The Death of Legion Field in Birmingham: Paul "Bear" Bryant's True Legacy

PK Note: Tomorrow, we tug on Superman's cape. Tonight, read up on this VDare article (Alabama’s Iron Bowl And Integration—Was Football Victory Worth It?, November 26, 2012) and this important article on why Birmingham Southern College - located in the heart of one of the worst Black ghettos in America - built a high-security fence around the school (Martyrs, Civil Rights and Quenette Shehane: The Tale of Birmingham, January 14, 2011). One man is directly responsible with the horrible state of 2012 Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile, and Huntsville.

In 2012, the only industry that 71 percent Black Birmingham can produce - outside of payday loan stores - is to live off the legacy of "Civil Rights" (Birmingham Civil Rights District named Attraction of the Year, Birmingham News, August 30, 2012); the sorry condition of the city being the ultimate legacy of "Civil Rights."

Bear Bryant at Legion Field, once the capital of football in a long dead America

Though the University of Alabama had already started recruiting Black athletes in the late 1960s to play on the famed Crimson Tide football team, coach by Paul "Bear" Bryant, the 1970 season would mark the final year an all-white team would be fielded. And it was on September 12 of that year in a game played at legendary Legion Field in Birmingham that an undersized Crimson Tide team (coming off of the two worst seasons since Bryant took over the team in 1958 -- largely due to changes in the rules that ended the era of "two-way" players and created the modern-era of specialized offensive and defensive units) would be soundly defeated by an integrated University of Southern California team:

On Sept. 12, 1970, a freshman basketball player named Wendell Hudson rode a bus packed with athletes to Birmingham, taking his seat at Legion Field. He watched as Sam Cunningham, the black USC fullback, torched the all-white Crimson Tide defense for 135 yards and two touchdowns in a 42-21 Trojans win. Hudson didn't like seeing his school embarrassed, but there was something sweet about a black player showing the holdovers from the Jim Crow South what they were missing. It was a loss for the Crimson Tide, but it represented something different, Hudson says, to the black community.

"I don't think there's any question," he says. "It was a win."

Later, it was suspected that Bryant brought the Trojans to Birmingham to show locals that it was time to desegregate his team. Was this all it took to be a contender again, five years after Alabama's most recent national title?

Bryant's actions, whether they were premeditated or not, prevented the Tide from falling behind -- despite resistance from boosters and even in the statehouse. Some say that game at Legion Field was the turning point; others say the story has been overblown, its significance mythologized.

Hudson says that, if nothing else, that fall Saturday helped to open minds and to ease the stress directed toward young black players.

"If Coach Bryant thought it was OK," Hudson says, "the state of Alabama thought it was OK."

Alabama was coming off of an 8-3 and 6-5 season (1969 and 1970) and though the Tide would field only two Black players in 1971 ( a virtually all-white team exacting revenge and beating heavily favored USC 17-10 en route to an 11-1 season - after going 6-5-1 in 1970 - thanks to the institution of the wishbone offensive attack),the idea that Black players were the key to winning national titles was set in the eyes of Bryant and his faithful -- the Crimson Tide Nation.

Starting the 2012 season, the University of Alabama football program is more than 70 percent Black: at a school whose enrollment is less than five percent Black male. And yes, Alabama has won two of the last three national titles; yes, Alabama won national title in 1992; and yes, Bryant would win 1973, 1978, and 1979 (teams that were overwhelmingly white), but the question of at what cost is never, ever asked.

The answer rests in the sorrowful state of what was once the south's greatest city, Birmingham, a veritable Black hole full of decaying memories of a storied past. The saddest building still standing that reminds those who look upon it of an era long dead is Legion Field, the 85-year old football stadium that played host to many of the Bear's most famous wins: (Alabama Forced to Abandon Unsafe Legion Field, NBC News, August 19, 2004)

So much for “The football capital of the South.”

Once proud to proclaim itself as the gridiron hub of an entire region, the city of Birmingham’s 77-year-old Legion Field is in such disrepair it’s no longer safe to use the 9,000-seat upper deck, which has structural problems. Its metal supports are dappled with peeling gray paint and rust.

With renovation or repair unlikely, the city and the University of Alabama on Thursday said they were ending their contract, meaning the Crimson Tide would no longer play any home games at the 81,000-seat stadium. The announcement marked the end of a long association between one of the South’s most storied football programs and the old field on Graymont Avenue.

“The Crimson Tide has played some of its greatest football at Legion Field, and Alabama fans will forever enjoy fond memories of those wonderful games,” athletic director Mal Moore said in a statement.

But none of those hold a candle to images of the stadium’s past: coach Paul “Bear” Bryant leaning on a goalpost during pregame warmups or Alabama vs. Tennessee on the third Saturday in October.

Legion Field was allowed to decay because the white tax-base fled Birmingham after the post-Civil Rights world made it untenable for white people to live safely and peacefully in the Magic City. Once Black people took control of City Hall, the precious little tax-revenue collected had to pay for basic services; maintaining a stadium that was but a symbol of the old "Jim Crow" was luxury that Black people couldn't afford.

At exactly the moment the University of Alabama football integrated (1971), the city of Birmingham died

In 1992, the inaugural Southeastern Conference Championship (SEC) game would be played at Legion Field. After one more game in 1993, it was announced that the game would be moving from Birmingham to Atlanta, largely because the Georgia Dome was a more adequate facility for hosting the game. Also, because the city hadn't gone as Black as Birmingham, Atlanta offered more attractions and safer streets for the alumni and fans who would attend the game.

In 1998, the last Iron Bowl - the Auburn University/Alabama football game - would be played at Legion Field, depriving the city of one of the last big revenue generating events (The House That Bear Built
Birmingham's Legion Field is, sadly, no longer a football mecca, Sports Illustrated, by Jack McCallum, November 29, 1999):

Nothing captures the fall from grace of the self-proclaimed Football capital of the South better than this: As 85,214 fans were preparing last Saturday to go to Auburn's Jordan-Hare Stadium, where Alabama would defeat Auburn 28-17, only about 5,000 people, many of them mommies and daddies, were gathered at 83,000-seat Legion Field in Birmingham to watch 12 of the city's youth football teams play six games in the 32nd annual Shug-Bear Bowl. For much of the 20th century it was the games played at Legion Field that allowed Birmingham to adopt the aforementioned billing, which stretches in large, painted letters across the facade of sections 33 through 37 of the 72-year-old stadium. The slogan was particularly true on those Saturdays when the Crimson Tide and the Tigers engaged in the blood rivalry that brought all other activity in the state to a halt. But when Alabama made it official in February that beginning in 2000, as part of a new contract, it would host its renewals of the season-ending civil war on campus rather than at Legion—a change Auburn had made 10 years ago—big-time football at the House That Bear Built effectively came to an end.

Ah, but it breathed once. It was at Legion in 1970, after Sam Cunningham led Southern Cal to a 42-21 rout of the Crimson Tide, that Bear Bryant finally became convinced that 'Bama needed a new kind of player—one with a black face. No doubt you've heard the line that emerged from that game: Sam Cunningham did more for integration in Alabama in three hours than Martin Luther King Jr. did in a decade. It was at Legion in '81 that Bryant passed Amos Alonzo Stagg's career victory mark of 314 with a 28-17 win over Auburn.

So whither Legion Field? Around Birmingham there seems to be little of the warm and fuzzy feeling attached to Legion that there is to Rickwood Field, the city's historic minor league baseball park, which is being lovingly restored. Art Clarkson, a Birminghamite who once owned the minor league Barons, has a plan for Legion: "Let's get 30,000 people lined up around the stadium, sing a few songs, make a few speeches and—wham!—blow the thing up."

Perhaps it was the sad story of losing the Alabama High School championship games to the campuses of Auburn University and the University of Alabama that illustrate the sad ability for those Black people in control of modern-day Birmingham for allocating money to keep the buildings and infrastructure they inherited from white flight in working conditions:

The Super 6, Alabama's annual high school football championship series, is leaving Birmingham and will be played in Auburn and Tuscaloosa for the next six years.
The Alabama High School Athletic Association on Wednesday approved a six-year agreement to move the state football championship games from 83-year-old Legion Field. The series will alternate between stadiums at Auburn University and the University of Alabama. 

Birmingham's Legion Field had hosted the football championships every year since 1996. The championship games for the state's biggest high schools have been at Legion Field for four decades.
Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Smoot said she was stunned by the decision.
"For me, it's a loss of sales tax once again in this county that we just can't afford. We're going to have to figure a way to replace not only this event but the money it generates," Smoot said. 

Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford said the city's bid included doubling financial support for both events. The mayor's office said it had budgeted $50,000 in financial support for the basketball game playoffs and doubled its pledge to $100,000.

"I had sweated what the results would be," Langford said. "All and all, I'm delighted because, to be perfectly candid, we raised the offer so high because we knew what we were faced with -- inadequate facilities."

Langford said the city continues to risk losing events unless new venues are built. Both the BJCC and Legion Field are outdated and inadequate, he said.

"Had we moved on that domed stadium or just shown the intent, the football games would never have gone to Tuscaloosa," he said. "No matter how much paint we put on Legion Field, it is a stadium that has served the state well, but is outdated."

Legion Field: Won't be demolished because of its "Civil Rights" importance

Jordan-Hare Stadium at Auburn and Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa are both old stadiums as well, but the alumni of each school are able to engage in capital campaigns that bring revenue and donations in to the schools for improvements to both the stadium and to the campus. The 71 percent Black residents of modern-day Birmingham... lack that financial acumen and planning ability for ensuring the structural integrity of the buildings they inherited from white flight and long-term initiatives for building capital to pay for renovations.

In 2007, the Birmingham News published a special report called Birmingham at a Crossroads: the reality is the city of Birmingham crossed the Rubicon on September 12, 1970.

It is a dead city as long as Black people are in control of the city's destiny, and a recent story about the inhabitants of the neighborhood that surrounds Legion Field illustrates this point powerfully (Neighbors around Birmingham's Legion Field languishing with blight, Birmingham News, December 4, 2011):

Boarded-up houses, darkened storefronts and a gutted hotel line the path thousands took recently on their annual caravan to Legion Field, where vendors and spectators indulged in a weekend of entertainment, celebrity and football.

Long after the echoes of music and roaring crowds of the Magic City Classic drifted past her house and faded until next fall, Iris Billups remains in Legion Field's shadow, where blight and neglect are her closest neighbors.

"After a period of time, I guess nobody cared," said Billups, a retired New York schoolteacher who returned four years ago to her family home off Graymont Avenue, one of only a few occupied houses on her block. "People moved away, and the people who owned houses died.

"Their children didn't move back and it just deteriorated."

Residents, planners and development experts say that's a problem not just for residents of Birmingham's Smithfield community, but for anybody who wants to keep Legion Field viable and attract more events to the 84-year-old stadium. Its future is linked to the struggling neighborhood in which it sits, they say.

With longtime plans for a domed stadium in the city shelved and a proposed UAB on-campus stadium axed by University of Alabama trustees, Legion Field remains the sole venue for major football games in Birmingham. Mayor William Bell has said he's working on bringing more games to the stadium and has announced upgrades to be completed in time for next month's BBVA Compass Bowl.

But some say revitalizing the surrounding community is just as crucial a need as improvements to the stadium itself.

Redevelopment plans have been pitched over the years, most recently in 2003, with little action. But with work under way on the city's first all-new comprehensive plan in 50 years and Bell proposing a $75 million bond referendum for yet-to-be-named projects across the city, hopes have been rekindled for improvements to the area around the stadium.

"What do you have to offer the people to come into the neighborhood?" Billups said, citing the scarcity of retail, restaurant and other development in the area for both visitors and residents. "The city has to think in terms like that. Why would we want to lose Legion Field? That's the only thing we have going."

The marketability of facilities such as Legion Field depends on visitors' experiences both inside and outside, said David Fleming, president of Operation New Birmingham.
"In general, it is clear from the trends of stadiums and sports facility development that people think about developing those facilities in context and not in isolation," he said.

Improving the condition of the area around the stadium is critical to the venue's marketability, said Arthur Allaway, a University of Alabama marketing professor.

"Some of it is just cleaning the streets and painting, because empty buildings that look good aren't dangerous-looking, while burned-out buildings don't look too attractive," Allaway said. "It will take private money in the long run, but in the short term, a commitment to the area from the city would go a long way."

Allaway said cosmetic improvements, along with incentives for redevelopment, should be the city's first steps.

Billups' father and uncle built the family house the same year she was born, 1950. After retiring, she returned to a street and community drastically different from the one she had left in 1972.

"You don't hear anything about this community until the next Classic comes," Billups said, sitting in the living room where black-and-white portraits of her mother and father still sit on the vintage furniture of her youth.

Back when the photos and furniture were new and Billups' house was filled with family, Legion Field was a premier sports destination hosting several Alabama football games a year, including the Iron Bowl matchup with Auburn. Those teams are long gone, and the statue of Paul "Bear" Bryant just past the resting lions at the gate stands as a memorial to Legion Field's place in sports history.

But Billups and others say the stadium and its neighborhood need not be consigned to sports manuals, yellowed newspaper clips and old television reels.

In 2003, the Graymont and College Hills neighborhood associations commissioned Auburn University's Center for Architecture and Urban Studies to canvass the area and draft a master plan for its rebirth.

The group led by Cheryl Morgan, director of Auburn's Birmingham-based urban studio, produced concepts that included preservation of historic homes, new neighborhood-based businesses and landscaping changes at Legion Field, making the area more park-like.

Morgan said she knows the drawings of trees at the stadium, and of fresh new homes mixed with renovated older ones near a new retail commercial district, are visionary.
"We really believe that you should set the bar high," Morgan said. "Part of what we believe is that the neighborhoods really do have the most responsibility and opportunity to make things happen locally, but they need tools to help them build partnerships to attract economic development to their area."

Morgan said Smithfield's location just west of downtown and its long history are assets that could aid in a revitalization.

"I'm a stubborn optimist. I look around and see so many amazing things in the city," she said. "Neighborhoods are living, breathing things, and change happens incrementally. Managing the change is one of the things that good planning helps you do."

Allaway said the area, which includes Birmingham-Southern College to the west, has elements that could be marketed to developers, including a natural customer base of students, residents and stadium users in addition to a supply of cheap land.

"There's got to be a market, and if there's a market, then there's an opportunity," he said. "All the commercial real estate guys are pretty smart in knowing what an opportunity looks like. Every place goes down and comes back up eventually.

Somebody could get in and get in cheap, and bring in some retail."

Fleming -- the former director of Main Street Birmingham, a neighborhood revitalization agency -- said plans such as the Auburn study require extensive support to analyze what is doable and put it into action.

"Somebody's got to be focused on making that happen and in that specific place," he said. "That's one of the challenges with redevelopment, keeping a focus and sustained effort of what's truly going to work in the marketplace."

City Councilwoman Maxine Parker, chairwoman of the Parks and Recreation Board that oversees Legion Field, agreed that Smithfield redevelopment should be tied to any effort to promote the stadium.

Birmingham is at a disadvantage in part because other cities have what is absent here, she said.

"When people go to other cities for games, when the game is over they want additional activities," she said. "Every time I went to a game I wanted to find the next place to have dinner and the next place to shop. You don't have it now, but if you make it a top priority you could have it soon."

City Councilman Johnathan Austin, whose district contains the neighborhood, agreed the city must shift more attention to the area.

"It's as if everybody has forgotten that there is a neighborhood around Legion Field that once was a thriving neighborhood," he said.

Change can occur gradually with city support, he said. Austin cites the recent vote to allow a Family Dollar store off Graymont. While that rezoning created a dispute between residents who backed it and members of a nearby church who opposed it, Austin said the store is an example of fledgling commercial interest in the area that must be championed.

"That may seem like something small, but in the large scheme of things, when is the last time we've had a new building built in Smithfield?" he said. "We don't have to go in and build huge grocery stores, but we can build neighborhood markets. We have an opportunity for neighborhood revitalization that we can mimic and replicate throughout the city."

Birmingham's project to develop a new city-wide master plan could shine new attention on the Auburn study, said Paul Neville, president of the College Hills neighborhood and Smithfield Community. "Moving from ideas to resources and implementation -- that's been our challenge," he said.

Neville said Legion Field, with its proposed green space and redesign of McLendon Park, could mimic the success of other neighborhoods where parks serve as anchors.
Capital needed to begin any major overhaul could come in a proposed $75 million bond issue that Bell announced recently.

Bell, who lives in College Hills and represented the area for years as a councilman, wants a citywide vote by early 2012 to finance projects across the city. The mayor has not named specific projects but said he would meet with each council member to compile a list of needs.

Repeated efforts to reach Bell for comment on possibilities for the area around Legion Field were unsuccessful.

Billups can easily give city officials her own list of needs, pointing out the number of empty houses on her street. That includes the Parker House, the home of A.H. Parker, founder and principal of the high school bearing his name. That house, and others in the area, were designed by Wallace A. Rayfield, whose other work included Sixteenth Street Baptist Church downtown.

The late principal would have to look closely to recognize his former home past the boarded-up windows. The city bought the house in 2001 and has stabilized it, but efforts to reuse it remain stalled.

"There are plans that the city has had for Smithfield, and they need to blow the dust off of them," said Emanuel Ford, a Birmingham Board of Education member and former longtime neighborhood officer. "It's not that the citizens have not raised their voices and given their ideas. It's just that sometimes it takes a long time to get something done. When you ride through Smithfield and you see all the blight and lots where houses used to stand, you wonder what happened."

What happened, Ford said, was that city officials turned all their attention to downtown revitalization while the neighborhood just west of downtown declined.

After years of little progress, Ford admits his optimism has dimmed a bit.

"You still keep pushing; you don't give up," he said. "I guess as we get older we learn to keep working, but then we also learn to deal with reality."

 Urban Blight? Declining property value? Virtually no legitimate economic activity? Crime and poverty? All hallmarks of a community that is all-Black. And not once in Joseph Bryant's article for the Birmingham News do you learn that the area around Legion Field has been all-Black for decades.

Once, the driveways of Black homeowners around Legion Field served as parking spots (and big-time money generators) for Alabama alumni and fans when they would attend games where the beloved Coach Bear Bryant would the Crimson Tide to victory. This all ended when Black political power took over Birmingham and completely neglected the infrastructure and public buildings they inherited from white flight, Legion Field included.

Now, the neighborhoods around Legion Field no longer accommodate University of Alabama alumni, students, and fans tailgating before a big game; they instead accommodate the camera crews of A&E's The First 48, with 71 percent Black Birmingham serving as one of the main cities for this show about murder and the police response to heinous crimes 

Legion Field needs to be demolished, like all of Birmingham; bulldozed, razed and ultimately, rebuilt again. But it won't: it will sit, decaying (with echos of a glorious past haunting all who enter the stadium; if you close your eyes you can even see the shadows of the 1971 Iron Bowl participants, as undefeated Auburn and Alabama battled in the last true game between the schools -- when both schools only had two Black players each, who were recruited for both academics and their athleticism), with the "blight" created and sustained by the Black residents of the neighborhood surrounding the stadium a reminder of the type of community they can create.

This is the true legacy of that September 12, 1970 game; the destruction of an entire state, though people are still too busy yelling "Roll Tide" or "War Eagle" to notice.

Tomorrow, we pull on Superman's cape. 

Opiate of America -- Penn State Edition

Nothing much else to add to this video. Penn State hit with crippling fine:

The NCAA has hit Penn State with a $60 million sanction, a four-year football postseason ban and a vacation of all wins dating to 1998, the organization said Monday morning. The career record of Joe Paterno will reflect these vacated records, the NCAA said.

Penn State also must reduce 10 initial and 20 total scholarships each year for a four-year period.

Someone get the NCAA a copy of Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, immediately. It's not just the sordid canonization of Joe Paterno and the primarily white student body of Penn State -- the opiate is on every campus. It runs deep at the University of Nebraska, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Miami, Florida State University, and every Southeastern Conference (SEC) member school.

There's a reason Bane started his "revolution" in the movie The Dark Knight Rises at a football game.

"A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community"

It's not just Penn State... it's every school

This nightmare we call Black-Run America (BRA) could end with one simple act: the nationalization of ESPN and the immediate firing of everyone associated with the monolith, be it radio, TV, magazine, or Internet.  Turn off the never-ending sports faucet that dumps positive images of Black people that are impossible to duplicate in any other environment, and instantly one of the only remaining roadblocks to rational thinking for whites in America is removed.

Instantly.

All of this became clear courtesy of Southeastern Conference (SEC) media days, when University of Georgia head football coach Mark Richt was asked about disciplinary problems on his hopelessly Black (and largely filled with academic partial qualifiers/special admission athletes) program:

As you might expect, the conversation was dominated about team discipline. We hadn’t had a chance to talk to Richt about Isaiah Crowell’s dismissal since it happened on June 29. So he talked about that and about the perception that there is a lack of discipline at Georgia.

On having to kick Crowell off the team: “Well, no decision to dismiss a guy from the team is an easy decision. It’s always tough because I care very much about all these guys. Having to make those kinds of decisions are tough. But, in the end, I think we did what was in the best interest of the program. I wish Isaiah the very best in his future and I hope everything will work out for him.”

On type of kids they’re recruiting: “We’re not recruiting bad kids,” Richt said. “We’re competing for the same guys everybody else is in the league.”

“We’re not recruiting bad kids,” Richt said. “We’re competing for the same guys everybody else is in the league.” Translation: "Don't blame me, look at what schools are also doing!"

Mark Richt justifies having a team full of - let's be honest - Black thugs (whose high school transcripts wouldn't even be considered by the University of Georgia admissions were they not to don the Red and Black of the football team) because other SEC programs recruit these same Black thugs that Auburn, Florida, Alabama, LSU, and Tennessee are also recruiting. Not to mention Florida State and Miami.

Isaiah Crowell wouldn't attend DeVry or some other For-Profit college, were it not for his ability to run with the football. Because he does possess that ability, supposed top-notch academic institutions compete for his services and primarily white alumni salivate over his potential on message boards like Rivals and Scout.com.

It's... pathetic.

Over at Alternative Right, I once wrote these words:

Indeed, the Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, and LSU football teams have been defined by crime. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that the most frequent type of coverage Black people involve two subjects––crime and sports:

The Meyer content analysis found that during three months last year, the largest block of news stories involving black men and youth were about crime—86 percent of the news broadcasts and 37 percent of the newspaper stories.The Pew report found that the most frequent topics for news broadcasts involving African-American men were sports (43 percent) and crime (30 percent). In the newspapers, crime led all topics involving black men at 43 percent.

Once crime stories were excluded, the content analysis found there were few other stories about black males.

But SEC white alumni just brush it off, constantly berating rival programs for recruiting "thugs" while defending their "thugs" to the death. Paradoxically, when it comes time to cheer for the SEC as a whole conference, the fears of "thugs" subside...

UGA is the best example of the Black thug recruit problem, with Black running backs constantly being suspended. The point needs to be made: none of these Black athletes would be attending UGA - one of the top public institutions in America for higher learning - were they not Black athletes.

Here's a rundown of the type of athletes Richt and the entire SEC compete for during recruiting season:

Crowell is only the most recent in a host of tailbacks to depart under less-than-ideal circumstances:

• Rising senior Carlton Thomas announced in March that he would transfer to another program following a junior season in which he served three separate one-game suspensions. One of the suspensions was for failing a drug test before the New Mexico State game, along with Crowell and fellow tailback Ken Malcome.

• Caleb King left the Bulldogs last summer after being declared academically ineligible. Following his arrival at Georgia as one of the nation's most highly recruited tailbacks, King encountered several disciplinary issues at Georgia even before the academic problems forced him to miss his senior season.

• King's backfield mate Washaun Ealey also was arrested during his time in Athens before getting suspended by Richt and eventually coming to a "mutual decision" with the coach that he should transfer elsewhere.

• Backup tailback Dontavius Jackson was arrested for DUI and other charges in July 2010. Richt first handed him a six-game suspension before Jackson opted instead to transfer.

Mark Richt spent years as the offensive coordinator for Bobby Bowden at Florida State, perhaps the biggest apologist for Black dysfunction outside of former U of Florida and current Ohio State coach Urban Meyer -- in all of sports.

It all comes down to the simple understanding that "A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community," isn't just found at Penn State.

As I wrote at Vdare last week:

Today, the long-anticipated investigation into Penn State corruption/child abuse coverup was released. It's... devastating, and will likely have major ramifications for the legacy of the late Joe Paterno:

Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and other university leaders "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse" from authorities, according to Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who conducted an investigation for the university in the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal.
Freeh also found that "although concern to treat the child abuser humanely was expressly stated, no such sentiments were ever expressed" by university officials, including Paterno and the university president, for Sandusky’s victims. [Report finds Penn State president, Paterno concealed facts about Sandusky sex abuse, By Bill Dedman,  msnbc.com, July 12, 2012]

Throughout the 267-page report [PDF] compiled on the Penn State scandal and the coverup of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse, it is one line that cuts to the heart of why America is is so much trouble:

The avoidance of the consequences of bad publicity is the most significant, but not the only, cause for this failure to protect child victims and report to authorities. The investigation also revealed:

A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community.

Its not just Penn State. As I noted in Joe Paterno And The Penn State Rape Scandal: Discrediting The Opiate Of America and Alabama’s Iron Bowl And Integration—Was Football Victory Worth It?, it is college football that is America's greatest opiate.

A "culture of reverence for the football program" exists on the campuses of Southeastern Conference (SEC), Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-14, and on the hallowed grounds of Notre Dame.

There's only one responsible thing to do in the wake of the Penn State scandal, and the numerous scandals that have engulfed the campuses of some of the top schools in America: Ban College Football.

Malcolm Gladwell even agrees.

You ban college football, instantly "the opiate of America" is diluted.

It's on every campus. Not just Penn State; this "culture of reverence" allows good people to become infatuated with the latest recruiting news at Rivals or Scout.com, so they can see what latest Black thug recruit their team is planning to offer a full academic scholarship to.

None of these vaunted Black running backs would be allowed to step foot in an academic building in Athens, Georgia, were they not first and foremost considered an asset to the football program. Instead of being considered what they truly represent: an academic liability and a threat to the general peace of the campus.

So on August 28, Paul Kersey will publish Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White and then turn his back - just like the University of Chicago once did - on the game completely. Secure a signed copy now.

More importantly, Stuff Black People Don't Like: 365 Black Days of Judging by Content of Character will finally be released on July 28. And then in mid-September, Negro Fatigue: A Year Inside Barack Obama and Eric Holder's America comes out.

We also have an October surprised planned too.

A Death in the (Auburn) Family

America could be saved tomorrow: Ban College Football (like Malcolm Gladwell has suggested)

The faster they run, the more touchdowns they make, the whiter they get! (as quoted in Charles H. Martin's Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980 (Sport and Society) -- An Auburn University Board of Trustees member in the late 1960s. Auburn would integrate its football team in 1970, when James Owens became the first Black player to wear the Orange and Blue. Now, Auburn University - like most Southeastern Conference (SEC) members schools - primarily recruits Black high school athletes. New member Texas A&M had a recruiting class of 22 players in 2012; only one was white.


Please also read this article on Georgia Tech and legendary coach Bobby Dodd; this article on the University of Georgia and Earl Warren; and this article on Auburn University and the University of Alabama: the state of Alabama's major cities (Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile) are hell-holes, a reminder of the majority Black population that now lords of these cities that white people have fled from. However, both schools recruit Black athletes for the beloved football programs from these very cities they have fled.

The Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White will be coming out in late July of this year. In it, you will begin to see why ostensibly conservative white people tolerate Black dysfunction in America: because they believe that only Black athletes can play a sport they base their entire life around - and live vicariously through - in college football.

It's sad. It's depressing (and it rivals the Afrikaners obsession with rugby which ultimately doomed their nation: remember, South Africa was barred from International Rugby as long as Apartheid existed), and the horrible state of Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, Mobile, Memphis, Augusta, and Macon is excused away as long as 17 and 18-year-old Black recruits can be plucked away from the mean streets and enticed to play college football for Alabama, Georgia (UGA), Tennessee, Georgia Tech, Florida State, or Auburn University.

Blacks who have no academic business attending even a for-profit college are allowed to attend these institutions as "partial qualifiers" because we have been led to believe that teams full of virtually illiterate Blacks are the only route to a National Championship.

It's funny: Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bussinger (author of Friday Night Lights) have recently argued that college football should be banned. But don't they realize if college football is banned, instantaneously you deprive the only positive images that most people will ever have of Black people (since they wear the beloved colors and jersey of their alma mater). At Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools, the student body of the 14-member schools are overwhelmingly white, with only a sprinkling of Black faces tossed in (Billy Hawkins book The New Plantation points out that in 2008, the UGA football team was 72 percent Black, yet the student body population - more than 33,000 - was only 2 percent Black male).

Maureen Downey of the Atlanta Journal Constitution was honest enough to write an article titled Without Affirmative Action for Athletes, fewer football stars on the field:

What do you call a Division I school that doesn’t lower its admission standards to admit star athletes?

Probably 0-12.

While many people condemn any consideration of race in college admissions, few complain about the routine acceptance of lower-performing student athletes admitted because of their outstanding abilities on the field rather than in the classroom.

In an investigation three years ago of admission standards for athletes, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates — and men’s basketball players average seven points less than football players.

At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which was 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia at the time. The Bulldogs’ average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 big-time college teams for which football GPAs were available.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to revisit the issue of race-conscience admissions policies is sparking new discussions of admission standards and deviations.
The court last addressed race in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision. In a 5-4 vote, the court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School, saying that the Constitution “does not prohibit the law school’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

 UGA is a school that prides itself on having high admissions to earn acceptance to the university -- unless you are a Black football player. Then, you get a "special admit" because most Black males in America don't have the acumen to produce the necessary grades and SAT/ACT score in high school to get in.

Oh, and Mrs. Downey: didn't a Boise State team that started 16 whites crush a UGA team that started 20 Blacks in 2011? Yes, they did.

If you remove college football from the university experience, automatically you no longer have a perceived need to recruit Black athletes (who some people have claimed, most notably William Rhoden, that they are exploited without monetary gain)? Forget for a second that Black males mature faster than white males -- giving them that huge boost when it comes to high school recruiting; why would you need to stack Black athletes in classes - as North Carolina did in its African and Afro-American studies program, which is under intense investigation for academic fraud - if you eliminated football?

In 2008 - according to Billy Hawkins - Auburn University's football team was 50 percent Black; the Black male enrollment - of 26,000 students - was 4%. So, if Auburn's football team had 110 players, and 50 percent were Black, you are looking at potentially 6% of this Black male enrollment being there explicitly for football. Auburn is a school that is more than 90 percent white.

As Walk-On by former Auburn Black football player Thom Grissom makes clear, it was only the integration of the football team that started to see an augmentation of the Black student body population to the school. Well, that and the threat of suits by the federal government, a point made in Bigger than the Game by Michael Weinreb.

In 2011, three Black football players and one white (a hilariously inept wigger) were arrested for armed robbery. They used the gun of fellow teammate Michael Dyer (a Black guy who was kicked-off the Auburn football team), who was the hero of the 2011 BCS National Championship game. Here's the story:

Auburn University head football coach Gene Chizik wasted little time in reacting to the news that four of his players had been arrested and charged with robbery, burglary and theft of property Friday.

He made them four former Auburn players.

Chizik said in a statement Friday that Antonio Goodwin, Shaun Kitchens, Mike McNeil and Dakota Mosley are “permanently dismissed from our football team” after the four were arrested and each charged with five counts of first-degree robbery, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of third-degree theft of property stemming from an incident early Friday morning.

Today, we learned of a rare murder in Auburn, Alabama - an oasis of whiteness in East Alabama, surrounded by a sea of Blackness reliant on EBT/Food Stamp's to survive - involving, well, Black people. Invariably, it was imported (recruited) Black football players - well, one player and two former players - that were involved:

Auburn police chief Tommy Dawson says the Auburn football players shot at an apartment complex Saturday night should only be considered victims in an incident that has claimed three lives, including those of two former players.

Dawson said Desmonte Leonard is the suspect in the shooting, and he has no affiliation with Auburn University.

"Let me point that out, the only connection the Auburn football team have to this is they are victims of a brutal shooting," Dawson said. "Sometimes the young men get a bad rap. But they're the victims. It's not just about the Auburn football players. It's about the other young men who have been injured, especially about the young man fighting for his life at UAB today. That's what this is about. That's why you do this job, for the victims."

Killed in the incident were former Auburn players Ed Christian and Ladarious Phillips, and Auburn resident DeMario Pitts. 

Wounded were current Auburn player Eric Mack. Dawson said John Robertson is "fighting for his life" at UAB hospital in Birmingham, Dawson said. Dawson said Xavier Moss was treated and released.

This is a scene that sounds like it should be from 71 percent Black Birmingham, where Auburn University recruits for its football team and where A&E shoots regularly for its hit show The First 48. This type of wanton Black violence happens daily in cities where white alumni of Auburn University (or any SEC or ACC school) chose to live far from -- think nearly all-white Hoover or Mountain Brook to Black-run Birmingham.

But because this happens to be a death in the (Auburn) family that includes Black thugs shooting at one another, it automatically is something we must worry about.

No one has asked this question, "but why were Auburn football players hanging out with DeMario Pitts, a Black thug who killed his own cousin in an accidental shooting on March 19?":

An Auburn High School sophomore is dead after what Auburn police are saying appears to have been an accidental shooting.

Jamon Baker, 15, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest Sunday evening, according to Auburn police.

A police report stated that shots were fired in the 800 block of Lunsford Drive in Auburn at approximately 7 p.m. Sunday. Police responding to the scene were flagged down by the occupants of a vehicle on North Donahue Drive attempting to take Baker to the hospital.

An ambulance transported Baker to the East Alabama Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 7:53 p.m.

Demario A. Pitts, 20, of Opelika surrendered to Auburn police at approximately 2 a.m. Monday morning — but has not been charged in the shooting — Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson said.

Dawson said that Pitts and Baker were cousins.

At Vdare.com, I've made my case about Auburn and Alabama in an article titled Alabama’s Iron Bowl And Integration—Was Football Victory Worth It? It's hard to even care about college football anymore, in light of the revelations that beloved Penn State coach Joe Paterno knew of a child sex abuse scandal and helped cover it up for years.

It should be a game played by actual student-athletes, who only participate in the sport for the physical activity and the thrill of representing their university in collegiate athletics. Instead, college football has become one of the ultimate vehicles for creating false impressions of Black America; heroes of illiterate Black thugs.

Like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker columnist and writer of Blink and The Tipping Point, I too agree college football should be banned. 

White America excuses away Black thuggery for one reason: because to admit the problem would potentially derail Auburn's (UGA, Florida, Florida State, Alabama, LSU, South Carolina, etc.) chances of winning a National Title. And because these white alumni of SEC (or ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 10) universities place greater importance on what happens on a football field between 18 and 22-year-old males, the future of our nation will be cities turned into just another Detroit or Birmingham.

But hey: we can at least get Black recruits from these cities!

The first step toward rescuing America from a future that resembles one big Detroit (or Birmingham) is simply this: ban college football.

Update: A hilarious portrait of the accused killer has emerged:

Desmonte Demontez Leonard, the 22-year-old Montgomery man at the center of law enforcement manhunt for his role in a mass shooting at an Auburn apartment complex, has been arrested twice on gun charges, according to online court records.

Records also indicate he has been sued twice for child support, with the most recent lawsuit filed on Friday, just one day before Saturday night's shooting.

 Leonard also was arrested Jan. 31, 2008 by the Montgomery Police Department's Crime Reduction Team after it responded to a report of a stolen vehicle, according to court records. Police spotted the 2001 GMC Yukon Denali and gave pursuit. Leonard, who was in the car, told police he had a gun in his pocket. Police confiscated a Smith&Wesson 9mm handgun that he did not have a license to carry, according to records.

Leonard also has been involved in two child support cases. The lawsuit filed Friday claims Leonard is the father of a girl born in 2011.

In January a court had ruled that Leonard was the father of another girl, now 4, by another woman. Leonard was ordered to pay $305 a month in child support, $21 of which was to go toward $7,336 in back child support he owed in the case.

It should be noted that Auburn University is one of only 22 universities in Divison 1, whose athletic department operated in the black financially in 2011. Auburn's athletic department has always been profitable - even when SEC schools fielded all-white teams and didn't rely on sharing television revenue, but instead relied upon actual gate receipts from games - but has found new riches since college football has emerged as cheap programming for ESPN and CBS.

Update II: Auburn, Alabama is a city that is 78 percent white, and one of the most affluent in all of the state of Alabama.  Auburn University has an enrollment that is 25,469, of which 81 percent is white in 2012. Only 3.3 percent is Black male; 41.3 percent is white male.

In 1976, the white male population was 57% of the student body (17,523 students); 1% of the student body (206) was Black male. The school's enrollment was 96% white.

That's what college football has done to the university.

How Many Chances Do you Get? The Bowdens and Black Athletes

Bobby and Terry Bowden

One of the worst human beings in America is Bobby Bowden. His toleration of Black criminality in the pursuit of football glory at Florida State - and his recruiting of primarily Black athletes whose academic ability wouldn't qualify them for entrance into a fourth grade spelling bee - has seeped into virtually every program in America. 

Infamously, 36 players - almost all Black - were unable to play a Music City Bowl game against Kentucky for cheating in the classroom, though most of these players were considered remedial students begging the question of exactly what type of cheating they were doing?

Not staying in the lines during coloring class?

Bowden's most famous pupil, former offensive coordinator at Florida State and current head coach at the University of Georgia Mark Richt, has a recruiting strategy that is directly out of the Bobby's playbook. Recruit nothing but Black thugs to UGA, a school with precious few non-athlete Black males on campus, and then watch as they compete with other Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools to see which team can have the most Black players arrested.

Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia are always vying for this award.

We'll deal with Bowden at length in the upcoming Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White, but want to draw attention to a story that deals with his son, Terry, and one of the "second-chance" Black athletes who ended up at the school he coached at because they couldn't abide by the rules at the former institution that attempted to educate them:

Under coach Terry Bowden, North Alabama has become a Division-II hotbed for transfer players seeking another chance after circumstances led them away from a Division-I school. Bucs receiver Preston Parker turned his playing career around at North Alabama after Terry’s father, Bobby, dismissed Parker from Florida State. In 2011, cornerback Janoris Jenkins and defensive end James Brooks played their final years of eligibility for Bowden after leaving Florida and Arizona State, respectively.

Bowden does intense background checks on individuals before accepting them on the Lions. He did the same on Jenkins, a projected high pick in the 2012 NFL draft.

“I tried to figure out as much of his background as possible to find out if he was just a kid who made mistakes or if he was not a good risk,” Bowden explained, per the Akron Beacon Journal. “… He really had three strikes at Florida. You have to understand how many guys I don’t take who get in similar types of trouble.”

While Bowden insists University of Florida officials “assured me he was worth the risk,” Jenkins apparently left out one detail. He never told Bowden about his four children, all under the age of four and allegedly by three different women.

This is the red flag on Jenkins’ past that may scare off the most NFL teams.

“He has a girlfriend; I’ve had to call him at her house plenty of times,” Bowden said. “He never told me any of that stuff.”

Bowden sounds willing to vouch for Jenkins when NFL teams call, but Jenkins’ secretiveness about this one issue begs the question of whether he’s been fully revealing during Senior Bowl and Scouting Combine interviews. Jenkins already has baggage that will likely eliminate him from several draft boards. He can’t afford much more.

In what vocation - outside of football - would Jenkins possibly earn enough income to take care of his brood? Think how many Black people don't become professional athletes, and you begin to understand why so many Black people are reliant on welfare, EBT/Food Stamps and Section 8 Housing, not to mention free lunches at school for their kids.

How many of the Black athletes playing college football or college basketball actually academically belong at the university they are attending? We are no longer a serious nation.

In the book Winning's Only Part of the Game: Lessons of Life and Football (a running dialogue between Terry and Bobby) Bobby Bowden let's slip this pearl of wisdom, which cuts the heart of the concept of Black-Run America (BRA). On p. 136, we read:

There are going to be differences in the way white people and black people see things. If you are white and your coaching at the top levels of college football or college basketball, your going to find yourself standing in the middle of a locker-room where your the minority. How can you not be sensitive to what black players are thinking?

What are these Black players thinking? Well, they need to realize that without sports, they wouldn't be anywhere near a college campus unless it was working in the custodial services. Unlike Good Will Hunting, it's hard to even conceive these "student-athletes" doing simple arithmetic, let alone trigonometry.

So when you see one or two white players on a major college football team this upcoming season, know that it was Bobby Bowden you influenced the recruiting patterns of scores of coaches. His son didn't fall too far from the tree.

Chances are, once Jenkins NFL career ends, he'll be just like former star Terrell Owens:

He caught a ton of footballs during his career, but troubled ex-NFL star Terrell Owens is catching nothing but heat - and may wind up in jail. 

His latest off-the-field controversy comes as an Atlanta mother claims he owes her $20,000 in child support for one of his children. 

Owens, 38, has never been married, but has four kids with four different women, and each of them has taken him to court at one point.

Darwin's Athletes?: Why College Football Recruiting is an HBD Event

PK: Business Plan coming for the billboard concept. Please understand that for this to work, a certain amount of secrecy must be involved in the negotiation with any advertising company. Yes, there are lawyers involved now. Five cities have been targeted now, with five others under consideration. If you are going to invest in something, it's important you see where the money will be going. Those of you who have supported SBPDL in the past can see through this sites growth where your investment has gone (the incredible design for the fourth book and the upcoming books on college football, the real reason for Detroit's Collapse, and Obama's War on White America are a testament to your investment). 


Things will continue to get worse in this nation, until a dramatic example shakes people from their apathy. 

Their indifference. 

If interested in the billboard campaign, just e-mail me. You need to know where your investment is going. This point forward, no more public discussion of it. To those interested (and who have pledged), e-mail me for the plan. 

Besides, it'll rattle the cages of Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs), long under the impression that opposition to their progressive dreams has been silenced.

Alabama students (the male crying) reacting to the loss to LSU in The Game of the Century. They won the rematch

New, longer post coming tonight. Just wanted to bring your attention to an article up at Alternative Right. It's a preview of a chapter from the forthcoming Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White (cover coming soon). Yesterday was National Signing Day, a holiday for pathetic white men everywhere who follow the recruiting of largely thuggish Black high school athletes (a modern-day version of the slave trade) to see which university they'll end up committing to play football for, with these same largely white alumni reaching a state of sexual euphoria if they sign with their alma mater.

One such Black player was Roger Lewis, who won't be signing with any school:

A Division I football recruit who was expected to make his college choice on Wednesday's National Signing Day festivities was instead in jail, being held on two charges of rape.

As first reported by ThisWeek Pickerington, and quickly confirmed by a number of other Ohio media outlets, Pickerington (Ohio) Central star Roger Lewis, who helped his team reach Ohio's Division I state football title game in 2011, has been charged with two first-degree felony charges of rape, both of the same female acquaintance. Like the alleged victim, Lewis is 18 and is being charged as an adult after a nearly month-long investigation by Pickerington Police.

The victim has been described only as a fellow Pickerington High student. She alleges she was raped both in December 2011 and again on Jan. 6.

On Tuesday night, Lewis was being held on $250,000 bond at Fairfield County Jail and was expected to be arraigned on Wednesday.

That's a long ways (at least metaphorically speaking) from the signing day ceremony he was expected to attend at Pickerington Central, where Lewis was expected to choose between scholarship offers from Ohio University, Marshall and Bowling Green. The wide receiver prospect also holds scholarship offers from 14 other schools, including the likes of Ohio State, West Virginia and Arizona, stacking up well against a number of other top wide receiver recruits who made their college decisions on Wednesday.

 The piece at Alternative Right is one that is a glimpse of the larger chapter. Soon, I'll post a glimpse of the chapter on college football coaches who helped paved the way for Black-Run America (BRA). Sports - especially college football and basketball - provide the primary basis for the creation of positive images of Black people, through the hero worship of these athletes.

Well, there's one reason for this, and you can read about it in (Meat) Market Failure: Recruiting, Genetics, and the White Athlete:

It’s with this thought in mind that we point out that of the top 100 Scout and Rivals high- school prospects (and those players selected to the play in the prestigious Under Armour All-American game, almost 90 percent of them are Black athletes.

Why is this?

Former Auburn University coach Pat Dye wrote in his autobiography, In the Arena—interestingly written, in part, as a response to allegations of racism from Black recruit Eric Ramsey—this about Black athletes:

Another thing I found, I already knew: we live in an age, and it will probably last forever, where the black kids in this region make the difference in football. If there are 10 college prospects in Alabama, seven are gonna be black.

Looking at the current rosters of Auburn and Alabama, Dye’s comment seems to hold true. Both schools boast overwhelmingly White student populations, but both have a disproportionate amount of Black athletes (to the general Black male populations of the school). This holds true for most major schools.

Remember that Rivals and Scout start to evaluate talent as early as the freshmen and sophomore year of high school player, providing star ratings to young men still developing and maturing. Or are they?

In Jon Entine now-classic study Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, he spends the majority of tome talking about why Blacks are better athletes than whites. In passing he notes, curiously:

It’s hardly an irrational leap to suspect that precocious infants will end up as athletically skilled adults, however. Blacks and white do develop different body types at an early age. Numerous studies have found that by age five or six black children consistently excel in the dash, the long jump, and the high jump, all of which require a short burst. By the time boys are teenagers, blacks demonstrate a significantly faster patellar tendon reflex time—the knee jerk response—and an edge in reaction time over whites.

Put simply, Black athletes mature faster than White athletes. In Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, J. Phillippe Rushton includes a chapter on Speed of Maturation, which points out that study after study concludes Black people go through puberty well before white people, reaching full sexual maturity at astonishingly young ages. Could this be the reason former Florida State football coach made this remark regarding the paucity of White high-school talent?:

An athlete is an athlete, but, dang it, there just seem to be more black athletes than white," says Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden. "We've got a [white] phenomenon on our team, a quarterback named Danny Kendra, whose vertical jump is 39½ inches—more than anybody else we've got. He bench-presses 425 pounds, and his leg press broke the school record. He runs a 4.5 40. But there ain't many like him. And my thinking is that there's a whole lot more blacks who can do that than white guys.

Why does this matter? Why mention race at all in a discussion of college football recruiting?

Mike Freeman’s Bowden: How Bobby Bowden Forged a Football Dynasty provides the answer. His chapter Law and Order establishes that the majority of the at-risk students that college-football programs recruit are these Black athletes who have matured physically faster than white athletes, though their mental acumen will forever see a gap remain (as noted by graduation rate racial disparities, despite the same amount of tutoring). Bowden built his reputation, like that of Penn State’s Joe Paterno, on the backs of academically challenged, athletically gifted Black athletes.

This presents a problem: though athletically gifted (thanks to a genetic clock that allows them to mature faster), Black athletes perform inadequately in the classroom. Many boast embarrassingly poor high-school GPAs and standardized-test scores and require special admission to be enrolled into the schools like Florida or Florida State. Though the white athletes being evaluated at Scout and Rivals haven’t reached physical maturity, they perform far better on the academic side of the ball. This is one of the primary reasons the U.S. Military Academies (Army, Navy, and Air Force) have remained so White, when most other big-time college football programs field majority Black teams: put simply, potential Black recruits don’t have the intelligence to get accepted or complete the work once enrolled at these schools.

So the question must be asked: Is there a bias at the big-time college football programs toward Black athletes, since the recruiting services have started evaluating players at ages when the early physical maturation of Blacks give them a pronounced advantage over White players? Well, yes there is.

Tom Lemming, one of the pioneers of evaluating high school football talent, told Michael Lewis in his book The Blind Side that White high-school athletes were discriminated against by college scouts and coaches because they couldn't possibly be as a fast as black athletes. He said the same thing to The Chicago Sun Times, By Taylor Bell; he said the same thing to the South Bend Tribune.

Consider that two of the top receivers in the National Football League (NFL), the Green Bay Packers Jordy Nelson and the New England Patriot’s Wes Welker, went virtually un- recruited out of high school. Welker—who was Oklahoma’s High School Player of the Year his senior season—got a scholarship to Texas Tech. Nelson had to walk-on at Kansas State. Both are White athletes.

Consider that arguably the best linebacker in the NFL, the Packer’s Clay Matthews, was a walk-on at the University of Southern California and didn’t even see the field until his senior year. In the October 2011 issue of Muscle and Fitness magazine, Matthews let slip a crucial point:

There’s this kid you know. A high school senior. Plays football hard, but he’s nothing special on the field. He’s around six feet in cleats, maybe tops out at 200 pounds after dinner, and he’s neither fast enough to be anyone’s idea of a bit-time, blue-chip prospect.

“I knew I wanted to play at USC from when I was a kid,” he [Matthews said, though he’d have to walk-on for this dream to occur] said.
“I told him to go for it,” says Charlie Wegher, who’s coached football at Agoura High for the past 18 years, “but honestly, I didn’t think he’d get a chance to play much because USC doesn’t typically have those kinds of kids.”

So Matthews wasn’t a Rivals or Scout “Five Star” athlete, a “can’t miss” prospect with an NFL-ready future stamped on him before he even played a down of college football, like the many high-school athletes who will be signing with big-time colleges and universities around the nation today. 

He was one of “those kinds of kids.” Meaning one of those often overlooked White kids from the suburbs who hasn’t physically matured yet, at least compared to the seemingly extra-ordinary Black athletes that Rivals and Scout have evaluated as the top talent of the 2012 high school crop.

Something tells me there is a market for undervalued White players that aren’t highly sought after commodities by the big-time schools only on the prowl for academically marginal Black athletes to use and abuse for football glory.

Knowing that the New England Patriots Bill Belichick has built a franchise based around undervalued White talent, the smaller college football programs, without massive budgets to spend on hyped high-school athletes, and which hope to keep up with the Michigans, Oregons, LSUs should start considering cultivating White athletic talent that has been overlooked by recruiting services in favor of the low-hanging fruit we should just call “Darwin’s Athlete’s.”

For one thing, signing undervalued White high school talent will require less of an investment in academics and an even less amount of money to pay for their unnecessary legal teams (consider the high rate of arrests for Black players at UGA, Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Penn State).

Another thing, if you’re a fan or alumni of one of these schools, you can spend less time on one of the recruiting services like Rivals or Scout, which has gone “all in” on the belief in Black athletic supremacy—truly, one of the most common “social constructs” of our time.

Until a service comes along to evaluate undervalued White players, you have to wonder how many talented suburban players or fly-over country athletes (like Welker and Nelson were) aren’t being courted by big-time schools tomorrow. How many potential NFL linebackers like Matthews, who haven’t physically matured yet, are out there and devoid of a scholarship offer? All because they are one of “those kinds of kids?” Not one of Darwin’s Athletes. Just some white kid.

As Tom Lemming said, “hundreds.”

This article doesn't touch on Brigham Young, a school that has traditionally recruited white Mormon athletes and molded them into winners. The same could be said for the recent emergence of Boise State, a school that this year started an all-white receiving corps that were lightly-recruited by other schools.

If Rick Reilly can complain about Brigham Young being able to play white athletes (the majority of whom are two or three star players) who have completed their Mormon Mission (two years) and then play football when nature has allowed their bodies to mature, then we at SBPDL can bring up the fact that these Black athletes have nature on their side, momentarily, which creates a competitive advantage over potential white high school recruits.

Looking at Scout.com and its listing of Top 25 schools recruiting classes, you begin to understand why so many "conservative" white people tolerate the destruction of their major cities and will continually move their families from one Whitopia to the next "drifter colony"-- because those major cities serve as incubators for the Black athletes who will provide them some grotesque form of sexual relief come National Signing Day.

On Saturday, Vdare.com will publish an article on the New England Patriots. It's going to be fun. Bill Belichick, the coach of the Patriots, once addressed Urban Meyer's Florida Gator team (story from Urban's Way: Urban Meyer, the Florida Gators, and his Plan to Win).

Meyer believed that only recruiting four and five-star recruits could provide the tools necessary to win. In his statement to the Gators team (spring 2007), that was largely addressed to the new - almost exclusively Black - recruits, Belichick said, "Some of you woke up on third base and don't even know how you there because you did not hit the triple."

That quote tells me more about Belichick then I'll ever need to know. He is aware that these Black athletes were treated as Gods in high school, and played against competition that they had largely matured ahead of, which enabled them to get the five-star ranking from Rivals and Scout.

Take a look at Belichick's team. How many of the key players on the Patriots offense were highly recruited athletes?

Now, how many of those four and five-star Black athletes ended up causing Florida severe off-field problems?:

Numbers mostly flatter Florida football coach Urban Meyer, who has produced two Southeastern Conference championships, three Bowl Championship Series appearances and a couple of national titles in his five-plus years in Gainesville.

Saturday against Kentucky, he figures to get his 100th career victory — in his 118th game, reaching the milestone faster than all but five Hall of Fame coaches, including Bud Wilkinson and Knute Rockne.

But another statistic is more bedeviling: at least 31 off-the-field arrests involving 25 of Meyer's players dating to the summer of 2005, according to a running count by the Orlando Sentinel. Many have been typical college-years brushes with the law, from alcohol possession to disorderly conduct. But a dozen involved initial charges of felonies or violent misdemeanors, and the run of incidents has shared front-page space with Florida's on-the-field accomplishments and invited pointed questions about the program's virtue.

After Florida receiver Chris Rainey was booked last week on a felony charge of aggravated stalking — for allegedly sending an ex-girlfriend a threatening text message — Orlando columnist Mike Bianchi wrote, "Sadly, this outlaw reputation is now the national image of the Florida Gators."

He added, "Tim Tebow is no longer around to clean up the mess."

 No, Tebow is not around to clean up the mess. But its not a mess Floridian's really care about, as long as the Gators win.