Morning News’s college sports coverage is a disgrace

Too often I get confused reading the sports pages of the Dallas Morning News these days because, if I didn’t know better, I would think I was reading the Bryan Eagle.

For some unknown reason, the idiots running the sports department at the News have assigned a writer (Kate Hairopoulos) to cover Texas A&M sports full time, while the local college team — a team incidentally coached by a basketball legend — is, for all practical purposes ignored.

I can’t remember the last time I picked up a copy of the News when it didn’t run the Southeast Conference basketball standings. Why? The only school in that conference is almost 200 miles outside of Dallas. Yet, try to find an instance when the paper ran the Conference USA standings.

If you’re a regular reader of the Morning News sports section, you probably have no idea what Conference USA is. That’s the conference that SMU plays in. If you’re a regular reader of the Morning News sports section, you probably have no idea what SMU is. That’s a Dallas based university whose basketball team is coached by one Larry Brown, the only basketball coach in history to coach a team to an NCAA championship (at Kansas in 1988) and an NBA championship (the Detroit Pistons in 2004).

Next year SMU will play in what was the Big East Conference, which has a far stronger basketball legacy than the SEC.

Take a look at today’s paper as an example. On Page 8C, the page the News set aside as its college basketball page, Hairopoulos’ story on an absolutely meaningless game between A&M and LSU is spread across all six columns at the top of the page. Presumably, the paper picked up the tab to send her to College Station. Meanwhile, the non-staff written SMU game story (courtesy of the Associated Press) — the school’s final game of the season — begins two lines from the bottom of the page. True, Tulsa, where SMU played, is 50 miles farther from Dallas, than College Station, but that would not have stopped a legitimate sports editor of a Dallas daily from placing a higher coverage priority on SMU-Tulsa than A&M-LSU.

Earlier this season, I attended SMU’s game with Memphis, the only Conference USA team to be in the nation’s Top 25 this season. That game was never even mentioned in the sports pages of the Morning News. Not an "advance" story before the game — played right here in Dallas, for crying out loud — or a game story the next day.

In this day of the Internet and 24-hour cable news and sports, there’s only reason for a newspaper to exist: To cover local news. The News sports department does an admirable job covering the local professional sports teams. It’s way past time to devote that same attention to the local college sports teams.