Welcome to the first ever edition of the the Jay Cutler DON’T CARE awards given the Media Relations professionals, University Sports Information Departments and athlete/brand PR firms that emailed me the least newsworthy press releases and story pitches.
Basically every Friday at 9AM CST we’ll publish THE WORST attempts to pass minutia and irrelevance as news. These are the story pitches and press releases which made say “Dooooooon’t Caaaaaaare” in my head before deleting them as quickly as possible.
We’ll call these awards “The Cuttys” for short.
This list is the worst of the worst. And believe me, it was HARD to narrow it down to just ten. Each item came as it’s own separate email pitch. These people believed that each one deserved to be a separate news story!
DON’T CARE!
These are not in any order…up until number ten which is the one I’ve deemed the most worthless of all the worthless media mailings this week.
Media members, tweet me your nominations for The Cuttys @paulmbanks
and/or email them to thesportsbank DOT net AT Gmail DOT com
1. Alabama Crimson Tide football…..
…..sent out pictures of the covers of their media guide
2. Al’s Beef…….
….named an item after Mike Ditka. Sadly, I did see a few lazy hack journalists take the bait on this one!
3. NBC Sports Group………
…..released a commercial for their Sunday Night Football opening theme with Carrie Underwood into movie theaters. Yes, the theme song and music video Underwood recorded and debuted LAST summer.
4. TONS OF College Football Award Preseason Watch Lists mailings
If you’re a journalist and you tweet/do stories on college football preseason award lists….you’re dead to me. I will amnesty you from my Twitter/Facebook if I see you treating college football preseason award lists and news. NOBODY CARES!
5. Sports Illustrated’s website set some kind of traffic record
Time.com, which owns SI sent out a self-congratulatory “news” thing, but I deleted it before actually paying much attention.
6. University of Wisconsin athletics sent not one, but two notifications about opening an athlete study hall building
Yawn.
7. An Iowa basketball player was selected for the Lebron James Skills Academy, and the Hawkeyes Communications felt this was such a big deal that they held a media teleconference around it.
I wonder how many people called in?
8. ESPN is extending their agreement to televise the Crossfit Games
This is a thing that exists? They’re on TV?
9. Alabama had to tell us about their gymnastics coach stepping down.
10. THE Ohio State University……
…sent out a press release about their football team spending a day of leisure at a water park. It detailed their usage of water slides and a picnic later at Urban Meyer’s house.
CONGRATS OSU FOOTBALL. You “won” the week with the most stupid and pointless “news” release/feature story pitch of the week.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports and Yahoo! The Postgame. He’s been a guest on news talk shows all across the world. Banks has been featured in numerous media outlets including NFL.com, Forbes, Bleacher Report, Deadspin, ESPN, NBC, the History Channel and more. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)