Q & A with WKCR Sports Director Sam Tydings

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At the center of the Columbia football situation has been the racist and homophobic tweets that WKCR, Columbia’s student radio station, uncovered and posted shortly after the arrest of Chad Washington. Here is my interview with WKCR’s Sports Director (and also my brother) Sam Tydings, who worked with both his coworkers at WKCR and with others to both find and display to the public the objectionable tweets from the football players. (I also interviewed him in January in Behind Enemy Lines to talk about Columbia taking on Penn in men’s basketball.)

Daily Pennsylvanian: What was your initial reaction when you found out about the arrest?

DP: So was that what drove you to look the players up on social media?

ST: Well, the first thing that really drove me to find out what was going on on social media is that on the Columbia Spectator, there were comments on one of the posts about the hate crime and someone copied a tweet from Tom Callahan, an offensive lineman on the team, and it was anti-Semitic. So I wanted to look and see what else was this guy saying on social media and as I was clicking over to see one of his other tweets, his account got deleted. I thought, “well, that was pretty strange,” but let’s look into some other people who were on the same floor as Chad Washington and they started deleted their accounts.

So I thought there was something weird going on and that’s what made me want to look into everyone on the football team and what are these players saying and why do they want to hide their accounts.

DP: What are the major takeaways from the tweets from your perspective?

ST: That there is a real homophobia problem between the players that we found. We ended up finding 18 public accounts and 12 of them had something pretty objectionable on there. Most of it had to do with homophobia rather than racist remarks against Asians or anti-Semitic remarks.

And the other takeaway I have is that athletics really dropped the ball on this. That we were able to find so many of these accounts from following the Columbia Lions football account or [head coach] Pete Mangurian’s account. That Columbia athletics knew what these players were saying. They should have known this was going on and either willfully ignored it and they were accepting it or were too dumb to properly use the internet. There really is not much other explanation.

DP: So would you say that this is an indictment of the football culture, the athletic department as a whole, or just this small group of football players?

ST: Obviously, I don’t think it is just these 12 players and that if you had all 100 players and their twitter accounts public, we would have found way more than just the 12 players we found. But I really don’t think you can judge the entire football team based off just this. I think there has to be some middle ground with this.

The biggest problem with this for me was with the administration and athletics. That this is an organization that takes so much effort into watching what the student media tweets about Columbia athletics, whether it is WKCR sports or the Columbia Spectator or Bwog.com, and to have such attention be paid to what we tweet and to miss your captain quarterback [Sean Brackett] who is the face of all your publicity using the f-word against homosexuals is really disgusting. They really misplaced their priorities obviously.

DP: What has been the reception on campus the players, the athletic department and everyone at WKCR?

ST: There has been a lot of backlash towards the athletic department. This is something that they will have to deal with now. They didn’t put out a public statement until [Thursday] at 2:00 pm after we broke everything at 5:00 pm yesterday. They continuously refused comment from us and it has gotten a lot of traction, especially on campus and now it’s starting to turn into the national media. Hopefully, this will increase the exposure on this a little bit.

As for us, we’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback – people congratulating us for doing all this work – and some negative feedback. I’ve gotten some Facebook messages from people I’ve never met before who said some not-nice things. We’ve gotten some backlash from athletes but we aren’t out here to indict all athletes. I really love Columbia athletics. I really think it is more of a problem with athletics and the administration and how they managed all this and the athletes themselves.

DP: What do you think the athletic department will ultimately do in response to the whole situation and what do you think it should do?

ST: First of all, it really is just not my place to be saying what I think they should do. I don’t think that is for me to decide at all. Though ultimately I don’t think they will actually do anything of substance. I think some players will probably be suspended or kicked off the team and they will probably make people admitted to Columbia sit through a social media seminar which no one will pay attention to. I don’t think there is going to be a serious change unless this scandal really blows up and people start calling for the heads of certain people in the athletic department.

DP: Do you think this corresponds in general to the whole Mike Rice situation? There was the homophobic language he used and it kind of relates to this in a way as well as the whole athletic department hiding that. So do you think this is a trend and how do you think it relates?

ST: The difference between this and Rutgers was that with Rutgers, that was the coach directly saying stuff to the players during practices. I think that is different from what we have here, especially since Pete Mangurian just posted a blog post that basically said he had no idea this was happening, which makes sense to me because he personally doesn’t upload to his account and check what is being said on there. Usually, it is staffs in the football organization [who upload to the account].

In parallel to the whole Mike Rice thing, it has to do a lot with administration. The administration knew this was going on and they did nothing to stop it, like the Rutgers AD [Tim Pernetti] who got fired for that. He saw the tape and did nothing to stop it except for a three-game suspension. Certainly, he did not take enough of an action. And with Columbia, obviously I don’t think Dianne Murphy should be sitting in her office all day looking at tweets of Columbia football players but certainly there are or should be people in the football administration whose job it is to make sure that the kids aren’t saying something incredibly stupid on social media and when they do, they have them take it down, they have the athlete say why it was wrong, and then offer an apology. So far, we have gotten no apology from the players, just the blog post from Mangurian. And all the players have done has been delete their accounts or lock their accounts or tweet something about how God is going to get them through this.

But it is seriously disgusting that these players said these horrible things online and then come after us for having the audacity to make it public when you post some stuff on your public twitter account.

DP: What do you think the coaching staff’s responsibility is here? Do you think they will be punished?

ST: I definitely do not think that Pete Mangurian will lose his job over this neither do I think he should. It really should not be the job of a Division I football coach to see what his players are doing on social media. However, I really wouldn’t be surprised if one of Mangurian’s underlings or Murphy’s underlings in the football SID’s office loses their positions over this. If you are in media for Columbia University and part of your job is to control the message your students put out, then you need to be on top of what your football players are saying. And that means all of them – from the best player to the worst player – because on Saturdays, they are all wearing Columbia University across their chest on games that are now often nationally televised.

And now, that might be the story. If one of these players ends up staying on the team and Columbia has a game on NBC Sports or the YES Network, the announcers are going to be talking about so and so using homophobic slurs on twitter instead of so and so having three sacks in the game. And that is too bad but it is something Columbia should have known about and more importantly, should have done something about.

DP: Do you think that this has an effect and leads to a trend in college athletics of a lot of athletes getting off of social media or making more professional accounts?

ST: I really can’t speak to what it is going to be on a larger scale because Columbia is D-1 but football isn’t a priority here. I’m sure LSU and Alabama and Stanford and others have people who keep real tabs on what their players are doing. And they are not as bad at it as what Darlene Camacho and Dianne Murphy have done in their job here so far.

I think on the Columbia side, the trend will to have kids with locked accounts. If people are on social media, they are just going to be sending messages to other people and you aren’t really going to have a public face of Columbia football interacting on social media, at least for next year. And I really hope that doesn’t spread to the rest of Columbia athletics because you have guys like [men’s basketball players] Brian Barbour and Grant Mullins who are great on there.The whole baseball team is on there and is fun to follow. And they actually win stuff, which is crazy for Columbia sports teams. I really hope that if there is this trend of hiding your tweets instead of just not being an idiot with them, that it is just football and doesn’t spread to the rest of Columbia athletics and the other athletes who are a lot more fun to talk to.

DP: With the baseball team just winning the Ivy League Championship Series, what do you think about the timing of all of this with how this is completely overshadowing that accomplishment for Columbia athletics?

ST: It sucks. As someone who covered the baseball’s ride to the championship and the championship series had two really great games. One was David Speer going up against a great Dartmouth lineup. He had 12 strikeouts and they got out of a jam in the top of the 10^th and came back to win the game in extra innings. In the second game, they were down to their final eight outs and they had a six-run rally with eight straight guys getting on base.

That should be the story around Columbia this week. We should feel good with Columbia baseball going to the NCAA Tournament. We’re going to graduate soon and it is a great time for everyone. And now, it has turned into this. Not that to any extent we should have sat on the story because it would have ruined a nice story, but it sucks that all of this had to come out specifically right at a time when the baseball team deserves a lot of praise.