily lives.

No, this isn't about those internets. But is is about how if you're not careful, the potential for single voices to rock your world. Close followers of this space and the Arkansas chapter of Nutt's life might make connections here that are untended. Today, Houston is not the one with the problem.

That is the President of the United States, courtesy of the latest invention of our digitally compressed world, WikiLeaks. A level of anonymity provided to those who are disgruntled or disturbed with the actions taken by their organization can now reach out to this world-wide website to become the whistle blowers that personal identification would not allow. Military members and others are putting tons of memos, videos and other data regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on WikiLeaks to reveal things aren't exactly as White House and other agency spokespersons portray.

I bring this political and human rights website to this audience's attention to say: how long until WikiLeaks or something like it begins to peel back the carefully constructed Potemkin villages of athletics. Better forewarned -- it's a heck of a lot easier to just operate knowing you're in a glass house than to get a rude awakening one day that your best kept inner workings are posted. To some extent, that exists with the unnamed source and the tabloid for pay news organizations. Still, you need to know someone and trust someone to use those tools. The WikiLink concept is DIY. Citizen Journalist, meet Citizen Muckracker; everyone an Upton Sinclair.

For now, only six records turn up the term "NCAA" at WikiLinks, and that's deceptive as two of the six are repeats. Only one document relates to the college sports world (the other three uniques are passing references to NCAA sports inside military documents). It is the full report of the Congressional Research Service into the whether or not due process existed within NCAA investigations. Not exactly top secret stuff, but even though publicly funded, the CRS doesn't publish reports publicly.

But you promised an Ole Miss connection. Yes, and the saga of future Rebel graduate student Jeremiah Masoli. Could care less about the events of Oregon and the right or wrong of being a one-year journeyman QB in the SEC (Tony Barnhardt said it best -- we can get all high and mighty, but at the end of the day, every SEC head football coach is judged by wins and losses; period).

What does catch my attention is the hard work by Masoli and his camp to prove that "his story" isn't getting out there. Call it spin if you like, but why not allow the student-athlete to create his own narrative. He's between programs to say that he must conform to their rules of personal media engagement. It is a little over the top to have hired your own PR agency to assist with your personal website and to sit for a Sports Illustrated profile. Masoli is presented by the networked media both the opportunity and the tools to create his own image.

Perhaps the most interesting of all the links on a cleanly laid out message website is the one for "Media Mistakes." Fourteen news stories countered by the Masoli team, with more than one for Bleacher Report (hey, that's not a "real" newspaper -- well, it is if you're a college sports fan).

If he has indeed learned from his past and seeks to reveal for others the struggles it took to get there, isn't that the personal growth we want from anyone? If he feels he has been wronged by a system that did not suitably honor his vision, can we really say he's being a self-centered [expletive]?

Not if at the same time we praise the "brave" soldiers and diplomats outing "wrong doing" through WikiLeaks.

This is the ultimate point. Transparency for the quarterback and the President; by its very nature, one is no longer given the luxury of saying it applies for one and not the other.

POSTSCRIPT
As I've said recently, even the most "savvy" can get scammed by the clever phishers on the internet. The Masoli story is a perfect example. Don't type his name with ".com" -- that is a fake site that's got just enough links and stock football images to give you the mistaken feel that you could click around and get his story. You'll probably get some really nasty international spyware instead. No, use the ".net" for the real former Oregon QB website. Crafty work on the .com, complete with links to Oregon tickets, NFL news, jerseys, DVDs, a Masoli show -- curiously also links to a bunch of trending top things like Suze Ormand and Mylee Cyrus. I wouldn't know if they were real links. I jetted off that faux site ASAP.