Now, come on. Take a deep breath and ask yourself: when and how did Paul Johnson mistreat the national media? A couple of Atlanta radio bobbleheads got dialed up for their cupidity? (I listened to that radio exchange and what I heard were two guys determined to start a fight, even if they had to purposely "not understand" what a recruit's commitment meant. At the end they got their fight and looked kinda stupid as a result.) An AJC reporter who got stiffed by a petty Johnson, but who as a good reporter would, shrugged it off and kept reporting? That's it? A columnist for the AJC did not like him all that much, but did not have that much to do with Georgia Tech, either. Like all columnists everywhere he is paid to have an opinion on everything, including one on that which he knows not.
I thought and wrote that Johnson was needlessly abrupt and sometimes churlish, and for a grown man could act awfully childish, and that part of his contract surely included media relations, so I am not handcuffed to him. I think it was worse toward the end and should have been the tipoff to us that he was looking for the door. So he had some problems sometimes. So what? The professional "media", including an ESPN reporter, and the press covering him at the Naval Academy, generally enjoyed their exchanges as brusque as he might be. If their feelings got hurt they got over it, which is what a professional is paid to do.
So it shakes out to a couple of yowling radioheads looking for conflict by accusing Johnson of breaching some sort of barrier by trying to recruit another school's commitments. Not those who had signed. Those who had committed to sign. You know, the way those schools recruited his commitments, the way it happens nationally. But who got miffed when they could not answer Johnson's simple question of, "If they are talking to me, then how committed are they?"
Maybe he would have been better off had he not finally said he would "repeat it again, real slow, so you can understand it." Maybe. But I am glad he said it.
Now as for Snyder, let's acknowledge he is a legend at Kansas State. One who overstayed his legend.
Say what you will. But we will miss that four-down offense.
