I'm not 100% sure it's necessary, but I know we're headed full-speed ahead into an awful lot of major controversies as is. Here's the column.
Virtually every college athlete in the country is on Facebook now. This makes sense, it's hard not to be on Facebook if you're under 35, impossible if you're under 25. But Facebook has become a public relations minefield for major athletic programs across the country. Whether it's players being kicked out of school for making a threat in their status message (Wake Forest), posting racist comments about the newly elected President (Texas), setting off an internet firestorm over whether or not you actually posted messages on another person's wall (Georgia) or just having your idiotic responses to quizzes posted all over for others to enjoy (Michigan). This is just the tip of the Facebook iceberg, every program is in danger at every moment of every day. All of this attention and all of this danger raises an intriguing question: Is it time for athletic departments to ban their athletes from having social media profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and the like?
This week the University of Arizona took action to combat the dangers of Facebook, announcing that all of their athletes in every sport must set their profiles to private. Setting the profile to private means that only those people you select as friends can see your profile. Otherwise the profile remains visible to the entire network (generally your college). How serious is Arizona about the new policy? Athletes who don't comply risk losing their scholarships if their online conduct fails to "reflect the high standards of honor and dignity" expected by the school.
But Arizona's policy reflects a tenuous middle ground, once a student accepts a friend request from anyone, their profile becomes accessible. Putting this into context, while researching my new book, one University of Tennessee official confessed to creating fake profiles and then friending the athletes to keep tabs on them. How did he get the athletes to add him as a friend? He took the best looking girl he could find on the internet and built a fake profile around her. When the attractive girl's profile picture showed up in their friend requests, bang, they all accepted.
Knoxville Police were called to a home on Franklin Station Way, in the Fort Sanders area. When officers arrived, they heard the caller screaming. They busted into the home, and saw the woman running out of her bedroom, screaming that a burglar was in her room.
Inside, they said they found former UT quarterback Jim Bob Cooter in the woman's bed.
Any woman who doesn't want Jim Bob Cooter in her bed is a no-talent floozy. There, I said it.
Good comments from y'all on the below comments. And good recovery on FanHouse from several of the posters. Many made constructive points. Like I said, I hope we can gradually take over the comments and have some interesting conversations over there and here. Many of them will be funny, some of them will be serious, but hopefully all of them will give evidence of what I already know, the column, books, blog readership and community that we're fortunate to have is the best in sports.
Couple of things that I didn't break down further in that piece that I want to address here:
1. I think looking at the structure of the NBA and NFL vs. MLB and the NHL is instructive to a degree as it pertains to the development, i.e. minor leagues vs. using the colleges as a de facto minor league. I should have spent more time on it. So here's a discussion on that.
What I should have broken down further is that I think the structure of the league systems are intertwined with the race of the players. In other words, I truly believe that if 79% of NBA players and 65% of NFL players were white, there would be a different draft system. The NCAA in conjunction with the leagues would not have been allowed to run roughshod over those leagues and restrict the ability of the best players to make a living.
In other words the racial paternalism is so endemic that it goes to the root of the draft systems themselves. Why? Because the relative bargaining powers of the parents, the coaches, the administrators, the people in positions of power, are all structured to benefit the majority. I don't think this is racist per se, I think it's much more complicated, a systemic disadvantage.
Now, plainly minorities who play these sports benefit from the structure too. For instance an 18 year old black kid who plays baseball very well can access the market value of his skills at 18 in that sport, he can't in the NBA and the NFL.
I think it's more than a coincidence that if you you plot the racial make-up of every pro sports league, the relative bargaining power of 18 year old's corresponds almost exactly: The more young black kids play, the less bargaining position they have in the sport at the age of 18. The more white kids play, the more bargaining position all 18 year olds have.
I think that's pretty systemic.
2. Now I don't think the NCAA, the NBA, or the NFL are racist. Far from it, I think they're corporations that act in the way they see as most beneficial to them. In fact, my intent wasn't to call anyone racist, just to point out that race influences our perceptions in ways that we often don't acknowledge. For me the 26 baseball players with college degrees illuminated the disconnect. My point on the leagues is that poor minority groups can't combat them in the world of popular perception. And perception governs our reality. So the NCAA, the NBA, and the NFL can argue that players need an education and as a society we accept those arguments from them. But we don't accept that argument from the MLB or the NHL, or tennis, or golf, or you name it.
Anyway, one of the things I'll be doing as we revamp the site, is using this format to respond to interesting reader points. (Don't worry, we'll still be doing the mailbag). But if someone raises a truly engaging point, I think we can carry on the debate.
FanHouse will have a couple of thousand words up from me on athletes and Facebook shortly. In the meantime, here is Jessica Biel from behind to prove that we all still know what's most important in life, a fine ass on a woman.
Here's some nice easy reading for you as the July 4th weekend approaches. Racial paternalism and college sports. (I've tried to ease it up a little with the snuggie picture.)
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that found just 26 major league baseball players and managers have college degrees. Twenty-six! That's out of a pool of a potential 1,042 players and managers. You want that in percentage terms, that's 2.5 percent. A staggeringly low percentage, even if you pull out all Latin American players (who don't have the same collegiate opportunities) from the equation. Yet, I defy you to find an article that utilizes this fact to make an argument that baseball players need better educations.
The same would hold true for tennis, hockey and golf. As a society, we don't care about the education of our athletes in those sports. In fact, what are the only two sports that you hear about when it comes to the education of athletes? Football and basketball. Which just so happen to also have the largest percentage of minority athletes. That's got me wondering, isn't our society guilty of racial paternalism when it comes to sports?
I think so. Put plainly, we don't trust a comparatively small pool of young black kids to make decisions about their professional sports futures, but we don't even blink when thousands of white kids head pro in sports without the slightest bit of education.
If I stacked every article ever written about the necessity of obtaining a college education, how many of them would focus on baseball? Any at all? Just think about it based on your own experience as a sports fan, how many articles have you read about the value of a college education when it comes to basketball and football? It's shocking, right? No one ever -- and I mean ever -- questions the right of kids to sign baseball contracts directly out of high school. No talking heads ever pound their hands into a desk and wax eloquent about the need for a college eduction, millions be damned.
The comments, as always, are already entertaining. My favorite so far, the column has just been up for forty-five minutes, comes from gsan201:
"Pretty much everything this jackbag writes about is race this and race that.YES CLAY is a RACIST,HE justt happenes to be Protected by(Political Correctness)because he HATES on White Anything...IF he can blame a White Person for something,anything HE WILL DO IT.Racistt biggtto is what he is and always will be.He is just nother KEVIN BLACKSTONE. He can't write or come up with a good article so he always wants to stir the pot and Scream RACE WAR,RACE WAR...lol If it wasn't so sad and serious this EVIL GAME that he and his buddies like him PLAY,YOU would think you were watching a SOUTH PARK episode and just think it is low brow humor."
Awesome analysis.
Sincerely, jackbag racist who "HATES on White Anything."
Rivals has a piece up on Evan Berry, younger brother of Eric, committing to play for the Vols. Interestingly enough, there is no part of the article that announces whether or not the UT staff has actually extended an offer. Certainly it wouldn't be a huge surprise if the younger Berry (who happens to be a twin) followed his older brother and father to UT, but is this really worthy of a story?
Particularly since it doesn't include the fact that UT actually offered. The result will be swift, ESPN is, not surprisingly, already running it at the bottom of the ticker. Just more fuel for the Kiffin fire. Even if there is no comment from Kiffin. And, even if, Tennessee can't really comment on the commitment because commenting on recruits is a violation itself.
Just to make LSU fans drool, Evan is a twin. His brother Elliott favors the Vols and LSU.
Note, I saw both brothers on the road this fall at Athens and a UT recruiter told me that both were on track to be as good or better than Eric. As you can tell from the article, the father agrees. We'll see.
Recently, Stanford University unveiled its imaginative new slogan for the upcoming football season. Are you ready? Hold your breath. It's astounding, it's going to rock your world. "We work."
That's it.
The sum total of Stanford's distilled brilliance, the essence of sports. Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit," so somewhere he's laughing. Everyone else? They want the athletic department to get a refund check.
What's the only thing dumber than this? Some people in the Silicon Valley think the slogan is offensive to people who are unemployed -- I only wish I was joking. Not offensive to anyone with a working brain, but offensive to the unemployed. Because, let's be honest, the unemployed among us often look to football slogans to offer solace in their time of need. Who among us hasn't been dragging their possessions in a shopping cart, when we've suddenly looked up and seen an athletic billboard that makes everything better? Welcome to the outskirts of Pac-10 football, where stupid and inane marketing slogans are a way of life.
Travis has become enamored of several objects, phrases or events which he frequenly references in the column. Among the most frequent:
'Bama Bangs- a term coined by Travis to refer to southern men's hairstyles that feature prominent bangs for no apparent reason. Brodie Croyle and John Parker Wilson are oft-cited violators of 'Bama Bangs rules.
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There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory.
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The newly favored man is not really a man at all, but a hairless, effeminate, germ-fearing, non-meat-eating, exfoliating, wristband-wearing woman of the worst order. We as men are told that we must embrace the sacred feminine in ourselves, even if it doesn't actually exist, and become the very quintessence of woman, plus penises. This situation is untenable. This trend must stop.
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Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson's Creek and My Super Sweet 16. While being raised in Nashville, Tenn., Travis developed a healthy obsession with college sports and Alyssa Milano. As a teenager his greatest accomplishment was taking a doo-rag wearing Luke Duke (balling as Tom Wopat) to the hole at the Nashville YMCA.
In the midst of a stellar legal career during which he specialized in rewarding the unjust and punishing the oppressed, Travis began writing for CBS Sports's SPiN section in September 2005...
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