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ESPN Magazine 2013 College Football Preview Issue arrives on newsstands Friday. The issue features profiles – also published on ESPN.com – of the Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel and possible Heisman successor Jadeveon Clowney.
It also includes The Mags annual player survey, “College Football Confidential”. Staff members Morty Ain, Ben Arledge, Carl Carchia, Hallie Grossman And Anna Katherine Clemmons interviewed 92 college football players on a wide range of topics: playing with gay teammates, dealing with concussions — and even dating the coach’s daughter. Senior Editor Ryan Hockensmith takes First row inside the process.
Who is involved in developing the questions?
For questions, I tend to request topics from (Mag’s) sports editors, which usually results in around 50 suggested questions. This is obviously way too much – players’ eyes start to widen around question #15. Anything over 15 starts to border on “Oh, look at the time, please stop asking me all these weird, annoying questions” territory. So, narrowing down from 50 to 15-20 can be difficult and frustrating – we’re still leaving some really good questions unanswered.
Were players reluctant to answer certain questions?
We always have a good number of players who say: “Thank you very much for these questions, I’m tired of answering the same things every day. » Most of them like to receive curved questions.
The hardest part is finding a reporter with an athlete, to begin with. We generally have a success rate of around 50 percent for schools that wish to participate. We spoke with players from 56 schools and at least two players from each conference.
But I have to say, college sports information directors are generally great to work with. These surveys always have a lot of difficult questions – PEDs, gay teammates, cheating, etc. – and I had a few SIDs who said they let their guys participate because it was an opportunity for a young athlete to address very difficult topics anonymously. .
Give us two results that stood out to you.
This year, dozens of players reported that one of their teammates was on a PED, and the average response to the number of potential NCAA violations observed was 8.1 per athlete.
Note: On ESPNU ESPN The Magazine College Football Preview Special broadcast on August 6 (see video below), Hockensmith and the host Dari Nowkhah talked about the survey.
