So What's Next?

So it got pretty ugly at the end of the Kansas-Kansas State game the other night.

The brawl came at the end of the Jayhawks' 81-60 win at the Allen Field House. It was either all the fault of Kansas or Kansas State, depending on which team you like.

It was, of course, completely unnecessary, as it started when Kansas was dribbling out the clock. It was also pretty bad, with real punches thrown, a player who picked up a chair and almost launched it into the middle of the melee and even cheerleaders trying to act as peacemakers.

The repercussions of the fight will be significant. And they should be, since this has no place at all in college athletics.

For starters, referees need to be really diligent about calling technicals at the earliest sign of unsportsmanlike behavior. If you let any of it go, you risk having it build.

For those who think this kind of conduct is much more prevalent in sports now than it was 20 or more years ago, TigerBlog isn't so sure that's the case. It's just that when there is a brawl like this, you don't just hear about it - you hear about it immediately (through social media) and even see it immediately (via smartphones).

If both of those existed decades ago, then there would have been a lot of ugliness caught on video as well, he's pretty sure.

In 2020, though, that's 100 percent how it works. And so it was Tuesday night, when angle after angle began to emerge of the fight. Also in 2020, it's a race to see either who can get the best angle video up on their Twitter account first or who can best make fun of the situation.

Very little of what TB saw indicated that anyone was anything other than entertained by it. That's a bad sign.

For his part, TB went to the official athletic websites for both schools to see what they had to say, if anything, in their game stories. Kansas had nothing - not even its normal postgame story, just a postgame notes page that didn't talk about what happened.

K-State had a quote from head coach Bruce Weber way down at the bottom of the postgame page: "I didn't see what happened at the end of the game. Obviously, I'm disappointed it ended that way."

By yesterday morning, KU had added a statement from its Director of Athletics about the incident.

One by-product of the look at the Kansas site was that TB really liked the postgame notes page.

Interestingly, the look at that page came on the same day that TB was part of a meeting to talk about some of what the future of athletic communications at Princeton will include.

The Princeton Office of Athletic Communications has always been good at evolving, and part of that is abandoning what no longer has value. It's about constant re-evaluation and looking at whatever metrics can help you make decisions while relying on common sense and anecdotal feedback. And about checking out what other people are doing.

So is there a future for the postgame story? What about the pregame story? What do you want to read? How much time are you willing to invest in reading something? What's too long?

What do you want only to consume through social media? What video do you want to see?

These are the questions. The answers constantly change.

This year, Princeton went away from the traditional pregame stories, which had been a staple of goprincetontigers.com in the first 20 years of its existence, to the format of Gameday pages. Do you like those? Are you getting the information you need?

How about bio pages? They're among the most read. Maybe most of the information should be filtered through them?

This is what the meeting yesterday was about.

It's a conversation that has been going on since TB first came to Princeton. He can vividly remember a discussion about the printed seasonal schedules that the OAC used to produce - and how big a deal it was when they stopped being produced.

The issues keep changing. The discussions do not.

What's the best way to get the information out to the people who want it and need it?

Or, as TB always says, what would you do if you were starting athletic communications from scratch?