I’ve complained a lot about how the Jordan Lynch, and NIU Huskies football pieces I’ve written are total page views death. Jordan Lynch is awesome college football player, and NIU is a really solid program, the Midwestern Boise State. It’s just that people don’t care. Well I was wrong, because this commenter REALLY CARES. Why else would he take all the time to craft a well-thought and detailed response that runs as long as this comment does.
I look at my comments section about once a month. And by rule I never respond to them. As a webmaster I simply don’t have time to answer all of them for a site with traffic this high. And it’s unfair to respond to some comments and not to others. Plus the comments section is not a place for me to voice my opinion, I do that in the articles themselves. It’s a place for you to voice your opinion. It’s extremely rare for me to take a comment and make it into a new single post. However, this gentleman, I’m assuming it’s a guy, but it could very well be a woman expresses his opinions quite articulately. He’s completely wrong in his opinions, but he conveys them well.
So here’s our offering from “budding novelist.” I appreciate his reaching out and giving feedback, but I’d give him 100x more appreciation and gratitude if he signed his real name to this. Also, BN appears to have only seen this Jordan Lynch piece that I wrote. He didn’t see this overwhelmingly positive Jordan Lynch post I wrote the other day. Or this glowing Jordan Lynch I wrote for Chicago Now last night.
Or this Jordan Lynch Heisman campaign article I penned back in August long before the Jordan Lynch bandwagon began.
Anyways, here’s BN’s contribution to The Sports Bank:
I found the tone of your piece to be quite disrespectful, not only of Jordan Lynch, but of NIU’s football program. Typical “Lynch is not a superstar” argument. READ the Heisman Trust’s mission statement. Nowhere in there does it say you have to play for a big school or be instantly recognizable to everyone who sees you.
It talks about excellence with integrity. You show me in the mission statement, which I just read, that the player’s school has to be a certain size or he has to be a celebrity or he has to have beaten a certain caliber of team. The voters have turned this into a popularity contest that is less about the actual mission of the Trust and what the award is supposed to stand for and more about how many people know your name and which schools you beat. What no one stops to consider is that Jordan Lynch has achieved excellence with integrity (and you don’t hear any scandal swirling around his name). He puts in just as much work as Mr Winston or Mr Manziel or Mr McCarron, but because you don’t approve of the school he plays for or the schedule he was given to play, you don’t feel he’s worthy. I think that’s ridiculous.
Is he supposed to go to whoever puts together the schedule and say “I’m sorry, but the sports writers don’t think this schedule is tough enough, can you change it for me, so they can take me seriously and not write me off as a joke?”
Which he would never do because that’s just not how he is. He doesn’t make it about him. It’s about his team and what he can contribute to the whole rather than what he accomplishes as an individual. It just so happens that his ridiculous individual achievements have helped his team go undefeated and he’s lost only 2 games as a starter. But that’s not what it’s about, right? It’s about how often you get mentioned on the internet, or how many “worthy” teams you’ve beaten.
It’s not about achieving excellence with integrity and putting in countless hours of work to make your team better. Oh, wait…the mission statement says it IS about excellence and not which teams you beat. My bad.
You have every right to your opinion, but I can’t agree with it.
Just another “journalist” who’s bought into the popularity contest so much that he can’t see past the celebrities and he can’t possibly consider that someone who isn’t Johnny Manziel might actually be worthy of winning. Do you think Michael Turner (RB, Atlanta Falcons) is a hack because he went to NIU? Because you pretty much say in this opinion piece (I can’t even call it an article) that if a player wasn’t good enough to be recruited by a “big school”, he’s a joke. Not your exact words, but the meaning was clear as day. Last time I checked, Michael Turner was a pretty darn good RB. You want to go tell him that his accomplishments are somehow not as impressive because he wasn’t good enough to be recruited by a “big school”?
I get why he/she calls himself a “budding novelist,” that comment is as long as a novella.
As you can see I’ve written about Jordan Lynch a lot this season, with fair accurate Jordan Lynch assessments, no bias.
Paul M. Banks is the owner of The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports. He’s also an analyst for multiple news talk radio stations across the country; with regular weekly segments on NBC and Fox Sports Radio. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks) and RSS Catch him Tuesdays talking Illini and Northwestern for KOZN 1620 The Zone, Fridays talking Chicago Bears for WAOR 95.7 The Fan