More on NFL discrimination

It's starting to look like there may well be a modest level of irrational anti-white discrimination in the NFL after all, although it's hardly as bad as J.B. Cash imagines. A social scientist reader has gone over some more data and finds consistently positive (but low) correlations between percentage white players on the roster and winning percentage. He finds that the correlation between 2005 percent white and 2005 wins so far is positive r = 0.27. And in 2003 for the full season, the correlation was r = 0.33. (He had previously found a correlation of 0.11 between 2005 % white and 2004 wins.)

The correlation between % of starters who were white and % wins appears lower (r = 0.13 in 2003 and r = 0.17 in 2002). This might validate Cash's theory that having whites sitting on the bench is better for team spirit because blacks who aren't playing are more likely to raise a stink about their not starting, poisoning the atmosphere on the team.

After all, our society for the last 40 years has lavishly encouraged blacks to claim to be victims of injustice, so it would hardly be surprising that among pampered athletes, all of whom were stars in high school, whites might tend to be more likely to keep quiet for the good of the team when they feel they are being mistreated than are blacks.

The increasingly bad performances of the U.S. Olympic basketball team from its awesome Dream Team peak in 1992, when four of the seven nonstarters were white, to the all black 2004 team's multiple losses also suggests the value of having white benchwarmers -- especially as black professional athletes were now mostly raised on gangsta rap, with its glorification of selfishness. (During the NBA's peak years in the mid-1990s, the stars were mostly teenagers before gangsta rap emerged around 1988. Michael Jordan, for example, whose musical tastes developed during the funk years of the 1970s, liked to listen to rap to get psyched up for a game, but didn't much like listening to it for enjoyment.

It's not surprising that the best NBA team in recent years, the San Antonio Spurs, has been among the least African-American by culture. Their three best players in 2005 were raised outside African-American culture: Tim Duncan in the Virgin Islands, Tony Parker in France, and Manu Ginobili in Argentina. And their great African-American star of years past, David Robinson, was hardly a representative of the 'hood -- he is an Annapolis grad who served as a Naval officer for two years before beginning his NBA career. The admirable characters of Robinson and Duncan allowed them to play together for years without tearing the team apart in the usual competition who-da-man? squabbling between aging and upcoming superstarts. (The strong performance of the Detroit Pistons over the last two years, though, shows African-Americans can still get the job done if they get their act together and play like a team.)

So, what are the chances that the sports media will pick up and run with this story about discrimination against whites in the NFL? I'd estimate, somewhere in the range from zero to negative infinity.

Two years ago I showed in a UPI article "Baseball's Hidden Ethnic Bias" that baseball teams had long been irrationally discriminating against American players, black and white, in favor of more free-swinging Latins who weren't actually as good as their gaudy batting averages suggested. That story got picked up by some baseball sabremetrician stathead blogs, but the rest of the professional media showed no interest whatsoever.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer