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So we used a picture of Charlie Strong on our most recent LaDarrius Jackson story. Regular readers know we emphatically jumped to Strong's defense when Judge Margaret Taylor foolishly called him out during Jackson's first appearance in her courtroom. We never have and never will claim that any of Jackson's issues are the fault of Charlie Strong. Still, a few readers thought it was wrong of us to use a picture of Strong in that post. We kind of agree!

SB Nation has licensing agreements with Getty Images and USA TODAY Sports to use their photos on SBNation.com and the team blogs it hosts, including ours. We have to use a photo for every regular post we write, and except for our own work and free stock photography, we're not allowed to use any other photos without permission, for obvious copyright infringement reasons. (In recent years, USF has graciously allowed us to use their photos for our Olympic sports coverage.)

If you're Florida or Texas or some other huge school, every game gets photographed extensively. You have lots of pictures to choose from, and every player has a few shots in the library. Unfortunately, Group of Five schools like USF get underserved. Not every football game is covered, and only a handful of basketball games are covered. Overall, we're able to make it work. We still have access to plenty of pictures of guys like Quinton Flowers, Auggie Sanchez, and Deatrick Nichols in the Getty and USA TODAY libraries. But if you're not a star player, there aren't a lot of pictures of you, and if you don't get much playing time, we may not have any. We couldn't use a picture of Jackson because there are none.

Maybe we could have used a generic picture of the USF campus, but we had just used all of those on the posts we did about USF's preeminent university saga in the Florida Legislature. Plus, we didn't exactly have official permission to use them in the first place. (We figured since we were rallying to defend USF's honor, the school wouldn't get upset. Not so much on the Jackson story.)

Why not use a picture of a helmet, or a football, or Rocky, or something else? First, most of them don't pair well with stories about sexual battery. Second, Strong was a small part of the story because he quickly dismissed Jackson from the team outright after his latest arrest. And third, we don't have very many generic USF football pictures that we can still use, because Willie Taggart was in a lot of them. You'll find out just how few we have when we start our player countdown... seriously?... NEXT FRIDAY? I GOTTA DO 99 OF THESE DAMN THINGS AGAIN? KILL ME NOW.

Hopefully this explains why we reluctantly ran that story with a picture of Charlie Strong. In a related topic, we continue to be interested in hiring a photographer for our site. Inquire within.

This post was created by one of our blog's readers.

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