Who are those "Vanilla Midgets" on the Patriots Offense? Moneyball, White Athletes, and the New England Patriots Chase a Dynasty

Tonight's Super Bowl between the New York Giants and white America's team, the New England Patriots, is beautiful racial theater. Tom Brady and a team of - what the media would derisively call - 'vanilla midgets' (the very white Wes Welker, Julian Edelman, and Danny Woodhead - will face the Giants in a rematch of the Super Bowl where Eli Manning out-dueled the Patriots back in 2008. Not to mention the incredibly talented white tight end Rob Gronkowski, the 2011 Patriots were an offensive unit largely paced by white athletes.

Wes Welker (middle) and Rob Gronkowski, both had 1,000 yards receiving in 2012. Tom Brady is far left.

Here's the latest column at Vdare.com that I did, on the game:

The 2011 National Football League season ends Sunday February 5, when the New England Patriots play the New York Giants for the Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl XLVI. Last year, the Superbowl game broke television rating records, with more than 111 million people watching the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers on Fox. Football has unmistakably supplanted baseball as America’s new “national pastime”.

The popularity of the NFL is due to various factors. The regular season consists of only 16 games, meaning it’s not impossibly time-consuming to follow your favorite team or player. And the NFL has instituted revenue-sharing from the awe-inspiring television contracts it has signed with networks like Fox, NBC, CBS, and ESPN, imposing a variant of socialism to ensure all teams have the same salary cap—the amount of money available to attract players. This creates a level financial field for every team—and means the NFL is more of a horse race (so to speak).

In contrast, professional baseball doesn’t have a salary cap. That’s why a team like the New York Yankees has a payroll of more than $202 million in 2012, compared to the Kansas City Royals’ $36 million. And when you can buy the best players and sign quality depth, a baseball team can basically mortgage the future of the franchise for a World Series victory. Indeed, the Florida Marlins have done this twice, in 1997 and 2003.

Still, Moneyball (book by Michael Lewis book, movie with Brad Pitt) is the definitive account of how Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s idiosyncratic but imaginative general manager, was able to turn a franchise with one of the smallest payrolls into one of the most competitive teams in baseball by finding what economists would call market inefficiencies in how talent was evaluated by scouts.

Beane’s idea, according to Lewis:

What he believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash.

Beane sought more effective metrics for evaluating talent, assembled a team of supposed nobodies, and turned them into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning games.

It worked. The A’s competed successfully with big-market teams flush with huge piles of cash, like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, repeatedly making it to the playoffs and winning 20 games in a row in 2002, breaking an American League record.

Beane had proved that market inefficiencies existed and revolutionized how baseball players are evaluated.

Of course, the situation is more complex in the NFL. Managers don’t have quite as free a hand, because the concept of a level-playing field is the unofficial mantra of the league—the team that finishes with worst record automatically gets the best positions in the NFL draft that year.

But the amazing success of the New England Patriots under head coach Bill Belichick, now competing in their fifth Super Bowl (they’ve won three), shows that market inefficiencies also exist in NFL scouting.  

And significantly, under Belichick, the Patriots have consistently fielded one of the whitest rosters in the sport. When you consider that the NFL has been 67 -70 percent Black over the past 15 years, it becomes increasingly clear that something strange is happening in New England. Why?

My view, as I argued in a prior column on Tim Tebow here at VDARE.com is that the NFL has a systematic anti-white bias.

Only one MSM sportswriter, the remarkable Jason Whitlock of Fox, has had the audacity to broach this subject. As a black guy, he can get away with writing about race.

Back in 2007, Whitlock argued bluntly that the abhorrent culture predominant in black America would eventually turn off white American football fans from black athletes (it happened in professional basketball) and, worse, damage the Black role in the game:

You get one NFL Truth today. Watching Chad Johnson and Larry Johnson undermine their respective head coaches, Marvin Lewis and Herm Edwards, on Sunday gave me a singular focus, forced me to contemplate an uncomfortable truth. 

African-American football players caught up in the rebellion and buffoonery of hip hop culture have given NFL owners and coaches a justifiable reason to whiten their rosters. That will be the legacy left by Chad, Larry and Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick and all the other football bojanglers. 

In terms of opportunity for American-born black athletes, they're going to leave the game in far worse shape than they found it. 

It's already starting to happen. A little-publicized fact is that the Colts and the Patriots are the league's model franchises and are two of the whitest teams in the NFL. If you count rookie receiver Anthony Gonzalez, the Colts opened the season with an NFL-high 24 white players on their 53-man roster. Toss in linebacker Naivote Taulawakeiaho "Freddie" Keiaho and 47 percent of Tony Dungy's defending Super Bowl-champion roster is non-African-American. Bill Belichick's Patriots are nearly as white, boasting a 23-man non-African-American roster, counting linebacker Tiaina "Junior" Seau and backup quarterback Matt Gutierrez. 

For some reason, these facts are being ignored by the mainstream media. Could you imagine what would be written and discussed by the media if the Yankees and the Red Sox were chasing World Series titles with 11 African-Americans on their 25-man rosters (45 percent)? 

We would be inundated with information and analysis on the social significance. Well, trust me, what is happening with the roster of the Patriots and the Colts and with Roger Goodell's disciplinary crackdown are all socially significant. 

 [NFL truth: Hip-hop culture hurting NFL  by Jason Whitlock, October 25, 2007]

Whitlock wrote about the racial dynamics of the Indianapolis Colts again in 2010, pointing out that the Peyton Manning-led offensive unit played 10 whites (out of 11 available positions). The lone black player on the field was a running back. As he said:

“The unwritten rule in sports writing/journalism is we’re only supposed to mention racial progress when it involves dark-skin minorities. Obviously, I don’t care about rules.”[NFL Truths: Colts offense has white stuff, Foxsports.com, Sept. 30, 2010]

And a recent Whitlock column on the Patriots’ game with the Baltimore Ravens—the winner was to go on to the Super Bowl—was perhaps the most racially combustible of his career:

Ravens-Patriots — Tom Brady vs. Ray Lewis — is a cultural war of the highest order.

Look, we can tip-toe around it, ignore the big beautiful elephant in the room, or we can embrace the fact that Sunday’s AFC Championship contest is soaked in the white-black racial component that has driven American sports passion at least since Jack Johnson whipped James J. Jeffries.

The stakes are high this Sunday.

Brady leads an offense built in his image. In a league that is predominantly black, Brady directs a high-flying offense that is predominantly white and relies on a deep cast of white playmakers.

Lewis leads a defense built in his brash image. Nine of the 11 Ravens defenders are African-American. To compensate for Baltimore’s inconsistent offense, Lewis’ defense not only takes risks to create turnovers, they take even more risks trying to convert those turnovers into instant points.

[Ravens-Patriots is ultimate cultural clash, by Jason Whitlock, Fox Sports, January 20, 2012]

Obviously, the Patriots won.

The Patriots’ All-Pro quarterback Tom Brady has consistently had five white offensive lineman protecting him (take a look at this famous 2005 Visa commercial with Brady’s lineman) during the team’s unbelievable run in the 2000s, where they set the NFL record for wins in a decade.

But of course, we can’t talk about this (outside of VDARE.com). Michael Holley recently published an excellent book, War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team,,  on the machine that Belichick has built in New England. But, typically, he didn’t mention the racial aspect of the team even once.

However, recently-retired former Patriots white fullback Heath Evans, whose career was rejuvenated by New England after he was waived by the Miami Dolphins, was devastatingly frank in an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s  Jeff Duncan

"You have some teams that are racially divided. You have some teams that are positionally divided. Some teams divided between offense and defense. Everyone has to buy in and be on the same page."

Nurturing such an environment in the "me generation" can be difficult. If not managed properly, the wealth and fame associated with the NFL can be hazardous to a locker room's cultural health.

"I believe the difference between winning and losing, between first and last place, is this much," Evans said, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart. "Not every team has great leadership."[Saints make effort to limit culture shock, August 02, 2009]

Evans got his chance to start at running back for Belichick’s Patriots —something he was denied at Auburn University, which he attributed it to his whiteness. And he ran for 84 yards on 17 carries, and caught three passes for 18 yards, in a game against the same team that had just cut him.

Similarly, the key contributors to the 2011 Patriots offense have primarily been white players overlooked and undervalued by the other 31 franchises—until they were all signed by the Patriots and allowed to mature as a team together.

Read the rest at Vdare. Comment on it here, but please use social media (Facebook and Twitter) to share it.

Michael Oriard, writing in Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Sport, included a chapter titled 'Football in Black and White' where he wrote this paragraph in regards to the conspicuous whiteness of the Patriots:

Here I cannot document my claims, because no one would have been foolish enough to write such things, but I am certain that in 2004 [Tom] Brady (and Peyton Manning) appeared whiter to football fans than any white quareterbacks before them, because of the many black quarterbacks jockeying with them for NFL supremacy. I am also sure that the Patrios were coded white, the Eagles black, in the racial theater of the 2005 Super Bowl, and not just because of Brady. 


As the media constantly reminded us over the course of the season and through the playoffs, under Bill Belichick the Patriot players did  not celebrate, they put the team ahead of themselves, and several of them signed for less money to remain with the club. Their most notable off-season acquisition, running back Corey Dillon, had arrived with the reputation of a selfish troublemaker only to be reborn as another Patriot team player. Dillon was black, as were key Patriots such as Willie McGinest, Richard Seymour, Rodney Harrison, and Deion Branch. The Patriots were black and white, like every other team in the NFL. But they seemed the whitest team in professional football because what they stood for had been coded "white" in a racial mythology that began in white bigotry, persisted less openly with the end of segregation, and had been fed in recent years by black showmanship.

Black showmanship. Let's be honest, most Black players in the NFL actively engage in strange celebrations that appear to be scripted from a Jim Crow-era Minstrel Show. One such player Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson, made a career based on his extracurricular activities and showmanship. After signing this season with the Patriots this season (he has only 15 receptions all year), Ochocinco has embraced the Patriots overt-white style of play.

He called the Patriots offensive-style of play "a machine"-- it should be noted that that offense is the whitest in the NFL:

Reacting to quarterback Tom Brady throwing for 517 yards and four touchdowns in a 38-24 win over Miami, Ochocinco tweeted: "Just waking up after a late arrival, I've never seen a machine operate like that n person, to see video game numbers put up n person was WOW."

Despite the Patriots marching up and down the field, Ochocinco had only one catch for 14 yards. Five New England receivers had more yards and three of the five had touchdown receptions.
ESPN analyst Tedy Bruschi, appearing on sports radio WEEI, said Ochocinco better "drop the awe factor" and "stop tweeting and get in your playbook." 

Bruschi added that Ochocinco shouldn't be looking at the Patriots' performance from a fan's perspective, but instead should assume this is the team's expectation.

"You're not someone who's on another team or watching TV," Bruschi said. "You're not an analyst. You're a part of it. They want you to be a part of it. So get with the program because obviously you're not getting it and you're tweeting because you're saying, 'It's amazing to see'? It's amazing to see because you don't understand it. You still don't understand it and it's amazing to you because you can't get it.

Fifteen catches. That's all. Most of the NFL is just one Minstrel Show in between actual football. The Patriots?

They've turned the concept of Moneyball on its head; they find undervalued white players (as of late) and turn them - as a unit, a team - into winners. Don't be shocked if a bunch of white guys beat the Giants by a few touchdowns tonight. Don't be shocked if other teams realize the obvious racial aspects of the Patriots team unity.