I no longer read Heather Dinich's blog with any regularity. I don't find her writing to be insightful or analytical. She breaks no news. In no way do her words better my understanding of the game of football. The user commentary on each post is usually a flame war set off by subject matter written to troll for page views. Sometimes her name is attached to the byline of useful posts, but that information is either regurgitated from elsewhere on ESPN.com, part of a release, or quotes from an interview or media session. Anything relevant to Virginia Tech football or the ACC I can get, and get it better, from hundreds of other places on the Internet. Unfortunately Dinich is unavoidable. She stands on ESPN's pulpit and has a hand delivered national audience.
Here's how I usually succumb to reading one of her posts.
/checks Twitter
//lots of unhappy Hokies retweeting @ESPN_ACC
///clicks link
No one has ever tweeted, emailed or Gchated me a link to a post of hers that they endorse. Nope, the only time she pops up on my radar is when she blogs something outrageous. And I bet this holds true across the board for the rest of the fans in the ACC.
There's some sort of "coaches we love to hate" theme happening on the ESPN college football blogs. Dinich's contribution was "Hatin' on the Hokies". Best I can tell, her point is "fans" (both ACC and Hokies) "hate" the notion that Frank Beamer hasn't won on the biggest stage—a national championship. It makes very little sense to me. If I was a fan at another ACC school I would never want Virginia Tech to win the national championship. It's the only barb left to spit at a team who has dominated the league. As a Hokie I personally appreciate everything Frank Beamer has done for Virginia Tech football. Not only that, but I'm happy to be along for the ride to the top. I'm glad I don't have to care about and cite some championship that was won by a coach I didn't know 20 years prior to being born. Without Frank Beamer, Tech wouldn't be frequently mentioned as a logical expansion target for the SEC. We'd be some middle-tier school the ACC would backfill with. I love Frank Beamer, and I've never met a Hokie who doesn't.
Until now curiosity has gotten the best of me. What dumb shit did she write now? Today I'm kicking the habit.
Comments
A-fucking-men
I think we all know my opinion on HD, but...
"ACC fans outside of Blacksburg are tired of the Hokies’ missed opportunities. They’re ready for someone -- anyone -- else to represent the ACC on the big stage and win a BCS bowl."
Really? They got their chance with Clemson in the Orange Bowl last year, and we all know how that ended. You're welcome, Heather, for winning football games and giving your mediocre ACC coverage some importance. I just wish you took the opportunity to act as an ambassador for the ACC instead of an attacker.
Heather Dinich's coverage of the ACC, and especially of its most successful team as of late - Virginia Tech, is hollow and uninteresting. I, too, don't read her blog unless someone brings a post to my attention. Heather Dinich is quite simply not worth my time... and if presented the opportunity in a fuck/marry/kill game, my choice is clear (or at least it will be as soon as I can change my twitter bio back).
That is what I found to be so completely idiotic about the post. She talks about how much everyone hates that the Hokies keep winning and getting the shot at the big games but she completely glosses over the fact that every other ACC has essentially fallen flat on their face in big games also. She specifically pointed out VT's loss to Stanford in the 2011 Orange Bowl, score and all, but didn't both mentioning how Clemson did this past year.
Her only saving grace is that her opinions are so dumb and poorly supported that it drives site traffic through the flame wars and everyone posting about her lack of intelligence.
Gummi bears, bouncing here and there and everywhere! High adventures that are beyond compare, we are the Gummi Bears!
Don't eat us Heather. If we have to go, it shouldn't be in the teeth of an untalented lardbrain.
Thank you for the forum
PapaGummi
Isn't ESPN doing a "hating on coaches" feature. I'm not a Dinich fan but I think this is part of bigger schtick
This has become ESPN's schtick in general, e.g. the douche that is Skip Bayless disagreeing with every point of any person that he is "debating" with that day. Any real story is broken by yahoo! or some other source and then repeated by ESPN. Growing up I loved nothing more than watching Sports Center and almost anything on ESPN, but now it just annoys me how much they just make stories up for attention. I support boycotting HD and ESPN as a whole.
ESPN has become the king of trolls, like a really big version of the lame weekend sports radio guy who brings up "the best player not in the hall of fame" discussion because he is desperate for callers. Very few are good analysts anymore.
My favorite color guy was, is, and will be Bill Curry. Great X's and O's, and the appropriate balance of gravitas and perspective. It is brutal to watch all the analysts trying to work their schtick so they can be the next star rather than actually analyze.
A...Fuckin...men.
?
Heather who? She must be that intern that they have allowed the last few years to poorly write articles about the ACC. I have always wondered if her scratch notes are wrote in crayon because I am pretty sure that my 5 year old can make better points and come up with better ideas to write about. Every other article is about how everyone hates the Hokies. Really? NEWSFLASH!!! Everyone always hates on a team that dominates more then others in a league. Her predictions are laughable at best and lack any type of stats or knowledge to back them. Anyone else ever notice she always goes with the popular pick?
GOD DAMMIT I HATE THAT BITCH
I have not read her stupid blog for some time now, nor have I read this article. Just by the description I can say it will make me want to put my fist through her skull. I have hate tweeted her so many times that I've been blocked by #1 Jacory fan herself. Fuck the fucking fucker.
Duke.
Duke, y'all. HD's sleeper team of the ACC. Then. Now. Always.
hahahaha
always.
Duke as a sleeper team predicted by Heather Dinich. In other news, Jerome Bettis is from Detroit, OJ did it, Kate Mara will not make out with me, and Sarah Jessica Parker uses a quarter horse named Milly as her stunt double.
HD is an idiot
IMO, the only reason she writes such crap is to run up her link count. The more folks clicks on the links to her 'stories,' the more she justifies keeping her job at ESPN. We all need to stop clicking on any links to anything she writes. That is all.
True story.
ESPN
just needs to show sports and nothing else. All their analysis and commentary is just crap. And Chris Berman is the absolute worst. Wouldn't mind if he got stuck in a well so we didn't have to hear all his stupid cliche nicknames for every single football player during the MNF halftime. Curtis "my favorite" Martin... Jake "daylight come and you gotta" Delhomme.... AJ "touchy" Feely... Sammy "say it ain't" Sosa... CC "splish splash, I was taking a" Sabathia...
Terrible.
Whoa whoa whoa
It's not just that ESPN is doing a series on hating coaches, it's that they're going through every significant coach in the major conferences. HD's done a couple of stories on the topic already and while they're not that great, there's no bias against Tech or Beamer. Here's the article about Jimbo Fischer http://espn.go.com/blog/acc/post/_/id/39239/meet-the-accs-coaching-villain and here's one on past coaches http://espn.go.com/blog/acc/post/_/id/39290/leaving-in-a-lurch-acc
That's the problem with critiquing a story when you don't regularly read the source, you have no context. In fact in this particular article, she opens by saying there's no way to hate Beamer. I got the impression that she was fully aware that this was a reach and was writing it just to keep with the theme that her bosses gave her not to actually attack Beamer.
I don't love HD, but she keeps me on top of stories throughout the non-Virginia Tech portions of the ACC and I generally think her writing is unbiased and relatively complete, though obviously not without flaws.
Thank you. This is what I was saying above. They are doing a bit where they "hate on" different coaches. They are not singling out frank. Again, I am not a big fan of espn in general these days but people need to calm down here. Lol
I thought this was cut and dry.
There's some sort of "coaches we love to hate" theme happening on the ESPN college football blogs.
I never said there was a bias against Tech, or Dinich hated Beamer.
Best I can tell, her point is "fans" (both ACC and Hokies) "hate" the notion that Frank Beamer hasn't won on the biggest stage—a national championship.
The points I tried to make were: her post was stupid, she adds nothing of original substance to the coverage of the ACC and Virginia Tech, I will no longer read any of her work.
She's documented (complained about) how much she doesn't like covering a nationally relevant conference and it to me she was the "fans" in this piece and was lashing out.
Well, in general we agree this is just a dumb article. The whole bit is stupid. ESPN can't have dead air, they've created their own enemy in that people want continuous content from them, even if the content is total crap.
As for the particular piece, I just don't care. They were supposed to come up with reasons why a coach would be hated so they did. A lot of what she said is true in terms of not winning big games, but to think that people "hate" Beamer for that is dumb. VT fans might be frustrated and other fans might talk crap, but I don't think they go so far as hating Beamer for that. Holier than thous at UVA and UNC might hate Beamer because he leads a school to victory over them and they can't fathom how a bunch of poor rednecks that are a lower class of people could have something better than they do. After all, daddy's money should be able to buy a better toy, right? So then Beamer must be dirty and a man of poor character and they use that logic to hate on him. But, in honesty, I actually kinda liked the article because at the beginning they noted how Beamer was a good guy who is hard to hate. Suck on that blue bloods.
But in general, the whole series is dumb and just a bunch of filler.
No disagreement from me. My main question is
WHY DO WE NEED FILLER DURING THE SEASON?!?!?!
THIS
"I'm glad I don't have to care about and cite some championship that was won by a coach I didn't know 20 years prior to being born."
The only good addition to ESPN since Pardon the Interuption was the 30 for 30 series, and even those have duds (Raiders.) Since then, the quality of their coverage of college football, college basketball, and baseball has gone downhill. Their NFL coverage is overkill (mostly to justify the enormous number of analysts they have) and caters to the casual fan. Even the shows that used to be interesting (the Hoge/Jaws/Kolber film study) or could be interesting (Gruden QB film study) have become schtick. Bayless, Stephen A, Woody Paige. Brutal.
And, no hockey, and no fishing. Bastards.
THIS
No more hockey coverage. Used to be the only place you could watch the NHL, then the strike, then no more NHL coverage. For the longest time, couldn't watch hockey because my family only had basic cable (and I was too young to go sports bars).
Penn State fan friend hates her also
A PSU friend of mine took me to the Nebraska game this year. Somehow in one of our conversations about the Hokies I mentioned HD. He went off about how she used to cover PSU and how terrible she was siding with the "Joe must go" crowd. This was of course before all the Uncle Jerry shiz went down. I think his point was she has no reporting skills and runs with a few minority viewpoints and tries to make it her own.
Hate on her all you want
but she is nowhere near the worst that ESPN employs for their blog network. As a diehard Denver Broncos fan, I mistakenly ventured onto the AFC West blog. There, I found the worst sports writer in history, Bill Williamson. He makes HD look like Nobel Prize winner by comparison. I won't defend her, but just know that we could do worse.
Uh oh.....is HD copying others' work?
I bought Chris Colston's Hokie Football Annual and was enjoying reading it last night. One of his stories feature Frank Beamer and much to my surprise, portions of it mirrors what HD wrote in her blog. Check it out if you have a copy and see what you think: pages 17-18. Could HD be guilty of plagiarism?!?!
BTW, Chris's book is great!!
perhaps Dinich is consulting for TechSideline then
Havent read her in years, havent clicked on espn.com in years (except when you post stuff here joe lol) and ive found i get upset about the sports media much less often. Like it says above there are literally hundreds of places to get sports info these days. You have to watch the channels though, they have such a high percentage of games its unavoidable as a sports fan. But yeah you guys are right the analysis across the board has been going downhill for years, smacks of bias, and in many cases borders on obsession (Farve, Lebron, Tebow anyone?).
I think Mrs. BCH said it best last winter while we watched teary eyed Herbie trash our program and the fact that we got the Sugar Bowl selection just because of our fanbase while simultaneously pounding the drum that Michigan should get in because of their fanbase; "Fuck you Herbstreit!"
Unfollow @ESPN_ACC
Hokies and ACC fans, Bad press is still good press. If ACC fans continue to follow, click and comment what HD writes, then she will continue to be the ACC rep writer. To execs, hating on HD is just as good as praising. If you want a change, unfollow @ESPN_ACC and don't click or comment. If her site goes dead, maybe we can get that Matt Fortuna guy. He seemed to have a clue.
Why Joe?
Why did you post this? You have now wasted our time with 28, no, 29 comments on this miserable topic. Gaaa, I fell for it too.
The good news: The Giraffe seems to have been removed from the ACC Blog on ESPN.com
The bad news: She now seems to be their "expert" on the College Football Playoffs and where things stand with that process....so if things weren't confusing enough for you, now you have to translate Dinich's take on the CFB (or go anywhere else that publishes CFB news and avoid the nonsense.
How in the world she got that gig i'll never know....ugh..i cannot stand that woman...
Blows my mind that blowhard got herself a goddamn promotion at ESPN from blogger to legitimate reporter. It was clear to everyone who read her that she legitimately despised covering the ACC, and that attitude ran rampant throughout everything she ever wrote. It wasn't just that she trashed VT, she trashed EVERYONE in every article she ever wrote. Every compliment was met with a swift backhand to bring you back down. Every praise was tempered with a couple points to point how how a school still sucked.
Case in point, she went out of her way this week in her post-weekend writeup to trash the ACC, even when the conference won all of its out of conference games. I'm glad she no longer is our beat writer on the Mothership, but I would have been much happier if they had just fired her. Unfortunately her all-around bitchiness seems to fit in perfectly with ESPN's culture shift over the past 10 years or so.
Yeah, there's been some flux in the ESPN blogosphere lately. I didn't hate covering the ACC as a whole, just teams north of Florida. And now I get to cover
my favoritethe best teams from the ACC with none of the fluff, since obviously FSU is the only real Playoff contender the ACC has right now, and Miami will be up there next year, count on it. Best of both worlds.I don't know this Heather Dinich person that you speak of...or this ESPN thing people keep bringing up. What is that an acronym for?
Heather Dinich............Never liked her.
Has anyone noticed how much weight she has put on?
I mean, I got that you were referencing the picture. lol
Maybe Joe needed someone to hold him accountable, like the person who tells others he's stopped swearing or drinking soda.
ESPN is for casual fans and folks that are more interested in the personalities (both of the analysts and the athletes) than the sport. It is the TMZ of sports. Not interested.
Actually, the internet and cable overall have flooded us with so much content that a portion of it is just going to be shitty. It is up to us to filter that out to ensure it doesn't annoy us hourly. Keeping my TV off of ESPN when there's not a game on and almost never going to their sites are two ways I do exactly that.
Initially I didn't see that this was a very old post, and I was thoroughly baffled by the first comment, like "..but Clemson beat Ohio State in the Orange Bowl..?"
Yeah I didn't want to waste another entire post on that little piece of information. There are already too many links with her name on it anyway.