Long considered one of college football's foremost journalists, Chris Dufresne has witnessed and written about several of the sport's signature moments. He sat down recently with FBA Communications and talked at length about the business of writing and how the model has changed in the challenging digital era.
You wrote about college football for 35 years for one of the most well-known newspapers, the Los Angeles Times. What are some of the highlights of your career there?
"Oh, man, that's a long list but let's give it a rip. Probably, because I'm most associated with college football the last two decades, I'll say being in the end zone when Doug Flutie threw his Hail Mary miracle to beat Miami at the Orange Bowl back in 1984. That play has stood the test of time. I wasn't even covering college football then but got the assignment because none of the established stars on a star-studded staff wanted to travel on Thanksgiving.
"It was basically "give it to the kid" so I took the redeye from LAX on that Thursday night and landed in Miami the next morning. It was a terrific game, Flutie vs. Bernie Kosar and I went down to the field at the end like most reporters do when they are not on a tight deadline.
"I still remember seeing Flutie's Hail Mary drift toward me in the end zone in the haze of drizzle and the stadium lights. After the game winner, celebrating Boston College players raced downfield and one of them picked me up and twirled me around like a cheerleader!
"What a blast. But that was just one sweet moment in a career of memories. I covered nine Super Bowls, about twenty golf majors, seven Olympic Games, twenty-something Final Fours and every college football title game since the 1995 season.
"How about Texas vs. USC, at the fabulous Rose Bowl, for the 2005 BCS title? I'd call that a highlight. But last year's Rose Bowl wasn't shabby (Georgia over Oklahoma), followed by Alabama beating Georgia in Atlanta for the national title.
"I'll never forget Eddie Robinson's last home game at Grambling.
"And how about this: I witnessed in person the greatest single-game passing performance in American pro football, the 574 yards Jim Kelly threw for against the USFL's L.A. Express at the 1985 opener. Same L.A. Coliseum where Norm Van Brocklin set his still-standing NFL 554 mark for the Rams in 1951."
Your tenure intersected the legendary Jim Murray's career. What are your memories of reading him and often working alongside him?
"Getting to work with Jim Murray ranks as the single biggest thrill of my career at the L.A. Times. I grew up reading him, of course, and consider him the greatest sportswriter of all time. He was a god to us and he was a super nice human being. I sat beside him for his last Rose Bowl, 1998, and he cracked jokes at me during the entire game. The fact he knew my name still gives me goosebumps!
"Murray died the following August 16, same date of death as Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley. On the wall next to my desk hangs a Christmas card he once sent to our family. "The Dufresnes," Murray wrote. "Have a wonderful holiday season." Then he signed it. I still imagine Murray sitting down that year and filling out a card to MY family. How about that?"
Once you retired from The Times, you helped found 'The Media Guides' aka TMG Sports. How did you, Herb Gould [Chicago Sun-Times], Mark Blaudschun [Boston Globe] and Tony Barnhart [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] come to be collaborators?
"Well I was 57 when I took the buyout and I knew I wasn't quite done writing. I started a blog the day after my last day at the Times in December of 2015 and got credentialed to cover the CFP championship game in Arizona.
"It was at that game that I huddled with Gould, Blaudschun and Barnhart about possibly starting our own college football website. We launched it the next year on Word Press. My wife Sheila did the hard work putting the website together.
"We all got a jolt when Tony couldn't get out of some contracts he had, so we had to go it alone that first year (2016) without Mr. College Football, kingpin of the SEC. We actually discussed not forming TMG without Tony but plugged along that first year and built a modest following.
"We decided on a subscription model because we didn't think working for free was fair and it was too hard to make money with traditional advertising based on page views. We charge about $20 a year, literally pennies a day. People still think that's too much, and that's their problem.
"The second year we found out Tony was free [to join us] and we jumped for joy! We started our third season in 2018 and hope to be around as long as people want to read us and pay us. Making it with a subscription model is hard, but we had very little overhead and TMG was a profit-maker from the start. We are on the cusp this fall of trying to find a larger distribution platform. The toughest part of our model is trying to get it out to the people who might want to subscribe. We hope to change that in the very near future.
How is covering college football in the digital/viral age different from what we now call 'print' journalism? Aside from not having true deadlines in the viral medium?
"It was a game-changer on the scale of cars replacing the horse and buggy. My last few years at the LA Times were frustrating in that I was playing a different game than the digital guys. I had REAL newspaper deadlines and, as you know, the Saturday night games kept getting later and later. If you can believe it the LA Times had a 9 p.m. deadline for sports with some USC and UCLA games starting at 7 p.m., or later. Try writing something interesting under that crunch.
"At national games I covered, many times I would be finishing my story and packing up when the dot.com guys were coming back from the locker room. They had fresh quotes and locker room atmosphere filler while I was handcuffed to the dreaded newspaper deadline.
"We would then, of course, have to refresh our stories constantly for the Times website so we really had two missions, print and digital.
"Writing now as a website-only [format] is obviously much, much easier. Two years ago, my computer messed up at the Rose Bowl, which would have been a catastrophe under a tight print deadline. No problem now. I just drove home and wrote my story into my home computer at about 3 a.m. And not one editor screamed at me!"
You began writing in an era when there was more camaraderie among journalists, coaches, ADs, etc. That era is mostly gone now. Do you miss it, and why?
"The camaraderie was what I loved. I probably had more close friends at other papers than I did at my own. I could go years without seeing other staff writers at the LA Times, but I would see Blaudschun (Boston Globe), Dick Weiss (NY Daily News), Ivan Maisel (ESPN), Andy Bagnato (Chicago Tribune) and others on the road every week during the college football (and basketball) seasons. We were called "The Rat Pack" but that changed when newspapers started pulling national guys off the road or eliminating the beat completely.
"When the Tribune Company bought the LA Times and seven or eight other papers in the early 2000s, the list of national college writers eventually got whittled down to….ME. National papers that used to have their own men and women on the beats relied on me to provide content for the entire chain. That was very disheartening.
"Even the L.A. Times started pulling me off the road as budgets became strained and I started losing contact with my friends and industry sources. It's amazing what you can get talking casually to commissioners and athletic directors in the press box before a big game.
"What I missed most was friendly dinner arguments after a big national game, surrounded by the national writers at Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and Washington Post. It was a big-boy circuit.
"That's probably my biggest regret with leaving the Times—the people. I do most of my work now at home, alone, although the neighborhood barking dogs keep me company!"
For years, college football's 'national champion' was determined by wire-service polls. Then the BCS Era came along. Fans clamored for a playoff, and the College Football Playoff has provided one with four teams. In your view, does the four-team arrangement suffice at this point in time?
"I'm fine with four for now because I love the bowl system and worry that further expansion would dilute the best regular season in sports. The BCS was a five-alarm mess but I almost cried when it ended, after 16 years, for all the stories it provided me. I tell friends it was like covering the circus! I have been mildly surprised how well the four-team playoff has worked while maintaining and sustaining regular-season interest in the sport. Nothing lasts forever and of course there is already a push for an eight-team playoff. It will happen someday but I'm in no hurry. Why does college football have to be like the NFL? Also, until all conferences play the same number of league games the system will always be skewed toward the SEC and ACC. An eight-team playoff would be fairer, but not necessarily more fun."
Roughly a dozen to 15 teams seem to dominate the national championship conversation each year. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
"It's just the way it is. I think it was the late, great SEC commissioner Mike Slive who said you can't legislate what people want to watch. Ohio State and Michigan will always draw bigger ratings than Central Florida vs. South Florida. The records don't matter. Is that fair? No, but that's reality. And that's why ESPN and Fox pay more money for the SEC and Big Ten than for Conference USA.
"Notre Dame Football has its own network even in years the Irish go 4-8. That doesn't mean NBC is going out to fund the BYU Network. College football is a collage of colors, brands, history, uniforms, contradictions and utter UN-fairness. It is Darwinism at its finest (or worst) and the opposite of the NFL, which props up the weakest teams for the sake of the entire monetary operation.
"College football is different. People seem to like it that way."
