justin verlander

The Point. You Have Missed It.

If you haven’t seen the ESPN Outside the Lines report on Mike Rice, you should probably watch it. The Rutgers head basketball coach was caught on tape chucking basketballs at players, grabbing and shoving players, and calling players the words that would STILL get mother to wash your mouth out with soap, including (according to ESPN) “m-----f-----s,” “p-----s,” “sissy b-----s,” “c---s,” and “a------g------ks.” Disturbing stuff, indeed.*

Fortunately, Rice was fired for, quote, “duh.” But I think we can all agree that this is was just a disgusting, shameful display by the Rutgers players and their parents. Wait… wut?

Lord I wish I made this up. But nope. Real.

That, of course, is Chief HEY LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I’M BEING CONTRARIAN LOOK AT MEEEEE Correspondent Rob Parker, placing blame where it so obviously belongs: on the guys getting hit in the face with basketballs. Blaming the victim is a pretty common thing in our society, but it’s usually masked a little better than this. It’s supposed to be something oblique, like “you have to wonder if the victims tried to say something” or “it’s a shame these players suffered in silence for so long.”

So, curious about where this came from, I dug back through Rob Parker’s feed to see if he has a history of this sort of thing, and sure enough, it seems to be a pattern.

This didn’t actually happen

Obvious parody is obvious, yes?

Okay, this one is probably real

You may now go back to ignoring Rob Parker. He has been conveniently placed next to Skip Bayless for the optimal avoidance efficiency.

Elsewhere in the “when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a market research question” category, we have Darren Rovell:

Rovell’s argument is that everything that has ever happened ever in the history of things the firing of Mike Rice is based solely and exclusively on money. To wit:

What put Rice on the chopping block is the fact that the tape went public. Nothing else. This was not a victory for human decency or for the players. This will simply be a victory for business.

The leap from the first sentence to the last is pretty impressive. Of COURSE Rice was fired because the tapes went public. And of course there were financial implications. But are we really supposed to believe that the primary reason they fired him was because of finances instead of “we need to do some serious CYA here.” Or maybe “OH MY GOD NO ONE COULD PUBLICLY DEFEND THIS JACKASS IN LIGHT OF THIS EVIDENCE?” Or because they are at a public institution and the state can bring down eighteen kinds of crap on you?

*Admit it: you spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out the last one.

[After the jump, Burke happens.]