Standing 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 150 pounds, Ross Dellenger knew he wasn’t long for the game of football.
As an undersized offensive guard, he said circumstances were less than ideal.
“I wasn’t coordinated enough to catch passes, number one,” Dellenger said, “and number two, the offense was the old-school, Les Miles offense.”
More than 15 years later, Dellenger received a call from Sports Illustrated to become a college football staff writer. The road between Mercy Cross High School in Biloxi and Sports Illustrated is one that led the writer to SEC football, the woman he would marry and chicken on a stick.
Dellenger’s trek began in Starkville, where he covered football for the Mississippi State Reflector. From there, the writer interned with the Associated Press at The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. The paper brought Dellenger to Elizabeth Crisp; the two married and formed a journalist tandem, one a sports writer, the other a capitol reporter.
After stops covering football at both Auburn and Missouri, Dellenger landed at The Advocate in Baton Rouge in 2015 as the beat writer for LSU. For a brief moment, the writer juggled football and baseball before digging in full-time with the football team.
It was at The Advocate that Dellenger met Scott Rabalais. The sports columnist did not mince words when speaking about the former beat writer.
“I’ve worked with a lot of people covering LSU football,” Rabalais said. “He’s the best beat writer we’ve ever had.”
Rabalais said Dellenger “owned the beat” at The Advocate, breaking what the columnist estimated to be at least 90 percent of the news on his trail in his time at the paper.
While he cast Sports Illustrated as one of the premier jobs in the field, Rabalais said he feels Dellenger is slightly miscast in his role with the company. He said the writer specializes in breaking news, a role he isn’t required to fill often with the magazine.
The last two years have seen Dellenger break three stories he said defined his time in the field. In September 2016, the writer broke the news of Les Miles’ firing at LSU nearly 30 minutes before any other outlet.
“It was the biggest moment, the biggest day of my life,” Dellenger said.
Two months later, Dellenger broke the news that LSU would be hiring Ed Orgeron full-time as head football coach after a stint as the interim coach. In November, two years and two months after the news that Miles was out at LSU, Dellenger reported that he was returning to coaching at the University of Kansas.
“As a beat writer, you pride yourself on breaking news and telling stories,” Dellenger said.
At the top of Dellenger’s list of his favorite stories to have written is an inside look at Oregron’s return to Ole Miss as a head coach for the first time since his time in Oxford more than a decade ago.
Among those Dellenger interviewed for the story was Phyllis, a cook at the Four Corners Chevron in Oxford. He wrote of Orgeron’s weekly tradition of visiting the gas station for fried chicken on a stick, an antidote that took social media by storm.
While Dellenger still does the type of regional stories that feature characters like Phyllis at Sports Illustrated, he said the biggest difference between the magazine and a local paper is the turnaround time on a story. Where he may have had a day to submit a story at The Advocate, he can now spend a week.
The miles Dellenger has traveled on his road to Sports Illustrated have taken him through multiple states and a handful of college football programs. The writer said receiving the call from the magazine in May was a pivotal moment in his career.
“When Sports Illustrated calls,” Dellenger said, “you do whatever you can to listen.”
The writer said he mostly operates in a regional domain for the time being, but over time, his coverage will grow to a national scope. As for what may be next, he said “it’s hard to go anywhere up.”
While Dellenger said there isn’t much above Sports Illustrated, Scott Rabalais said his competitive colleague can go anywhere. The columnist said he believes his former partner, more than 15 years removed from being a vastly undersized offensive lineman, can make a name for himself in sports journalism.
“He can be one of the preeminent writers in college football.”
Comments