Columnist Ron Kantowski: Media day is waste of time

Thursday, Aug. 3, 2000 | 9:37 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

Other than the fast-talking administrators, optimistic coaches, well-coiffed sportscasters and overweight sportswriters who consider it a perfect excuse to overdose on chicken and golf, is there anybody who can justify the useless exercise known as Mountain West Conference Football Media Day(s)?

It took the above group two whole days at the Four Seasons Hotel to determine that Uncle LaVell (Edwards) has gotten a year older and that Utah might to be the team to beat this season.

Whoop-de-doo!

And here I thought the grease monkeys down at the local Pep Boys who kept my truck eight hours to change the spark plugs were wasting time.

I must confess that having attended about a dozen of these functions when they still were one-day affairs, I did not RSVP to the MWC VIPs when I received this year's invitation.

At least when we were a Big West town, media day was a little less tedious. It was a down-and-back flight to Los Angeles, where each of the league coaches told lies -- er, talked about his team -- during his 15 minutes at the podium in some banquet hall at the Airport Hilton/Hyatt/Marriott.

As a member of the (semi) working press, about the only thing I took away from those get-togethers was a hotel laundry bag filled with media guides (except UNLV's, which always seemed to be late). And even that was unnecessary, as duplicate guides almost always arrived in the mail.

Most conferences have adopted the meet-at-a-central-location method to get the word out that football season is starting in about five weeks, but there has to be a better way to do it. For instance, in the old WAC, there was a "Skywriters Tour" in which the beat men from the various schools actually traveled from campus to campus and reported from the practice fields, of all places.

To me, seeing players in pads was a little more useful in sizing up their talent than hearing a coach talk about them.

And will somebody please explain the logic behind voting for a conference all-star team and players of the year before the season even begins?

Does the Motion Picture Academy vote on the Oscars before it has seen the movies?

The annual media and coaches polls, the releases of which are the closest thing to a media day happening, basically fall into the same category. For that matter, ditto the Associated Press, USA Today, ESPN and every other dot-com site that features power rankings.

Wouldn't it be more prudent to wait a couple of months, until each team has played three or four games, before conducting a poll?

Perhaps that way half the field wouldn't be eliminated from national championship contention before the season even begins.

That might have been a good topic for media day. But it never came up.

It also never occurred to anybody that had the media just picked up a copy of the Street and Smith's yearbook and dialed into a conference call, the Mountain West could have saved a ton of cash.

And a lot of chickens.