With Ari Fleischer on the College Football Playoff’s payroll, the group never has to wait long for his next burst of negative feedback. They have an advertising consultant who specializes in generating negative publicity. Virtually the opposite of what should be desired.
Fleischer’s appearance as a moderator at Tuesday’s Saudi Arabian-backed LIV Golf press conference was just the latest jaw-dropping moment from a guy who never failed to fail while working for CFP. He has also made regular appearances as a political commentator on Fox News, which has created some unease for a university track and field organization trying to remain apolitical. And then there’s pretty much everything he touched on his role as a college football propagandist.
Fleischer was part of the doomed public relations effort to save the Bowl Championship Series and avert a playoff, which should have been enough to free him from any role in the sport’s next iteration, but no. Fleischer remained on board as a consultant for CFP, proving magically malleable on the post-season issue of the sport.
(It seems really hard to get fired from the Old Boys Club that runs college football.)
Whatever impact the former White House press secretary had under George W. Bush in the first seven years of the playoffs seemed negligible. It wasn’t until the failed launch of plans to expand the playoffs from four to 12 teams last year, when the June leak unfortunately caught several conference commissioners off guard, that someone recalled that the CFP had a consultant. for the media. The mess surrounding that expansion plan was enough to derail the expansion for the foreseeable future.
CFP is inherently quite controversial: four teams chosen subjectively by a selection committee out of 130 have a chance to win the national championship. The playoffs make matters worse on its own with a weekly TV show that publishes its charts as the last third of the season unfolds, with his work prone to mockery every Tuesday night. The list of injured parties is long and vocal each season.
Why add to the accumulated criticism by creating an internal problem for yourself with a consultant like Fleischer? Why have that guy in the room with the most powerful people in college football when they make the big decisions?
This was confirmed by CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock Sports Illustrated Tuesday Fleischer is still a consultant to the group. Hancock noted that Fleischer consults with a number of other entities outside the PCP and is not required to inform him of every position he takes on. Neither Hancock nor many other leaders of the PCP seemed to have any idea of this particular work of Fleischer.
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Taking money from the Saudi Arabian government has led to big setbacks for a number of the world’s top golfers, from big winners Phil Mickelson to Dustin Johnson to Graeme McDowell to Sergio Garcia to Martin Kaymer and beyond. They are willing to accept criticism for joining arms with a brutally repressive regime in exchange for huge rewards, and at the Fleischer-led press conference on Tuesday they did their best to pretend there was no dispute.
When LIV golfer Talor Gooch was struck by a question about “Saudi Arabia” which “tarnished” his global image as unseemly for human rights abuses, he replied, “I don’t think the claim is right.” . Then he tried to get out of that political sand trap by essentially describing himself as just a stupid golfer. “I’m not that smart,” Gooch said. “I try to hit a golf ball into a small hole. Golf is difficult enough. I try to worry about golf and I am excited about this week ”.
Apparently Fleischer has done its part to provide cover for poor multimillionaires who have been asked questions about anything other than hitting a golf ball in a small hole. Rob Harris, an Associated Press reporter, was reportedly interrupted and escorted out of the press conference after attempting to ask a follow-up question about the reconciliation of Saudi sports wash-down attempts to buy favorable impressions via the purchase. of golfers. He was later allowed to re-enter.
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It is all a welfare enterprise. Only good people trying to “grow the game” of golf.
Like golfers, Fleischer seems to have a price at which he can give up his beliefs. For ESPN’s Kevin Van ValkenbergFleischer was asked at the LIV press conference, “how did he square his current relationship with LIV Golf with his past tweets claiming Saudi Arabia was spending billions to make sure Mohammed bin Salman wasn’t overthrown ( n), and this was not an example of that. Fleisher said that tweet was “a long long time ago.”
And many dollars ago, one might assume.
The mix of Ari Fleischer and sport seemed to produce little beyond embarrassment, missteps and slaps in the forehead. Why the College Football Playoffs want to keep paying that nincompoop to help shape strategy is as baffling as the reluctance to expand the playoffs.
More games are better. Less Ari is even better. No Ari is the best.
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