Somebody has to ask the hard question of Carla Williams at the upcoming introductory press conference for Anthony Poindexter: how do you feel about somebody close to your new coach using the media to get a leg up on negotiations?
Williams, the Virginia athletics director, and UVA President Jim Ryan just saw themselves get played, to the point that you don’t even have to wonder who the Big Man on Campus, er, Grounds, is at this stage.
It’s the football coach, and the people who orchestrated the resignation of Bronco Mendenhall with their millions to get their guy the job.
And as this story played out, damn, this was impossibly easy.
Call up reporter, plant seed of story, whip up frenzy online, rinse, repeat.
Makes you think that the attempted coup aimed at deposing Teresa Sullivan from a few years back was a training exercise.
What the plotters didn’t have then was somebody in the media willing to play along.
Now we’re all reduced to hoping against hope that this all somehow works out for the best.
Poindexter needs to get to work putting together that staff that will blow your minds, which shouldn’t be all that difficult, because coaches across the country are apparently willing to take pay cuts to be part of what is about to unfold here.
Don’t @me about how ridiculous that sounds. That’s the official party line now; I want to keep my credentials.
The only stumbling block to winning a couple more football games each fall is getting the folks in admissions to lighten up, Francis, and let more of our top recruiting targets in.
We know how that situation gets resolved: leak the story, whip up the online frenzy.
Williams and Ryan don’t run the show anymore; they’re ciphers at this point in our story.
Football is the tail that wags the dog now at the University.
Which is why it wouldn’t be worth the time to make poor Carla Williams have to wiggle and sweat her way through answering a question on how she had to sit back and watch herself get played.
Her next job depends on this not blowing up in everybody’s faces, which unfortunately seems foreordained.
Story by Chris Graham
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