At ESPN, Voepel offers the story behind the story her newspaper ran this morning on the alleged mess at K-State.

She says it was hard to write. Really, really hard: "I considered Patterson to be a friend -- as much as a head coach can be with a journalist... I won the Mel Greenberg Award in 2003 because Patterson had taken the time to nominate me. But I realized that other people had very different experiences."

How many sports reporters, in how many markets, would find themselves unable to write the big, tough story Voepel has just written, because their editors didn't think the sport worth the column inches the story would take?