Grizzled Reporting

You Don't Mess With Montana's Communications Students
Deadspin.com

Following an order from the coach to his team to stop talking to their reporters, Montana's student newspaper struck back in a beautifully catty way: they started covering the Grizzlies' opponents.

It started when the Kaimin, UM's student paper, published an investigation on an alleged assault by two players. Coach Bobby Hauck, a gaping vagina of the highest order, made his displeasure known in his press conferences.

At a recent weekly news conference, a Kaimin reporter asked Hauck whether he was going to continue rotating quarterbacks.

"You want something from me now?" replied Hauck. "You've got to be kidding me."

A Missoulian sportswriter immediately followed up with the same question, to which Hauck provided an answer.

At the following week's news conference, the Kaimin reporter again asked a question - this one on how the Grizzly defense would defend against the speed of an opposing running back.

Hauck's reply: "I'll give you this, you're persistent. Who's next?"

More recently, a player told a reporter that he wasn't allowed to talk to the Kaimin staff, a directive that supposedly came down from Hauck.

Faced with this stonewalling, the paper did what they had to do. For the homecoming Gameday publication, which usually profiles a Grizzly player, they ran a feature on a coach for the opposing Cal Poly.

You've got to love the moxy of this kid. Doing a feature of an opposing team's player after being blocked by the Grizz. I wish I would have thought of that when Leach banned the UD back in '03 after my thrashing assessment of the Red Raider defense. But it was Baylor week and I figured noone would care much about missing quotes. I was right. This kid has a future in the biz though. Too bad the biz is almost extinct. I guess there's always the internet.