For Kentucky fringe, love morphs into lunacy

His name is Marc Maggard, he works for something called Kentucky Ink, and unlike Jerry Tipton, he's not a Hall of Fame journalist. He's not a journalist at all. Journalists don't work for one-dimensional websites bringing only happy news to a team's fan base, and that is what Kentucky Ink is. It's a fan site, a place where Kentucky fans congregate to share their love for the Wildcats. Nothing wrong there. Every school has them, and they generally coexist with the real media.

Kentucky Ink stopped coexisting with the Herald-Leader about 10 days ago when Maggard used his forum to attack Tipton.

You can read an outstanding synopsis of the story here, but in a nutshell, Maggard used his site's message boards to accuse Tipton of undermining Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie. Tipton, according to Maggard, asked parents of two UK recruiting targets overly negative questions about Gillispie, including his appreciation for the nightlife.

Maggard, who has clashed with Tipton in the past, offered no proof. He did speak to the same parents and he did post those interviews online, but those interviews didn't support his accusations. However, Maggard insisted the parents were critical of Tipton ... in unrecorded conversations. Trust me on this, Maggard told his readers.

And then he told them something else:

"I can tell you with 100 percent certainty," Maggard wrote, "that Tipton is UK enemy #1."

Kentucky fans went crazy.

They hit the Internet to vent, and within hours they made their position clear: They want Tipton fired, and to facilitate that they want to boycott the Herald-Leader. If that doesn't work, they want to boycott the companies that advertise with the newspaper.

The editor for the Herald-Leader got involved, listening to recordings of Tipton's interviews and finding no basis in fact for Maggard's attack. No matter. Kentucky fans wanted him fired, assuming they couldn't have him killed.

This story picks at one of the most common rocks in sports today, and it has turned that rock over and exposed what crawls beneath. Patrons of fan sites like Kentucky Ink honestly believe the media should support the home team, a ridiculous notion to me but one that must not seem ridiculous to them when they can read unvarnished support on certain websites and publications.

Fan revolts can even work, too. Florida State recently fired radio color commentator Peter Tom Willis -- a former FSU quarterback -- because he wasn't enough of a homer.

Some fans don't want facts. They want propaganda. And certain fan sites provide it, often by working in secret conjunction with college coaches. NCAA rules prevent coaches from talking about unsigned recruits, but they routinely break that rule by leaking information to school-friendly fan sites. And then when those sites use that illegal information to break actual news -- so-and-so committed last night! -- they gain traction and legitimacy with the public.

And so when a guy like Marc Maggard at a place like Kentucky Ink tells his gullible readers to go crazy on a solid newspaper and a Hall of Fame reporter, they go crazy. They gather at message boards. They engage in undiluted groupthink. They bitch. They moan. They want businesses boycotted and they want people fired. They even make death threats. On the inside, surrounded and stoked by people who think just like they do, it must seem rational.

Everywhere else, we recognize it as insanity.

Until the insanity comes to your yard. At which point you won't recognize a damn thing.