The Artists Were Clearly Influenced By Robert Mapplethorpe's Later Work.

This seems to be recycling day on my end, so let's get some frivolity in it. Thanks to the Wiz and EDSBS for tipping us to what happens when your college football stadium is left open to the public, like Cincy's Nippert Stadium is.



(If the title joke makes no sense to you, here's some Wikipedia to help.)

Gopher Problems.

The Big 10 just wants to rack up the Fulmer Cup points for off-season chicanery as far as college football goes, as three Minnesota Golden Gopher players, including DE Alex Daniels, CB Keith Massey, and RB E.J. Jones were arrested and are being questioned in criminal sexual assault allegations.

Here's the basics, from SI:

According to a police report, an 18-year-old woman was raped sometime between late Tuesday and Wednesday morning. The victim, whose name is not being released, was examined at a local hospital.

University Police Chief Greg Hestness said in a statement that his department learned of the allegation early Friday, and the players were being questioned that evening. Once the investigation is complete, he said, the case will be submitted to the Hennepin County attorney for possible charges.

"Obviously, this is disappointing news for any coach to receive," said Brewster. "There is an ongoing investigation and we will cooperate fully with law enforcement on this matter."

Coach Tim Brewster has suspended the three players until the allegations work their way through, which is a good way to nip it in the bud until truth and fiction are separated. However, this doesn't help with the recent Penn State party fighting allegations and Illinois' chicanery. It means the Big 10 may just beat the SEC in something for once, although I'm sure the Big 10 commish would rather this not be the way it's done.

Update: The Fanhouse is on it, and here's the Minneapolis Star-Trib piece they use.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part IV.

Here are Parts I, II, and III of the prior deconstruction of Jason Whitlock's multi-column "solution" to fix men's college hoops and college football. And Part IV (hopefully final) is a doozy, because now he's dug himself so far into the hole that he won't be able to dig out: his final grand proposal is to scrap Title IX, calling it a welfare system. Not new, not particularly revolutionary, but incredibly reactionary and stupid, and is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's get started.

Today, I drop the other shoe. I point out the benefactors of the continued exploitation of these directionless athletes and how fixing football and basketball players will end the gravy train of other non-black athletes.

Great. So the goal is to completely scrap the athletic opportunities for students who (gasp) are actually at college or university to go to school and get a degree in order to see that black men get one, even if they may not necessarily be aiming for it? If this is your idea of improving the lot of black men (which I am in favor of in general), count me the fuck out.

You could argue, and I will here, that the NCAA is in the business of recruiting impoverished, poorly educated black athletes for the purpose of securing gigantic TV contracts so that its schools can fund sports primarily played by white kids. The NCAA, rather than take a portion of the revenue it generates off its football and basketball players and invest in those athletes' intellectual and academic development, chooses instead to divert those revenues to volleyball, softball, baseball, golf, tennis, women's basketball and track athletes and their coaches.

Because they have resources that already exist in order to invest in their athletes intellectual and academic development: THEY ARE CALLED CLASSES AND ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS. It's very simple. If you stop riding the men's hoops and football players so hard to be pseudo-pros, cut down on the travel schedule, and make sure they go to class and take the exams, then you have what you want in the first place. But no, that cuts down on the gravy train for the universities, and they want to hoard that money. They use Title IX as an excuse, and as far as excuses go, I'd say it's a damn good one.

While the athletes remain eligible, the NCAA cuts deals to get them more and more television appearances on every night of the week. It's a vicious cycle that has produced the mess we have today. The athletes know they are being used for money, and they express a hard-to-digest hostility and sense of entitlement because of it. The NCAA, NBA and NFL ignore the athlete (who did not choose his environment or dysfunctional upbringing) and allow him to rot until age 18, and then wonder why he is hard to bring under control at age 23 or 24 when he's been handed several million dollars.

It is not the responsibility or job of the NCAA or any of the professional leagues to educate and develop an athlete before the age of 18, regardless of what you might think. That is incumbent upon parents and teachers at the lowest levels, and at higher ones, local, state, and federal government. I shall repeat my notes from prior installments: EDUCATION IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN EMBRACE BY DEMAND. That love has to be developed and nurtured. It is not the responsibility of an athletic association to educate its athletes. If they truly are students, then it is incumbent upon their universities, and the NCAA accounts for this, however flawed the standards are (and they are highly flawed) for men's hoops and football.

The intervention process must happen much sooner. Major League Baseball builds academies in foreign countries hoping to develop future major leaguers. But we can't build outreach programs to help our young football and basketball players develop academically and socially? We know there is a need for this. We know it's the right thing to do.

Yes, it is. Then ask your local school district, get your city councilman's attention, get the state house or assembly, the state senate, the mayor, the governor -- make it your mission to be active and demand these programs that help academic development for all children who need it, especially those in impoverished areas. I cannot repeat this enough: Whitlock aligns himself indirectly with a generation of American society that got theirs and said "fuck you" when it came to standing up and advancing the causes for equalizing funds in public education or advocating alternatives such as adequate vouchers (I'm not a voucher fan, but at least it's something.)

I am not in favor of paying college athletes money. Has money solved TuPacman Jones' problems? He needed counseling at age 12 and 13. He needed a strong alternative from hanging with the boyz 'n the 'hood at age 14. The NCAA and professional sports leagues should have given him an alternative long ago.

Please see the above response again. My blood is boiling over this now. Just because you don't want to pay them doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to earn money on the side, take a job. If the sport is a full-time job, then they should be able to get a bit of a stipend for it. Didn't you just advocate such a stipend in part three, saying the NCAA should give a poor student-athlete a $2,000-$3,000 stipend based on academic effort? Either you want a stipend or you don't want to pay them. Pick one.

A portion of the money that these athletes generate should be invested in the athletes who generate the money. Many of the non-revenue sports should be club sports. What we have now is a comfortable welfare life for Olympic athletes. I'm not knocking those athletes. I'm suggesting there's a lot of fat in their budgets. Why should any of them ever compete in an event that requires them to get on a plane or stay in a hotel?

Fine. No more athletic championship tournaments for golf, tennis, gymnastics, fencing, etc. Then, watch as there are no more Olympians come every couple of years. Every golf phenom will go the Michele Wie route of turning pro at 16 rather than the Tiger Woods route of spending a few years learning how to win at Stanford. Kids who are good at their sports, but have lesser to no expectations of going pro will have no opportunity to test their skills against the best in the country, and figure out what it means to win at a higher level.

You think amateur sports are professionalized enough? Just wait. With this solution, we'll be digging into high schools more and more as the NCAA funds its version of the AAU camps, and athletes in other sports enter tournaments at younger ages because they know there's no quarter for them in college.

Here's another analogy for you: you run a university that produces scientific scholars and patents that bring in lab funding and research money, so you give all your money to that department, and pull it out of the humanities by de-funding history, English, or music (no new desks, new building, or re-tuning the pianos in the practice rooms in the hall). That's what this is akin to -- screwing over a bunch more students than you started with.

It's called welfare or Title IX or stupidity or exploitation of football and basketball players who just happen to be primarily black, poor and in desperate need of the resources being funneled to white kids and their even whiter coaches.

I bet very few of those football and basketball players or their families are that stupid. The NCAA created a system, the coaches and players are trying to make their futures in it with "advisers" and "consultants" -- just don't call them agents, but that's what they are. This is the "posse" you decry so much, that apparently takes advantage of them -- these kids are not as dumb as you think they are, Whitlock; teenagers never are.

Black football and basketball players are not alone in having their hands out. They just happen to have sufficient justification. We need to do whatever it takes to put education in those hands long before they ever hit a college campus.

Sure. But stop making it incumbent on the NCAA, NBA, and NFL -- these organizations are utterly amoral when it comes to education, and it's probably better that way -- they'd screw it up or run it like AAU without the middle man. Here's an idea, expressed often, but worth repeating one more time: if you care so much about the downtrodden black student-athlete, then why not help his local city, state, and country care about him as a student and a black man rather than an athlete? Because that would dare to venture into the bigger picture of politics and the precepts we blindingly accept as part of American society (so you're poor, you can't afford school supplies, and your history textbook is ancient history of its own? Bootstraps, people!), and Whitlock either can't or won't bring himself to tackle those sacred cows. Minority students in urban areas get shafted because good schooling costs money, whether you move into good schooling in the burbs or pay for it in private schools, but that doesn't seem to matter too much -- the prism is still so small for him; looking at the politics of education, anything that might force him to take his focus off of sports and onto the context in which sports exists is clearly over his head.

Proposing a fix for a broken system like the NCAA while refusing to look at the bigger picture of education and money in American society as a whole is akin to calling yourself an expert in Shakespeare or Joyce after reading the Cliffs Notes.

Nutt Busting.

EDSBS and Journo Rock are all over the latest mess that makes up Las Cronicas Locas de Boss Hawg (TM Swindle and Montana, when are we gonna see a script, gents?) -- for the uninitiated, that's Houston Nutt, Arkansas football coach, and boy oh boy, are there a lot of fun accusations in this one. If you want to read the whole PDF, here it is, but the Newspaper Hack already did it so we don't have to (although I must admit, the good stuff kept me captivated for a good half-hour or so). Here are the biggies:

1) Involvement in an email from a booster supportive of him to QB Mitch Mustain titled "Hello Mr. Interception King"
2) Hiring a new O-coordinator while the old one was still around; hell, you could say, behind his back even.
3) Flirting with both N.C. State and THA U on their recent head coaching vacancies.
4) Doing more than just flirting with local TV anchor Donna Bragg. (Well, you have to give him good taste. I know college coaches text-message like mad to get recruits, but thousands to a woman not involved with the program is well, questionable.)

Coach Nutt probably needs to make like Altman and get the hell out of Fayetteville while he still can. If a booster is willing to put together this 48-page doc based on FOIA requests, that's more hardcore than you really need at your program.

So Long, Coach Robinson.

Younger fans of the college football like yours truly can appreciate the numbers behind Eddie Robinson's life at Grambling (408 wins, 85% graduation rate, etc.), but speaking for myself, imagining what he went through in the Jim Crow-era South to lead those teams is something I'll never be able to conceive of when it comes to difficulty.

So, I leave the tributes and notes to my betters at Deadspin and EDSBS; meanwhile, this definitive analysis by D-Wil is a must read.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part III.

Read the prior fisking of Jason Whitlock's first two installments of columns on fixing college basketball and football before this one; here's Part I, and here's Part II.

In Part III, Whitlock lays out his plan to improve the education of the big-time collegiate athlete for us. I feel like I should state that I think he means well (others may disagree), but the road to hell is re-paved on an hourly basis with good intentions. Let's get cracking. He has six parts of the basic position; to save space and your eyes, I will only re-post the ones in full with questionable assumptions.

1. True, especially considering the NCAA's mouthing of "academic integrity" and the integrity of amateur status. No major quibble there; if you're going to dump money into a TV sport and profess integrity, you're going to have to pay to ensure it, if you have any interest in doing so (and that's probably where we run into issues.)

2. I don't think anyone can argue with this one.

3. Football and basketball are dependant [sic] upon predominantly black, American-born athletes. A large percentage of these athletes are from impoverished, no-father-in-the-home backgrounds. Black youth culture has been corrupted by hip-hop/prison culture, which is hostile, self-destructive and anti-education.

First part, yes -- second, not so much. I made the same point in Part II: hip hop culture is not intertwined with prison culture, you cannot write or speak of them as if they were intertwined. Hip-hop culture, like most subcultures entwined and borne from a form of music, is about speaking an alternative truth. The truth of the war on drugs and the war on the poor is that black men, many non-violent offenders, are cycled through the prison/industrial complex to serve a machine of mindless prohibition. I don't think it's so much anti-education as a distrust of what's being taught, because history is written by the victors, and for centuries, black folk have been subjugated. We try to modify these faults as the years pass, but that doesn't mean they're still not there. Distrust of an education system didn't start with hip-hop culture.

Also, who's your copy editor?

4. That's probably safe to say -- if you were part of massive profits for your school, yet couldn't even take a stipend from an on-campus job, you'd be pissed too.

5. Poorly educated, hostile and resentful professional football and basketball players are creating a public-relations nightmare (potential loss of TV ratings) for the NBA and NFL by breaking the law off the field and projecting a hip-hop/prison image that makes their fans uncomfortable. These same athletes are contributing to an unhealthy image of American blacks at home and across the globe.

OK, so we take into account the Bengals, Pac-Man Jones, Ron Artest, and they're supposed to represent the majority of the image of players, including folks like Allen Iverson, who've been good citizens? Why are fans uncomfortable? Is it because media tends to overhype the bad actors (especially minority bad actors) in society to arouse fear, and since the media is controlled by the few, that image is the one that gets portrayed around the world?

6. The NFL and NBA are trying to crackdown on these athletes with dress codes and other get-tough policies. The new rules are necessary but will fail if not supported by an improved educational system for athletes.

Oy. Last column you wrote that these rules were as useful as the failed war on drugs and the war on the poor. Pick one. Either they're necessary or designed to fail.

The key to correcting what is wrong with football and basketball is education and tying the financial interest of the athlete to education. It is a mistake to give young people what they want. A wise parent and/or society gives young people what they need.

Ah, here's the thesis; interesting, but flawed, because actual athletic skill has fuck-all to do with education. I'll elaborate in a bit. The second sentence here seems innocuous enough, except you realize that we are talking about and dealing with 18-year olds. You can't force them any more.

The NFL and NBA need to go into partnership with the NCAA on its two television sports. The NFL, NBA and NCAA would all financially benefit from developing well-educated athletes...I'm against an age limit for entering the draft. I'm in favor of gigantic financial incentives for athletes entering the league after completing their college degrees and/or five years of college. A 22-year-old college graduate has far more to offer the NBA than a 19-year-old who spent one semester pretending to be a college student. The American college graduate also has far more to offer the NBA than a 19-year-old foreigner who American fans are unfamiliar with.

Not a terrible idea at first sight, but the problem is that the NCAA is so much more than Division I-A -- there are thousands of member schools to be concerned with, so many of them that will never send a player to a professional sports leagues, and they will be left out of this subsidy and crying foul. I've never liked the age limit either, but do you have any proof of the back half of that statement? Ultimately, no pro league or scout will be judging based on how long that athlete has spent in college. The question is always, "Are they ready to play at the next level?" Thinking it could be anything else is delusion, regardless of how smart it is overall. I'm pretty damn sure a 22-year old who's played all four years in college probably has more to offer, but I can't assert that.

As for the 19-year old foreigner: wouldn't these be the same 19-year old foreigners that Whitlock believes play at a higher level than our own ballers?

So my step one would be for the NBA and NFL to institute a salary structure that paid college graduates and/or five-year college players significantly more than early entrants. Isn't this the way it works in most professions? The more educated you are the more money you earn as an entry-level employee...You could stagger the money non-graduates are paid based on the number of years they spent in college. The rule might entice foreign basketball players to enroll in American universities.

Professional sports are not most professions. Again, the problem is that the level of formal education is not important in the overall scheme of professional sports. The reason many white-collar jobs (including mine) rely on measures of formal education is because our jobs require a certain amount of it. Playing basketball or football for a living requires smarts and intelligence that aren't necessary directly linked to your skill with say, history. Formal education might improve your skill as an athlete (it will most likely help you get around a playbook more easily), but it won't ensure you have the talent to survive a physically demanding lifestyle.

With regard to foreign players: again, these are players whom Whitlock has said are already better skilled, so why put in a rule that's unfair to them? Also note that folks like Andrea Bargnani are the exception -- many foreign players these days come into the leagues in their early 20s, Manu Ginobili was in his mid 20s in his rookie year; Jorge Garbajosa is in his late 20s. Dirk Nowitzki was 20; that'll probably be less common. So why force them to go to American universities to earn what they're worth?

Step No. 2 would be for the NBA and NFL to recognize that college football and basketball are developmental leagues and that the NBA and NFL need to financially subsidize college football and basketball.

OK...don't mind that too much....

This subsidy is necessary because my other central belief is that the NCAA needs to get involved academically with its potential football and basketball players as they enter ninth grade, and the NCAA is going to have to offer modest financial rewards for its poor athletes who achieve academically and stay in college.

Oh, HELL NO. I have enough of a problem with high school sports being professionalized enough as is, and the NCAA should be getting involved with 14-year old kids? You can say academically all you want -- knowing the NCAA, it's not going to happen that way.

The NCAA needs to measure and reward academic effort. A formula needs to be devised that takes into account academic effort and achievement in high school and economic background and provides a freshman college athlete a stipend ($2,000 to $3,500 per semester). This stipend would only be available to the poor. And the stipend would increase each year based on the student's effort (attendance) and achievement (grade point average).

OK, so this stipend would only be available to the poor, and the well-off athletes who are barred from taking a part-time job or earning most forms of money while on scholarship are going to have to lean on Mommy and Daddy? There are middle-class athletes on scholarship whose parents are feeling the pinch, too; they might be able to squeeze sending in some money, but don't pretend that they couldn't use it either.

To replace AAU basketball, NCAA schools need to host their own four-to-five-week summer football and basketball camps that would be a mix of athletics and academics for potential recruits who are incoming high school freshmen to seniors. This would be expensive. It's also very necessary...You bring the recruits up during the time frame that the coaches are hosting their money-generating camps for rich kids with little real talent. The money from those camps is split up among the coaching staff and (in basketball) payoffs/speaking engagements to AAU coaches. I'd take all the profits from those camps (along with money from the shoe companies, which will have less interest in lining the pockets of AAU coaches) and spend it on academically, socially and physically nurturing 25 basketball and 50 football recruits for a month each summer.

It's a fascinating concept. I shudder to think what the NCAA would do if left in charge of it; they'd likely run it just like AAU is run right now. Basically, you're just consolidating, removing the middleman. Putting the NCAA in charge of anything involving an athletic camp and hoping that they will mix academics in is a mistake. There's no incentive to do that.

To ensure the integrity of a college athlete's academic progress, universities need to hire academic-athletic directors who report directly and only to the school president or chancellor. Their only concern would be the academic success of athletes. If academic fraud was uncovered, the academic-athletic director and the school's president would take the hit -- not a coach or athletic director.

Another needless level of bureaucracy. Keep the athletic director responsible for this. The problem is that the NCAA is made up of the presidents and ADs -- they aren't going to police themselves very well; the problems with the system are a feature, not a bug. We don't blame ADs enough as is for bad performance on and off the field or court, and now they should be let off the hook?

Money is driving football and basketball. We need to financially reward high-profile athletes for embracing education, and we need to financially penalize high-profile athletes who reject education. We should not deny the uneducated an opportunity to be professional athletes. Denial creates hostility.

Ever known anyone who just wasn't suited for university, just wasn't one of those people? I have, and this is a system that creates de facto denial. This essentially creates a new age limit by tying salaries to a concept that doesn't have as much to do with the primary function of a professional athlete.

I realize that Title IX and other factors (cries of racism by shakedown artists such as Jesse Jackson) stand in the way of implementing the solutions I suggest. I'll address all of that.

Nice to see the slam of someone who has actually gone out of his way to try and see that some of the gains made in the civil rights area were actually preserved instead of stripped by those in charge of the government. Can't wait for the next one.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part II.

Previously: Part I. Now, here's where Mr. Whitlock and I probably run off the rails, because Part II for him is about athletes showing off "the wrong image" for pro basketball and football.

Change is coming in professional football and basketball whether hip-hop athletes and their groupies like it or not. We've already seen it in the NBA with the age requirement, dress code, rules limiting hostility toward the referees, importation of foreign-born players and harsh penalties for any negative interaction with fans. Now the NFL and its new commissioner, Roger Goodell, plan to join the fight by enacting a get-tough policy on law-breaking players. The NFL Players Association set the tone for this by suggesting a three-strikes policy shortly after TuPacman Jones allegedly made it rain one-dollar bills and bullets at a Vegas strip club.

"TuPacman" is absolutely unnecessary; a rhetorical blast of irrelevance designed to link any criminal actions of Pac-Man Jones with hip-hop, part of Whitlock's thesis and arsenal; he does not understand the relationship between correlation and causation, he would rather condemn the members of a youth culture he doesn't understand while refusing to acknowledge where such youth culture stems from. And what part of "allegedly" isn't understood (although it doesn't protect you legally)? The accusations are that one of Jones' associates shot up the club, which is an important distinction to make. Is Jones a troubled person? Most likely. Would a suspension based on prior record and legal problems he's still dealing with appropriate? Yes. Will a three-strikes policy possibly be as misguided and problematic in execution as it is as a sentencing guideline now? Most definitely.

Music is rebellious and sometimes divisive for no good reason. Sports are patriotic and unifying. There is too much pointless, unjustified rebellion in football and basketball right now. Muhammad Ali made sports fans uncomfortable for a good reason. That's why he eventually became beloved. Today's hip-hop athlete makes fans uncomfortable just because he can and for the approval of his fawning posse.

If this were the Sixties, Whitlock would be writing a column about how Ali should never have joined the NOI, never have sat out the Vietnam War, and should have shut his mouth. Frankly, we don't know if today's basketball or football star will go down in history as being bigger than just sport -- we can't be that forward looking, but they don't have fewer opportunities to do that because they're uneducated; a lot of it has to do with corporate handlers who prefer non-confrontational, non-political athletes. Don't stop the money train.

More and more fans sense they have nothing in common with the athletes they're watching. And, even more troubling, more and more fans are reaching the conclusion that they don't want their children emulating the style of dress or behavior of the athletes. Again, whether we like it or not, sports are supposed to be "All-American," played by the boys next door. We sing the National Anthem. The games are supposed to bring us together, make us see our common humanity. There is economic value in the perception that the players love their teams, love their schools, want to be educated and act and dress like middle America.

Black people are still trying to be part of middle America. It's only been 40 years since the struggle Whitlock prides (and rightly so) that ensured that we even got to vote. Back then, "all-American" and "the boys next door" meant all-white, non-bohemian, non-threatening to the archaic notions of the culture, and to some extent, despite the rise of black music as the driving force in pop music, it still is. The fear still exists, no matter what brown folks of any color do to stand out. Why would athletes whose parents didn't get a chance to be part of Middle America want to emulate all the factors of it? Most of your professional athletes want to be part of America, and they'd like to leave their violent pasts behind, I bet. But they want a measure of control over how they become part of the upper class.

There's a cultural clash going on inside the arenas/stadiums between the predominantly white fans and the predominantly black players. There's a mutual distrust and disrespect. From a business standpoint, the athletes are wrong. This is America, with its capitalistic economic system. The customer is always right.

It's nice to know that the right to be an ignorant consumer trumps the right of men playing on the field or on the floor; these gladiators are performing for your entertainment, and damn them if they happen to have body art or listen to music you find untenable. It doesn't reflect badly on you, because you paid your money, and the men on the floor are there to serve at your pleasure.

From a social standpoint, the black athletes are wrong again. They are contributing to a negative, stereotypical view of black Americans. No one believes that wealthy young men shouldn't enjoy all the excesses that America has to offer. You can enjoy those excesses without breaking the law, without mocking the educational system and without smothering yourself in prison/hip-hop culture.

If the black athletes are wrong, then so are the white handlers that sign them to contracts to sell sweatshop labor-made shoes to teenagers of all colors. And how many times do we have to state that hip-hop culture and "prison" culture are not one and the same? Many of the athletes signed to multi-million dollar contracts do exactly what Whitlock writes in that last paragraph: LeBron, Tracy McGrady, D-Wade, you can make a longer list of multi-millionaire players who have been nothing but clean. Still taking the examples of a few and tarring the many.

Whitlock is right in saying that black athletes are our ambassadors to the world, but mostly because entertainment is the only way black men and women with any semblance of power are exported to the rest of the world -- business leaders, any other arena of society, that's white men being displayed as our oligarchy, our collection of the creme de la creme of American society.

They're failing us. And we are failing them. We have let them down by falling in love with their money, rationalizing their every misstep and not demanding that they embrace education.

You can't demand people embrace education. This is a fundamental and crucial misunderstanding of how learning works. If you are a parent, you have to give your children a reason to learn, and if you want to foster an embrace of education, you have to give those same kids a reason to be curious, a reason to love learning. You can tell a child to study for his own good, but when that child reaches the teenage years, that child wants more of a reason why. I've never heard of, met, or read about a parent that didn't want their kids to be educated, but the 24/7 nature of the American work force makes it difficult for families where both parents work two jobs to show kids why it's important. In that case, you need societal structures to help: after school programs, etc. -- but you cannot demand that anyone embrace education; otherwise, it's a crock, and the savvier segment of athlete, prospect, and ordinary teenager will smell a rat.

The letter he re-prints from someone teaching in China, with all the questions about stereotypes, is exactly what happens when you have a semi-monolithic media source feeding negative images and stories on many people who don't fit into the cultural majority. It's not what athletes put out; it's what the media chooses to focus on.

Now, I'm sorry, as a black man, and a proud one, I'm not going to sit quiet while a group of idiots define us all as idiots. No way. I know a little bit about history and how Martin Luther King Jr. and others won us the freedoms we take for granted today. We had the moral and intellectual high ground internationally. We had the bigots outflanked. These guys who serve as our ambassadors don't know that because we've failed to inform them. They can't see that the picture they're painting of us justifies the prison building (new slavery) at home and limits our ability to combat it.

And you stood by while your cities, states, and country failed to fund the elementary, middle, and high schools or either cut funding to the schools in a rush of standardized testing mania, and now you blame them for not learning from your example that they couldn't get in school? You got yours and didn't follow through. You let society pull the ladder up in the "greed is good" 80s ethos and now blame the kids that got put through that system for not knowing better? Blame the victim, indeed. At least the men who make millions toting the ball or shooting it had a way out. This is the ultimate problem I have with many prominent boomer black folk: it is never part of their responsibility to make sure the gains Dr. King, Malcolm X, and many others made were preserved by speaking out in the social or political arenas, and many of them decided to slam those who tried, like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, for being hucksters. I addressed a similar hypocrisy by jokingly asking why Oprah hated America when she built a school for girls in South Africa and took a jab at American kids.

It is rare when the right thing to do is also the right thing to do business-wise. Fortunately, when it comes to football and basketball, we are at that crossroad. My solution for fixing football and basketball is the right thing to do socially and the right thing to do financially for the leagues. The get-tough policies that are being adopted/suggested by the NFL and NBA won't cure what ails the sports or the athletes. They're public-relations ploys designed primarily to satisfy angry fans. They'll be as effective as America's "war on drugs/poor people."

So, why are you implicitly supporting those PR ploys here if they're going to be completely ineffective? The war on drugs/war on the poor is the elephant in the room, why the rest of America sees fit to build more prisons to house non-violent offenders, a prime contributor and developer of the "prison culture" you decry in modern American athletes. How ironic that the black market created by the war on drugs sends poor people with very few options to prison, and puts them into a culture that the writer deplores for being put to vinyl, cassette, and CD, there to supposedly influence others who grew up in the same realities.

Part III tomorrow, and Part IV will come after Whitlock writes his wrap-up column. I understand this stuff can be tedious to read, but I can't let this stuff go, even when I probably should.

You Can't Fix A System Designed To Be Broken, Part I.

Jason Whitlock is doing something right post All-Star column madness despite frequent amounts of stupidity and belonging to the old-school generation of Buppies who like to hate to black youth culture, because for some reason, I'm still reading. At least he picks a worthy topic this time: how college football and basketball ought to be fixed, which deserves a serious look, but so far, his look isn't serious, as evidenced by Part I. (Part II and III are up; I'll get to those later.)

Men's basketball and football are rotting on the inside. March Madness, no matter how much the media fawn, doesn't cover the stench. The players are mercenaries who rarely get properly educated. At the professional level, the lawlessness of the players is an embarrassing turnoff to fans. In the NBA, it's widely accepted that the players don't play hard until the postseason and the pro game has been exposed as inferior by international competition. The professional leagues are overrun by immature players who are completely unprepared for the money and spotlight the NFL and NBA provide.

Not a completely unfair assessment, as far as theses go, except for the last sentence, prepared to target all players as bad actors from the get go.

NBA executives, people presumably intelligent enough to know that [Kevin] Durant and [Greg] Oden will stunt their intellectual and basketball evolution by entering the NBA at 19, have been breathlessly jockeying for Durant and Oden to leave college.

I still think Oden won't. I think he has a good enough coach in Thad Matta to keep him from going and teammates that might stay (Mike Conley, Jr. for example); Oden knows he has holes in his game and is more likely to stick around, because in the NBA, purely defensive-minded big men are a dime a dozen. Whitlock asserts that it would stunt Durant athletically and mentally to leave Texas, but how much of a benefit will it be to stay at Texas when a coach like Rick Barnes isn't sure how to engineer an offense around him? When considering why an athlete leaves college early, part of the decision has to be on whether the style imposed on the team by the coach (since he is coach, GM, and father figure in one) works for the player. We put a lot of the decision to leave early on the player and his maturity, forgetting he plays in a system he did not create.

If he leaves Texas now, it's almost a certainty he will never reach his full potential as a basketball player. Kevin Durant doesn't know the first thing about winning. His Texas team, although young, underachieved this year, losing 10 games and bowing out of the NCAA Tournament in the second round after an embarrassing performance against USC.

Does Rick Barnes know the first thing about winning? That's a valid question to ask in the wake of a poor coaching job against USC. Yes, Texas consisted of four freshmen, but that's even more reason to look at Barnes' coaching job.

Kobe Bryant is the only straight-from-high school NBA superstar to win multiple championships. Of course, Shaquille O'Neal was the true star of those Lakers teams, and Kobe's snotty, child-star-spoiled attitude tore apart that Lakers dynasty.

Shaq is just as juvenile, pithy, and ego-ridden as Kobe, because he is a pro athlete, and a top one at that. O'Neal just has better tact and a better way with the media, which is a good skill to have, it allows you to feign humility. And it's nice to see Whitlock let Shaq off the hook later in the column for taking half the regular season off and not calling that a spoiled attitude (saying he won't be the last is not condemning the behavior, and it doesn't excuse calling Kobe "spoiled".)

Whitlock identifies an important part of the college/university experience, the new peer group.

It used to be that 95 percent of NBA players spent at least three years in college. What happens to most people when they're in college? They develop a totally new social group. The friends you thought you couldn't live without in high school get replaced by the friends you make in college...Big-time athletes rarely say or do anything important now because a Dr. Harry Edwards never gets a chance to get inside their head. The athletes visit college campuses for a year or two, but never experience what's really happening on those campuses because their entourages won't allow it. They're also less likely to develop friendships with people who don't have a financial interest in them. They don't develop peers -- young people their age who are headed for professional careers.

It may have something to do with the fact that there's not a lot of time to do that. From all the time spent in practice, travel, games, etc., there's not a bunch left over to socialize with people from outside the team. It's not on the entourages -- I really wonder if he has any evidence for that assertion; blame it on the revenue sport itself, the coaches, who have to produce that star player to keep their own job. I wonder how much time you have to develop off-the-court peers when all your time is spent on the court or in the few chances you have to go to class during that season.

The current setup is failing the game. We play an inferior brand of basketball. The NBA is virtually unwatchable in the regular season.

Expansion probably has more of a hand in this. There are plenty of roster spots that need to be filled, and there will be mediocre players used to fill those spots. Unless Whitlock is prepared to tell some NBA teams to close up shop, that's not going to change a whole lot.

Kevin Durant just finished 25-10 without elevating the performance of one of his college teammates, and he'll be seduced with a shoe contract from Nike or Reebok that will dwarf the 25-year, $25-million "lifetime" contract the Lakers once offered Magic after he'd made the Lakers and the NBA the rival of the Cowboys and the NFL.

I don't know about that. I don't think Texas makes the tourney without Durant. He saved the team in several games when D.J. Augustin, Damion James, and A.J. Abrams just couldn't get it together. He had to play a Kobe role because the rest of the team had frequent off-days. Durant is a major reason the Longhorns got as far as they did this year, and many of us thought they could have gone further. As for Magic's contract, t hat's just because the money wasn't there in the league yet -- if Magic came out from MSU today, he'd command as much as today's pro prospects.

The setup is also failing the athletes. Their educational opportunities are compromised the moment they enter high school and are identified as a prospect. By the time they enter college, almost no one in authority over them has a genuine interest in their education. The interest is in their eligibility and their ability to meet the demands of TV networks.

No argument there, but I suspect there will be more in the next installment.

Gaming The System Is Easy When You Make The Rules.

Most of your intelligent college football and basketball fans are entirely cognizant of the hypocrisy necessary at the highest levels of the NCAA in order to perpetuate the belief in "amateurism" in its two most lucrative sports. Now, lawyers for all D-I college football and basketball players want to challenge that practiced hypocrisy in an L.A. courtroom come June. As Lester Munson writes for SI, the question is whether the NCAA has illegally fixed that cost of a scholarship beneath the actual cost of a college education.

Lawyers representing all Division I football and basketball players (there are 11,500 of them) claim that the athletes are shortchanged an average of $2,500 a year because of an arbitrary NCAA limit on scholarships.

If they're right, the athletes are entitled under anti-trust laws to triple damages, a potential liability for the NCAA of more than $86 million for a single year. If the trial includes four years of scholarships, as the players' lawyers suggest, the damage multiplies to $344 million. The NCAA's annual budget is $465 million.

That is a staggering amount of money to be considering as an ultimate payout in damages, and even if limited by a judge afterwards, it would still be a sizable amount out of the NCAA's budget, never mind profits. The haggling point is what is called a "grant-in-aid," or GIA -- to sum up what it actually consists of, think of everything you ever bought while at school that was not included as tuition or room and board: laundry, travel expenses, incidental expenses, and as most college graduates remember least fondly when it comes to the wallet, text books.

The NCAA's Elsa Cole defends the GIA limit like this: in essence, removing the cap provides another recruitment tool for schools to use in attracting players -- by offering to pay their expenses, supplies, and books, we remove the "amateur" from the ideal of student-athlete, since better-off schools will offer to pay that ENTIRE way as another carrot to attract the top blue-chippers.

The problem for the NCAA is that even president Myles Brand has admitted the cap should go, and a former head addresses it in even starker terms:

The NCAA's reliance on the protection of amateurism is a familiar riff. Walter Byers, the former executive director of the NCAA, dismissed it: "Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue. It is an economic camouflage for monopoly practice."

Ultimately, this monopolistic practice, like most others given to sporting organizations, is based on the appearance of providing a public service of sorts, in its own way. The problem for the NCAA, regardless of how the lawsuit pans out, is that the school presidents and the athletic directors are well trained to repeat the mantra and myth of the "student-athlete" in these two money sports while shoveling the cash in their pockets. Now, if there is any sort of karma, they will have to share.

The NCAA is the reason why I have never blamed players or coaches who bend or flex the arcana that the organization calls "rules." They are forced to fight for their jobs, their starting spots, and their basic livelihoods in a world they had no part in creating.

What I Imagine The Ninth Circle Of Hell Is Like.

And that would be having to listen to Joe Theismann teamed up with Brent Musburger on Saturday nights for college football season.

These two jackasses together would make Pam Ward and Mike Gottfried sound sane. Yet the rumor going around the blogs is that this might actually happen -- as if ESPN/ABC would willfully ruin Saturday night college football games by putting these two together.

Viewers already have to watch Musburger's games drunk because that's obviously the way he calls them, and with his blatant favoritism towards certain programs (Notre Dame, for example), he'll be an absolutely perfect match in hell for another Golden Domer legend. It's the announcing team from the Ninth Circle of Hell, the one the Devil tortures all right-thinking and loving college football fans to for eternity to be tortured by Brent's mindless cliches and Theeeesman's insistence on making points that are completely blown apart by what is actually happening on the field.

Would the WWL do something that insane, that incredibly stupid? Oh, wait -- they would. The only way it could conceivably be worse if it happened is something that has already been discussed -- pairing the two with this dumbass below:

How Deep Is Your Love?

While commenting on Deadspin's Up! All Night thread for Sunday, I noted PQ Crash's labeling of sports in terms of serious relationships. I figured it wasn't a bad idea to flesh out.

Football is my soul mate, best friend, and everything I could ever want. We were childhood sweethearts from the day my dad introduced us, despite his preference for baseball. My eyes and my affection could stray, but I always come back, and it became true love when I was a teenager in Denver, and realized everything it could be by watching the Broncos build to win and finally pull a couple of championships (never mind that I could actually play it somewhat well in high school.)

Baseball and I have had a side thing going on for years. I never liked her current parents, but when pitchers and catchers report, I take notice, and I get excited, because we've got six or seven months, plus three of them all to ourselves. I blame myself sometimes for not being more interested, because I never really attached myself to a team except for hate reasons.

Basketball is the first real love, the first sport I grew up playing seriously -- but I guess I stopped paying attention when football took over, and basketball's regular season seemed to be less important before February. Her younger, college-going sister gets my attention back every year, and then she has me until that last game of the finals.

Hockey and I have had tough times. Again, we met when I was a teenager, and I was infatuated really quickly (she came down to Denver, whirling in from Canada). It was puppy love, but her folks bug me. They do everything in their power to keep us apart -- unnecessary additions to the family, even moving away for an entire year when I'd left for college. She's the crazy ex I never stopped loving, and always check on as often as I can, usually for the winding down of the regular season and the playoffs.

Mom thought soccer and I would hit it off, and we did when I was younger; she was fun, but she never captivated me, and I stuck with her for a while because the parents approved. But I moved on, and while I still find her attractive, we only go out when she comes for a visit every couple of years (World Cup, Olympics) or if I can make time to see her (trying to watch the Premiership on Saturdays, for example.)

How has your relationship with the sports you love watching gone?

this year's coaches as South Park characters.

Found at the Georgia Sports Blog via the FanHouse (click to enlarge):



Dan Hawkins needs to be screaming after the "intramurals" rant a couple weeks ago and Mangino needs to be fatter. Next, the Big 10 (saw it on Deadspin a week ago, I think):



Bret Bielema looks like Buddha, and I'm OK with that. I didn't think Cheaty McSweatervest ever showed emotion. Tim Brewster looks so high he has no idea what's going on. Now, the SEC:



Les Miles looks ready to kill a motherfucker. Finally, the ACC:


Chan Gailey looks very old. Four years of Reggie Ball will do that to you. Butch Davis = stoner. No way Friedgen is fatter than Mangino.

Zach did the Pac-10 version last year, and I think that's the only big-time conference left for 2007. I eagerly await.

two days.

That's apparently all it took for it to get out that USC is looking into allegations involving contact against NCAA regulations with its new RB Joe McKnight, according to the L.A. Times, and if it couldn't be any better, it also involves alum and Saints RB Reggie Bush, who's still under the microscope for the whole mess involving a sports marketing agency and his mom and stepdad's home.

Former players are regarded by the NCAA as "representatives of athletics interests" and are forbidden from telephoning prospective recruits. For example, NCAA bylaw 13.1.3.5.1 states, "Representatives of an institution's athletics interests are prohibited from making telephonic communications with a prospective student-athlete or the prospective student-athlete's relatives or legal guardians."

Carroll, for his part, says it never happened, and Bush couldn't be reached. Frankly, we all would be much better off if everyone just adopted this approach, courtesy of EDSBS.

your John Hancock on the line, please.

The New York Times piece on Illinois football coach Ron Zook (known around EDSBS parts as [NAME REDACTED]) and his apparently amazing recruiting class is notable for the mudslinging done by Golden Domers and Spartan lovers.

John L. Smith, who was recently dismissed as the head coach at Michigan State, expressed a view shared privately by many rival coaches and recruiters: “If they had a winning program and all of that, it would be a different deal. If they had the greatest facilities in the world, then maybe they could sell them. But what are they selling?”

He added, “Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire.”

Smith ought to know better than that, because he and Zook are peas in a pod -- decent to great recruiters, can't coach for shit. It's what got Smith fired at the end of last season, and will likely get Zook canned after the next two years if said recruiting class doesn't show up. It's one thing to land (pay?) top-notch football talent to sign with you, especially when it's obvious you'll be able to get your freshmen playing time right away. It's another thing to get a conference championship and a BCS bowl out of it. OSU and Michigan are still in the Big 10.

I'm not sure of what to make about signing day in general -- the overexposure via ESPN, SI, and other venues to high school sports (never mind Two-a-Days and Friday Night Lights, even though the latter is fictional) are putting 17 and 18-year old high school students in a bad spot. I mean, we're obsessing over where high school students are going to spend their next four years in life like it was a guarantee they're meant for Great Things depending on where they sign.

do not let this man near your football program.

My daily skimming through Ben Maller brought up this little tidbit from the St. Paul Pioneer Press: "Former Northwestern and Colorado football coach Gary Barnett is very interested in the [Minnesota] Gophers' vacancy."

Let us remember this choice passage, as One More Dying Quail has helpfully resurrected it in an otherwise great post on how questionable the state of Colorado has been for athletics in all forms:

"Summer 2000: Colorado University kicker Katie Hnida is allegedly raped by a teammate on the school’s football team. Coach Gary Barnett later dismisses this and other allegations of sexual misconduct toward Hnida by saying, “It’s obvious Katie was not very good…she was awful. Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible, OK? There’s no other way to say it.” Barnett also saw Colorado deal with a recruiting scandal before losing his job in 2005."

Let us also reflect on this bit of admitted schadenfreude by Barnett kept for posterity by the Wizard of Odds, the fall after he was fired two years too late (of course, only getting fired because he got shellacked by a Vince-Young led Texas):

"Former Colorado coach Gary Barnett told the Colorado Springs Gazette said he has mixed feelings over the Buffaloes' stumbling start under new coach Dan Hawkins. 'I hurt for the kids, he said. 'Those are my guys. I know the talent that we have there, the maturity and the leadership, and I want those guys to get everything they deserve, and I want them to play in the [Big 12] Championship Game again. Then, on the other side, I got taken out of that situation. I got removed from it and someone else made that decision. Part of me felt a little vindication because of it.'"

My dad and I have both suffered through the abject stupidity, aloofness, and classless behavior of Barnett over the years (Pop is a Northwestern alum; I spent ten years watching CU football and have several high school friends who played on various teams), and recently, we came to a conclusion: any athletic director who offers this man a head coaching job ought to be tarred, feathered, maimed, shot, and then run out of town if s/he somehow managed to survive all of that.

No one at CU thought it was possible to do MORE damage to the program after Rick Neuheisel left for Washington, but Barnett exceeded all expectations.

deja vu.

If Mark Schlabach's preview is any indication, a bunch of opiners and analysts will be looking at USC in most Top 5's for next year's college ball season. Makes sense, even if WRs Dwayne Jarrett (already declared) and Steve Smith are on their way out. Where the problem comes in is if all these rumors about Wayne Huizenga being stupid-dumb as well as stupid-rich pan out and he really is chasing after Pete Carroll, so much so as to possibly offer another college coach some really stupid amount of money, even after getting burned badly by the Nick Saban mess.

Carroll is at least handling this the right way, as opposed to Saban's bald-faced lying or Bobby Petrino's sneaking out of Louisville with not much in the way of comment:

"This was the one instance I've come in contact with that has all the elements I have talked about," Carroll said at a news conference on campus. "[Huizenga] has structured a program where the head coach has the entire say, from top to bottom. It's a one-voice program. I don't think there are any other situations like that in the NFL."

Carroll said he was not offered the Miami coaching job, and stressed that he has never thought about leaving USC since arriving after the 2000 season. "I'm thrilled to be here," he said. "As I've been the whole time, I haven't wavered. I know that being curious about it has helped me appreciate what we have here. I absolutely expect to be here."

This is better than flat-out denial; admit you are curious and intrigued, but you like what you do and what you have. Good on Carroll; bad on Huizenga, as he's clearly learned nothing from the last couple of years. The era of offering a coach complete control of an NFL program is over and done; Mike Shanahan is the last of that trend from the 90s, I believe. Most coaches don't have that kind of time to deal with signing players on top of the usual duties; get a personnel man who knows how to work with a coaching staff, and maybe, find your organization a coach he can work with.

archaic notions.

In a well-meaning attempt to take the popular view of coaches at all levels of football down a peg, Gregg Easterbrook, unsurprisingly, manages to fuck up several points crucial to his thesis. Here are the six he attempts to prove, with the fuck-ups bolded by me:

• The illusion of control.
• The abdication by politicians and intellectuals of the father-figure role.
• The exaggeration of insider knowledge.
• The illusion of special motivational ability.
• The winner-take-all of modern economics.
• The Walter Mitty daydream (loose translation: the "I could do that" factor)

3, 5, and 6 are all fine with me: there are too many analysts and commentators out there to make the coaches think they have an advantage when the most sly thing done in pro football coaching is the practice of the Hobo and his acolyte in New York doctoring injury reports. You can't be a genius watching games, but there are simple things you can gather, and analysts exist on shows like NFL Live in order to take out the rest of the insider knowledge (never mind newspaper beat writers and the cadre of people writing for Fox Sports and ESPN's web ops). Celebrity-obsessed society demands these men be paid: it's the same thing we do with CEOs and other business titans, but it's silly, and EVERY bastard out there (including me) thinks he could do better than the lunkhead coach on the field in the NFL.

The reason is that it accounts for the fundamental difference in NFL and college ball, which the Tuesday Morning Douchebag doesn't buy: in the pros, you aggregate talent and have to build the system around it, because NFL teams run some very similar systems; it's a conservative league because no one wants to lose his job -- but his "illusion of control" point is destroyed when going to college ball, even though a lot of college ball is the players. Since those players will always be temporal, spending a max of four or five years in your system, the system (and the coach) rules. Part of recruiting is convincing the kid that your system will benefit him in his drive to get to the NFL.

The second bolded point is ridiculous on its face, at least to me: coaches were revered at the college levels (if not as well paid) before politicians took a dive in popularity. Easterbrook then decides to take his shots at Nick Saban, which are the writings of a complete naif:

Saban repeatedly lied about interest in the Alabama job even as his agent was negotiating with the school. And sorry Jason Taylor, "everybody does it" does not justify such deceit. Coaches in big-deal sports are paid huge sums of money in a world of poverty and want, and one rationalization for their pay is that they are supposed to set good examples for the young. What kind of example did Saban set by repeatedly lying in public?

Whose rationalization is that? Part of the reason coaches aren't saints to at least the relatively informed of us is that they can, have, and will be just as temporal as the players, because in the pro and college game, they can be out on their asses long before their contracts have expired. Most Division I-A programs have become amazingly impatient with their coaching hires, and it's a chicken-or-egg question as to whether the programs got impatient before their hires started making millions or not. As for the high school kids they are recruiting, the premise relied on above depends on high school athletes and their parents being naive, thus preserving some sort of "pure" notion of big-time college athletics when the reality is likely anything but. Saban is only known as a sleaze because he left a track record.

A few generations ago, millions looked for life guidance to the examples of public-spirited intellectual figures such as Albert Schweitzer or Upton Sinclair. Today's intellectuals seem arrogant, money-focused and contemptuous of the average person.

I'd argue most of America left behind the concept of the public intellectual for a very nasty brand of anti-intellectualism -- just look at most of our politicians -- and they have more options for their free time, which is increasingly limited. If today's so-called intellectuals have some contempt for the average person, I can't slag 'em too much, and neither can you -- we all have a very low tolerance for stupid, don't we?

a plea to the head FUPA in charge.

Rarely do I get a convergence of topics as lovely as this one -- apparently former Stone Temple Pilots/current Velvet Revolver singer Scott Weiland is a big Notre Dame fan, and has issued a plea to coach Charlie Weis to continue coaching his Papist insurgency (thank you, Deadspin), and resisting the wiles and temptations of the Big Apple (well, really, New Jersey, and doesn't that make the decision easier?) Here's a clip:

""Okay Charlie, at this point I am going to assume that you haven't spoken to the Giants' organization about their 'potential coaching job.' But LEAVING NOTRE DAME, your alma mater, without having achieved really anything of monolithic proportions like you've promised us, is absurd and unfair. So at this point, I will get on my knees and beg. Don't do it, coach. Don't do it! Stay and do what you promised; your team, your school, the fans, the legacy deserves to be taken to the promised land."

Um, Scott, about being absurd and unfair with loyalty? I think the DeLeo brothers might want to have a couple more words with you about that. Anyway, I think you have a shot at keeping Weis, but you've got to keep him alive first -- I hear heroin suppresses the appetite.

selling your franchise and/or sport.

(Disclaimer: I'm not claiming to be super-bright or authoritative on this matter. I'm just trying to sort it out for myself; as a result, I'm sure it rambles.)

If you are an NFL owner or GM in the lottery this year, do you want this face to be the face of your franchise come 2007? And if not, why?

I was snarking earlier about JaMarcus Russell and tossed off a "He better hope Al Davis doesn't care about black people" in a comment thread, and it got a slight reaction, wondering why color always seems to rear its head when it comes to QBs and the draft. Zach put it pretty well: Brady Quinn is a good-looking pin-up boy with an arm that can sell tickets; sell a franchise revival to people (if you are the Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns, all the chiseled good looks on your QB in the world can't help you.)

In a perfect world, the subtext would have been utterly eliminated when Doug Williams led the Redskins in a rout over the Broncos in Super Bowl XXII, never mind when Steve McNair became a model of continuity for the Houston/Tennessee franchise (led 'em to a Super Bowl) and Donovan McNabb took the Eagles to three straight NFC championship games and one Super Bowl. McNabb is the lightning rod for all these perceptions -- from time to time, he has rows in his hair often, but he is the most heavily marketed black quarterback, bar none, and the last time this topic became quite so um....paramount was when Rush Limbaugh made his infamous remarks about Donovan (bad move on ESPN's part; despite Rush's sports background, it was like hiring Noam Chomsky to do NBA color commentary.) McNabb straddles the line -- he is marketable, but continues to be under the microscope not only in a city that is notorious for its perception for nastiness in its sports fans (I remember his booing at the draft because the Eagles faithful wanted Ricky Williams), but also because he has had chances and failed to come through, either because he's been injured or been asked to do it all (Westbrook shows up when he's injured, it seems.)

Daunte Culpepper was shipped out of Minnesota after the Lake Minnetonka incident. McNair got the heave-ho in Nashville, but is doing well in Baltimore; Michael Vick is about as much of a focus in this sort of talk as McNabb (Vick is a victim of his style of play; the most common slap on him is his passing game -- entirely valid, but brings up the old stereotypes). The burden is double -- not only do you have the pressure of leading your football team to victory, but the "black quarterback" continues to hang, no matter what you do -- Peyton Manning faces such scrutiny for having loaded Colt teams that don't get to the big game, but a lot of it is foisted off on the Colts' shaky D, as well as a less-explicit "choker" theory that doesn't break him down to base game elements that would imply a stereotype; his problem is that he runs into defenses that can read his patterns of audibles, and also exploit his lack of foot speed.

White athletes that are uncommonly good are "gym rats." Really fast black dudes, even if they only did the long jump, are "track stars," and it continues into other forms of analyst-speak (a lot of the black players are the "projects," maybe because there are more of them playing than anything else, but it's worth considering.) It's part of how teams grade athletes and assess them, and how we see them: the word "intangible" means so much, but everyone's measurement is different. Do you mean "intangible" as "instinct," meaning a Vince Young-style tendency or ability to recognize situations where he should use his feet. Or does it mean a Peyton-like ability to micromanage the offense? These are different types of instinct and football intelligence, but they are symbolic.

Corporate ownership is risk-averse by nature, so when teams draft for a franchise player, those concerns probably rear their heads again. Brady Quinn is an easy sell: marketers would push him as hard and in similar ways to Tom Brady. Peyton is ubiquitous in TV marketing; hell, even Matt Hasselbeck gets Chunky Soup ads now, and if Alex Smith develops, he'll be just as easy to put forward.

This is going to get more and more problematic as an issue as hip-hop centered athletes (and their look) becomes more and more prevalent -- we may see the same conflicts between ownership and players on rules and regulations that we see when NBA commish David Stern drives some draconian rule on the players and he gets lauded for ruling with an iron fist. I mean, it's a sign when the league hires a GOP operative for NBA outreach, never mind if you put in a dress code when half the players dress in baggy pants.

These perceptions are all tied into a base desire of fandom to me: whether conscious or not, it's nice to see yourself represented on the court, ice, diamond, or field -- and it helps determine whom we idolize, whose jerseys we buy, and which athletes we hold in the pantheon as young sports fans. When we get older, the more we stay with our viewing habits, the more we can appreciate the player's game on its own merits, disassociated from whether we identify with the athlete personally.

But, in going back to the initial question -- is Russell marketable? Sure, any star athlete is, and he will be too if he can get whichever team winds up drafting him some wins, but don't be surprised if you hear code words or phrases used in the draft previews -- big, mobile, athletic, if he has the smarts to play QB in the NFL. He will have extra hurdles on his way to the top. I mean, his name is JaMarcus. I do think I was hasty on saying he ought to avoid the Raiders -- maybe that is the home for him; the popular perception of Oakland's franchise is one of outcasts. Maybe it isn't Brady Quinn, but Russell who can change that franchise's futility (or at least send it in the right direction). I don't doubt that Al Davis has that in mind; the QB that can change his franchise's perception, but where will it lead him, and at what point will we be able to stop wondering if these questions will ever come up again?

(Note: According to ESPN, Mel Kiper, Jr., he of the petrified hair, has Georgia Tech WR Calvin Johnson at #1 on his draft board.)

department of corrections.

For those of you who read the post below: I acknowledge after watching Florida's D-line, linebackers, sick secondary, and constantly morphing offense dominate every minute of the game tonight that my prior post was bunk. The University of Florida holds both the championships in college football and college basketball, which is a hell of a feat, and the Downtown Athletic Club is probably calling for Troy Smith right now to ask for its trophy back.

JaMarcus Russell will be a Raider in the fall now.

Now, let's see if Merrill Hoge has any extra room at his table. There will be a lot of analysts joining me there, too...hope crow meat is tender.