Category: Sports

Why Don’t We Trust the ‘Experts’?

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One of the great fools of our age, Tom Nichols, published a book a few years ago with the title, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, about which I’ll quote Wikipedia:

Publishers Weekly said that “The crux of the book’s argument is that… the American public have grown increasingly hostile to expertise” and described The Death of Expertise as a “highly researched and impassioned book that’s well timed”, further noting that “Generally, Nichols displays strong reasoning, but at times he goes off the rails. It takes some time [in some sections] for him to make his point”.
Kirkus Reviews described The Death of Expertise as “A sharp analysis of an increasingly pressing problem”, although Nichols (who “sounds less like an alarmist than like a genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance”) fails to propose a satisfying solution. Andrew Joseph Pegoda disagreed on the last point, writing that The Death of Expertise “does what good books do… and provides some possible solutions”. Pegoda also described The Death of Expertise as “extremely interesting, important, and timely” and said that “Nichols, in short, provides a brief History, informed by psychology and political science, of what he argues is a new phenomenon whereby people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but ‘proud of not knowing things’“.

Now, I will be generous enough to stipulate that Nichols has a point, namely that we live in an age when it is common for people to overestimate their own abilities and knowledge. Some people believe that, because they can do a Google search about a topic, this puts them on the same level of expertise as a genuine expert.

Such pseudo-expertise, as we might call it, explains why every journalist with a blue-check Twitter account suddenly became an expert in epidemiology as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, then just as suddenly became an expert in Eastern European affairs the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. If tomorrow the Earth were invaded by aliens from another planet, the same Twitter know-it-alls would instantly begin offering their opinions as experts in the field of extraterrestrial life.

This kind of fake expertise can have serious consequences. The loud clamor of voices demanding a maximum lockdown response to COVID-19 resulted in devastating harms that, in hindsight, were entirely unnecessary. Especially in terms of school closures, the evidence is now clear that (a) children were never a high-risk group for the disease, and (b) keeping schools closed for months produced enormous educational losses. Compare the per-capita COVID-19 death rate in maximum-lockdown states like New York (3,554 deaths per million population) and Michigan (3,619) to Florida, which re-opened in May 2020, with death rate significantly lower (3,457). The states that imposed onerous restrictions and kept them in place for months on end didn’t really save lives, yet the advocates of lockdown policies claimed that The Science™ was on their side,  so that if you questioned their policies, you were accused of being “anti-science.” The Science™ turned out to be a cult, and Doctor Fauci was the High Priest of that cult. The fact that Fauci had impressive credentials as a genuine expert makes the failure of The Science™ all the more devastating, and yet so powerful is the cult mentality that his followers won’t even admit they were misled.

Believe it or not, there are still people walking around wearing cloth masks, believing that this protects them against infection despite all evidence to the contrary. My daughter flew back from college this week, and when I went to pick her up, I was astonished by the number of people wearing masks in the airport. While the airlines may require masks while you’re on the plane, there is no such requirement in the airport, and if you didn’t catch COVID-19 while you were encased in a pressurized cabin with 200 other passengers, why would you imagine you were at risk just walking through the airport? But cloth masks simply don’t work, in terms of protecting against the virus, no matter what the cult of The Science™ would like you to believe. Alas, I have digressed . . .

The case of Anthony Fauci and COVID-19 illustrates my point that what Nichols calls The Death of Expertise is mostly a case of suicide — that is to say, the “experts” have discredited themselves, on issue after issue, in controversy after controversy, so that if people no long trust the “experts,” it is the experts, not the people, who are to blame.

Notice that, in the subtitle of his book, Nichols asserts that someone — who? — is waging a Campaign Against Established Knowledge:

A  kind of intellectual Gresham’s Law is gathering momentum: where once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge. This is a very bad thing. A modern society cannot function without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts, professionals, and intellectuals. (For the moment, I will use these three words interchangeably.) No one is an expert on everything. No matter what our aspirations, we are bound by the reality of time and the undeniable limits of our talent. We prosper because we specialize, and because we develop both formal and informal mechanisms and practices that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.

The essential problem with this argument is that it is un-American.

America was established by pilgrims, pioneers and frontiersman who, having left behind the civilization of Europe, created a new civilization by their own labors. The pioneer in his remote cabin in the wilderness had no “experts” to tell him how to do whatever it was he needed to do to survive. Thus, he had to be self-reliant, operating on a trial-and-error basis or else trusting in traditional methods — knowledge passed down from preceding generations — just to be able to support himself and his family amid challenging circumstances. It is from this pioneer heritage that the American spirit of “rugged individualism” emerged, and this is the spirit which Nichols denounces as “a very bad thing,” a threat to “modern society.” Americans like to do things for themselves, rather than waiting for some “expert” to tell them how to do it, and you sure as hell don’t expect Americans to seek permission from “experts” to form their own opinions of matters. This is the real heart of what Nichols is up to, in bemoaning public hostility to “experts.” It’s not so much about knowledge as it is about opinions. Tom Nichols was of the opinion that Hillary Clinton should be elected president, and he became angry because enough of us disagreed that Donald Trump got elected instead.

That’s the real bottom line for the whole #NeverTrump crowd — from the moment Trump rode down the escalator in June 2015, these “mainstream” Republicans decided he should not be president, and set about trying to prevent him from getting the GOP nomination. The first problem was, the #NeverTrump crowd was unable to coalesce around an alternative early enough to turn the primaries into a two-man race. The second problem was, Trump attracted to his campaign a legion of supporters who had never voted in a Republican primary. So while the anti-Trump votes in the primaries were divided up between a bunch of other rivals — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, et al. — Trump kept stacking up delegates. But having invested their egos in the #NeverTrump jihad, his critics in the pundit class (the whole Bulwark crew, the Lincoln Project crowd, Max Boot, etc.) could not accept defeat, and instead doubled-down, becoming de facto Democratic Party operatives, whether they were willing to admit it or not. And what they were most angry about was that stupid voters got to decide the election, thus violating the “social division of labor” whereby pundits like Tom Nichols get to decide who is elected president.

You see what I mean in calling this “un-American”? The pundits who claim they’re trying to save “Our Democracy” don’t really believe in democracy at all. But again I digress . . .

What got me thinking about the crisis of the expert class wasn’t presidential politics or the COVID-19 pandemic. No, it was football.

In case you never read my blog before, I’m a born-and-bred University of Alabama fan and, when the New England Patriots drafted our quarterback Mac Jones in the first round of the 2021 NFL draft, I instantly became a Patriots fan. In doing so, I found a new class of experts to hate — the commentators, columnists and TV analysts who get paid to talk about the NFL. Some of these guys are actually OK, like Evan Lazar, who can analyze video with an astonishing level of insight. Some of them, on the other hand, are utterly evil. No, I’m sorry, let me restate that — one of them is utterly evil, namely Nick Wright of Fox Sports, a Kansas City Chiefs fan masquerading as a neutral commentator.

None of the other NFL pundits are pure evil like Nick Wright, but there is a notable bandwagon effect among these alleged football experts. Today I was checking ESPN’s site on my phone and noticed an emerging consensus that the Buffalo Bills are the team to beat in 2022.

This is not an unreasonable expectation. The Bills have an excellent quarterback, Josh Allen, and a tough defense. They have won the AFC East division two years in a row, made it all the way to the AFC championship game two years ago, and this past season lost a divisional playoff to the Kansas City Chiefs in an overtime thriller. It is thus a reasonable guess that Buffalo will be among the top contenders when the NFL season kicks off this fall. But (a) the Bills have never won a Super Bowl and (b) they haven’t been to a Super Bowl since the early 1990s.

If you say I am prejudiced against the Bills, I won’t deny it because, of course, they’re the rivals of my Patriots in the AFC East. But I daresay there may be elements of prejudice in the consensus of pundits who think Buffalo can make it to the next Super Bowl. One of the reasons the pundits like the Bills so much is because Josh Allen is one of those “mobile, athletic” quarterbacks who play the kind of run-and-gun “schoolyard” football that all the TV commentators love. The pundits seem to agree that this style of play is the future of football, and more traditional drop-back passers are dinosaurs on their way to extinction. As much as fans might enjoy the run-and-gun style — and that shootout between Allen and Patrick Mahomes in the divisional playoffs was one of the most exciting spectacles in NFL history — there are downsides to relying on the “mobile, athletic” quarterback. Typically, they don’t last very long in the NFL, where all it takes is one hard tackle to wreck your knee or ankle and there goes your precious “mobility.” Last year Josh Allen was the second-leading rusher for the Bills, with 763 yards on 122 carries, but how much longer can he keep that up? Trust me, as a Patriots fan, it was agonizing to watch New England’s defense try to catch Allen, who ran for 66 yards in the Wild Card playoff game. Sooner or later, though, Allen’s going to get wrecked. He cannot defy the probabilities forever — or at least, that’s my view, as an unapologetic fan of the Patriots and their old-fashioned quarterback Mac Jones.

My opinion, however, is that of a fan, not an expert. And what is the track record of these professional NFL pundits? Well, I decided to check. Last year, in their season preview, CBS Sports had seven of its personalities — Jason La Canfora, Pete Brisco, Will Brinson, Ryan Wilson, John Breech, Jared Dubin and Jonathan Jones — predict (a) the exact order of finish in each of the eight divisions of the NFL, (b) the six teams to get Wild Card playoff berths, (c) the teams that would make it to the Super Bowl, and (d) who would win the championship.

How many of these experts correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner?

Zero. The number is zero.

Still, some of them were close. Two of them (La Canfora and Wilson) correctly predicted that the Los Angeles Rams would win the NFC West division, and four others (Prisco, Brinson, Breech and Jones) had the Rams making it to the playoffs as a Wild Card. So six of the seven experts at least correctly predicted that the Rams would be in the playoffs, and two of those (Dubin and Jones) actually picked the Rams to win the NFC championship. But none of them — zero — figured that Coach Sean McVay and quarterback Matt Stafford would take L.A. all the way to victory in the Super Bowl. Two of the experts (La Canfora and Prisco) had the Tampa Bay Buccaneers returning to the Super Bowl as NFC champions, and La Canfora thought the Bucs would win it all. Wilson and Breech expected the Green Bay Packers to win the NFC title, with Breech predicting that Green Bay would win the Super Bowl. Brinson thought the San Francisco 49ers would be Super Bowl champs. In fact, the Buccaneers lost to the Rams in the divisional playoff, the Packers were beaten by San Francisco in the other NFC divisional playoff, and the Rams beat the Niners in the NFC championship game.

So while none of these experts correctly predicted the Rams as Super Bowl winners, they at least were fairly accurate in predicting the teams (Green Bay, Tampa Bay, San Francisco and L.A.) that in fact proved to be the main contenders for the NFC title. As for the AFC, however . . .

Oh, my goodness gracious!

Five of the CBS Sports experts (La Canfora, Prisco, Brinson, Wilson and Breech) predicted the Buffalo Bills would take the AFC championship, with Prisco and Wilson picking Buffalo to win the Super Bowl. As previously explained, the Bills lost a divisional playoff and thus didn’t make it to the AFC title game, much less win it. The team that beat Buffalo, the Kansas City Chiefs were picked by Dubin and Jones not only to win the AFC championship, but also to win the Super Bowl.

Well, at least the Chiefs made it to the AFC title game, but they were defeated there by Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals.

Guess how many of the CBS experts predicted that the Bengals would be in the playoffs? The number is — you guessed, didn’t you? — zero.

All seven of the CBS Sports experts picked the Bengals to finish fourth — i.e., last place — in the AFC North division. Five of the experts (La Canfora, Prisco, Wilson, Dubin and Jones) predicted that the Cleveland Browns would win the AFC North. In fact, the Browns went 8-9 and finished third in the division. Brinson picked the Baltimore Ravens to win the AFC North, but they also went 8-9 and, because of tiebreakers, placed fourth in the division. Breech was the least wrong of the experts in terms of predicting the AFC North winner, as his pick was the Pittsburgh Steelers, who finished second and lost a Wild Card playoff to the Chiefs.

How was it that nobody — not a single one of these CBS Sports experts — thought the Bengals were a playoff contender? How was it that the eventual AFC champions were a unanimous choice by these experts to finish dead last in their division? To give credit where credit is due, all seven experts correctly predicted the winners of the three other AFC divisions (Bills in the East, Chiefs in the West, Tennessee Titans in the South), and all of them also got the exact order of finish correct in the East (Bills, Patriots, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets). Breech correctly picked the final order of finish in the AFC South (Titans, Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars). Nobody got the order of finish correct in the AFC West, however, because the Las Vegas Raiders (whom the experts predicted to finish third or fourth) ended up in second place. Prisco picked the Denver Broncos to finish second in the AFC West; in fact, the Broncos at 7-10 were last in the division. The other experts predicted the L.A. Chargers would finish second in the AFC West, but they were third. Of the many wrong predictions about who would get the AFC Wild Card playoff berths, La Canfora, Wilson, Dubin and Jones incorrectly picked the Chargers and Ravens for two of the three slots. Brinson and Breech wrongly predicted the Chargers and Browns. Prisco got two of the three Wild Cards correct, missing only with his pick of the Broncos. All seven correctly predicted that the Patriots would win a wild card bid. But none of them — zero — picked the Bengals.

Generally speaking, these experts produced a carnival of wrongness. Yes, they got some things right — the easy stuff, like figuring that the Chiefs, Bills, Packers and Buccaneers would be playoff contenders. But even though all of them predicted the Rams would be in the playoff hunt, only two thought the Rams would make it all the way to the Super Bowl, and none of them thought McVay’s team would win the Super Bowl. As for their AFC predictions, everything got completely wrecked for the experts by Cincinnati and their second-year quarterback Burrow.

It’s easy to see why the Bengals were underrated. Nobody anticipated what the reunion of Burrow and his LSU teammate, wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, would mean for Cincinnati. Burrow and the rookie Chase connected on 81 passes for 1,455 yards and 13 touchdowns. For the season, Burrow completed 70.4% of his passes for 4,611 yards and 34 TDs. This was a remarkable improvement from Burrow’s rookie year and — just incidentally — Burrow isn’t one of those run-and-gun quarterbacks that NFL commentators rave about. Neither is the Rams QB, Stafford. Both of them are old-fashioned dropback passers, and so the bandwagon effect among the CBS Sports experts (who thought Mahomes and the Chiefs or Allen and the Bills would win the AFC) is readily apparent as a source of their total wrongness about the Super Bowl.

What does this say about Tom Nichols or Anthony Fauci? Not much, directly. But indirectly, the wrongness of the CBS Sports “experts” does illustrate the general credibility problem of our media-certified expert class. Once upon a time, wrong predictions would be forgotten because, despite the durability of the printed word, few people could be bothered to go to the library and do the research necessary to find who had predicted what. Thanks to near-universal computer access, however, anyone can now do this kind of research and publish it on the Internet.

Bad news for the experts — the Internet never forgets.




 

Fools and Their Money

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DK Metcalf (left); Tori Lynn (right)

DeKaylin Zecharius “DK” Metcalf is a 23-year-old wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, drafted in the second round out of Ole Miss in 2019, and the son of former Chicago Bears lineman Terry Metcalf. The younger Metcalf is also a fool, who seems to believe he can run around with trashy women without consequences, which is how he ended up being put “on blast,” as the kids say, this week. The lurid details:

Seahawks wide receiver DK Metcalf is a single man in Seattle just trying to live the life of a multi-millionaire NFL player and along comes some OnlyFans ‘model’ — using that loosely here — named Tori Lynn who comes along and outs the guy for how he’s been handling his relationship with the woman who charges $15 a month to see her content.
In a series of videos posted to social media and downloaded by Egotastic Sports, Tori Lynn explains how the Seahawks wide receiver, whom she has visited a time or two, recently summoned her to his place for a little quality time.
Tori, being a good teammate, got in her car and headed for DK’s house. At some point along her journey she gives DK her estimated time of arrival, but there’s a huge problem and DK tells her she might as well turn around.
Here’s what allegedly set off the OnlyFans model: DK was at the bar trying to land two other fish, then add Tori Lynn to the mix and have himself a foursome. DK’s doing the timing in his head and he’s busy working on two ladies while Tori Lynn’s on her way to his house. It’s a huge timing issue. He has multiple things running through his head.
DK’s trying to run the two-minute drill and Tori Lynn gets all offended.
Look here, Tori Lynn. DK Metcalf is a 23-year-old NFL wide receiver. The guy is clearly looking to live the NFL wide receiver lifestyle. That means there are nights where (alleged) foursomes might develop and there are nights when the guy might just be looking to settle in for a quiet night of steak and whatever else happens.
And here you go getting all offended when DK tells you he was trying to throw together a foursome. This is the N…F…L, babe. That stands for Not For Long, and it appears your days of visiting DK’s house for steak and Netflix are officially over.
Tori Lynn comes off as thinking her and DK are more than just a random hookup.

In the grand narrative of The Collapse of Western Civilization, this is just a minor data point, but perhaps not insignificant. How is it that a professional athlete, who signed a four-year contract worth $4.5 million is hooking up with this trashy bimbo from OnlyFans who is nowhere near as attractive as one would think an NFL girlfriend should be.

But looks are only part of her problem, and not the worst part.

An OnlyFans “model,” sir? Trashy whores, all of them — herpes, bad tattoos, drug habits and mental illness. Any man who associates with such women is expressing his own lack of self-respect.

Where do these trashy whores come from? What trailer park did “Tori Lynn” crawl out of? And what has gone wrong in American culture that the Internet is now crammed full of such vile trash? Let’s be clear that nothing good every happens in the vicinity of such women, who attract only men of poor judgment and bad morals. If some day in the future we learn that “Tori Lynn” has been arrested on felony charges, we won’t be surprised, nor would it surprise us if her corpse were discovered in a cheap motel, dead from blunt force trauma. Bad things happen to bad people, and selling your nudes on OnlyFans? Yeah, you’re a bad person.

But who is buying those nudes? What kind of pathetic creep would pay $15 a month to see naked pictures of a trashy whore like “Tori Lynn”?

It’s a truth of economic that demand calls into existence supply. These whores wouldn’t be uploading nudes if there weren’t fools willing to pay for to see them, but why? What value do men obtain from such a transaction? It’s utterly mystifying, except by resort to the ancient proverb that a fool and his money are soon parted — which brings us back to DK Metcalf, he of the $4.5 million contract.

Very few NFL players stay in the league more than 10 years, mainly because injuries tend to take their toll. The fleet-footed receiver is just one twisted knee away from being a washed-up has-been. The kid who signs a multimillion-dollar contract fresh out of college has to know that the big money won’t last forever, and it behooves him to avoid the kind of problems that afflict wealthy men who associate with whores. So this story about DK Metcalf trying to pick up two girls in a bar, so he can go back to the crib and have a four-way with his OnlyFans girlfriend — well, it does not bode well for Metcalf’s future. A guy with lots of cash who rolls that way is apt to be blackmailed or ripped off or hit with a lawsuit by one of those money-hungry bimbos. Look at what a mess Deshaun Watson has made of his life, accused of sexual assault by 22 women.

Living amid The Collapse of Western Civilization, the smart thing to do is to avoid having any of the debris land on you. Stay away from drugs and whores and crime. Get yourself a wife and some kids and a tidy little home on a cul-de-sac, and learn to take pleasure in domesticity.




 

College Softball Lesbian Sex Scandal!

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C.J. Browder and Katie Rietkovich were softball teammates in college, and also teammates off the field, as the two lesbian softball players got married in December 2019. C.J. had been an assistant coach at Louisiana Tech, while Katie got a job as assistant coach at Ole Miss.

This was not a scandal. Everybody in college sports knows that “varsity softball” is a synonym for lesbian. There may be heterosexual women playing Division I softball somewhere, but I’ve never heard of one. Despite the notorious prevalence of homosexuality in women’s varsity athletics, however, you don’t expect to see this kind of story:

Members from Ole Miss’ softball coaching staff are under a Title IX investigation after complaints were filed against assistant Katie Rietkovich Browder for her involvement in a sexual misconduct case involving two players from the team. The team’s head coach, Jamie Trachsel, has also been cited in the report for knowing of the situation, but remaining silent on the misconduct from Browder. . . .
Browder’s sexual misconduct was detailed as the assistant coach being romantically involved with a student-athlete on the team, who was concurrently dating a teammate on the Rebels’ softball squad. Texts sent by Browder were discovered by the partner, alerting her of the affair going on between her girlfriend and coach. The events took place in July.
Once coaches got involved in the case, the two student-athletes were reportedly bribed with “scholarship money” to keep the story under wraps.
“Based on these new allegations, Head Coach Jamie Trachsel has now violated NCAA Bylaw for Unethical Conduct and the Conduct of Athletic Personal Responsibility of the Head Coach,” states the letter to [Ole Miss athletic director Keith] Carter. . . .
The two coaches under investigation were also cited for strange declarations in their time at Ole Miss after making subtle political commentary regarding conservative-minded players on the team.
“If my wife or other people in my family voted for Trump then all they would be doing is hurting me,” said asst. coach Browder, during a Zoom call with Ole Miss officials.

The lesbian coach who molested one of her players hates Trump? I’m shocked, but what’s even more shocking is the suggestion that there could be “conservative-minded players” — Trump voters? perhaps even heterosexuals? — on a Division I varsity softball team.

But of course, it’s impossible to confirm such a far-fetched rumor.

UPDATE: Of course, the Daily Mail is on the story — the British press loves lesbian sex scandals as much as I do — but still no confirmation that there may be heterosexual players on the Ole Miss team.




 

England Soccer: ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’?

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This is a subject that I am loath to raise because (a) I don’t know a lot about contemporary England, (b) I don’t understand soccer strategy, and (c) this involves accusations of RAAAAACISM!

England lost the European championship final to Italy in an overtime “shootout,” a sort of sudden-death situation where the teams, having finished in a tie (it was 1-1 between England and Italy after two 15-minute overtime periods) take turns with penalty kicks. As soon as it finished, England’s fans lit up in outrage at the defeat, with some claiming that the coach, Gareth Southgate, had blown it by choosing black players to take three of the team’s first five penalty kicks. All three of the black players — Marcus Rashford, Jaden Sancho and Bukayo Saka — missed, and the online abuse directed at these players caused a big controversy.

Here was what was suggested by some England fans: This happened because their coach wanted to make some kind of political “statement” by having one of the team’s black players kick the decisive goal. That’s why, according to these fans, the penalty-kick lineup went with two white players first, then the three black players, because it’s the player who kicks the last goal who makes the headlines and, had it gone as the coach hoped, this would create an “anti-racist” media narrative in England (where claims by Meghan Markle that she’s a victim of royal family racism have dominated the news for months now).

As I say, I can’t judge the likelihood of this scenario, but if it were actually true — if Gareth Southgate really did engage in a sort of athletic tokenism for political reasons — it would be insane. England is as crazy about soccer as Alabama is about football, and never in a million years would Nick Saban allow racial symbolism to affect his decision-making. Saban cares about exactly one thing — winning — and whether players are black or white (or Hawaiian, as with Tua Tagovailoa) is absolutely irrelevant in that calculus. So the suggestion that England’s coach would have sacrificed a chance to win the European championship in order to promote an anti-racist media narrative is so mind-boggling to me that I’d dismiss it as a conspiracy theory but . . . but . . .

But the choices Gareth Southgate made do seem rather suspicious. He claims that he picked the best available PK “takers,” and certainly no one could fault him for the first two choices — Harry Kane, 27, and Harry Maguire, 28 — both of whom scored on their kicks. But next up was Marcus Rashford, 23, who was nursing a shoulder injury and hadn’t played much in the game. Rashford managed to fake out Italy’s goalie, but his kick struck the post and bounced away. OK, it was still 2-2 in the shootout at that point, but then Italy scored on their next try, and next up for England was Jadon Sancho, 21, who only started two games during the tournament and, like Rashford, had only been brought into the final against Italy in overtime. Sancho’s kick was stopped by the Italian goalie. Next for England was 19-year-old Bukayo Saka. He had started four of England’s five games in the championship tournament, but this was the first penalty kick of Saka’s adult career!

Again, the coach swears his choices were entirely based on the ability of the players, but how could it be that the final kick was allotted to a mere teenager who had never taken a PK in a professional game?

Of course, the England fans raising questions about this can be dismissed as promoting a racist conspiracy theory, but the circumstances are such that you can’t say there’s no reason for their suspicions. And if they’re right — if Gareth Southgate was trying to arrange matters so that a black player could become a national hero — then he bears the responsibility for the backlash when that plan didn’t work out. If that was the plan.

But my knowledge of “metric football” is not sufficient to enable to me to evaluate this situation, and I only mention it because the sports media are denouncing English soccer fans as RAAAAACIST! Which, maybe they are. But sometimes, even racist soccer fans may have a point.




 

More Proof America Is Racist?

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Professional sports teams derive most of their revenue from TV contracts. If fewer people are watching sports on TV, that’s less revenue for the teams, and ultimately the players will be paid less. Because 69% of NFL players are black, guess who will suffer the most?

The ratings for Super Bowl 55 are in, and the news is not good. The numbers show that viewership fell nine percent, making the game the lowest-rated Super Bowl in more than 50 years.
“CBS averaged 91.629 million TV-only viewers for the Buccaneers’ blowout of the Chiefs in Super Bowl LV, the game’s lowest TV viewership since ’06 when Steelers-Seahawks averaged 90.75 million on ABC. That figure is down from just over 100 million TV-only viewers for Chiefs-49ers last year,” Sports Business Daily reported.
But that is not the worst of it. Sports Media Watch also published the ratings numbers for the entire history of the Super Bowl and this year’s ratings crash is precipitous. According to the numbers, the 2021 ratings (38.2) are the lowest since 1969 (36.0). And Super Bowl 55 is the first game falling below the 40.0 ratings mark since the 1990 Super Bowl between San Francisco and Denver (39.0).

If you didn’t watch the game, this is proof you’re racist.

Millionaire Athlete Lives Matter.

In other sports news, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was spotted at the Super Bowl not wearing a mask: “Someone said, ‘Hey, you were at the Super Bowl without a mask.’ But how the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on? Come on. I had to watch the Bucs win.”




 

Sports News From Wokeville, USA

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What do NFL players think their anti-white message will produce? Because to accuse someone of thinking in stereotypes is a deliberate insult. What such an accusation really means is, “You are ignorant. You are morally and intellectually inferior, and therefore in need of tutelage.”

NFL players are saying this to their own audience. They are accusing NFL fans of racial prejudice. So the people whose patronage pays the bills are treated like grade-school children, lectured by a bunch of multi-millionaire athletes, accusing NFL fans of being racial bigots.

It’s a short trip from Wokeville to Brokeville, I’m told.




 

Fake Noose, Fake News

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Not a hate crime:

The FBI has determined that a noose found in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday had been there since at least last year, according to the bureau.
A statement issued by U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town said that an investigation has concluded that no federal crime was committed.
“The FBI learned that garage number 4, where the noose was found, was assigned to Bubba Wallace last week. The investigation also revealed evidence, including authentic video confirmed by NASCAR, that the noose found in garage number 4 was in that garage as early as October 2019,” the bureau said. “Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week.”
Further details were not immediately released. The FBI said no charges would be pursued in relation to the incident.

The supposed “noose” was just the rope pull-down handle for the garage door, where somebody had tied a loop in it for a handle. No one who had spent any time around that track could have thought this was a racial threat, but for some reason, NASCAR officials did, and triggered days of hysterical self-denunciation by NASCAR officials and drivers.

Bubba Wallace went on The View and said only “simpleminded” people would doubt this was a hate crime:

“People are entitled to their own opinion to make them feel good or help them sleep at night,” he said, adding, “Simpleminded people like that, the ones who are afraid of change, they use everything in their power to defend what they stand for.”

Got that? You’re just stupid and “afraid of change.”




 

The Basketball World Mourns ‘Mamba’

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It’s been years since I paid attention to the NBA, or to basketball generally. When I was a sports editor in the 1980s, of course, I followed the game, but in my mind, the Golden Age of Basketball was when Larry Bird’s Celtics battled Magic Johnson’s Lakers back in the 1980s. Still, when the news flashed Sunday that Kobe Bryant had been killed in a helicopter crash, I knew that this was a great tragedy.

The son of a former NBA player (his dad played with Dr. J), Bryant was a high-school sensation who turned down college scholarships to go directly into the NBA, and became the youngest player ever to play in a professional game. His second season with the Lakers, he became the youngest All-Star in league history, and his third season — when he was still only 20 years old — “marked Bryant’s emergence as a premier guard in the league.” Imagine being a two-time NBA All-Star before your peers have reached their senior year in college, and yet Bryant was only beginning to astonish the basketball world. In the next three seasons, the Lakers won three consecutive NBA championships, with Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant forming an indomitable scoring duo in the historic “three-peat.” Later, in 2009-2010, Bryant again led the Lakers to back-to-back titles. How many players have ever had five NBA championship rings? Nicknamed “Mamba” by fans, Kobe retired after the 2016 season with a career scoring average of 25 points per game over 20 seasons, having led the league in scoring twice and played in 12 All-Star games.

 

Bryant was married nearly 20 years to his wife Vanessa, whom he first met in 1999, and they had four daughters; the oldest — Gigi, 13 — was killed in Sunday’s helicopter crash with her father. Fans built a makeshift shrine to their hero outside the Staples Center arena in L.A.

While fans were mourning, and as President Trump was paying tribute to the NBA legend, a writer for the Washington Post had other ideas:

A Washington Post journalist has been suspended by the newspaper after she tweeted a link on Sunday to a years-old story about the Kobe Bryant rape case just hours after the basketball legend and his daughter were killed in a helicopter crash.
Felicia Sonmez, who covers national politics for the Post, took to Twitter shortly after the world learned of Bryant’s death along with eight others aboard his private helicopter which crashed outside of Los Angeles.
She posted a link to an April 2016 story from the news site The Daily Beast which carried the headline: ‘Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.’ . . .
Sonmez deleted the tweets due to the overwhelming backlash, but others on Twitter screengrabbed the posts and responded with disgust.

 

She got the ratio from hell — more than 20,000 negative reactions — on Twitter, and continued digging until she nearly lost her job. I’m sure she’ll be reinstated after her suspension, but what shall we say about this? I remember that 2003 case, and my attitude at the time was that when an NBA player invites a woman to his hotel room, she should know what her acceptance of the invitation implies. I mean, c’mon — when NBA players leave the arena after a game, they are thronged by women desperate to be their companions for the night, and Kobe was an All-Star who had just won three consecutive championships. The fact that Kobe was married, of course, should have restrained his advances, but many high-status married men (famously including former President Bill Clinton) seem to regard their marital vows as non-binding.

The story linked by the Washington Post reporter includes details that highlight the way these “he-said/she-said” incidents so often develop: Kobe was obviously a man who had seldom been rejected. She kissed him and, well, where did she expect this to lead? She’s a 19-year-old Colorado hotel clerk, and he’s a multimillionaire athletic superstar, and certainly we can imagine that Kobe thought any display of reluctance on her part was just “playing hard to get.” Also, we must factor into this equation the matter of race: His accuser was white, and while she evidently was not a racist (she told police she was initially “excited” when she learned the NBA star was staying at the hotel, and apparently didn’t mind kissing him), but what did Kobe think? Did the NBA superstar imagine that this teenage hotel clerk was rejecting his advances merely because he was black? I don’t mean to defend Kobe insofar as what happened was clearly wrong (as he himself later admitted), but rather to explain How Things Really Are, as opposed to How Some People Wish Things Were.

It’s all fine and good to avow “color-blindness,” and to denounce as racism — there are five A’s in “RAAAAACIST!” — any deviation from such an ideal, but not everyone thinks that way. Even people who disavow racism will often behave in ways that are race-conscious. This is true of people of every race, and if Kobe felt he was being disrespected because a white woman spurned his romantic advances, he would certainly not be the first black man to feel that way. What we need, as a society, is more license to discuss our feelings on such subjects without fear of being swarmed by a mob of Social Justice Warriors if we deviate from whatever the official “progressive” attitude is supposed to be.

Live long enough, and you’ll see liberals do a 180-degree turn on many issues, and the way Kobe was treated in the aftermath of that 2003 rape accusation is certainly such a case. Once upon a time, liberals would have defended a black man accused in any similar circumstance, but nowadays the feminists have decided that lynch mobs are “progressive” and defending due process of law makes you a right-wing extremist. Liberals have also done a 180-degree turn on free speech. I’m old enough to remember when liberals adamantly defended all manner of things — including Communist professors and federal grants for pornographic art — on First Amendment grounds. Today’s progressives, however, act like the Thought Police, vigilantly on the lookout for any evidence of racism, sexism or homophobia. Even I, who laugh at being hate-listed by the SPLC, must carefully weigh my words when writing about these issues, lest I offend some of my conservative friends who are eager to avoid any guilt-by-association with a Thought Criminal.

We should remember Kobe Bryant for what he accomplished as one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the game. I loathe the tendency to inject politics into every aspect of our lives, and if Felicia Sonmez learns anything from her experience, let us hope she learns that sports fans don’t want her “woke” attitude anywhere near their games.

Hey, Felicia: Why do you think we elected Donald Trump, anyway?