Hey, some Flyers news!

So what do you know, the sports staff at the Dayton Daily News figured out how to pick up the phone and, you know, report stuff. They actually took some time to 'seek out information', 'gather news' and 'interview people for a story'. Those are novel concepts for the DDN. I mean, why would you want to put stories about probably the only thing that matters in the city of Dayton in your paper? It would never work.

A young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk. A simple Q&A with the athletic director and coach at a basketball school. Both concepts sell themselves, right? You can't screw them up, unless you're the DDN.

Here's Tom Archdeacon's interview with University of Dayton athletic director Ted Kissell and a related article.

In 45 minutes of interview time, here's what we learn:
-Brian Roberts is good
-Brian Gregory is not like Oliver Purnell
-Some fans are frustrated BG hasn't led the Flyers to postseason play
-Chris Wright is going to play at Dayton
-Some players transferred
-No one noticed the ticket price increase

Just a thrilling Q&A of absolute bullshit. You've got the athletic director of a major university as your interview subject. How about actually asking some questions with substance. What about Kissell's stance on the text message ban? What can be done to fix the bottom-feeding Atlantic 10 teams? Should the NCAA tournament be expanded? And if you can't get an answer from Kissell on why Norman Plummer and co. transferred, how about asking a bunch of other sources to find out what really happened? I know if I wanted to, I could probably make less than three calls and have all of the juicy details within the hour. Why can't the DDN do this instead of putting together a Q&A that is formatted how I would expect these sessions to appear in textbooks, only without good questions or information. If I turned this into my sports writing class at UD, I probably would get a C.

I'm not even going to get into the BG interview. Just a plethora of bad questions and follow-ups.

Once again, a bang-up job of screwing up the simple art of the Q&A by the DDN. And they are the ones getting paid for this stuff?

There is no easy way to do it, so I'm not even going to attempt to transition into the sad news. It's been a couple of weeks now, but I only recently heard the news that UD economics professor Larry Hadley passed away.

I took sports economics with Dr. Hadley and to put it mildly...he was an 'interesting' dude. I'm not going to lie and say I enjoyed the class. I didn't. The material didn't appeal to me and economics really wasn't my thing, but I still attended the class regularly, which is more than I can say for most of the classes I hated.

I could tell Dr. Hadley knew a shit-ton about his subject matter and that was appealing to me. It was actually kind of an honor to be taught by one of the premier sports economists in the country and I appreciated the he always knew what he was talking about. The UD community lost a good guy and a great teacher. Larry Hadley will be missed.