Is the Brady Rule Racist or Just Affirmative Action for White Guys?

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Recently, I struck up a debate on whether the NFL is racist programming. Yes, ESPN has allowed the NFL to promote racist systems. Thanks to the antitrust exemption on media rights given by the US Congress to the NFL in 1960, ESPN's complicity has not been by choice. Thus, ESPN will do whatever the NFL wants, because if ESPN does not follow, then the NFL can pull ESPN's ability to cover the NFL.

Why did I think to report ESPN to the FCC?  The reason is that if ESPN is unwilling to question the racism that the NFL pushes down its throat through their media omnipotence, then something must occur to change the situation.

I do not need a lecture on free speech. I guarantee you that I know as much or more than most about the US Constitution. I believe that because I have been a Constitution geek since the age of 13, when I studied it for fun, whilst others taunted me for not drinking beer.

Yes, for fun. 

I even graduated from high school with honors in American Government and Civics.  In fact, I was the only student at my high school to do so.

Sure, you have the right to say anything you want, just as I have a right to respond by calling you a racist, an idiot, or a racist idiot.

In regards to bias, all I am after is for ESPN to make an effort to provide both sides of the issue, rather than present one side as fact.

That practice is especially apparent and egregious when it comes to the Raiders and Al Davis, such as, "biggest post Super Bowl collapse in NFL history," which can be disproved quantitatively and qualitatively.

I have pointed out Woody Paige, Bob Ryan, and Sean Salisbury, because they are just trees within the forest on the issue of whether ESPN has reported false, negligent, and/or malicious information about Oakland, the Raiders, and Al Davis.

Some journalists have now gone as far as to say that Michael Crabtree's holdout is the fault of Al Davis, which, frankly, I think is a subversively evil thing to assert.

It would suggest that Crabtree is unaccountable for his decisions and thus has no free will, thus no soul (or as the neo-Nazi will incessantly try to argue, "Black people don't have a soul").

Crabtree is just a fractious person to deal with, and the 49ers took a chance on a player who had not proved anything besides that. If Crabtree holds out for the season, then that is the decision of Crabtree and only Crabtree. If that happens, Crabtree will catch the 49ers with their pants down.

I am not saying that ESPN should create the image that all is fine in Oakland.  Certainly, the Raiders have had problems. I can even tolerate the jokes.

To me though, it has become clear that ESPN would rather see those problems remain unresolved. 

They would rather take the word of washouts like Michael Lombardi and other disgruntled Raider personnel that are more than willing to trash Davis to protect their reputations. 

You know if journalists continue to repeat lies like "biggest post Super Bowl collapse in NFL history," then eventually, players start to believe it, which can effect their motivation and focus.

Just ask Randy Moss. Moss simply stopped wanting to play in Oakland because he believed the false hype. When Moss wants to play, he will significantly improve a quarterback’s statistics. 

Just ask the token white guy, Tom Brady.


The Bigger Picture

I asked that the FCC review the NFL to determine whether their broadcasts have been racist in nature. 

The suspensions of black NFL players by Roger Goodell have clearly been racist.  All one must do is compare Odell Thurman to Jared Allen.

The NFL has suspended Thurman, a black player, since 2006 for a DUI and a failed drug test. The NFL has suspended Allen, a white player, for a mere two games after a triple-DUI.

Thurman entered Alcoholics Anonymous, while Allen has not.

Forget to tell that to Pete Prisco of, though.

Someone like Prisco, who has repeatedly demonstrated that his opinions are inherently racist, laps up the racist suspensions by Goodell as just a tough stance.

The stated policy of Goodell's office has been to punish those who bring negative attention to the NFL, regardless of whether that behavior is criminal.

What exactly does Goodell base these suspensions on?  Sometimes I wonder if it is just a matter of whether or not Goodell likes the guy's face.  These suspensions have not been about “helping” troubled players, but about a veiled attempt to segregate players on the field. 

I do not buy Goodell’s crocodile tears.

You can prove that with statistics—you know, those numbers that determine the future of players—simply by adding-up the number of white quarterbacks, middle linebackers, offensive-linemen, punters, kickers and long-snappers.

From the journalists—all the credit goes to the quarterback, while the defense does not matter, because it is just a matter of who has the ball last. Okay, but those journalists, like Pete Prisco, will still praise the middle linebacker.

When will NFL teams be held accountable for rosters that are clearly racist by design?  Would someone please read to Roger Goodell the riot act?


Watch the Games

All one must do is watch an NFL game to see that all the credit by journalists goes to the predominantly white position of quarterback,  a position that the NFL has unreasonably protected with arbitrary rules, such as the Brady Rule.

All of those discriminatory rules give an unfair advantage to the predominantly white position of quarterback to the detriment of predominantly black defensive players.

Some would rebut that the NFL needs to protect the quarterback, because the QB makes the most money. 

The problem with that is this—the quarterback makes the most money because the NFL has arbitrarily created rules (i.e., the Mel Blount Rule, Tuck Rule, Ty Law Rule, Neil Smith Rule, and Brady Rule) that make the quarterback the most important player on the field, regardless of his overall athleticism or talent.

Clearly, it is a racist paradox and it must stop.

Few racists (if any) actually believe that they are racists or made a conscious decision to be a racist. It was simply the result of what "makes sense" to them, and, well, what makes sense to one person can in fact be evil.

Before the Civil War, it just "made sense" to white plantation-owners to own people as workers, because the success of the plantations benefited the economy as a whole. 

Yet, no credit went to those who worked, only to those who bought the workers.  To add insult to injury, those workers would eventually be counted as five-eighths of a person for the purposes of enumerating that state's population.

Yes, some defenders of slavery would eventually write outright racist arguments on why some people are less than human, but I do believe that slavery originated simply because it "made sense" to those who wanted cheap labor and wanted to take all the credit for it.


Token Tom and the Spygate Patriots

I have drawn a conclusion that Tom Brady is in fact the beneficiary of Affirmative Action for white guys. 


The NFL understands that white players have been increasingly unable to keep pace with predominantly more athletic black players.  Thus, the NFL uses rules to create positions that are conducive with the obsolete abilities of the less athletic white players.

If it were not for those NFL rules, then players like Tom Brady would not be playing.  Think about it—if it were not for the Tuck Rule, Brady’s career would have ended right there.

I do not argue that it was a fumble; I argue that it is a stupid rule that gives an unfair advantage to the quarterback. If it was not for the Tuck Rule, Charles Woodson would have earned a sack and forced fumble, Greg Biekert would have earned a fumble recovery, and Tom Brady would have landed on the bench behind Drew Bledsoe.

Instead, thanks to an arbitrary rule by the NFL that protects the predominantly white position of quarterback, the Patriots kept the ball and eventually kicked a game-tying field goal and won in overtime.

Do not forget the stolen signals either.  Do not let Roger Goodell fool you—he destroyed the Spygate tapes because The Tuck Rule game was amongst them. 

All you must do to determine that is consider that New England stole signals on the road in Pittsburgh and against St. Louis in the Super Bowl.  Yet, we are supposed to believe that the Patriots would not steal signals in the same postseason, at home, in the Tuck Rule Game?


On My Intentions

Often times, people will try to generalize to marginalize the message of a messenger.  Fox News does it all the time.  It is not the content of the message, but instead what you dislike about the messenger.

Why does some white former college Republican care about issues of social justice; what is his angle?

Those who have sold their racism as something else duped me. I was once a talk radio fiend, and annoyed by so-called "victimologists."  I nearly became a producer at Rush Limbaugh's starting place, KFBK.

I willingly believed that those who cried racism were just melodramatic. For one, many of my friends while growing up were/are black and female, so I did not see a problem with me. I also grew up in Santa Cruz, which can skew a perspective of the world.  My main political issues were money, priorities, pragmatism, and defense.

I got involved with the California College Republicans at Cabrillo College and UCSC only to hear such "ice breaker" questions like, "If you could eliminate one race, which one would it be?"  I also heard incendiary comments to the Black Student Union, like, "Those black people would kick our asses."

Those comments all sank in beyond the point of no return during the Gulf Coast hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, in 2005.  It was clear that the outrage was meek and muddled by shock questions about whether George Bush was a racist. 

The picture was clear to me.  I had been wrong about the state of race relations, and that my association with political elephants had in fact created a state of pachydermatous on race.

It was also my version of the Tet Offensive in that I could not believe that things were going well in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Bush administration could not even handle a natural disaster on home turf—and after all the new post-9/11 laws to keep us "safe."

Perhaps I simply subconsciously seek to atone for my political sins; maybe I am just an ass, or maybe I am the dose of reality that some people need to question themselves. 

I am sorry to say, but even journalists should question themselves.  They are not "above it all" or eternally vigilant.

Question or judge yourself before you question or judge others. That is really the only thing I hope that people will take from what I write.

Here, though, is a question I conjured from a nexus of tangents: If journalists believe that Crabtree is unaccountable for his decision to holdout and thus has no soul, is that an admission that journalists are just the product of an omnipotent NFL and thus lack a soul as well?

Frankly, those who do not stand up to the evil of racism have no soul.

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