Monday, July 24, 2006

Day 1

Kansas City, MO., Staying up all night before heading to Kansas City, Mo at 6am Sunday morning probably wasn’t the best of ideas, but then again, it made falling asleep easy as closing my eyes thereby shortening a 12.5 hour drive to just over six. I did my fair share of driving, but my partner on this trip, Ricky Treon, had no one to talk to as I slept.

Kansas City has fallen behind since Rogers and Hammerstein penned “Ev’rythin’s up to date in Kansas City. They’ve gone about as fur as they c’n go…” Instead, we found a quaint cityscape about as impressive in stature as Waco on steroids. To be fair, everything here is clean and trees line the streets making the city a pleasant setting for the Big 12 Media Days we’re here to cover.

Media Days signal the start of football season for those of us in the press. Here we’ll get our first look at a pair of new head coaches, in Colorado’s Dan Hawkins and Kansas State’s Ron Prince. We’ll get to catch up with Oklahoma’s Adrian Peterson and listen to Texas Tech’s Mike Leach say something bizarre (just wait, you’ll see).

Other perks of the trip, like free meals, notebooks and various other moderately useful items aren’t to be overlooked. And rubbing shoulders with national writers while reacquainting ourselves with our counterparts from papers around Texas and the rest of the seven Big 12 states makes the trip just that much more worthwhile.

We’ll be here for four nights and cover three days worth of press conferences. We’ll collect a couple hundred quotes and write all the news that’ll fit our one page of sports. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see if this town has any bars worth going to.

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