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"Do you think The Roanoke Times is on Tech's public relations payroll?" a friend asked me this week. She was kidding, but sometimes I wonder the same thing.

With Tech's season opener scheduled for this past Sunday, I was reminded of one of the things I hate most about fall: how much football dominates the media. Specifically, I began to feel the old irritation about how often I see Virginia Tech's football team on the front page of The Roanoke Times.

From the Monday before the BCA Bowl through Tuesday of this week, Tech was the subject of six front-page stories. Four of them were about football, and the other two were related: I-81 improvements to create a quicker route to Lane Stadium and a new web-based college merchandise business whose board of directors includes Head Football Coach Frank Beamer. This past Monday alone, the Hokies got a triple play: a front-page picture and domination of the Virginia and Sports section fronts.

The team also got four and a half of eight pages in the Thursday, Aug. 24 "College Football 2000" special pullout section. Michael Vick got nearly three pages all to himself and was the subject of 20 photos, if we count reproduced magazine covers featuring the Heisman hopeful. If Vick doesn't make more photo appearances in The Roanoke Times this year than anyone else, I miss my guess.

The Virginia Cavaliers got the second-most coverage in the insert, at one page, but were pushed back to page 5. Oddly, an article about the struggling North Carolina Tar Heels came earlier, on page 3. The Times also gave a nod to Ferrum. A team likely be our best in nearly a decade, expected to dominate the Atlantic Coast Football Conference, got about a tenth of a page, as did Washington & Lee and VMI. No other teams were represented, except in season outlook roundup type articles and schedules.

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of those bookworm types with disdain for all things athletic. (Actually, I'd like to be a bookworm; I just can't find the time.) I was an intercollegiate athlete; I watch the Atlanta Braves at every opportunity, and I have a passion for tennis. The Ferrum women's soccer team has a special place in my heart. As I worked on this column, I flipped back and forth between a Braves rainout and early round U.S. Open tennis matches. Much of my favorite clothing bears the word "Adidas."

But honestly, enough is enough.

I grew up in a town where some of us joked that if Jesus returned to Earth on Friday night, everyone would miss him if he didn't stop by the football stadium. During my junior high and high school career, we won two state championships. This did nothing to dim the mania.

It's not that I don't understand football -- an excuse I frequently hear men attribute to women who don't share their pigskin enthusiasm. As my dad was a referee, I even know most of the penalty signals. It's just that I saw enough football in the first 18 years of my life, including several Virginia Tech games, to last me for the rest of it.

When I moved to the Roanoke Valley in 1990, I soon began to feel I had traded in the town that worships football for the newspaper that idolizes the Hokies. Occasionally, a sports story merits page one coverage. When Michael Vick was a Heisman Trophy finalist last winter, I expected to see him on the front page (and, if memory serves, I didn't). When Tech played in the Sugar Bowl, I might have put that story on the front page myself -- particularly if they had won.

But I frequently see fluff about Tech on page one. The best example was the Sugar Bowl feature about the guy who got one degree at Tech and another at Florida State and was thus in a quandry about whom to root for. (I would only have put that in the Sports section on a slow day, let alone news.) Last Sunday's article about fan preparation for the BCA Bowl continued the Times's tradition of Tech trivia up front.

I would have relocated all the articles about Tech which ran on the front page this week except one -- the story about changes to Interstate 81. Blacksburg is somewhat inaccessible, whether you're headed to Lane Stadium or the university library. (I realize I don't recall the name of the university library. That's probably because I don't see it repeatedly on the front page of The Roanoke Times.) The stretch of I-81 between Wytheville and I-64 is notoriously problematic, and improvements benefit everybody. However, I think the newspaper's go-Tech bias is apparent even in that article's headline: "Work at I-81 exit to smooth out route to Tech game." I would have chosen "Work at I-81 to ease Blacksburg traffic" or something similar.

Every other article about Tech should have been placed farther back. I'd have put the Monday, Aug. 21 article about stadium renovations in Sports; instead, that story ran on page one and, the next day, a follow-up appeared on page one of the Virginia section. "Businessman gives it the old college try" (Aug. 25), about a Tech alumnus's web-based college merchandise business, belonged on the Business page. Sunday's fan story belonged in sports or features, as did Tuesday's "Storm snags Tech fans." In fact, the newspaper pandered to Tech supporters three days in a row, with fan stories on page one (Sunday), the Virginia front (Monday), and page one again (Tuesday). If you watch the newspaper closely, you'll notice a tendency to put sports-related features in the Virginia or Extra section, as though they might take up the room better used for real sports news in Sports.

Of the Tech-related stories which actually appeared in Sports during this period, I also question the prominence given to "Shane's Homecoming," a story about Frank Beamer's son, now a graduate assistant at Tech's Bowl foe, Georgia Tech. On the same day, a tiny article at the bottom of the page revealed that the Salem Avalanche will extend its affiliation with the Colorado Rockies. That seems like relatively big local sports news, to me, yet it got fewer than four column inches, not counting the headline, and continued inside.

I am fully aware of Virginia Tech's contribution to our region, particularly after Tuesday's (Aug. 22) front page article "Study: Tech's impact is huge." The institution is directly or indirectly responsible for 15,000 jobs and more than a fourth of the gross regional product. "Huge," I would say, is no understatement.

So I would expect a fair amount of space devoted to the university's affairs in the regional newspaper. I would NOT expect the vast majority of it to be devoted to one athletic team, no matter how prominent. I would like to know, for example, the name of the campus newspaper editor. Not only is it narrow, but The Roanoke Times's Tech coverage often seems soft, as well. Arrests of athletes are reported, as their omission would really raise eyebrows, but the newspaper avoids investigative pieces when developments don't necessitate them. In the aftermath of stories about bears mangled in Tech-owned leg traps and the cloning of pigs, shouldn't the newspaper send someone to find out who makes policy governing animal research?

Amidst all the front-page Hokie hype, I also noticed an article about recent trends in SAT scores. Math and science scores have hit a 30-year high, but verbal scores are holding steady, at best. The Harry Potter phenomenon notwithstanding, children aren't reading for fun much these days. Sports practices and competitions gobble up more of their time than when I was a kid 30-some years ago, watching over the right field fence while my classmates played Little League baseball. They played about once a week and practiced a few other days. Now, even children's teams practice almost daily and travel regionally and out of state for competition.

And if media coverage in general is like The Roanoke Times's, what's to tell our children there's anything wrong with practicing six or seven days a week and reading only what's assigned? A few years ago, a Franklin County High School Odyssey of the Mind group won the state competition. The Franklin News-Post ran a small article about their victory on a page near the obituaries. The article did not even list the winning students' names. If the high school's football team had won a state championship, I know where that story would have appeared.

Such news priorities are based on the belief that newspapers should give readers what they want to read rather than shaping their priorities and values. Certainly newspapers face economic realities. On Wednesday, my news writing students discussed what one called "the news-stand factor." News organizations have to attract readers, and a newspaper or magazine has only one page to hook readers who buy single issues -- the front.

But news organization should take very seriously their role in setting cultural values. And when a single sport or a single team is featured so prominently day after day, what impression does that make on a 13-year old who wants to be the next Michael Vick? On the 13-year-old who wants to be the next J.K. Rowling? On 13-year-old girls, whose only role in a football universe is to wear a short skirt and yell inane cheers from the sidelines?

I also read this week in The Roanoke Times that renovations to Lane Stadium will cost around $37 million, nearly $11 million more than expected. UVa recently upgraded its football stadium, with a price tag of over $80 million. If those seem like grotesque amounts to you, just keep in mind that football's cost to our culture is far higher -- and graver -- than that.