The Bills have some ridiculous rules about media and practice
The Buffalo Bills have enacted a get-tough-on-the-truth media policy that prevents working members from reporting — get this — on things they see with their eyes. Also banned: Things heard with their ears.
Via ESPN’s Mike Rodak, the Bills’ new reporting guidelines appear a bit, um, restrictive:
We imagine a typical story on the Bills’ on-field work this offseason might read as follows:
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You ready for some hot Bills summer action?!
Seriously, this is childish and stupid. Other NFL teams have restrictive policies on reporting schemes and specific plays from practice, and we understand why for some of it. If I am at camp and report that the new rookie wide receiver is running a Statue of Liberty play, well then teams facing them in the regular season might specifically game plan to stop that play. Makes sense to a certain degree.
But here’s one problem: When teams tell media they can’t report something, they are forgetting about a key element — on both sides of the message. The fans. First off, fans suffer on the receiving end because they’re being robbed of information they otherwise hang on during the summer months as they get excited for the season. Now a lot of that excitement has been sapped — although this is the Bills, who have missed the playoffs 16 years running now, we’re talking about.
[More Shutdown Corner: Why do we still care about Johnny Manziel?]
And fans are on the giving end, as well. They’re allowed to attend some of these sessions, and so any of them with a smart phone can take pictures, record video and audio and tweet to their hearts’ content about what went down on the field. That happens, and Twitter is a wild, unruly place for that kind of information. If media members see something unusual or interesting, we can then ask the players or coaches about it, and they can put it in proper context. Now that has been taken away.
The majority of teams are not this overprotective. Not reporting on dropped passes or interceptions? Ridiculous. It’s also pretty telling that turnovers are lumped under the “strategic and tactical information.” A new Bills slogan should be molded around this: “Dropping passes and throwing picks since 1960!” Come on here … We can’t report who is rushing the passer? If last season was any indication, the answer would be no one. And, well, it won’t be Shaq Lawson anytime soon, apparently. Oops, I just talked about an injury.
Seriously, what would happen if all the Bills media, en masse, just decided to ignore the rules? Would they all have their credentials stripped? What if they turned in their badges for a day and sat up in the stands? Could they report freely about the goings-on on the field?
None of this makes sense. The only reason an entity tries to protect the message to this great a degree is because it’s afraid of bad press (example No. 1: the NFL suppressing potentially harmful research about football and head injuries). And if you’re afraid of that, it can’t be a good sign for the team’s chances of ending that embarrassing playoffs-free streak.
One more thing: Head coach Rex Ryan loves to drivel on and on about his team, and this makes the media focus more about him and his words and less about his players’ actions. That’s seldom a good thing. We’ve seen his grip tighten with adding brother Rob to the staff and Rex’s apparent signing off on the Lawson pick in Round 1, despite a preexisting shoulder injury. If anyone is going after this season, it’s GM Doug Whaley and not Ryan.
This is a team that’s supposed to be in win-now mode, but they’re acting like the train is about to run off the tracks. But if it does, you won’t likely hear about it from us. Our lips have been sealed. Your disappointment will just have to wait until the start of the regular season!
So long as they deem it OK to report about the actual games, of course.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm
