No comment, no job

We all know how the Internet can be a vast wasteland of rumormongering, red-faced ranting, and all-out baloney. That goes double for the message boards related to sports -- and college football in particular. But what happens when those rumors are true?

Alabama football coach Mike Price found out the hard way, when Net rumors about his behavior at a pro-am golf tournament led to intense talk radio chatter, which led to mainstream press scrutiny, which led to sordid details, which led to his firing last weekend. It didn't help that he told the Mobile (Ala.) Register early on that he would not address Internet rumors but would make a statement at some point in the future. What, no denial, no "I did not sleep with that woman?" Hmmm.

For those who need the sordid details, Price allegedly spent some time at a strip club with a dancer named Destiny; later, an unidentified woman ordered one of everything -- to go -- from room service at his hotel. Price reportedly picked up the tab, a $1,000 charge that likely didn't go unnoticed by school officials. But what role did the Net play in sparking the story and outing the coach's drinking problem?

Dan Raley, a sports reporter for the faraway Seattle Post-Intelligencer, thinks the Alabama press was "queasy" at first about the story and its lack of solid sources. He's more of a general assignment writer at the sports department (a "takeout" guy, he says), and got an 11th-hour assignment to cover the Price rumors because the coach was formerly at Washington State. But without access to eyewitnesses, Raley depended on the Net allegations and Alabama talk radio host and columnist Paul Finebaum. Not surprisingly, his story had more details, saying Price was accused of "being a womanizer who allowed an Alabama-issued credit card to be used in an unauthorized manner."

Watching the boards

Raley says the Alabama specialty site, Tider Insider, had some of the earliest rumors, many of which proved to be true. "You have to be careful about online boards," he told me. "You don't want to repeat silly rumors, but Tider Insider had all the details way before anything was in the press." Raley is a true believer in the power of the Net, and sees online news organizations as the wave of the future.

Mike Fish, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated's SI.com, is still wary of the online boards and the chitchat focused on nearly every sports team. Fish wrote a thoughtful piece on the new scrutiny of college coaches due to the Net and talk radio -- something legendary 'Bama coach Bear Bryant could never have imagined. Fish thinks the Price fiasco was sped up considerably because of the Net, but sees the boards as a double-edged sword: "They make our jobs harder because there's so much stuff out there we have to do a massive amount of screening," he says. "There's a lot of vicious, ugly stuff."

So how do you spot something accurate? Fish says you have to consider the source, see if the person is legitimate, and have anonymous e-mailers give a call. But despite the added workload, watching the boards has become de rigueur for sports reporters at some papers. Beat reporter Steve Irvine at The Birmingham (Ala.) News had early details on the stripper who entertained Price, but says he only had vague information on credit card fraud during the rumor phase.

Irvine regularly follows the online bulletin boards on Alabama football. "I go on every day," he says, "but mainly for the humor. They're clowns, basically, but you get a pulse on what the fans think. Everyone on this beat is looking at them, though."

And just how enterprising are these rabid football fans? Irvine says they have even used online plane tracking services to find out where university planes are headed during coaching searches.

"One time they got excited about a plane headed to South Carolina and started wondering who they were going to hire," Irvine said. "But it ended up just being officials going to see the old school president take a job there."

Sure, the vast majority of online chatter is pure scuttlebutt. But sometimes it's better to comment on those Net allegations before they bite you right in the butt.