To look at Wednesday's Sportsbeat front, you wouldn't think twice about the scrambling it took to get it all together.
Originally, the boys hockey game at the top was the centerpiece with art in the middle, where the Pistons stories are. But, due to unfortunate events, the photos from the game didn't arrive, so we were forced to come up with a backup plan.
And what a Plan B it was, as former Pistons and No. 2 overall pick Darko Milicic came to town and began to run his mouth about how he thinks Joe Dumars and the Pistons ruined his career by sitting him for most of his 2 1/2 seasons in Motown.
The Darko story fit perfect coupled with the game story about the team's eighth straight loss.
We did as much as we could to localize the Mike Leach story, which means playing up the fact Texas Tech is playing Michigan State Saturday in the Alamo Bowl.
B4 was originally supposed to be a local page, but we put everything on B3 because of an abundance of college hoops. Go figure.
All in all, it could have been a disaster, but everything worked out just fine, and if readers can't tell we went through hell to get the paper finished, then I guess we did our jobs pretty well.

I still have yet to author a winning Lions headline Sunday (I was off the copy desk for both wins this year), and it's getting hard to come up with losing headlines.
I wanted to post this Sunday page because I haven't seen designer Matt Mowery lately to tell him how cool the Lions centerpiece looks. It's not just the photo, but as readers may have noticed, Matt has a way of accentuating the picture with bold text (Memphis Bold is the font used here).
The Urban Meyer news caught everyone off guard, but the guys on the copy desk moved the Red Wings game story to the inside to make room for the big news. The Little Caesars Pizza Bowl stayed on the front, accompanied by the aforementioned main stories, a Pat Caputo column and an interesting interview with former Lions cornerback Dre Bly.

As we did last week, we will be facing earlier deadlines Wednesday night to get the pages sent to the press, meaning SportsBeat will be missing most or all of the prep results in Thursday's edition. We will run the results in the next day's edition, Friday, and live online at www.MIPrepzone.com.
Make sure to visit the site for up-to-date results the latest episodes of "Prep Sports Chat," featuring Oakland Press prep sports coordinator Keith Dunlap and sports editor Jeff Kuehn.

To follow the more than 150 comments we received on our original Clarkston-Sterling Heights Stevenson story last week, we received a lot of mail for our weekly Sports Soundoff in Sunday's edition. We typically get the same two or three letter writers, but we got a whole new bunch last week. It's going to go down as one of the best high school football games of all time and we have reaction from one of the players involved in it.
High school coordinator Keith Dunlap said this game had gotten us the most feedback he's ever seen in the final football installment of "Prep Sports Chat."
“In all the years of covering sports here, we have never received as much feedback for any high school game as we did following the Clarkston-Sterling Heights Stevenson game,” he said.