Monday, August 08, 2011

Peter Gammons Tweets on Bubba and Bo

Earlier this morning, my Twitter feed blew up with retweets and mentions of Peter Gammons' comment about Bo Pelini and Bubba Starling:
Bo Pellini going off on and threatening Bubba Starling is great news for the Royals.
My reaction is the same as nearly every other member of the Nebraska media corps:  What did I miss? What is Peter Gammons talking about?  Did Gammons receive some sort of scoop?  My initial take is: Probably not.  I think it's likely that Gammons heard part of the story of Starling not being on the Nebraska practice roster, misinterpreted it, maybe got a little misinformation as well, then filtered it through the national filter where the prevailing perception is that Bo Pelini is a raving lunatic

And out on Twitter it went, all with the same amount of cross-checking and validation that he spent on Pelini's last name.  (Only one "L", Peter...) Could Gammons be onto something?  Dirk Chatelain gives it some credence, though Sam McKewon got a denial from Starling's father. I personally don't give it much credence because so often I hear national reporters get stories about Nebraska football wrong, which makes me think this might be the case here if we can't get any further substantiation of it. That doesn't mean Gammons is automatically wrong; he's connected to a different set of sources on the baseball beat and may have gotten a good tip.  Those different sources may have also gotten the report wrong as it went through something similar to the telephone game, where one person tells something to somebody else, who repeats it to another, and before long, the story doesn't resemble the original story at all.

If Gammons report is true, it is a damaging report for both Starling and Pelini. I just don't know how accurate it is until Gammons reveals more than 140 characters of the story. And knowing just how wild the rumor mill gets around these parts (see Taylor Martinez "quitting" after the A&M game), if something really did happen, there would have been rumblings. So barring any further information, I'm putting this one in the unsubstantiated rumor bin.  Maybe Bob Davie's cable guy can make some sense of it.

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