Another white receiver who couldn't get a scholarship

In 11 games for the St. Louis Rams this year, Kevin Curtis has 50 receptions for 741 yards, putting him on pace for the 1,000 yards in a season milestone. Like many highly effective whites at stereotypically black positions, such as Mike Haas of Oregon State who is leading the NCAA in receiving yardage this year, he couldn't get a college scholarship. So, Curtis walked on at Utah State and ended up setting school records. (Curtis, by the way, scored a 156 IQ on the quick and dirty Wonderlic IQ test that the NFL mandates.) The Deseret News, being a Utah paper and thus less gagged by the diversity sensitivity that makes newspapers in in more diverse parts of the country so boring, even mentions that Curtis is white in this article.

Football is basically meritocratic, but it appears to have a tendency to overlook whites playing black positions. The same tendency toward a minor amount of discrimination against unstereotypical jobseekers happens all the time in competitive markets, but the free market is pretty good at developing niche firms that capitalize on these mistakes by snatching up people who are the victims of prejudice.

Thus, it would make sense for some college programs to develop the recruiting expertise to fill a niche specialization in recruiting overlooked white players. The problem though is that if the sportswriters, those most frantic enemies of free speech on race, found out that you were systematically looking for discriminated-against whites, you would be run out of the coaching business on a rail.

Indeed, at the Air Force Academy, where the high admissions requirements (the Air Force doesn't like the idea of football player cadets with 85 IQs trying to fly expensive planes) and the four years in USAF requirement, means the football team is extremely white by typical college standards (I counted only 12 blacks out of 77 pictures in the press guide), coach Fisher DeBerry has put together an impressive program that consistently wins by focusing on what white players do best. You can never put together a national championship team without a heavily black line-up, but if you play in a second string conference like Air Force does, DeBerry has shown that you can consistently qualify for bowl games.

DeBerry was allowed to get away with this for years as long nobody mentioned the racial aspect of the Air Force teams, but as soon as the 67-year-old coach mentioned recently that he needed more black players to compete with the fastest teams, then he was crucified in the press and publicly humiliated by the Academy.

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