Unverified Voracity Is Paterno 2.0 Comment Count

Brian

Baylor fires everyone some people. Others get tiny American flags. First Ken Starr, and today Art Briles. For Baylor to fire the best coach in their history by several light years, the reports that have already come to light are probably the tip of the iceberg. They're bad. They're very bad. But programs will go to extraordinary lengths to keep coaches as good as Briles around, so expect a bombshell. Like, another one. If "football team brings down university president" isn't enough for you. 

Oh and here it is:

That'll do it. Last time I mentioned Baylor I said you could "go either way" on Briles, which wasn't particularly clear: I meant whether he should lose his job, not whether he was implicated in this or came off well. Moot point now, and obviously there's no way to read Art Briles as anything other than despicable.

I wonder if the NCAA will get involved here. This is a million times worse than anything Ole Miss has done. Giving people money is generally helpful to them. Enabling sexual assault is… not. This should be the very definition of lack of institutional control; Baylor is systematically overlooking felonies to make their football team better. This is Paterno-level stuff here.

Pause. … Yeah, I mean that. Baylor created more rape in the world. This is probably worse, at least in terms of the actions taken by the football staff, than the Paterno thing since it appears people actively got involved in direct violation of title IX.

Meanwhile Starr is actually being reassigned to some cushy retirement position, the rest of Baylor's staff is staying on, and the athletic director somehow didn't get fired. Ooookay.

Like whatever man. This is my opinion on the #1 jersey:

I offered this opinion because like clockwork someone asked Edwards about #1 because someone had the temerity to issue it.

No offense to the Fab Five or Braylon Edwards, but I have massive fatigue about these topics. I don't want to hear about how Jalen Rose asked Sandy to the dance but Chris Webber already did that and now one of them is mad at the other and they haven't talked for 15 years. And I don't want to hear about Braylon Edwards's quest to take the One Jersey to Mount Doom and his inevitable opinion that anyone who hasn't taken the One Jersey to Mount Doom shouldn't get to wear it. I know how he feels about this. We can take it as read. I know that Jalen and Chris are in the world's longest performance of Mean Girls. I would rather hear about anything else.

Well maybe not anything else. It turns out that firing Jason Whitlock is necessary but not sufficient to have a successful venture. The first piece that's been social media'd into my lap from The Undefeated is this article on how black people don't do analytics from Michael Wilbon. Wilbon talks about how stats are dumb about as frequently as I talk about how people are just in charge of things, but usually he doesn't bring damn near 20% of the American populace with him. At least he included someone bombing his dumb ass in his own column:

“So many front offices are staffed by guys like me, who didn’t play the game, who didn’t come in through the coaching ranks … Don’t tell me that there are no black people who are good at math. There are black people who expert at qualitative analysis,” Elhassan said. “I worry that it becomes a way to exclude. Don’t tell me there aren’t any black people on Wall Street who are passionate about basketball. These people exist. Wall Streeters, people with qualitative analysis backgrounds. I know them. I went to school with them. I just don’t believe that one ethnicity is more predisposed to this than another. You realize, of course, that this is the new gateway into the game … into sports?”

I'll let Elhassan speak to the wider implications of Wilbon's piece. I just want to focus on Wilbon's inability to grasp what he's even saying. This paragraph is a perfect encapsulation of Wilbon's worldview:

My friend and ESPN colleague J.A. Adande relayed a conversation he had a couple of seasons ago with Stephen Curry when the then-future MVP was transitioning from shooting guard to point guard. Curry told Adande one of the biggest differences he noticed immediately was playing the point took him away from the corners of the court, where he felt most comfortable taking 3-pointers. Curry didn’t cite any numbers, just his comfort level shooting from the corners relative to the top of the arc. Only later, after the shift, did we learn how much better Curry was from the corners. One stat, according to ESPN Stats & Information, assigned Curry some number in excess of 100 for his 3-point sniping from the corners. This tells you just how bogus the exercise is if the “percentage” reports to be greater than 100.

Step by step:

1. Curry says playing PG takes him away from the corners, where he thinks he shoots better.
2. Statistic created by ESPN confirms this.
3. Wilbon agrees that this is true.
4. Wilbon dismisses the stat because it is over 100.
5. Wilbon thinks this means ESPN believes Curry hits more than all of his shots from the corner.

That is the most ignorant thing ESPN has put in the world for years and yes I am including First Take. Wilbon doesn't bother linking to or explaining what this metric is, because he's a columnist and that means he can put a piece on the internet that references something else on the internet without telling you what that is. But I bet one dollar that this metric, as many are, is calibrated such that a league average player gets 100.

In the very next paragraph Wilbon whines that efficiency metrics are per 100 possessions instead of per 48 minutes. If black people really were the monolith Wilbon suggests they are, they would do well to assemble and vote him out of the race. Ditto SAS, who apparently got on the same bandwagon in a Sportscenter clip you literally could not pay me to watch.

Etc.: David Schilling blasts the Wilbon article in a witheringly entertaining piece. Saddi Washington profiled. Samoans happy to get a visit from Harbaugh. Ross Fulton on OSU's defense in 2016. Josh Rosen on UCLA's endorsement deal. Hockey gets a commit from Jake Slaker, who had 42 points in 57 USHL games this year. Also team captain. 19.

Comments

late night BTB

May 26th, 2016 at 2:37 PM ^

I live in Dallas and really Waco could just be burned flat.  If Fixer Upper weren't there, there'd be no question that no one would miss the place.  Everything about it sucks.  Baylor fans suck as fans and as people, they don't know how to tailgate, and they're the definition of new CFB money.  I'm not even getting into this FB stuff and the BBall stuff.  Place sucks.

True Blue Grit

May 26th, 2016 at 4:05 PM ^

gigantic institutional problem they have, they need to fire A LOT of people including the AD.  They just can't afford to allow any of the cancerous thinking people that got them into this mess to remain employed there.  It's like they need to hit the reset button for their entire athletic department and how it's run.  At least that's what should happen.  Apparently after the Dave Bliss nightmare they didn't get the message loud and clear.  

BursleysFinest

May 26th, 2016 at 2:28 PM ^

I don't care what any former player player has to say about the sanctity of their number.  Give it to a freshman, and let him try to live up to it. If he doesn't, so what.   

Even if everyone wearing the #1 for the next 15 years is a scrub, I'm still going to remember AC's TD against Indiana  and Braylon's Halloween domination of MSU and smile. 

Credit812

May 26th, 2016 at 2:46 PM ^

of Briles, Starr and everyone else involved at Baylor were reprehensible and the NCAA should look into strong penalties. But Paterno covered up the criminal activities of his primary assistant for over two decades. He and others in power there enabled the behavior by letting Sandusky use Penn State's name and influence to set up a children's charity. Briles has 20 more years of enabling sexual violence before he reaches JoePa's level of wretchedness.

jg2112

May 26th, 2016 at 2:32 PM ^

I can't wait to hear Chris Webber's side of all this when he releases the book he's been writing since the second GWB administration.

Lawyer12

May 26th, 2016 at 2:53 PM ^

I think it's interesting that Wilbon writes and article about the exclusion of black folks, in a sport that is dominated by black guys. The reason black guys dominate basketball is because they are better. If white guys dominate analytics because they are currently better, so be it.




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rkfischer

May 26th, 2016 at 3:01 PM ^

“@CoachArtBriles does not exist” should be the byline for an entire issue of MgoBlog. There are many universities where Baylor type problems exist such as Florida State, Tennessee, Oklahoma, etc. The NCAA does not have the will power to bring justice to these situations. Public opinion and the threat of the Feds (Title IX) is wielding power right now.  It makes me sad that we are depending on a few reporters to bring to light these type of situations. There should be better leadership about female equality – in college.

The power of sports and hero/winning worship is not new. Female empowerment is a good thing. Better education, enlightenment and civilization are all good things. Having better education and sports equality for females is relatively new in the history of the world. The USA has been a leader for this. However, seeing the Baylor and Florida State situations is disturbing to me. I love sports especially college football and Michigan football. But my priorities are with women.  I’m male and I have benefited from have strong, educated women in my life – my mother, aunts, cousins, teachers, sisters, wife and daughters. I’m in favor of equality for women.

Art Briles, the football staff and university staff should be roasted for the situation at Baylor. The death penalty would be fine by me. The same should happen at other schools. Maybe people would start to get the point. Women in the 21st Century America (or anywhere) should not be afraid to attend a university or any school. That is more important to me than winning any game or sport. I hope that is true for Michigan.

Thank you Brian for helping to make this point. 

Da Fino

May 26th, 2016 at 3:06 PM ^

"Baylor created more rape in the world. This is probably worse, at least in terms of the actions taken by the football staff, than the Paterno thing."

Never been a fan of using horibble and deplorable actions to compare evil people and/or institutions.  What value does this add?

 

Da Fino

May 27th, 2016 at 9:55 AM ^

Do we really need to compare retaliation against rape victims to child molestation "to indicate the gravity of what Baylor has done?"  I mean, are we not able to judge what went on at Baylor based solely on the findings of fact?  Again, I have to ask, what purpose does this exercise serve?  In my opinion it is insensitive to victims on both sides to engage in competitive suffering.

Once victims' horrible experiences are framed in terms of magnitude ("X was worse than Y"), it initiates a completely unproductive and futile debate that drags these victims through soiled ground ("No way, Y was definitely worse than X because Z."  "Well I disagree because blah blah blah.")  Can we not simply acknowledge that both X and Y are abhorrent and give victims the peace and understanding they justly deserve?

Autostocks

May 26th, 2016 at 3:41 PM ^

I don't understand the hate on Braylon.  What I read was that he's perfectly happy to let Harbaugh assign the 1 jersey or not.  He has full faith and confidence in Harbaugh.  Did I miss something?  And as to why he was asked, and why his comments are relevant, Braylon endowed a scholarship to support the wearer of #1.  That certainly earns him my respect on the topic.

charblue.

May 26th, 2016 at 4:13 PM ^

Back when Kenneth Starr was the go-to Republican hatchet man in Washington and carved out a political controversy and wore it like an emblem of courage in pushing the impeachment of the Clintons to the brink for the breach of a sordid escapade with a White House intern and alleged other things that got so legally convuluted they boggled the media mind for years on end, until the country just got so tired of the Starr chamber and his vapid political theater, they turned it off.

Finally,  everyone mostly moved on. The case largely died because of bad ratings.

Afterward, life became more deadly and White House decisions while still awash in skullduggery turned  on less lusty tales of political intrigue. And Kenneth Starr became the president of a  Texas university in a place best known for FBI incinceration of a nutball and his followers in Waco.

Now, as Hillary Clinton reincarnes a run for the White House and her husband still has to dash and dodge the political barbs leftover from that woman period of his Starr-crossed past, the man who sought to take him out, has now been forced to his own private exit, brought down by the politics of football sexual scandal, a deadly combination even in Texas where football and politics, always a great cocktail, suddenly became a toxic mix.  If you were a producer of Friday Night Lights, you couldn't make this up if you had to find someone to write a screenplay about it.

As president of Baylor, Starr was charged with failing to heed an ongoing government edict to root out rampantly bad sexual behavior on campus and apparently came up with an F grade. So he was impeached. Again a victim of bad ratings. Just another fallen star.

4godkingandwol…

May 26th, 2016 at 4:47 PM ^

... except when it comes to the ability to do advanced mathmatics.  I gues they just gave up there as an ethnic group entirely.  Thanks Wilbon for letting me know.  

Now excuse me while I go to a research scienctist on my team to let him know he is in the wrong profession because of his color.  I'm sure he'll appreciate the info.

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