XPANTHER,No thoughts on a FRONT PAGE story ???
Oh I've got thoughts about it, I've been talking about it with friends & family this week. This continuing special story bothers me b/c I think the Seattle Times is acting like the ultimate pimp. They're pimping the shit out of folks who don't really follow college football. People that don't realize things like:
01) Tyrone Willingham did not replace Rick Neuheisel, there were 2 years of Gilbertson before Willingham.
02)
It's all relative: The fact UW football is AVG when it comes to the delinquency department, and probably above average since Willingham took over. The folks on capital hill who go hiking on the weekends but who are "chiming in" on this issue don't know that a former RB at Arizona State murdered somebody, they don't realize that an asst.
coach at UCLA is under investigation for a burglary ring in South Central LA. They don't realize that hippy UC Berkeley has a sizable chunk of players who have been in trouble w/ the law. They don't realize that outside of Stanford, all Pac-10 programs have similar rates of delinquency and graduation.
02)
It's demographics stupid: That the college football industry as a whole actually has a LOWER demographically adjusted crime rate than society as a whole. The numbers fluctuate a little every single day, but roughly 1 in 4 African American males is under some form of control within the justice system, and on these college football teams in the Pac-10 you've got 40-50 black dudes on these non-Stanford squads, so as long as less than 10-12 of these guys are getting in trouble during their four years in school, then these college football teams are actually doing society a favor. The PA and white dudes on the teams get into trouble too, but I would guess that they also do so at a lower rate than their general populations as well.
^ Basically the point there is that college football teams represent such a unique and "challenging" demographic when it comes to avoiding legal trouble, that there's not a whole lot the programs can do other than not recruit kids who might be trouble in the first place. I suppose the UW could've done that with Jerramy Stevens, but with Pharms I didn't see any reason to predict trouble other than maybe the fact that he was from Valley HS in a very rough part of Sacramento CA. So what the hell is a program supposed to do, stop recruiting kids who grew up under the poverty line? But you just can't stop recruiting in these areas, not only would you be denying opportunities to dozens of great kids who would thrive if given a football scholarship, but predicting who's going to fuck up and who's going to thrive is tough if not impossible. And you'd get your ass kicked on the field. You just cannot expect many of these guys to behave as well and achieve as much academically as the average student, college football is not in a vacuum, it mirrors society to a huge extent. This may sound bad, to automatically expect less of people, but that's the harsh reality of how it plays out most of the time.
03)
It's not a simple choice between Ws and behavior: They reduce college football to a choice between winning w/ thugs and losing w/ choirboys. They act as if demanding wins, as opposed to merely hoping for them, is automatically condoning thuggery. The two are not mutually exclusive as the Times seems to suggest.
It does seem to be somewhat of an agenda to discourage public sentiment from helping them out w/ their stadium. And the typical white granola liberal in Seattle will be outraged at each of these stories, and vote no if given the opportunity. So I think it hurts their chances for getting that $150 million from the public, but other than that, I don't give a shit.
