2020 Media Coverage Thread

[AZCatGirl]

CBS national news just reported that Rob Gronkowski just caught the world record football at Arizona State. Sigh.

Gronk should sue for defamation.

[TheCatInTheHat]

Nice...and very true!

[Chicat]

I won’t usually do this (posting the whole article from a subscription service) but this article from The Athletic was cool.

Rob Gronkowski, a helicopter and world record attention for Arizona Football from Buccaneers tight end

Add another wild resume line to fall into Rob Gronkowski’s hands: obscure world record holder.

The Buccaneers tight end and newly re-crowned Super Bowl champ was back at his alma mater, Arizona, last weekend, to be inducted into the football program’s Ring of Honor and serve as honorary captain for the first spring game under new coach Jedd Fisch.

As if having the future Pro Football Hall of Famer back on campus wasn’t enough to draw extra attention to the Wildcats program, Arizona added to the fun by having Gronkowski attempt to set a world record for the “highest football pass caught,” renting a helicopter to fly more than 600 feet above their stadium and hiring a video production company to chronicle the incredible drop.

“One of their big things was Guinness records,” Fisch said to reporters after Saturday’s game. “They’ve done many, a few with Cam (Newton), and we came up with the idea of how about the highest altitude catch? From 563 feet is what it was, and it’s now 620 feet by Rob Gronkowski. I’m hopeful that every high school player in America wants to come here, and if we get every good high school football player in America that wants to be an Arizona Wildcat, it will benefit our program and we’ll start winning a lot of games.”

A two-minute video shows Gronkowski, wearing a Wildcats helmet and his old No. 48 jersey, being introduced to the current Arizona team on the field. Players watched with cellphones recording as Gronkowski caught the ball, made his signature Gronk Spike and was mobbed by the team at midfield.

“Every time you step on the field, you’ve got to raise that bar to another level, baby, and I just raised that bar to this level,” Gronkowski tells the players before breaking the huddle with the program’s signature “Bear Down” on three.

It started with Liquid Light, a West Hollywood company that has worked with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and comedian/actor Kevin Hart, as well as Newton, who set a handful of world records in a YouTube video shoot at the Panthers’ stadium in Charlotte in 2019.

Newton threw passes to help YouTube personality MrBeast and his crew set records for the longest between-the-legs football catch (39 yards) and farthest moving blindfolded football catch (24 yards), and Newton himself set another record with 51 one-handed football catches in a minute. The highest-catch record was attempted, but they couldn’t pull it off, with high winds making a difficult challenge impossible.

“There’s a world record that evaded us,” said Mo Darwiche, Liquid Light’s chief executive officer. “We tried it at Panthers Stadium and failed. It was so windy. There are so many factors when you’re that high in the air. The ball starts like a pinprick and you’ve got to track it down on the field, and the wind’s taking it left, right, wherever.”

The “stunt catch” craze of prominent athletes attempting to reel in balls dropped from ridiculous heights goes back some 135 years.

Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin has an amazing history of it in his 2013 book “The 34-Ton Bat,” which notes that when the Washington Monument was completed in 1885, visiting baseball players were challenged to catch a ball dropped from the top of the obelisk. From a height of 555 feet — slightly less than Gronkowski’s drop — one ball broke two fingers on the bare hand of Nationals catcher Phil Baker.

Rushin wrote that another baseball caught from the Monument in 1908 was measured as traveling 135 feet per second, about 92 miles per hour. That phenomenon literally escalated to baseballs being dropped from planes, though White Sox catcher Billy Sullivan, who had caught three balls from the monument, declined a chance to attempt to catch some dropped 1,000 feet from a plane. He said he “might as well try to stop a bullet as to be on the receiving end of one whizzing from an aeroplane,” Rushin wrote. In 1926, even Babe Ruth got in on the fun, catching balls on Long Island dropped 300 feet from a biplane.

In 1938, Indians catcher Hank Helf caught a baseball dropped 708 feet from the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, at a reported speed of 138 miles per hour. “They looked like aspirin tablets coming down,” he said in Rushin’s book. “We were dumb enough to think it wasn’t dangerous.”

One of the go-to sources for trick-shot sports challenges are the folks at Dude Perfect, whose wildly popular viral videos include a 2017 shoot at TCU in 2017, where they chased 14 football-related Guinness records. Among them was the highest catch, with a helicopter over the stadium dropping a football that was caught by Tyler Toney for what was then a world record, approved by an official adjudicator in attendance.

The Liquid Light folks had broken some of Dude Perfect’s records in Charlotte, but the highest-catch one had eluded them until Saturday in Tucson. How high is 600 feet? The tallest building in Tampa, known as 100 North Tampa, is just 579 feet, and the tallest building in Arizona is the Chase Tower in Phoenix, just 483 feet.

Measuring the height of a pop fly in baseball is easier with today’s technology, but Ted Williams is said to have hit a legendary pop fly in 1941 that was estimated at 172 meters, which works out to 564 feet, close to the old football record. How high can a punted football go? It made headlines in 2009 when footballs punted in the course of play hit the gigantic video boards in the middle of the Cowboys’ stadium, and those are hung just 90 feet over the field (five feet higher than the NFL requirement), so this Gronk drop is six times higher than that.

How fast might a football dropped from 600 feet be traveling? We asked Charles Wolgemuth, a professor of physics at the University of Arizona since 2012 and director of undergraduate studies in the College of Science. In calculating the acceleration due to gravity, an object’s speed increases at a rate of 9.8 meters per second, but that’s mitigated by air resistance, which is more difficult to calculate.

“The terminal velocity is the velocity at which the resistive force from the air is equal to the gravitational force,” Wolgemuth said Monday. “When they equal one another, the net force on the ball is going to be zero. One of the biggest factors is actually the cross-sectional area of the object. Aerodynamics plays a role, too. Is this a sphere? Or something more like a raindrop? You can definitely approximate that terminal velocity that it reaches.”

Baseball pitches and home runs (with exit velocities) are constantly measured in miles per hour, exceeding 100 at times, but footballs are rarely measured as such. With a larger ball, passes are rarely faster than 60 miles per hour, and a kicker’s foot is traveling as much as 49 miles per hour when it makes contact with a football. Former Broncos receiver Rod Smith said he would practice for John Elway’s strong arm by catching passes thrown from a JUGS machine set at 70 miles per hour. Darwiche said their nonscientific research of the dropped balls had shown it “basically comes out to the equivalent of a really, really fast JUGS machine.”

[Chicat]

continued:

How did Fisch find a Hollywood viral-video company to help promote his football program? Fisch is friends with WME agent Brad Slater, a 1996 Arizona grad who has Johnson among his clients. He also represents boxer Ryan Garcia, and Liquid Light had handled Garcia’s YouTube channel, winning a 2020 “Streamy” award for sports channel of the year. Scott Stuber, Netflix’s head of original films and another Arizona grad, also helped bring them together.

Arizona football could use a bit of rebranding, having gone 0-5 last season to extend a 12-game losing streak, their last game a 70-7 loss to rival Arizona State, leading to the firing of Kevin Sumlin and the arrival of Fisch. To maximize the national exposure, Darwiche sought to take the celebrity status of Gronkowski, who caught 16 touchdown passes in his 22 games at Arizona and had already committed to serve as a guest coach for the spring game along with another former Arizona and NFL star, Tedy Bruschi.

The initial pitch was for Gronkowski to be much less actively involved in the record.

“We’re like ‘Hey, Gronk, do you want to do this? Maybe we’ll put you in the helicopter, you can drop it a player on the team!’ Darwiche said. “He’s like ‘Hell, no. I’m catching this goddamn ball. This is going to be my last official catch for the University of Arizona.'”

They priced out helicopters and paid about $5,000 for the use of one, going out early to test the range of the drops, aiming for the logo on the 50-yard line but seeing the ball actually land on either 40. Fisch initially wanted to do the stunt at halftime, with a crowd in the stands, but Darwiche said he “axed that,” fearing a gust of wind has the ball veer into the crowd and hit someone.

Gronkowski showed up expecting just a film crew on the field, not the entire Arizona football team.

“He comes out, says ‘This is about as nerve-wracking as the Super Bowl was,'” Darwiche said. “It was crazy. He was super nervous. Bruschi’s out there as well.”

With the cameras rolling, with an entire team of players holding up their phones to record, Gronkowski couldn’t track down the first drop, just out of reach, and he got his hands on the second. Did Gronkowski check with the Bucs first to get the green light? That’s unclear, and moot now, but did allow for a few uneasy moments, though Darwiche called it “a really safe situation for everybody involved.”

“Rob had to be careful,” he said. “I was afraid maybe he might jam a finger or something like that. The second attempt, where it hit his fingers, it made me a little nervous. Bruschi shouts at him ‘Use your body, you idiot!’ and he kind of cradled it with his body on the catch, used his chest protector.”

He caught the third drop cleanly, but he had plenty more opportunities if he needed them. The production company had 15 balls in the helicopter just in case, with a family friend of the Gronkowskis and Arizona alum, Donnie Salum, aboard and tasked with dropping them with a bit of spin.

Guinness World Records said through a spokesperson that because they did not have an official adjudicator on hand to verify the record, they “are currently awaiting evidence to review” before awarding the record to Gronkowski. Liquid Light recorded everything and will be posting longer behind-the-scenes videos of how they pulled off the drop, but they’ve already accomplished their original goal for the Wildcats.

“It was exactly what we were planning to do: How do we put the University of Arizona and their program and what they’re doing on the map in a big way?” Darwiche asked. “Sometimes you have to do these stunts for people to pay attention. What they’re saying on SportsCenter was ‘When Gronk was at his alma mater to coach the spring game, he broke a world record.’ This is why Jedd Fisch is brilliant. His team is already top 10 on SportsCenter, and hopefully this is not the last time they’re in the top 10 this season.”

[TheCatInTheHat]

I'm basing this purely on a Hansen comment some people might have missed, so anybody can feel free to fact-check away. Apparently Justin Spears of Tucson's Star newspaper will re-start a sports call-in/interview show on 1490 this afternoon from 3 to 6. This has typically consisted of him having segments with beat reporters like Lev and Pascoe, maybe Hansen, and fawning over his boss, who I'll charitably say tends to come off as somewhat self-absorbed. An additional option like that is always good news for a button-puncher like me. More competition theoretically should improve everybody's quality, but there are only so many people to talk to on the limited topics of local interest, so we'll see if the same handful of people tend to rotate being interviewed on the three stations. And, Tucson being Tucson, rather than having a feast of options, in a crowded field, somebody usually takes their ball, drops out, and goes home. It would be nice if somebody would commit to a decent scores and sportstalk show in the morning, rather than having three going head-to-head in the afternoon. It's interesting that Hansen mentioned that the competition in that time slot is former Citizen writer Steve Rivera and former Star writer Jay Gonzales from 3-5 on 1450, but he didn't mention Rich Herrera from 3-6 on the UArizona flagship station, 1290. So there...take that...courtesy of Captain Pequeno Pistola.

[TheCatInTheHat]

If anybody noticed that Rich Herrera has been off the air concurrent with the new show on 1490, he tweeted out an explanation. Sadly, his mother passed away, right before Mother's Day, and he's spending some time with his family. We've lost some folks in our family over the last several months, so very sincere condolences.

[TheCatInTheHat]

The fat ugly guy at the Republic has been flailing away with his hate propaganda for awhile now, so I'm finally getting around to responding. My reaction has been about at the level of an adult walking down a hallway of a middle school and overhearing lower-level pizza-faced kids ragging on each other. Stupid and pathetic, but nobody's likely to get through to them anyway, and it's not worth the time to intercede for their benefit. Just more unfortunate scenery you pass by on the way to something more important. But my analysis of why anybody would dig through twitter or comb blogs and relatively obscure web site postings to find opinion mud to put in what is purported to be a sports section dedicated to one of the two major college sports programs in the state is three-fold. First is the sad state of local newspapers and the pretty demonstrably ineffective and tired approach of desperately stirring the pot to get more views; doesn't work. Second is the sub-juvenile appeal to fans of the world's largest on-line community college in Tempe; someone should explain that they don't read. Third is the real motivation: frustration. Look at the roster of coaches and teams (at least in sports anybody cares about) at each school. For ASU, their "eras" are all overripe, while at Arizona, there's excitement, or at least positive publicity. The Pac-12 football season was a victim of COVID. Ours sucked more than others, but we're re-booting, and one lop-sided score in an asterisk year doesn't mean much. Otherwise, I think we'd take the overall result for the academic year in every other sport (minus our self-inflicted hoops penalty.) So, they're down to rooting against us in baseball, and hoping that Edwards can do more with the usual over-hype than spout his odd "Herm-isms" and go to something like the Sun Bowl that nobody cares about.

[TheCatInTheHat]

So the Cats won the conference automatic bid (the de facto championship) last week by winning the series at Oregon State. A couple of days ago, they won it outright when Oregon lost to Cal. Then, they celebrated it last night after winning the last game of the regular season. Lots of chances to put some mention of it in the Republic, where it's "all the news that's fit to print, unless it hurts our feelings." Meanwhile, at a critical time for post-season seeding, ASU rose to the occasion by going down in flames at home to UCLA, getting swept by the Bruins. Somebody will probably point out the "oversight" by the unhappy little editor with the red stapler, and they'll throw in a "by the way" paragraph or something. But just don't expect to see anything resembling balanced and straight-forward reality there.

[TheCatInTheHat]

Pretty minimalist coverage of the latest ASU recruiting violation charges in the Republic so far. I mean, that's the third biggest sports story in Phoenix this year (I'll give the Suns season to date and firing Smith priority over it.) Statewide, you'd have to add the tournament runs by Adia, Candrea, and JJ's teams and our basketball and softball coaching turnover, but it's still way up there. And, depending on how it turns out, it could really start climbing the charts over some of those stories. Go figure. You'd think they'd have their sports department mobilized to opine about it, since they like to weigh in on so many other things, and they could certainly go gather quotes from out-of-market experts, or even do man-on-the-street interviews. I guess for some things, the source of truth in Maricopa County gets out the wisk broom a and sweeps the crumbs under the coffee table rug.

[Chicat]

Can Hansen talk to his buddy “Look” about what’s going on at ASSU?

[azgreg]

[TheCatInTheHat]

I'll give Kent Somers full credit for his bit today in the Republic. But, I don't expect the usual ASU butt-sniffers on that beat to do anything more than repeat the ASU narrative. And tone-deaf ASU bleats out their self-serving narrative in a manner that most self-respecting institutions would be embarrassed to engage in.

[TheCatInTheHat]

Speaking of ASU butt-sniffers, obsessed red stapler guy at the Republic finally wrote something on the ASU recruiting violations. As you might expect, it wasn't exactly something to make Edward R. Murrow proud. With a major scandal in his own backyard, the guy just sat around sucking on his juice box while listening to a mediocre network radio sportstalk show. Then he repeated the unsupported rank speculation by the host (who studied football at USC, not journalism), because it falls in line with his own narrative and delusions. So let's name the alleged leaker, because the main thing should be about being angry at the leak, not the (so typical throughout ASU history) rampant disregard for rules and ethics, which would result in a wholesale housecleaning at any decent institution. And then cling to the "oh, it's really just a minor scheduling mistake that's being blown out of proportion." Well, they'd be the ones to know all about blowing things in whatever proportion they choose. So they'll screw their eyes shut and hang on for dear life with their fingernails and toenails, because their hype machine said they might be "pretty good" this coming season. (Which in real world terms means maybe the sixth or seventh best team in the conference.) The truly important thing is to not spoil that big post-season trip to El Paso.

[UAEebs86]

So let's name the alleged leaker, because the main thing should be about being angry at the leak, not the (so typical throughout ASU history) rampant disregard for rules and ethics, which would result in a wholesale housecleaning at any decent institution.

Gee, I wonder where they learned that behavior from?

[TheCatInTheHat]

As the most penalized school in NCAA history, covering 5 or 6 sports and dating to the 1950s, I'd say they're pretty much self-taught and anybody else would look like a piker compared to them.

[TheCatInTheHat]

Hansen missed one in today's Sunday Follies. He listed ASU's NCAA violations, which by his tally puts them one behind SMU. His starts in 1954 with paying impermissible expenses to recruits. But, in 1952, NFL HOF player John Henry Johnson played one semester at ASU. He was paid the equivalent of about $50K in today's money for doing so, and they got busted for that, too. There's a whole correspondence between Pop McKale and the NCAA in Special Collections on that topic. So, they've achieved a tie for top "honors," even before the Herm Edwards thing gets adjudicated. Yeah, we've gotten busted for malfeasance from the Warren Woodson and Tony Mason days, and some other picayune stuff, along with however you want to characterize the latest FBI dog-and-pony show designed to distract from their own highly questionable imbroglios of recent years. But 10 (soon 11?) is still more than 3 (of any consequence.)

[TheCatInTheHat]

My response to Republic red stapler guy (loved him in Dodgeball) is to have more taste than to mention some poor old guy with sadly misplaced priorities, and just remind him of the phrase: "No Pity From The Committee." Meanwhile, based on the Creighton precedent, we may be in relatively good shape in hoops. That is all.