There’s outrage from Buffs fans about the John Henderson article in Sunday’s Denver Post about player conduct, and while I’m not surprised, I can’t say the anger is justified. Here’s my take on the situation, as a University of Northern Colorado journalism graduate and an outsider looking in at the CU football team:
Buffs fans are accusing Henderson of being unfare and misrepresenting the program. In Henderson’s lede, he simply points out that last year the Buffs got into a bunch of legal trouble and that without a bowl game to play in this year it doesn’t help the possible problem the program is facing with player conduct. No harm there.
Yes, the article was published close to national signing day, but the Denver Post doesn’t care about its affect on CU’s recruiting, or any other program’s for that matter. The article was printed a year after the first arrests were made following last season and it was timely.
It appears there may have been some factual errors in the story, which is of grave concern. Any time an article isn’t entirely factual it deserves to be questioned. But saying a player wasn’t enrolled in classes during the fall semester when he actually was enrolled isn’t the most agregious of errors. It was poor and lazy journalism, but let’s not hang Henderson in efogy.
I will agree with Buffs fans, however, who say the article should not have been written by Henderson. The Post has a CU beat writer and Henderson isn’t that person. This story was clearly an article to be written by a beat writer. Hopefully a beat writer wouldn’t have made any factual errors and he hopefully would have pointed out that Bernard Jackson and Lionel Harris weren’t actually on the team when they were arrested last June. That said, they were just a few months removed from being Buffs and in the eyes of the media they were still connected to the football program.
My advice to Buffs fans: Lighten up. The article is more about Dan Hawkins’ efforts to clean up the program than anything else, and that can only be a good thing.
