Thanks to the guys at BGS for pointing this one out. In their look back on the history of the Ron Zook drama, they came across a piece by Mark Tupper of the Decatur Herald & Review. We’re not going to link it as per our policy that people with the IQ of a dog biscuit do not get links. However, BGS has a link, and we’ll link to them because they’re pretty smart fellas, so if you want to read the whole piece, start there. (BGS’ own write-up is very well worth the read, by the way.)
Anyway, here are some highlights (?) from the piece. Bold is mine.
Postings on college football message boards carried out similar finger-pointing and, as too often happens with blathering on the Internet, they took on a life of their own.
Of course, all of these accusations had one thing in common: They were delivered under the cowardly cloak of anonymity.
It turns out, however, that knowledgeable people with resources and the right legal knowledge can track these so-called anonymous Internet postings. And so when Guenther hired an Indianapolis law firm more than two months ago to probe the source of these accusations, the process began to zero in on the author.
Uh, no. It’s actually pretty much impossible to track such things down. We’ll agree, it is cowardly, but to actually pinpoint the source of any accusations made on a message board without any level of, oh, let’s say reasonable doubt, is impossible. That’s especially true if these “knowledgeable people” do not have access to logs from a website to indicate things like an IP address. And that’s something you’d have to compel the owners of the site to supply. How, exactly, would Illinois go about doing that?
Even though there was absolutely nothing more than vague innuendo, the story provided more inflammatory material aimed at Zook.
By then, and as national signing date arrived on Wednesday, whispers about Zook and foul play were filling newspapers and providing juicy content for sports talk shows from coast to coast.
And on Thursday, Zook was in Chicago, doing a media blitz in which he offered himself up to answer any and every question on the subject.
Again, I have to ask, what are the accusations? There must be some because “Zook was in Chicago, doing a media blitz in which he offered himself up to answer any and every question on the subject.” Why? What were the questions? I’ve seen these pieces in the Chicago media. We never hear any actual questions. They just intro the piece, mentioning that there are a lot of questions floating around, and then they play a clip of Zook going “Aw, shucks. I don’t know why this is all happening to poor, little ole’ me.” Indeed, Zook and the Illini are putting on a media blitz to defend themselves against some ethereal notion of “questions floating around.” And again, I ask, why so jumpy, Zook?
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