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.]

That’ll Happen

Trey Burke stole a national monument and put a cow on a barn roof. But how big was The Shot exactly? Well, we were here…

And then this happened:

Oh, you've seen this? NO PROBLEM WATCH AGAIN.

And then everyone was all:

…and…

…and…

For a moment, Lil’ Wayne was more coherent than Ace. Powerful, that shot.

A Tragedy? HEY, LET’S CAPITALIZE

Kevin Ware broke his leg. You know this. I could include the Twitterverse’s reactions, but it would just be twenty or thirty million “Oh Sweet Mother of God”s and “AAAAAAHHHHHH”s. Fortunately, Ware took to Twitter to assure everyone that he was okay:

Thnx for the thoughts and prayers everybody. I’ll be fine. All I’m thinking about is the Cardinals getting the W!

— Kevin Ware (@KevinWare_5) March 31, 2013

Shock must be a hell of a thing, because Ware apparently created that account while his leg was making teammates vomit. And yet, whatever opportunistic dumbass created that account accumulated more than 18,000. Ware already had a Twitter account (@_billionairebev), but it was quiet. So Fake Ware it continued:

RT this for your chance to win tickets and airfare to the Final Four in Atlanta.

— Kevin Ware (@KevinWare_5) April 1, 2013

And continued, with each tweet garnering this guy more and more attention,

Almost at 10,000 followers. Then I will pick a lucky follower to come to the Final Four!

— Kevin Ware (@KevinWare_5) April 1, 2013

And HOW IS THIS STILL GOING?

Next 1,000 people to RT this and like my Facebook page facebook.com/IAmKevinWare will have a chance to win tickets to the Final Four.

— Kevin Ware (@KevinWare_5) April 1, 2013

Parody accounts can be fun. But at some point you have to have a soul, yes? LOL just kidding this is the internet. On the bright side, Ware’s real Twitter account now has over 140,000 followers (it only had a few thousand before his injury), and the fake account has been suspended and its creator has been arrested and charged with impersonating an athlete [I’m assuming. I don’t really know how Twitter works].

What is even more despicable is the attempt by Louisville and Adidas to reap a financial windfall from Ware’s agony. They are selling a “Rise to the Occasion” shirt similar to the one Michigan (among other teams) has been wearing, but in the following obviously Ware-related modification:

Fortunately, in the name of purity, not a dime of that $25 can go to Ware. And it does not appear that Louisville plans to send it to charity or to starving orphans or that damn Sarah McLachlan thing. Nope, Ware is going to get whatever assistance he was going to get, and Louisville and Adidas will get a nice shinbone-related bonus.

You want my opinion? Send that $25 to Ed O’Bannon.

[UPDATE: Louisville has apparently announced that they will waive their share of the revenues from the sale of this shirt. Which, great, but now the money goes to Adidas and the NCAA. La-di-freeking-da.

Also, as Darren Rovell wisely points out (yep, you read that right), this is a little dicey for Louisville and the NCAA. Schools have tried to argue that numbers do not represent actual athletes (i.e. Michigan didn't sell a bazillion Denard jerseys, they sold a bazillion #16 jerseys while Denard happened to wear #16). This Ware thing is pretty much admitting that, yeah, #5 is actually Kevin Ware. I heard Pitino say as much on the radio this morning.]

[UPDATE THE SECOND: Now it appears that Adidas has announced it will donate a portion of every sale to Louisville's scholarship fund. So, Louisville waives a royalty, which Adidas donates to Louisville. Am I missing something? Money is fungible, yes? So isn't this just a fancy way of keeping the status quo? It'd be like me saying, "I love my job so much that I'll work this week for free," and my boss responding, "because of your selfless dedication, we will donate the equivalent of your weekly salary to the bank account of your choice."]

A Good Week for Guerilla Marketing

Some of you may remember my run-in with Jadeveon Clowney, Meijer, and a scary-ass dairy cooler. It appears that a number of major companies are getting wise to the ways of the interwebs, and are acting likewise:

I enjoy this.

Creepy Recruiting is Creepy

We all know this already. But there there is an entirely different level of creepy out there, and while I am hesitant to give them too much exposure, clearly the last thing these particular accounts are concerned with is over-exposure. Accounts like @RecruitingUT, and @ISUrecruiting  exist to try to convince recruits to attend their respective schools, despite the fact that they are raging violations of NCAA recruiting rules. And the fact that receiving random tweets is probably below “proximity to a Kinkos” on recruit’s list of things to give a flaming crap about.

But if you want to take it to the, ahem, twin peaks of recruiting creepiness, we have The Ladies of BBN (@KentuckyHot), which operates under an even simpler premise: recruits will go the school that grants them the most convenient access to pictures of hot coeds. Logic, man. Logic.

MEMO TO ANYONE THINKING ABOUT DOING THIS FOR MICHIGAN: Please read this.

Not Twitter-Related But I Don’t Care

A tradition unlike any other: gettin’ blunted with Rastas (h/t Buzzfeed)

Weekly Canseco Update Letdown

I am so unsyatisfied.