ap012215@ohio.edu
From the NCAA through the professional leagues, the world of sports is full of scandals.
Many people outside of the sports programs likely only see what their favorite team or favorite player do on the court or field, but the amount of stories that arise from what's seen from television on game day can, depending on the organization, be just as much, if not less than stories that happen off the field.
For an athletic department and its public relations team, that's either a nightmare scenario or a perfect opportunity for the representatives to do their job — spread news and information about the organization to the public.
But fans and a general audience sometimes forget what the job of a PR team is. A PR team wants to spread as much positive news about the sports program as possible, and rarely will PR representatives be the ones who break negative news about a player committing a crime or any other sort of news that could give the program a bad look.
The job of a PR representative has certainly gotten tougher as social media and the daily uses of technology expanded in recent years. These new nuances of communication have made it easier for anyone to find information that could unveil a scandal or other negative news about any popular company.
In sports' recent years, this issue is perhaps at its biggest, and it's growing. So it's important for people to understand the goals of an athletic department's PR team and those within an independent news source.
Some of the strictest PR teams can be found in the NCAA, where many schools are implementing programs to educate its athletes on how to stay out of trouble.
The NCAA's high level of strictness is likely because the athletes whom the department is trying to protect are college kids that are unpaid (except that's not always true and there are likely more scandals within this facet of college sports awaiting to be uncovered) and free. So, the PR team has strict guidelines for independent media outlets in terms of availability. This is apparent even here at Ohio University, where a Sports Information Director must be present at all times when media want to talk with an athlete.
The process of having an SID is just one of many ways the university tries to filter the news that comes out of the athletic department. This isn't necessarily all about bad news — an SID may want to make sure a player isn't spilling news about the university switching multi-million dollar deals with an apparel company — but the NCAAs deepest scandals have also been kept hidden for an incredible amount of time.
Some of the biggest scandals in NCAA history have been kept under wraps for years by some key members in an athletic department. The Penn State scandal of Jerry Sandusky's decades-long child molestation, as well as the more recent scandal of college basketball teams paying athletes to come play for their school, were known by coaches and athletic directors for years.
The uncovering of both of these scandals, both by independent media outlets, forced massive implications in the university and sports world. The two aforementioned scandals led to the firing of arguably the two most successful coaches of the sport in Rick Pitino and Joe Paterno.
So fans and those who follow sports teams shouldn't only follow a team's news page, which is essentially run by the PR team. They should also look at independent media outlets who also follow the team for a more impartial, and often investigative look on the team.
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