Derrick Gragg oversees one of the most successful athletic departments in the Mid-American Conference but what defines Eastern Michigan University, to the frustration of the school's athletic director, is the failures in two sports instead of the success of the many others.

Specifically, football and men's basketball have earned the very definition of futility for the past 10 years in Ypsilanti, with football struggling ever since the ill-fated Huron decision was quietly broached in the fall of 1990. Add an administrative train wreck prior to Gragg taking the reins of athletics and Dr. Susan W. Martin assuming the president's position and you can understand why Eastern's recent football hire was so important.

But did Eastern hire the right person for their long-term future? I'm not saying the man who got the job, Ron English, isn't the right man for right now, nor am I saying he wasn't the most qualified candidate. If anything, Ron English is probably over-qualified, a charismatic man who's on-field success and passion for football supersedes the most fervent coach you could imagine.

But was Michigan State running backs coach Dan Enos the better candidate for the long-term viability of EMU football? Is it possible the right man was passed over because he didn't exude of the aforementioned qualities English possesses while remaining the most viable candidate for long-term success?

Yes, I'll concede that sounds a bit naive, so let me explain.

EMU has been a springboard for too many coaches and athletic administrators for too long. Eastern needs its own company man, a Bo Schembechler, Eddie Robinson, Duffy Daugherty or Herb Deromedi-type man to accompany a Don Canham-type athletic director. Moreover, Eastern needs a man content with building a successful, long-term program that will succeed him for a couple generations. I could see Ron English, the dynamic, hard-nosed, smart coach winning more than a handful of games next year, and eight or nine games in Year Two only to be poached away from Ypsilanti for a jackpot of dollars and a conference affiliation that starts with the letters B-C-S.

Where will that leave EMU? The same place it was was when Ron Cooper, another dynamic, hard-nosed, willful leader left after two years for the green pastures of Louisville after a 4-7 season was followed by a 5-6 campaign in 1994. Cooper had been head assistant coach at Notre Dame under Lou Holtz before being hired by another golden domer when Gene Smith tabbed Cooper to replace Jim Harkema in 1993, his final year as EMU's athletic director. After Cooper left EMU was 6-5 under Rick Rasnick in 1995 but that was a bit of a faux record. EMU didn't earn a winning mark in the MAC that season and hasn't notched a noticeable ledger in the MAC since 1989 when the then-Hurons lost to Ball State on the last day of the season in a winner-take-all scenario for the league's title berth to the California Bowl.

The school hasn't had a winning record since. If you think EMU doesn't matter in the big scheme of college football, consider that 20 young men with ties to metro Detroit populate the EMU roster, 11 of whom either lived or prepped in Oakland County.

Dan Enos interviewed for the job at Eastern. He's a Dearborn product, a former Edsel Ford Thunderbird who also led MSU to their last Big Ten title, when the Spartans earned a share of the championship in 1990 under the former Spartan quarterback. Like English, he's got Big Ten coaching experience and has children he's not willing to uproot. It was rumored that Enos was already building a staff that included George Perles' son, Pat, and former MSU standout receiver Courtney Hawkins.

I'm absolutely certain EMU hired the best candidate it was afforded in its search. I simply wonder if EMU missed hiring the best candidate as it relates to EMU's long-term success.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, available from Arcadia Publishing.

The American media model we all grew up with, grew accustomed with and embraced as our informational drinking fountains are drying up. News papers, magazines and other resources are crackling into oblivion like dry trees in a raging wildfire. The print world is being replaced with URL's, hyperlinks and CCS templates to accompany terms like Web 2.0 and blogosphere.

This isn't your father's media, that's for sure.

This morning I opened my daily news primer, courtesy of MediaBistro. If you haven't checked out M-B, it's well worth the fee, which is a few dollars more than a high school varsity football official will make in one game to get a year's worth of access to the national scope of what's news in the media industry. It's an electronic buffet of the best magazine, newspaper and electronic media news from all relevant corners of the country.

That brings me to the dichotomy that so many papers and magazines are facing: At what point to they admit theonline ventures they've engaged themselves in are indeed the future media model to follow and subsequently ditch the hard copy version they were chartered from?

The Christian Science Monitor made huge headlines last month when it announced it was discontinuing the staple magazine-format that had made her famous. I can still remember my dearly-departed journalism professor, the unforgettable Curt Stadtfeld (pictured above), from the fourth floor of Eastern Michigan University's Pray-Harold building, telling us he "missed reading the Christian Science Monitor like an old love; like a taste on the tip of my tongue..." How much do I remember Stadtfeld's lectures? I can still see his outdated shirts in my mind and his voice resonates within my head, his lessons lasting like the thunder of a college fight song's dramatic crescendo.

Rolling Stone is no longer publishing the large, almost poster-sized template that it was pioneered upon. Many national newspaper sites in the larger-than-life media markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have instituted subscription requirements for online access.
One of the more interesting arguments I hear from the old guard at the many small and medium sized newspapers within metro Detroit is that neither the paper or online versions of their product have enough demand to justify eliminating one in favor of the other. My question is how much is one bleeding traffic from the other and vice-versa? I have to believe that the pool of readers and viewers of one is diluted by the other simultaneously.

What if The Oakland Press, Pontiac's flagship news source, ceased publication of the paper to produce a subscription-only online product? If you haven't checked out the new Michigan Prep Zone , you can get a quick look at what the future of a writer's mainstream media will look like. I can't speak for the O-P, or the Free Press or News for that matter, but you can't tell me that day isn't coming. If nothing else, the resources that go into a newspaper are a ten-fold increase over an online edition.

Paper to print upon and delivery of that product from a mill. A facility to produce the paper. Machinery to crank out papers by the thousands. Operational manpower to run the machinery, bundle, package and deliver the paper. Finally, a pool of hungry sharks to procure enough ad revenue to keep the publication afloat while a top-notch editorial staff goes out and pounds the pavement to cultivate a keep an attentive audience.

Conversely, with an exclusive online edition, you have to implement an expensive army of servers with an ocean's worth of mainframe storage and custom CCS creation. Add editors, writers, photographers and design professionals. No expensive machinery to buy, lease or fix. A mountain's worth of savings from a physical production standpoint.

You can see why the old newspaper model is going to fail. When I hear writers lamenting the small fees they are offered to write online, I wonder if they understand that until one or the other fails first, there simply isn't enough cash in the kitty left to pay a good writer what he or she is worth. Further, if a writer wants to get paid, where's the least amount of overhead to be found to pay writers from.

The world is online -- how soon will the writers who could benefit most from it embrace that fact is still open for debate. As for the media world Stadtfeld left behind? I 'Googled' his name and found a pair of letters Stadtfeld penned to Harper's Magazine in the late 1960s as a response to an issue that riled him up beyond mere opinion, because Curtis K. Stadtfeld was never without words. When I clicked on the links to read them in whole, I was told in a matter of words:

"Of course you can read them -- you just have to subscribe for as low as $16.97 a year."

It's time to subscribe to the new media world.

~T.C. Cameron is writing his second book, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

Today I did a little good will hunting at The Lil' Cafe on Michigan Avenue in downtown Dearborn at Pat Stagg's unofficial City of Dearborn High School Hall Of Fame.

The basketball book is in full research mode and although Dearborn won't have nearly the stake in the basketball book as it did in the football book, I still thought it prudent to look for a few compelling pictures, maybe a background or inset picture for the cover, perhaps. Plus it's really cool to root around in Stagg's restaurant and talk prep sports with all the fans over a plate of strawberry pancakes at three o'clock in the afternoon!

Are my sleep patterns messed up or what?

Anyway, the day's events brought me back to a quote from my friend Orlin Jones in Detroit, he of Pershing High track and field fame from the 1950s. To quote Jones, ever the historical collector: "There's always a connection in high school sports."

I've refereed basketball since 1988 when I was working for coach Roy Inglas on the recreational courts at basketball hotbed Vincennes University in Vincennes, Indiana. I returned to Michigan when I enrolled at Eastern Michigan University in the fall of 1990. Besides discovering the difference between junior college cross country and powerhouse, Division-I cross country, as well as the difference between a Huron and an Eagle, I learned about veteran MHSAA officials, the ones who wore the striped shirts that former EMU track coach Lloyd Olds invented nearly 80 years ago on the same Ypsilanti campus.

Guys like Paul Kinder, for example. Kinder was already long remembered for his acumen as an official rather than his days as a basketball captain on the Dearborn High team of 1955. Therefore, you can imagine the astonishment when I saw the picture of Kinder, a young, focused floor general in his testosterone days as a Dearborn Pioneer on the walls of the Lil Cafe today.

There was another photo of a hotly-contested game between Kinder's Pioneers and the Edsel Ford Thunderbirds that evoked The Orlin Jones Rule, if you will, that was discovered today. In the picture was a referee identified as Casey Lopata. Now, there aren't many Lopata households in metro Detroit, but there is a K.C. Lopata on the current University of Michigan football team, the same K.C. Lopata from the Farmington - Farmington Hills area. Many a Ford Motor Company employee moved from Dearborn in the late 50s and early 60s to the sticks of Farmington, Birmingham and Royal Oak.

Maybe it's all a huge coincidence, but my eye-opening experience with the football book tells me the chance that Lopata is related to the referee working this game I found in picture today is much greater than the chance he isn't.

There's always a connection, right?

Photo courtesy of the The Lil' Cafe, Dearborn, Michigan

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, available from retail and online merchants now. Cameron's second title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, is due in August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

This weekend I get an up-close look at the destination of many an Oakland County prep student, Rochester's Oakland University. The Golden Grizzlies welcome Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne (IP-FW) for a four-game set this weekend.

The neat, professional-looking campus is a reflection of the county footprint it's nestled within. The tony stores and quaint retail districts of Rochester and neighboring Rochester Hills, plus the manicured lawns and jaw-dropping residential communities that surround Oakland University are unique to just about any collegiate campus in the state. In short, there's no 'student ghetto' at OU. In fact, I've yet to see a fraternity or sorority house on or near the campus, although I do see the letters BMW, SAAB, and H3 quite a bit. I'm fairly certain nearly any college student would take that over what a beer-stained frat house could offer.

Yesterday's first game was rained-out, meaning four games will be played in the next 31 hours, starting with today's first pitch at 12:00 p.m. Oakland's varsity field has long been known to be a liability to just about every coaching staff the school has empowered since the days the school was better known as the Pioneers and was a Division-II powerhouse in many sports. Per usual, the weekend will be played with fingers crossed and eyes wandering to the sky, hoping prayers for no more rain will be answered.

It shouldn't be like this. I know Michigan is in the midst of a one-state depression and even mighty Oakland County feels the pain. That doesn't mean progress can grind to a halt, too. In my near-10 years within college baseball, I've watched three different head coaches struggle to recruit the best talent available in Oakland County to OU because of facility offerings. Nate Recknagel was a freshman team All-American at OU; He's at the University of Michigan now. This week he had a single, double and home run for the Wolverines in a mid-week victory over Western Michigan. Several county student-athletes like Recknagel have chosen schools like Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan and Central Michigan because of facilities.

Players don't chose the aforementioned schools over Oakland because of academics. OU's got tremendous offerings in the undergraduate programs it features. Three years ago the University of Detroit canned their baseball program, giving Oakland a better pool of players to pick from against the other five Division-I schools in the state.

Oakland needs a new facility, a legitimate facility, if they expect to compete for any of the county's best baseball players. Oakland County is chock full of collegiate-quality baseball players. Look at the most recent statewide poll from the Michigan High School Baseball Coaches Association, at http://www.mhsbca.org/, dated 4/30/08. Four of the top 10 teams in the Division-I poll pull their players from Oakland County, including top-ranked and defending state champion Lake Orion, also ranked No. 26 of the top 50 teams in this week's nationwide poll at Rivals.com. The state's No. 10 team in Division II is Madison Heights Lamphere.

Times are tough -- I get that. College baseball is not a revenue-producing sport in this part of the country for any school, that is also fact. I don't pretend to have all the answers and the truth is, the answers are hard to come by. None of what I'm saying is news to the leaders at Oakland University and I'll be the first to admit I'm not going to be the one the writes the check to solve the problem. But as an Oakland County resident, I can also say that OU is a jewel in the rough, tucked away behind the glam and glitz of a well-to-do county. The school could be a regional, collegiate powerhouse at the Division-I level.

Oakland has a tremendous swimming facility and a perfect basketball facility, one that helped Coach Greg Kampe's Grizzlies to a win over the University of Michigan a few years back. Oakland's won conference championships and NCAA invites in other sports, proving it can be done.

Here's to hoping there's a way to create a better opportunity for the county's best players to stay at home and play college baseball at OU.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing