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bobbyw24
10-08-2009, 10:43 AM
Blackballed?
by Steve Sailer on October 07, 2009

Let’s celebrate diversity! In Division 1-A college football, 19 of the top 20 players in rushing yards are—as sports fans expect—black. Yet, the #1 rusher is a white guy.

Toby Gerhart, Stanford’s 235-pound tailback, has piled up 650 yards on the ground to power lowly Stanford to a 4-1 overall record and a Pac-10 leading 3-0 conference mark. He had 134 yards on the ground in Stanford’s victory Saturday over 4-0 UCLA, which had been ranked 9th in the country in defense against the run. The previous week Gerhart had rushed for 200 yards in beating Washington, conqueror of USC.

Gerhart has been the most valuable running back in college football so far this season because Stanford doesn’t have much else going for it. Every defense knows Gerhart will be coming at them, but they haven’t stopped him yet.


Still, while surprising as Gerhart’s success may seem to casual sports fans (in the NFL, for example, whites have started only a handful of games at tailback all decade), it can’t be shocking to the young man himself. Gerhart set Stanford’s rushing record last with 1,136 yards and 15 touchdowns. He had played big school prep football in Southern California’s Inland Empire, where he passed Dallas Cowboy Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith for 3rd place on the all-time national high school rushing rankings with 9,662 career yards.

Of course, there are many white running backs who shine in high school. At the high school level, the game remains much less racially stratified by position. State champions tend to be Catholic schools or exurban public schools with mostly white players, some with star black running backs, some even without. (Football is an expensive and complicated business, and inner city public schools tend to be longer on talent than on resources and organization.)

At the college level, however, white players in nontraditional positions are found mostly at either remote colleges, such as Wyoming, or at academically elite schools that take their admissions requirements fairly seriously, such as the service academies. Stanford and Northwestern both start 15 whites out of 22. Gerhart, for example, scored 1810 out of 2400 on the three-part SAT—not enough to get him into Stanford as a non-athlete but a lot higher than most college tailbacks.

Caste Football has the numbers of white starters for each Division 1-A team for 2009. Some of the blackest teams tend to be private colleges willing to walk close to the edge of NCAA recruiting trouble, such asUSC and Miami.

Why are white starting tailbacks so rare in college football (at least, outside of the Mountain Time Zone)? (Football position terminology is fluid, so I’ll use “tailback” to designate the featured ball carrier in contrast to “fullback,” whose primary duty is blocking.)

It’s not because the few whites always fail. LSU won the national championship in 2007, for example, with Jacob Hester as their primary running back.

This is not a question that gets asked much in print. Yet, thinking about it helps shine a light on much beyond the football field.

To help you understand where I’m coming from in thinking about race and running backs, allow me to indulge in a little nostalgia concerning the first college football game I ever saw. It was November 16, 1968, and I was nine. My dad had taken me to the museums in Exposition Park next to the University of Southern California. When we came out, a few minutes after one in the afternoon, the parking lot was full and the Coliseum next door roaring over the rematch between defending national champion USC and the only team to beat them the year before, Oregon State.

With the game already underway, a desperate scalper offered to sell us two tickets for whatever my father had in his pockets, which turned out to be $1.10.

As my dad and I trudged ever upward to our 55-cent seats in what turned out to be the 89th (and top) row in the end zone, I started to wonder if the scalper hadn’t gotten the best of the deal. Standing on my seat, I could peer over the back wall of the Coliseum and see our 1963 Pontiac down in the parking lot. Still, our Goodyear Blimpish view through the goal posts was ideal for watching the encounter of two All-American running backs.

The #13-ranked Oregon State Beavers from Corvallis, OR, were known as


http://www.takimag.com/site/article/blackballed/

cheapseats
10-08-2009, 10:52 AM
Is you, or is you ain't, FAST?

Is you, or is you ain't, got GOOD HANDS?

Is you, or is you ain't, able to HURDLE?

Is you, or is you ain't, got a QUICK FIRST STEP?

Is you, or is you ain't, able to TAKE THE HIT?

Football is Big BIG Money in America.

I assure both white AND BLACK racists that the Top Bananas in football (primarily white, if memory serves) will assign position FIRST AND FOREMOST on winnability. Read that, PROFITABILITY.

Elwar
10-08-2009, 10:54 AM
collectivism

bobbyw24
10-08-2009, 10:56 AM
Not sure about that Cheapseats:

Racists in the Ole Miss football program declined to recruit an aspiring black high school running back a few decades ago cuz he celebrated a TD in a culturally diverse way.

He went on to do OK at historically black Jackson State and then with the Bears.

We knew him as Walter Payton.

I am glad to see things have changed some what since those days.

brandon
10-08-2009, 10:59 AM
Does affirmative action not apply to the NFL? Or does it not apply to whites? Just curious...

Krugerrand
10-08-2009, 11:07 AM
I assure both white AND BLACK racists that the Top Bananas in football (primarily white, if memory serves) will assign position FIRST AND FOREMOST on winnability. Read that, PROFITABILITY.

The author makes some pretty good points that this isn't that straight forward.

It’s not true that natural talent always wins out in sports. Arbitrary forces have some impact as well. For example, in the National Hockey League, 57 percent of players’ birthdates fall in the first six months of the year. This is because the cutoff birthdate for junior leagues is usually January 1, so the kids born earlier in the year tend to be bigger and better and thus get selected for traveling squads with better coaching. The kids born later in the year are more likely to fall by the wayside.
Is an NHL team not going to sign somebody because their birthdate is in the 2nd half of the year .... certainly not. But, these things happen over time. The author is suggesting that the players that could otherwise be talented enough to play one position are redirected to another position at a young age. By the time you reach the NFL - and to a large extent even college - the general role of the player has already been established.

cheapseats
10-08-2009, 11:14 AM
Not sure about that Cheapseats:

Racists in the Ole Miss football program declined to recruit an aspiring black high school running back a few decades ago cuz he celebrated a TD in a culturally diverse way.

He went on to do OK at historically black Jackson State and then with the Bears.

We knew him as Walter Payton.

I am glad to see things have changed some what since those days.

Please know I have GREAT regard for your insightfulness. I am also exceedingly appreciative of your tireless research. Ditto, Sarge and disorderlyvision and some others whose screen names escape me at the moment.

It is VITAL that we address the HERE AND NOW.

MindOfMo Congressional forte is screwing up the future by addressing the past's problems in the present. We HAVE the problems chiefly owing to THEM.
7:26 AM Oct 4th from web

MindOfMo If Congress dropped into a sinkhole with both Houses in session, we could have no greater confusion or ineffectiveness than we have now.
3:40 PM Oct 4th from web

When I was in high school, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I lived in Atherton. Willie Mays wanted to move to Atherton. I kid you not when I tell you that a buncha Rich White Men met expressly to decide whether to buy the house that Mays had his uppity eye on, and hold it until a more Suitable homeowner would materialize. It was decided that the cache of a Baseball Superstar in residence superseded objections. Word.

So what, in a way. That was then and this is now. Sometimes cookies crumble and sometimes loaves multiply. Life.

CRAP LIKE THIS IS PURE DIVERSION, KEEPIN' THE RACE CARD ALIVE, BUYIN' OBAMA TIME.

BenIsForRon
10-08-2009, 11:16 AM
Does affirmative action not apply to the NFL? Or does it not apply to whites? Just curious...

Affirmative action only applies to government institutions.

I know the NFL is financed by banks that got bailouts, but I don't think that counts.

bobbyw24
10-08-2009, 11:21 AM
I hear ya Cheapseats--I believe that discrimination based on race is wrong--irrespective of the color/ethnicity of the "victim."

Krugerrand
10-08-2009, 11:23 AM
Affirmative action only applies to government institutions.

I know the NFL is financed by banks that got bailouts, but I don't think that counts.

That's not entirely true. If your hiring practices attract the ire of the ACLU, you can be faced with a discrimination lawsuit.

cheapseats
10-08-2009, 11:27 AM
I hear ya Cheapseats--I believe that discrimination based on race is wrong--irrespective of the color/ethnicity of the "victim."

It's wrong, alright. And it'll fuck with a Bottom Line. In perfect non-discrimination (stipulated as an impossibility) lies optimal function of a free market (stipulated as non-existent).

That said, I am in the midst of an essay defending the right to BE racist, including TO discriminate so long as you ain't a recipient of Federal Feel Good Funds. I will argue that anti-hate crapola constitutes LEGISLATING LOVE, a lousier bet than a WAR ON DRUGS.

This is a Moneyian Nation, I don't have to tell you. The bottom line is that the Bottom Line is where change occurs. Or doesn't.





Racists in the Ole Miss football program declined to recruit an aspiring black high school running back a few decades ago cuz he celebrated a TD in a culturally diverse way.

He went on to do OK at historically black Jackson State and then with the Bears.

We knew him as Walter Payton.

Fred Smith is rumored to have earned a C on the senior thesis in which he postulated the feasibility and profitability of a company that would go on to become FedEx.

Things turned out okay for him, too.

Water seeks its own level.




I am glad to see things have changed some what since those days.

Three-quarters of a step forward, half a step back -- that's my new motto. ;)

bobbyw24
10-08-2009, 11:27 AM
That's not entirely true. If your hiring practices attract the ire of the ACLU, you can be faced with a discrimination lawsuit.

15 people or more can be sued under the Disparate Impact theory of discrimination whether or not it is a governmental entity.

Disparate impact #20
by Ross Runkel at LawMemo

"Disparate impact" is a legal theory for proving unlawful employment discrimination. However, most actual cases use the "disparate treatment" theory.

Disparate impact is the idea that some employer practices, as matter of statistics, have a greater impact on one group than on another.

A good example, taken from the first US Supreme Court Title VII case on the topic: When hiring laborers, the employer required applicants to have a high school diploma. The diploma requirement screened out vastly more blacks than it did whites. Therefore, there was a disparate impact based on race, even though there was no intentional discrimination.

The Supreme Court said that once the employees proved a significant disparate impact, the burden shifted to the employer to prove that the diploma requirement had "a manifest relationship to the employment in question."

Federal legislation enacted in 1991 says that if the employees prove that a practice causes a disparate impact, then the employer must demonstrate that the practice "is job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity."

The disparate impact theory can be used whenever there is a large impact based on race, sex, religion, age, or other unlawful factor.

Disparate impact cases are complex (and expensive) because they require the use of experts and involve sophisticated statistical methods.

Age cases: In 2005 the US Supreme Court decided that the disparate impact theory can be used in age discrimination cases. However, these age cases are extremely difficult for employees to win for two reasons. First is that the 1991 legislation that makes things easier for plaintiffs does not apply. Second is that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) specifically permits any "otherwise prohibited" action "where the differentiation is based on reasonable factors other than age."

In the 2005 case a City gave police officers with less than five years service greater pay raises than more experienced officers. Obviously this had a negative impact on the 40-and-over group. The Court pointed out that the City based its decision on seniority, which was a "reasonable factor other than age." Therefore, the City won.

lester1/2jr
10-08-2009, 11:42 AM
what interesting is if you got to the castefootball site they describe what liberals have been describing as racism for decades. point by point specifically as it is used to margenalize and not develop white talent. I wonder if Mr Sailers readers can understand how this same system is used FOR whites in many places

jkr
10-08-2009, 12:00 PM
disparate impact...

bobbyw24
10-08-2009, 07:16 PM
what interesting is if you got to the castefootball site they describe what liberals have been describing as racism for decades. point by point specifically as it is used to margenalize and not develop white talent. I wonder if Mr Sailers readers can understand how this same system is used FOR whites in many places

Wonder who owns/runs the castefootball.com site

BlackTerrel
10-09-2009, 02:24 AM
The author makes some pretty good points that this isn't that straight forward.

"The author" is a dude obsessed with race and one who has for decades made the argument that whites have higher IQ's than blacks and Hispanics. What the hell he has to do with Ron Paul I'm not so sure about.