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The journalism major who brought down Borges
Cold, Hard Football Facts for March 8, 2007
(Ed. Note: There's a segment of folks out there, almost all of them (surprise!) FORB in the media, who believe that the Cold, Hard Football Facts have some sort of agenda against a certain Boston Globe sports scribe. Let us, for the record, outline what it means to have "an agenda." If what you report is true, there is no agenda. If what you report is a fallacy ... say, for example, you spend your days ripping the only coach in history to win three Super Bowls in four years ... then you do have an agenda. And, certainly, the guy who exposed Ron Borges had no agenda: The first time he heard of the discredited Globe reporter was four days ago.)
 Mark Sandritter spent a good chunk of his Monday in a classroom, taking a test on journalism ethics at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.
To say it was a timely subject for the 20-year-old journalism major would be a fairly large understatement.
The previous night, Sandritter was trolling for football news on the Internet when he stumbled on a football notes piece on Boston.com.
Ron Borges, he thought, looking at the byline.
Hmm.
“If it weren’t for (the chatter about those conflicting stories), I probably never would have noticed anything,” said Sandritter, who goes by the name "Seattlestatman" on football message boards.
But the name registered with him – Borges, OK, this is the guy Patriots fans hate, the guy they say has it out for Belichick and the Patriots. The message boards are crawling with venom toward this guy.
Sandritter doesn't care much about the Patriots (i.e., he has no "agenda"). But the diehard Seahawks fan did want to see what Borges had to say about Seattle wide receiver Darrell Jackson.
So he read on, and quickly recognized that the words in Borges’ piece were not original.
“Sando is crazy. He goes all out,” said Sandritter. “If a fullback gets signed to the practice squad, he knows – he’s breaking down units on the field, how they all play, what they’re doing … he has stuff that is beyond what you could possibly expect.“
Seems like young Sandritter, like most of the pigskin public, has a pretty good grasp of the difference between a good reporter and a guy who mails it in each week. (Sando, by the way, is pretty damn good. Check out his blog. It's filled with great material, facts, figures, fresh info.)
Sandritter went back to check the two articles, and was pretty sure it was plagiarism. So he posted links to the two stories on a Patriots message board on ESPN. And they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. Like a deadly pigskin plague, the story spread from a college apartment in the Pacific Northwest to the Ivory Tower halls of the Boston Globe 3,000 miles away – and it was all emerging on Sandritter's computer.
He spent much of Sunday night and Monday morning tracking the fallout. And when he returned from a class Monday night and learned that Borges had been suspended from the Globe … well, it was a little mind-blowing.
“How random is that?” he said. “Crazy, right? I mean, we were just talking about all this stuff in class, and now this happens when it happens. It’s amazing. I sat there with my buddy, and I’m like, ‘Wow, did that really happen?’ Is that real?”
The reality came home over the next couple of days.
“It was everywhere,” he said. “My friends are like, ‘Oh man, it’s even in the Spokesman Review' (the local paper). At first, I’m wondering why so much publicity – I guess it’s been in something like 160 publications, as far as Romania. AP picked it up. But the circumstances all just had to be right, and they were.”
Sandritter posted his version of the story on his own website, smtsports.com, and got his first taste of a journalist’s burden: angry e-mails. (Welcome to the club!)
“I get one saying ‘This guy’s not going to be able to feed his family because of you. You’ve got a grudge against this guy,' ” Sandritter said. “I just kind of shook my head at that one. I certainly didn’t feel good about the guy getting suspended, but I’m not the one who wrote the article either.”
Sandritter might be just a journalism student, but he has a pretty professional grasp on what’s right and wrong.
“If you’re going to rip something, you better do it in the right way,” he said. “I understand that there’s sharing info, and there probably should be, but there’s using it and then there’s using it verbatim.”
As for his own future, Sandritter hopes this experience will help him build a résumé and eventully become a football writer.
And at the very least …
“I hope I can get some extra credit or something!”
Here's one thing we know he can get: free beer in every barroom if ever visits Boston.
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