Gary Danielson really doesn’t hate your team at all
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Version 0 of 1. The native Detroiter began roaming the American Southeast nine autumns ago. His job, if you can believe it: to analyze the college football games the locals cherish, and to do so, if you can believe it, on television. So we’ve established that the man is dauntless. Yet as Gary Danielson completes his 10th season on CBS observing and opining on the towering subject of Southeastern Conference football, culminating with Saturday’s league championship between No. 2 Alabama and No. 18 Florida, there’s something else — actually, a whole lot of something else. He has had one keen window upon human nature. [An eight-team College Football Playoff would’ve been perfect this year] For starters, what is it about criticism that stays lodged in the human ear, even when deluged with non-criticism that ought to dislodge it? Danielson has lived this utterly. “I chart everything I do,” he said in an recent interview. “Ten to 12 percent of my broadcast is critical. Part of it’s the officials, part of it is the coaches, part of it is the players. But it’s very cold. Not, ‘He’s a great kid and he’s very . . .’ I don’t have time. ‘Here’s what you should have done, and you didn’t do it.’ That’s the style I try to bring. “It elicits a lot of noise,” six words that foment a laugh. Portions of seemingly all 14 SEC fan bases presume Danielson as anti-them. “I did a Vanderbilt game and all of a sudden they go, ‘You don’t like us either!’” said the former quarterback of 13 NFL seasons. “So, yeah. And I like them all. I know how hard this game is.” Some hear only the 12 percent. “Our mind only registers the slights, basically, and it just stays in.” “If he states an opinion, you can count on the fact that it’s not off the cuff, it’s not off the top of his head, it’s well thought out” said Verne Lundquist, Danielson’s comprehensively excellent broadcast partner. “He didn’t just come to that expression of that position in the last 20 seconds.” While Danielson’s opinions might invoke venom on, say, Twitter, it never happens in person, and there goes another aspect of human nature. “Never,” Danielson said. “Never.” “Never?” “Never. A little bit, they may kid me.” “They’re not mad?” “Never. It’s a part of the herd mentality. When you’re on Twitter, you’re calling into talk shows, you just kind of join the flow, okay?” In person, SEC fans are much more apt to advise, “Don’t listen to that stuff,” and the thing about that is, he doesn’t mind that stuff and, in fact, finds it ideal. Working with Brent Musburger for ABC, he called the 2002 Michigan-Ohio State game, which the Buckeyes won 14-9 on the way to the national title. He says he drove home toward Michigan hearing a few Ohioans on sports-talk radio lament his anti-Buckeye bias, then crossed the line to hear a few Michiganders lament his anti-Wolverine bias. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said. “I can’t try to please both. I don’t think I’m doing my job.” He doesn’t blow into town, eat at the ballyhooed spots and parrot overheard views. He’s rather a studious hermit. “I thought it would be to my advantage to be an outsider, and take a clinical approach to it,” he said. “And I couldn’t find the Grove” — the legendary tailgate spot — “if you dropped me off at Ole Miss right now, and I really have no desire to see it. You know, it really is like the way I played. It’s all Xs and Os. “You know how a surgeon covers up everything on the patient and really just concentrates on the area? That’s what I try to do. I try to block out, you know, not the history but more the intensity and the surroundings . . . and, ‘You’ve got to visit this Dreamland [the famous rib joint in Tuscaloosa, Ala.],’ and, ‘You’ve got to do this.’ I come in, I watch practice, I watch game tapes, I might go to Panera. I really don’t really get involved in that stuff” — a pause, for emphasis — “on purpose.” Coaches sometimes try to befriend him, “and I try to be very standoffish on that,” he said. On a recent Thursday in Oxford, Miss., he and Lundquist met with Ole Miss coaches, whereupon Danielson tried to peg the technical contrasts between Coach Hugh Freeze’s offense there and Gus Malzahn’s offense at Auburn. Said Lundquist, “The depth of his questions and the security he brings to the conversation are pretty compelling.” Added Lundquist: “He can tell you who’s got the best room service. But tonight he’s not going to do this because we’re in the TownePlace Suites with no restaurant. My guess is there’s going to be a call to Domino’s Pizza.” Also said Lundquist: “He feels uncomfortable if he’s not with his notes.” That brings us to another facet of human nature, the enduring power of memories from ages 18 to 22. Danielson thinks that helps college football bulldoze Americans’ general disinterest in minor leagues. He also views it from the harder side, which might help explain his studiousness. To this day, he yearns to play in a Rose Bowl, a chance that flickered, then vanished, in Purdue’s cruel, 9-6 loss at Michigan on Nov. 18, 1972. To this day, he would take a Rose Bowl over a Super Bowl. “I’d love to have another chance at college football,” said the quarterback who spent nine professional seasons in Detroit and four in Cleveland. “All the stuff that happened, ever, the biggest regret is my playing. You know, I had a lot of teammates, and you realize now, that they’re all dependent on how you play, and I didn’t study hard enough. “You know, it’s the first time away from home. I wasn’t as committed as I was later in my career. That’s hard. That’s hard to face up to that.” Fortunately, in his teen years, his parents, Daniel and Virginia, insisted upon his participation in dinner-table conversation. “I think it’s the way the world was then,” said Danielson, a man born in 1951. “We weren’t as dominated by TV. My father was a shop steward, a union steward. They had strong beliefs about how people should be involved, how the world worked. And my mom, until she passed away, I used to go, ‘Mom, there’s not an argument you don’t like.’ She would dive right in. My mom and dad didn’t get mad at each other, but I can see my uncles, oh my God.” All the gab proved invaluable, remains so. Of course, we all mingle more. From Purdue circa 1970, the SEC seemed some distant kingdom. “But I think all of that has melted a little bit,” he said. “You can still hear the dialects, but we all listen to the same shows now. A lot of the shows are national now. We all kind of share the same stuff more than we used to.” A Detroiter has interloped in the SEC until, 10 years on, he’s not interloping anymore, in a world intermingled. The 10 years have bolstered another thought about humanity. “People are inherently good,” Gary Danielson said, “and we spend too much time thinking about the aberrations.” More college football: Playoff scenarios: Ohio State, Stanford have long-shot chances Terps introduce D.J. Durkin as head coach Durkin impressed two of college football’s biggest stars. Now he’ll oppose them. |