According to the popular Notre Dame blog The Blue-Gray Sky, the seeds the for what we’ll now refer to as “The Great Bielema Hoax of 2009” were apparently sown Thursday evening when an anonymous e-mail was sent from an anonymous Google Mail account (BGS revealed that the source of the e-mail was in fact an acquaintance of that site’s operators) to the staff at FootballCoachScoop.com indicating that Wisconsin head coach Bret Bielema would soon be a target in Notre Dame’s search for a new head football coach to replace the recently dismissed Charlie Weis.

Word of interest in Wisconsin's Bret Bielema appears to be the work of a well-played hoax.

The details – pulled verbatim (with links included) from The Blue-Gray Sky – are as follows:

1. Friend of BGS decides (not at our behest, by the way) to email the rumor site FootballCoachScoop.com with a choice tidbit. FootballCoachScoop seems to post all kinds of unsubstantiated rumors, and said friend wants to see how easy it is to get something started.

2. Friend composes a very short, but specific email: "I used to work in the athletic department at Notre Dame (a lie), and I have heard that Jack Swarbrick is interested in Bret Bielema, the head coach at the University of Wisconsin." This was at 6:56pm last evening. The email is sent from a free gmail account. There is no other email sent from friend, no attempt to "sell" the rumor beyond the initial communication, and nothing else to back up his credibility.

3. Meanwhile, friend has another buddy randomly tweet a few times about the Bielema rumors, and goes to bed.

4. FootballCoachScoop does not reply to the email. FootballCoachScoop does not ask any followup questions. FootballCoachScoop, to friend's knowledge, makes no attempt to verify emailer's bona fides in any way.

5. The next morning, FootballCoachScoop runs the rumor almost verbatim. Friend chuckles and shares the development with a few friends.

But the lesson of the day didn’t end there, and its impact wasn’t felt by just FootballCoachScoop.com, because throughout the day several media outlets picked up the hoax, accepting it as truth simply for ending up in print on a rumor site’s homepage. Other victims of the hoax included: TheExaminer.com, NBCSports.com, ESPN.com, and Madison.com, which even had a reporter track down Bielema for comment.

“The one thing that strikes me about this whole episode is the multiple levels of failure in the way the story was allowed to grow,” [Jay], who’s article on The Blue-Gray Sky revealed the hoax, told BlueandGold.com in an e-mail early Saturday morning. “For starters, you've got FootballCoachScoop, who really should have known better than to run something unsubstantiated, although they're now claiming that they had other sources on it.

“Then you've got the whole phenomenon of The Examiner and sites like it, who have the veneer of respectable journalism but really are just glorified blogs, open to anyone to become a ‘reporter.’

“Then you've got an actual Badgers beat writer buying into it, ESPN bloggers buying into it, etc, without doing much fact checking at all, despite the story being blown on BGS for hours already. At least [Madison.com writer Jim Polzin] was trying to run down the rumor with the coach and AD himself, but how embarrassing for him.”

But what would this hoax really be without the red faces?

The media has learned two very valuable lessons here: 1) FootballCoachScoop.com is not a credible source of information. The fact that they’ve linked every working coach in the free world as a possible candidate to the Notre Dame job should enough support to the suggestion that they’re just throwing darts like the rest of us. And 2) maybe sometimes it’s more important to be right than first. Journalism is going down a slippery slope these days where its acceptable to shoot (or write as the case may be) first and then ask questions later. It should be the other way around.