notredomer23
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ESPN scribe brings up alleged ND alum racism
- Thread starter ITellTheTruth
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ITellTheTruth
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notredomer23
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G
goldenlid
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ITTT what has Ty done over the last three years at his new job. I'm talking win/lose,bcs bowls, and recruiting. Look at that then maybe you will be able to see why he was let go and why you are always in an argument on this site. The guys at ESPN have got to know what Ty has done and is doing and what CW has done and is doing they are just stirring the pot. Off topic saw some of the game on ESPN last night with Lou, May, and Reese and it looked like they were just waiting to laugh at Lou, then he said something about the KR team and something he saw and what he said came true then not a word from May or Reese. It was great to see good old Lou show that he has forgot more about the game then the two guys next to him even know. I bring that up because ESPN have got some guys that work for them that are not the end all be all of football and we/you should not put to much stock in what they say or write.
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johnnd05
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It's happening again ...
It's happening again ...
(Via the Roundup.)
Why is it that every time I get <a href="http://www.irishenvy.com/irishroundup/wait-til-next-week" target="_blank">good and mad</a> at <strong>Charlie Weis</strong> - you know, mad enough to hop on the next flight to South Bend, march over to him and <strong>Charlie Jr.</strong> on the sidelines, grab them by their necks, and shove those stupid headsets up their asses - someone has to come along and say something stupid that makes me feel obligated to run to his defense?
Actually, wait. Before you answer that question, let me start you off with a hypothetical scenario.
Imagine you're the general manager of a baseball team, and you have to choose between two players - call them "Smith" and "Jones" - whose numbers over a three-year stretch look pretty much identical:
<ul>
<li><em>Smith</em>: .278 avg., 87 HR, 282 RBI</li>
<li><em>Jones</em>: .274 avg., 88 HR, 289 RBI</li>
</ul>
Taking a look at those stats, you might conclude that Smith and Jones are players of pretty much the same caliber. If you did this, though, you'd be the biggest idiot to occupy a front office since, well, lots of the GM's who apparently occupy them right now. Why do I say this? Because a judgment like that ought to be based, not just on comparison of two three-year stretches, but on at least a <em>year-by-year</em> breakdown of their statistics. If you did such a thing, something like the following could very well turn up:
<iframe src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxGUTlbeQLEPBkBGZB9j7Kg&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=a1:e9" frameborder="0" height="175" width="400"></iframe>
What these numbers would suggest was that Smith and Jones achieved those similar three-year statistics in very different ways: Smith did it with a single great year followed by two mediocre ones, while Jones had two solid years and a third terrible one. As a GM, you might come up with all sorts of possible explanations for these numbers, which you'd have to play against each other: perhaps Smith was using steroids, or just got really lucky, in that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Anderson" target="_blank"><strong>Brady Anderson</strong></a>-esque first season; perhaps Jones was injured, or poorly protected in his lineup, or once again just really unlucky, in that third season; and so on. Obviously it would be tough to figure out which of these explanations was the right one - the only point is that looking only at numbers that span three full years isn't sufficient to make a judiciously informed decision.
Now imagine that you're a sportswriter with an agenda, and you're covering the free agency situations of Smith and Jones. Perhaps Jones gets offered the bigger contract because, well, he had two good seasons followed by what may have been a mere aberration, while Smith had just one good season before sliding into mediocrity. (Obviously there would be a risk here, since maybe Jones really is a .220-13-54 hitter after all: but hey, we can't predict the future.) If you were a sportswriter with an agenda, you might gloss over the fact that Smith's and Jones's numbers look so different when you break them down year-by-year, and instead come up with some OTHER explanation of why Jones's contract offer was bigger: perhaps he's better-looking, or darker- or lighter-skinned. Maybe the fans like him more. Heck, maybe Jones is sleeping with the owner's daughter. The details don't matter - the point is, it would be very easy to use the Smith-Jones situation to make an argument like this:
<ol>
<li>Smith and Jones have nearly identical three-year numbers, so that can't be the explanation of the difference in their contract offers; and</li>
<li>There's this OTHER difference between Smith and Jones - appearance, skin color, fan preference, whatever - that's pretty salient; so</li>
<li>That other difference must be what accounts for their different offers.</li>
</ol>
Such an argument, though, would be demonstrably faulty: for you'd have failed to take into account the OTHER explanations that might be given to account for their different offers - in this case, the most obvious one would be the different YEAR-BY-YEAR statistics that the two players put up. But if you were a sportswriter with an agenda, this wouldn't matter: you could gloss over the most natural explanation in order to get on your moral high horse and argue - or perhaps just insinuate - that something unjust was going on. You know, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system," and all that.
Which brings me back to Charlie Weis. Here's the illustrious <strong>Gene Wojciechowski</strong>, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3097324&sportCat=ncf" target="_blank">writing for ESPN.com</a>:
<blockquote>When <strong>[Tyrone] Willingham</strong> finished 6-5 in his third year (by the way, he beat eighth-ranked Michigan, ninth-ranked Tennessee, Michigan State and Navy), <strong>[Notre Dame President Rev. John] Jenkins</strong> called for the punt formation. It is that glaring difference in treatment that legitimizes questions asking whether Willingham's firing was racially motivated. If nothing else, it keeps alive the perception that racial undertones were at work.</blockquote>
Wojchiechowski's argument has exactly the same form as the one offered by our hypothetical journalist-with-an-agenda: since Explanation A (in this case, the coaches' records in their third seasons) doesn't account for the difference in treatment, it simply MUST be based on something MUCH more insidious, and the most reasonable candidate is skin color.
Of course, Wojciechowski doesn't actually come out and SAY that it's a matter of racism: he simply says that the situation "legitimizes questions" about it, and "keeps alive the perception" that this might be so. But the same goes for, say, the government's response to crazy conspiracy theories about 9/11 or the JFK assassination: MAYBE the reason they're not answering is because of a huge cover-up, but it's much more likely to be due to the inanity of the theories themselves.
The same thing goes here: you can say all you want - and Wojciechowski says it all - to paint a picture of Weis and Willingham as coaches with nearly identical tenures, but the fact is that there's a completely race-independent explanation of why Willingham was fired after three years while Weis won't be:
<iframe src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxGUTlbeQLENnlbzmSt4fWQ&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=a1:d7" frameborder="0" height="140" width="400"></iframe>
The NATURAL explanation for the Weis/Willingham situation is, in other words, just like that of the Smith/Jones one, namely that <strong>2 > 1</strong>. Willingham was fired in 2004 because he'd had TWO straight seasons that together suggested that 2002, i.e. his ONE good year, was the same sort of aberration as the hypothetical Smith's "Season 1," and Weis will be retained because he has had ONE (very very very) bad season, and the TWO good ones that preceded it suggest that it may be 2007 that's the aberration.
But if, like Wojciechowski, you're a journalist with an agenda, you can paper over those kinds of statistics. After all, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3097324&sportCat=ncf" target="_blank">you can't dispute the numbers</a>:
<blockquote>Weis is 20-14 after his first 34 games; Willingham was 21-13 after the same period and 21-15 when he was fired.</blockquote>
Oh, and in case you haven't heard, Weis is WHITE, and Willingham is BLACK. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D." target="_blank">Q.E.D.</a>
It's happening again ...
(Via the Roundup.)
Why is it that every time I get <a href="http://www.irishenvy.com/irishroundup/wait-til-next-week" target="_blank">good and mad</a> at <strong>Charlie Weis</strong> - you know, mad enough to hop on the next flight to South Bend, march over to him and <strong>Charlie Jr.</strong> on the sidelines, grab them by their necks, and shove those stupid headsets up their asses - someone has to come along and say something stupid that makes me feel obligated to run to his defense?
Actually, wait. Before you answer that question, let me start you off with a hypothetical scenario.
Imagine you're the general manager of a baseball team, and you have to choose between two players - call them "Smith" and "Jones" - whose numbers over a three-year stretch look pretty much identical:
<ul>
<li><em>Smith</em>: .278 avg., 87 HR, 282 RBI</li>
<li><em>Jones</em>: .274 avg., 88 HR, 289 RBI</li>
</ul>
Taking a look at those stats, you might conclude that Smith and Jones are players of pretty much the same caliber. If you did this, though, you'd be the biggest idiot to occupy a front office since, well, lots of the GM's who apparently occupy them right now. Why do I say this? Because a judgment like that ought to be based, not just on comparison of two three-year stretches, but on at least a <em>year-by-year</em> breakdown of their statistics. If you did such a thing, something like the following could very well turn up:
<iframe src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxGUTlbeQLEPBkBGZB9j7Kg&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=a1:e9" frameborder="0" height="175" width="400"></iframe>
What these numbers would suggest was that Smith and Jones achieved those similar three-year statistics in very different ways: Smith did it with a single great year followed by two mediocre ones, while Jones had two solid years and a third terrible one. As a GM, you might come up with all sorts of possible explanations for these numbers, which you'd have to play against each other: perhaps Smith was using steroids, or just got really lucky, in that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Anderson" target="_blank"><strong>Brady Anderson</strong></a>-esque first season; perhaps Jones was injured, or poorly protected in his lineup, or once again just really unlucky, in that third season; and so on. Obviously it would be tough to figure out which of these explanations was the right one - the only point is that looking only at numbers that span three full years isn't sufficient to make a judiciously informed decision.
Now imagine that you're a sportswriter with an agenda, and you're covering the free agency situations of Smith and Jones. Perhaps Jones gets offered the bigger contract because, well, he had two good seasons followed by what may have been a mere aberration, while Smith had just one good season before sliding into mediocrity. (Obviously there would be a risk here, since maybe Jones really is a .220-13-54 hitter after all: but hey, we can't predict the future.) If you were a sportswriter with an agenda, you might gloss over the fact that Smith's and Jones's numbers look so different when you break them down year-by-year, and instead come up with some OTHER explanation of why Jones's contract offer was bigger: perhaps he's better-looking, or darker- or lighter-skinned. Maybe the fans like him more. Heck, maybe Jones is sleeping with the owner's daughter. The details don't matter - the point is, it would be very easy to use the Smith-Jones situation to make an argument like this:
<ol>
<li>Smith and Jones have nearly identical three-year numbers, so that can't be the explanation of the difference in their contract offers; and</li>
<li>There's this OTHER difference between Smith and Jones - appearance, skin color, fan preference, whatever - that's pretty salient; so</li>
<li>That other difference must be what accounts for their different offers.</li>
</ol>
Such an argument, though, would be demonstrably faulty: for you'd have failed to take into account the OTHER explanations that might be given to account for their different offers - in this case, the most obvious one would be the different YEAR-BY-YEAR statistics that the two players put up. But if you were a sportswriter with an agenda, this wouldn't matter: you could gloss over the most natural explanation in order to get on your moral high horse and argue - or perhaps just insinuate - that something unjust was going on. You know, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system," and all that.
Which brings me back to Charlie Weis. Here's the illustrious <strong>Gene Wojciechowski</strong>, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3097324&sportCat=ncf" target="_blank">writing for ESPN.com</a>:
<blockquote>When <strong>[Tyrone] Willingham</strong> finished 6-5 in his third year (by the way, he beat eighth-ranked Michigan, ninth-ranked Tennessee, Michigan State and Navy), <strong>[Notre Dame President Rev. John] Jenkins</strong> called for the punt formation. It is that glaring difference in treatment that legitimizes questions asking whether Willingham's firing was racially motivated. If nothing else, it keeps alive the perception that racial undertones were at work.</blockquote>
Wojchiechowski's argument has exactly the same form as the one offered by our hypothetical journalist-with-an-agenda: since Explanation A (in this case, the coaches' records in their third seasons) doesn't account for the difference in treatment, it simply MUST be based on something MUCH more insidious, and the most reasonable candidate is skin color.
Of course, Wojciechowski doesn't actually come out and SAY that it's a matter of racism: he simply says that the situation "legitimizes questions" about it, and "keeps alive the perception" that this might be so. But the same goes for, say, the government's response to crazy conspiracy theories about 9/11 or the JFK assassination: MAYBE the reason they're not answering is because of a huge cover-up, but it's much more likely to be due to the inanity of the theories themselves.
The same thing goes here: you can say all you want - and Wojciechowski says it all - to paint a picture of Weis and Willingham as coaches with nearly identical tenures, but the fact is that there's a completely race-independent explanation of why Willingham was fired after three years while Weis won't be:
<iframe src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxGUTlbeQLENnlbzmSt4fWQ&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=a1:d7" frameborder="0" height="140" width="400"></iframe>
The NATURAL explanation for the Weis/Willingham situation is, in other words, just like that of the Smith/Jones one, namely that <strong>2 > 1</strong>. Willingham was fired in 2004 because he'd had TWO straight seasons that together suggested that 2002, i.e. his ONE good year, was the same sort of aberration as the hypothetical Smith's "Season 1," and Weis will be retained because he has had ONE (very very very) bad season, and the TWO good ones that preceded it suggest that it may be 2007 that's the aberration.
But if, like Wojciechowski, you're a journalist with an agenda, you can paper over those kinds of statistics. After all, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3097324&sportCat=ncf" target="_blank">you can't dispute the numbers</a>:
<blockquote>Weis is 20-14 after his first 34 games; Willingham was 21-13 after the same period and 21-15 when he was fired.</blockquote>
Oh, and in case you haven't heard, Weis is WHITE, and Willingham is BLACK. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D." target="_blank">Q.E.D.</a>
LOL....I saw a similar thing in a game earlier this year (I think it was Navy?) It was a close game and the other team had not been respecting Navy's pass game at all (big surprise.) Lou pointed out that one of their receivers had been open on a go route almost the whole game, and when they needed it, it would be there for the taking. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb just kinda wrote it off like Lou was senile or something.
Sure enough, Navy was down late and needed a big play.......whatdayaknow?.....ol' Lou was right.
Again, I think it was Navy v Pitt, and the pass went for a TD in OT, but I'm not sure.
S
SteveM
Guest
Good analysis. But it doesn't matter. Just like most journalists are Democrats, most sportswriters hate ND for no good reason, except for their TV contract and bowl invitations. (What's ND supposed to do, turn down the money?) They should hate the NBC and the bowl selection committees not ND. But it does not work that way. Guys like Dan LeBatard are toxic bungholes.
I mentioned in another post (oh - are we sometimes redundant?). But what spins my gyro is the racism charge. ND is one the few schools committed to graduating their kids (of all colors). Yet gets demonized as racists. While a Tennessee or Miami that use and lose their (minority) athletes to academic no-man's land get a free pass.
Ignore those guys.
Sheesh...
I mentioned in another post (oh - are we sometimes redundant?). But what spins my gyro is the racism charge. ND is one the few schools committed to graduating their kids (of all colors). Yet gets demonized as racists. While a Tennessee or Miami that use and lose their (minority) athletes to academic no-man's land get a free pass.
Ignore those guys.
Sheesh...
johnnd05
Johnny T. works for me
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What's the WWL?
johnnd05
Johnny T. works for me
- Messages
- 4,522
- Reaction score
- 275
The self-proclaimed "World-wide leader."
Ahh, got it. Yeah, I don't think they take unsolicited manuscripts, let alone things written by people with an ounce of sense.