Randy Smith: Earlier SEC Media Days

  • Tuesday, July 11, 2017
  • Randy Smith
Randy Smith
Randy Smith
One of my favorite things about summer used to be covering the SEC Media Days in Birmingham, Alabama each late July, Each head football coach in the SEC would appear with a few of his top players to talk about the upcoming college football season. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the date for the Media Days each July. It's now in the second week of July rather than the fourth week; approximately two weeks earlier than it was a few years ago. 

My family would always schedule our annual trip to the beach during the second week of July and that would give me a few days when we returned home to tie up some loose ends before we would drive to Birmingham for three days of hard, yet fun work.
In addition to doing stories on each teams chances for the upcoming year, we would shoot enough tape to produce a half-hour show which would air a week or so before the season started. We also enjoyed catching up with old friends around the league; guys you only see once or twice a year. (I fondly remember my visits with the "Voice of the Razorbacks", the late Paul Eels.) I also always looked forward to visiting with my buddy, Jerry Clower the country comedian whom I met at an airport in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1984. We hit it off and became friends and every so often he would show up at the SEC Media Days. He always called me "big man."

No sports information director ever did it better than the late Haywood Harris at Tennessee. He and H.D. (Bud Ford) would start making a list when you walked in the doors in Birmingham for those who would attend a dinner one of the two evenings with the Vols head coach. First it was Johnny Majors then Phillip Fulmer. It was always a fun-filled stress-less evening with plenty of stories to be told, some repeated from year to year. A lot of those stories carried over from the old SEC Skywriters Tour which was replaced by the Media Days format sometime in the 1980s.

Of course there was always golf to be played on day two. I never played golf with those guys, because I quit playing golf not long after graduating college. I was awful at it and it just wasn't fun to me. I always used that time to write stories for the next day, so we would be ahead of the game a bit. I guess I was pretty boring. 

The best part of all however was interviewing and getting to know some of the SEC's coaches. Though Tennessee fans hated Steve Spurrier, especially when he was tormenting them at Florida, he was always a likeable and genuinely nice guy. He always gave me a good interview and never refused to answer a question posed by any reporter. Georgia's Mark Richt was also that way. In fact there were very few coaches who weren't all that friendly with reporters, and I would imagine that was because everyone was 0-0 at the time and practice had not started. By the way, Nick Saban was more likeable when he coached at LSU than when he went to Alabama.  And speaking of Alabama, my favorite Crimson Tide coach during my time covering the SEC Media Days was Mike DuBose. 

Now that things are beginning to happen much earlier in the SEC we have longer to wait until the season kicks off. For someone who is retired that makes for a an even longer period of time through the "dog days" of August. By the way, we have 45 days remaining until the season kicks off, or roughly six weeks. Can't wait!

* * *

Randy Smith has been covering sports on radio, television and print for the past 45 years. After leaving WRCB-TV in 2009, he has written two books, and has continued to free-lance as a play-by-play announcer.  His career has included a 17-year stretch as host of the Kickoff Call In Show on the University of Tennessee’s prestigious Vol Network. He has been a member of the Vol Network staff for 30 years. He has done play-by-play on ESPN, ESPN II, CSS, and Fox SportSouth, totaling more than 500 games, and served as a well-known sports anchor on Chattanooga television for more than a quarter-century. In 2003, he became the first television broadcaster to be inducted into the Greater Chattanooga Area Sports Hall of Fame. Randy and his wife Shelia reside in Hixson. They have two married children, Christi and Chris Perry; Davey and Alison Smith. They have five grandchildren, Coleman, Boone, Mattingly, DellaMae, and CoraLee.

He can be reached at rsmithsports@epbfi.com

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