I don’t have a strong name take. I know Brendan feels very strongly that reporters shouldn’t call coaches “Coach” because they aren’t their coach so maybe we’ve talked about it on the pod. I know he calls everyone by their first name.
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Feels weird to have to refer to someone who isn’t your superior with their formal title. If they’re your coach, or your boss, or whatever, then it makes sense to me. But if I met someone and demanded they call me by a formal title and my last name, I think that would be pretty egocentric.
I suppose you can argue Mr. Coach Sanders earned that right, but it still just seems a little small.
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Maybe he wanted to be called “Primetime.”
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Coach is an honorific that people carry with them and like to be called decades after they were fired for their one coaching job and now are doing studio analysis for the local UHF affiliate. Lots of people not coached by someone still call them coach. Seems normal to me. But also seems abnormal to take a stand there. I would not be willing to call him Coach Sanders, but I could be convinced to compromise with something fun yet factual like Coach Post His Prime Time.
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Right, that was Brendan who said that. Certainly an interesting “debate” but I remember Beilein never really seemed to care too much. I forget if Juwan does or not. Either way, really interesting to see Deion Sanders leave like that.
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So Brendan only refers to his own personal physician as “Doctor”?
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Seems reasonable to me
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You’d have to ask Brendan for his feelings on this, but my bet is if he was interviewing a Doctor, he’d refer to him by his first name.
Dr. is also a real honorary with a degree, etc. rather than a job.
The argument for media not calling coaches “Coach” is that it creates a very uneven power playing field between media and coaches.
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I see what you’re getting at. When you see a doctor at the bar call them by their first name, but if you see them at the hospital, even if they’re not your personal doctor. Should probably still use the term “doctor”
I’ll contribute with my perspective on this. I have a PhD and am involved in higher academia. Standard practice is to call a Professor “Professor X”, in pretty much any scenario. Other Professors will call each other by their first names, and some Professors will give express consent for students to call them by their first name. But unless specifically told by a Professor to use their first name, the standard practice is to call them “Professor X”, whether they’re a Professor who you do research with or have taken a class with or not. This rule also generally extends to lab/building managers who are employees and not researchers/students, so no one is their Professor just like no one is a reporter’s coach.
This is also relevant to Dylan’s point about Dr. being a real honorary rather than a job. While Dr. is an honorary with a degree, Professor is a job specific term. There’s the assumption that all Professors are Doctors (which is generally true but may not always be true), but not all Dr.'s are Professors. Also personally I don’t believe that an honorary with a degree should be that much different than a different type of honorary, at least in terms of justification for how people are addressed by others.
For me, I couldn’t care less whether someone calls me Dr. or Professor X vs my first name. But that’s a personal preference and I know a lot of peers who feel differently and that they earned that title and should be addressed by it. So I get the point that Brendan and others make of not wanting to address a coach as “Coach X”, but I also understand Sanders being annoyed that he wasn’t addressed as coach, especially if he feels like others get addressed that way and he’s being treated differently.
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There are a lot of people I call Doctor, or, more commonly, Doc.
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Really and truly?
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Would you happen to work at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters?
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Creates probably should be “emphasizes” and I honestly have zero interest in this debate (just trying to add context) but yes.
It’s also just very normal for coaches to be addressed by their first name in press conferences. I’m not sure why people think that is odd. There’s a video going around of Saban being addressed as “Nick” by various reporters.
If a coach sees another coach at Peach Jam, are they referring to them as Coach or “John”? (It probably depends if they remember their name 
)
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There are so many names that I’ve been called, I’m quite thrilled when it’s just my first name.
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This is all true but I guess the distinction I would make is that in those cases the professor is in a higher position than those people and a part of the same organization/institution.
Reporters and the people they ask questions of are very much not in that situation. If anything there’s a certain kind of distancing that makes a lot of sense in that scenario.
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That’s totally fair. Like I said, I have no problem with Brendan/reporters not calling coaches “Coach X” and get why it’s good/normal for them not to. With regards to the Deion stuff, I get his annoyance if he feels like other people get addressed as coach and he doesn’t. But otherwise I agree, I think it’d be weird if he expected people to call him Coach all the time.
The issue with his argument is that he might feel this way but it isn’t really true.
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Rest assured that I will be off to debate this in the appropriate forum. Just checking that “uneven playing field” is the argument.
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