The Fort Worth/Dallas Star-Telegram has decided to decrease its coverage of Texas Tech football to only game stories because football coach Mike Leach has limited media access to only two of his players.

I don't blame the Star-Telegram for what it did. Covering a team encompasses covering an entire team, not two spokesmen that a coach singles out.

Others will argue that this forces sports journalists to be journalists. But this is not making them journalists; it is making them play-by-play men and if you want play-by-play, watch the game or listen to it on radio.

Sports journalism has changed since the days when Grantland Rice would poetically write about the Four Horsemen. If that approach was still popular, Keith Jackson's mumbling would be confused with poetic speech. The age of ESPN and the Internet allows fans to get up-to-the-minute facts. A newspaper must tell the story behind the story, and talking to players is a major avenue in doing so.

By having quarterback Cody Hodges and defensive back Khalid Naziruddin play Penn to the rest of the team's Teller, Leach is building a wall of boring not only between the team and the media but also the team and the fans.

Sports is all about personalities, and that's what Leach forgets. If I wanted to see mute players rumble on the field, I would hook up electric football and play card baseball until the wee hours of the morning.

What happens if one of Leach's players who is on the mum list raises his draft status greatly this year and gets selected in the first round? Cameras flashing, questions being zipped left and right — the player will be less coherent than Fenster from "The Usual Suspects."

The Star-Telegram is really sticking its neck out on the line with this new policy. The Red Raiders are ranked No. 19, and if things go according to plan, they should be undefeated going into their Oct. 22 match-up versus Texas. It will be interesting to see if the coverage of Texas Tech does not expand at all when the date of big in-state match approaches.

The interaction between players and the media develops to a larger extent a relationship between the players and their fans. Joe Namath became a legend by making a guarantee, not just by beating the Colts in Super Bowl III. Al McGuire became a folk hero not by winning one national title, but by saying everyone should spend six months as a cab driver and six months as a bartender and then they would really be educated.

The underlying beauty of sports lies in the people involved, and Leach should be ashamed the public does not get the pleasure of seeing the beauty. They only get a peek at his paranoia-filled ego.

This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on September 15, 2005.