Arizona Basketball: ESPN remains irresponsible when reporting on FBI investigation

Will this ever stop? Come on ESPN!! Mark Schlabach’s editors chose a picture for the headlines and ESPN had Adam Rittenberg tweet out his latest post.

Mark Schlabach’s ESPN Editors are at it again. Schlabach wrote an FBI Investigation piece over the weekend and his editors chose a picture for the cover of Sean Miller looking mad and guilty. Miller is NOT on trial, his former Assistant Coach is, and not for any Adidas affiliation, for working with a Finance Manager and an Agent to funnel money to a player (allegedly, don’t know if there is proof money ever exchanged hands) in order to get him to sign with them in the future.

Just go to Schlabach’s Twitter feed, you will not see him posting this post, someone decided that Adam Rittenberg would post it instead. We don’t know who made the decision, but you can bet it wasn’t the writers. Deciding to use that particular picture of Sean Miller, and focus on Arizona in the article was irresponsible. ESPN knows it was a lock that Arizona Basketball fans would go after whoever posted the tweet with the article.

There were 64 replies to Rittenberg from what seemed to be Arizona Wildcats fans. The themes, from what we read, included claims they felt Schlabach continues to target Arizona with a false story when the school is not an Adidas school. They responded with comments about Schlabach not Tweeting the article himself, that was not lost on fans. They also point out that Yahoo Sports wrote more accurate articles with pictures not depicting the Wildcats head coach.

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ESPN’s Dick Vital finally backed off and apologized to A Players Program and Arizona Fans so why now are Mark Schlabach’s Editors targeting Sean Miller? There are so many other schools involved or named in this whole FBI investigation including but not limited to Louisville, NC State, and USC (seldom hear anything about USC, wonder why?).

Per Dan Wetzel, Yahoo Sports, “During jury selection in college hoops scandal, a list of schools that may come up during trial was listed to jurors. Includes: Arizona, Louisville, NC State, Miami, LSU, Oregon, DePaul, Creighton, Texas, Oklahoma State, USC.”

Wildcat Authority Editor Jason Scheer Tweeted the following:

"[Bringing this to our attention]ESPN using Sean Miller as the cover photo when this is the Adidas case, he’s not on trial, and Schlabach isn’t allowed by ESPN to tweet out his own article.[Why didn’t Schlabach tweet out the article?]Because it’s not true. ESPN can’t suspend or fire him technically without being sued so they’ve backed him off the story. That’s also why no college basketball writers are backing the context of his initial report"

Rick Pitino already lost his job, why couldn’t they use his picture? How about a picture with a trial court? What about a picture of an NCAA Basketball? Nope, they had to find a picture of Sean Miller, on purpose. Hmm. Maybe because they want to get more views on the post? They have to know that Arizona Fans will comment and tweet and retweet about this post, so it’s possible that they are strategically trying to get more eyes on Schlabach’s post. And they are targeting and smearing Sean Miller and Arizona Basketball in the process.

Tell us, what’s the first thing you think when you see this cover photo? OMG so many thoughts come to mind and none of them are positive. It’s horrific they would pick this one.

We honestly hoped we would never have to write about this again, that ESPN was done targeting Arizona, but they aren’t and it’s not lost on Arizona Basketball fans.