This isn't really a view, Mo. It's a guess. Maybe you can call it an educated guess when looking at who her sources are (if any) in this, but it's still a guess. I detailed that in my first post. And yes, I'm sure her editor did green light it with website hits in mind. As I said before, it's the dead part of the offseason and this is a hot button topic. She admitted right off the bat that both sides (the team and Brady) have been quiet and then proceeded to talk about it anyway.
Okay a few things -
Since I'm down here in VA, I don't read the Globe regularly, and only know ProJo exists basically because of SMY's Asante Samuel reporting. I'm also not a cap expert, though early on here I tried to learn as much as I could about how it worked. I found it fascinating to go from ignorant fanboy who believed whatever was reported to knowing more than most reporters.... and still be an ignorant fanboy in comparison here.
Howsomever, sports guys generally cover "who threw da ball real good, who runned real good, who catched real good, who hit who so hard they had to stop play," and the like. Then they add on random bits of knowledge of the game as they go.
From the Asante era, I remember a few things about this particular writer -
1 - pretty knowledgeable, and pretty open to learning what she didn't know
2 - obviously open to interaction w/the fan base... probably went to a conference or two where beat writers were told to use social media, and realized familiarity w/those media were an easy built-in advantage over the older beat writers. Still, it's pretty ballsy to accept that trend, get on the bleeding edge, and deal w/whatever the fans sling at you. And really, would you rather have a reporter w/the guts to do it, or one that can't cope? If nothing else, this is
the place for cap discussions on the Pats, particularly when you factor in the Miguel stuff (again I've been out of it for a while but I assume he's maintaining the motherlode of cap info)
3 - Just as we fans see bias in the media, they see the much more obvious bias among fans. It is almost a given that the media will seem to be "stirring the pot." and of course, they
are rewarded when pots are stirred.
4 - you might have her dead to rights, Mo, I don't know. That would just mean that in a chat format, she didn't get the complexities of the structure of a contract right. She might be using a B+ knowledge of those facts to support a conclusion that her observations suggest to her, or a conclusion just for the sake of buzz. Okay, that's going easy on her really. If you've got more knowledge than her, that's a bad thing, since she is a sports reporter... at least in the abstract. It seems to me most of them do way worse. On the other side, we as fans - as a class - do way worse in terms of objectivity... sports reporting centers on the home team, pro or con. If they bring up a con, we want to know why they'd ever say such a thing and we lambaste them mercilessly. If they bring up a pro, we cross our fingers and call them insightful.
5 - She seems to be closer to players than teams, as has been mentioned here. That yields good things and bad things. In the Asante saga, she got the tattoo right, a reference to a song that had a layer of slang built in ("get rich to this,") while the rest of the media was portraying it as "get rich or die trying" or somesuch, and was routinely calling it an unambiguous statement of greed. Now, the explanation might have been bullcrap, but the facts were out there for anybody to pursue... as far as I know she was the one that "broke" this bit of the story.
Is it just me, or does it seem that the ability to get those player interviews and to report those player viewpoints seems to be her forte, if not her stock in trade?
We're a fan board. We tend to like management's viewpoint, because it represents "the team." That might be a Patsfans thing... we didn't think Drew Bledsoe was our personal friend, we didn't think Ty Law was irreplaceable, or Lawyer Milloy, or any of the various receivers who have come and gone. A lot of us have decades w/this one team, and the charge of "bandwagon jumping" is leveled at the slightest provocation.
We might feel differently on Brady, but if he walks like Montana did to play in KC, I think we'll wish him well except when he plays against us... and most of us would go back to being Pats fans, sans Brady, and with a good deal less optimism every season.
So on Patsfans I think we're by and large fans of the team, and have seen personnel come and go... But out there in the general readership there's lots more of being fans of this or that player.
Getting player POVs out there is probably a big part of her job description.
One broad outlines thought: Brady's up for his next deal. It's been widely reported and widely agreed upon that Brady pushed back money to the last year of his last deal when we got Moss. Brady's next deal is not yet done, so they have not yet agreed on what is fair.
While SMY tried to go deep into the mechanics, and by Mo's light, got it all wrong,
is it possible that she's got the broad outlines of any disagreement right, but the mechanics wrong?
I am asking, not telling. It seems that there's a claim of superior contract knowledge here, which I just am not in a position to evaluate.
What SMY has is superior access to the players. Is it possible that they put their camp's viewpoint out there in so many words, and she filled in the blanks wrong?
I know that this very post will send some of you guys scurrying for the "the very fact that you asked the question proves you don't know your ass from your elbow" response, and that's fine... I'll sit back and watch.
Fgssand's got the deterioration of media in general right, by the way. Recently saw a plenary session on the direction of media by a guy who teaches journalism... he did a pretty comprehensive presentation regarding what people are going into journalism for. Evidently there are no more aspiring Woodwards, Bernsteins, Cronkites, or Murrows. Instead, everybody wants to be on TEEVEEE. Meaning, they
want to be the talking head, not a real journalist.
I'll leave it to you guys to decide whether that's SMY's case... to me, she's far from the purest example of this phenomenon you'll find (but I can buy the "get me some hits, new-media lady" explanation.... and btw, you can bet her editor is not as skilled in capology as she is, whatever her relative level s in that regard.)