A reader writes on why the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana is increasingly aligning its sports teams with the Atlantic Coast Conference in the southeast.
As an alumnus and over interested-follower of Notre Dame sports and football in particular, I think you more or less get it right.
I would highlight the fact Notre Dame is emulating the Duke basketball model on the football field. I tend to think the talent pool of African-Americans who can compete at the highest levels of college football and not completely embarrass themselves in an institution where they must pass a calculus class and if they are business majors intro accounting (which is the class the ND starting QB got caught cheating in and subsequently kicked out of school) is increasingly found in the prosperous suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Baltimore.
That makes a lot of sense. It raises a question that white people are generally oblivious to: metropolitan variations in black quality. I got in trouble during Hurricane Katrina for pointing out that the bad behavior of New Orleans blacks shouldn't be considered a random sample of how blacks nationally behave: we already had lots of evidence that New Orleans blacks, like Milwaukee blacks, were below the national average in law-abidingness and educational application.
What kind of horrible white person knows things like that?
In contrast, there's a fair amount of statistical and anecdotal evidence that intelligent blacks are congregating in the suburban Atlanta area, and perhaps parts of North Carolina, too. If I was a black college graduate and wanted my kids raised around black college graduates' kids, I would definitely consider moving to Atlanta or a few other similar metropolitan areas.
The urban school systems in the Midwest have quit producing scholarship athletes. In Minneapolis and St. Paul the city schools barely field football teams even though they must be loaded with potential athletes. Any African Americans who want to play big time sports either go the Catholic School (Cretin in St. Paul) or head out to the western suburbs of Minneapolis (Hopkins Wayzata).
It's an interesting thought experiment, is the dearth of athletes caused by the abandonment of the schools, youth programs etc, or has anyone who was a clue just moved south and left the midwest with only the dregs.
The other demographic trend that killed the Big Ten and Notre Dame's recruiting in the midwest is the white ethnics aren't what they used to be. The 1988 ND national championship team had a Kolwalkowski, a Stams, a Smagala, a Bolcar, a Grunhard, an Alm. In Minnesota, the big white kids all play hockey. Maybe on the east coast they're playing lacrosse. Maybe hockey.
Thanks and Go Irish
You can see this at the high school level. I saw this with the local rich kid's private high school in my neighborhood. My neighborhood is maybe 3 percent black, all middle class or above, almost all connected in some fashion to the entertainment industry, all thoroughly integrated in housing. (It's like Stanley Kramer's vision in 1962 of racial utopia.)
The first year, this local private school had one black football player, a very fast but very small freshman. My son's school beat the local school in a good, close game. By the third year, the local school had suddenly acquired about eight huge fast black players, and won 46-0. By the fourth year, all the giant black players had vanished, leaving only the little black receiver, now a senior, and the game was close again.
I never got the Inside Story on this strange evolution, but I assume that an ambitious coach had brought in a bunch of superstars from South-Central. But then, maybe, something very, very bad happened and all the superstars from South-Central were kicked out, leaving the one good but undersized black athlete who had gotten into the school back as part of the normal course of events, not as part of some demented coach's plan for world domination.
The ideal set-up for a private high school with football/basketball ambitions is to be located near a large pool of middle class blacks, such as Baldwin Hills south of Beverly Hills. Perhaps Serra HS in Gardena, south of Baldwin Hills, which had Robert Woods and Marqise Lee, the future USC star receivers as teammates, might be an example.
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19 comments:
"The urban school systems in the Midwest have quit producing scholarship athletes. In Minneapolis and St. Paul the city schools barely field football teams even though they must be loaded with potential athletes. Any African Americans who want to play big time sports either go the Catholic School (Cretin in St. Paul) or head out to the western suburbs of Minneapolis (Hopkins Wayzata)."
In addition to Catholic schools or other schools that turn themselves into sports factories, it's interesting to note that many supremely talented basketball players cut their teeth in the AAU leagues, while playing high school ball only sparingly (or not at all). These are loosely-organized private (non-profit, I guess) "travel" leagues that feature talented teenage kids and poor oversight. They allow 16-year old players to be seen by scouts and recruiters and still technically retain their eligibility.
Often, the kid's uncle (or neighbor, or friend's cousin) will coach a team and draw a solid paycheck and a ton of unreported fringe benefits. The athletic gear companies sponsor a lot of it. Needless to say, under-the-table deals abound. It's not uncommon to see a truly awesome basketball player enter his freshman year at a big school with only one or two years of high school ball under his belt - he's been honing his skills and making a name for himself on the AAU circuit. Often, his AAU coach (again, usually some relative or friend of his Mom) will then get a cushy job at the school in exchange for steering the kid there.
I could write about this for hours, but ... suffice to say, Steve, you could find a lot to interest you in the world of AAU sports. Google a kid named "Renardo Sidney."
Makes me appreciate the diversity of European soccer more. Sad to see an increase in de facto segregation in US sports.
How does that make sense? Am I to understand that in order to recruit smart black kids from, say, Maryland, ND must join the ACC? The kid would have to leave Maryland to attend ND, right?
I don't get it.
A prominent school like ND -- one with its own TV contract -- recruits nationally. A player good enough to be recruited by, and eventually play for, ND is probably thinking he has a chance to go to the NFL. And would therefore be 'willing to relocate' in order to maximize his exposure at a school like ND.
In the end I have no idea why ND decided to go with the ACC. But IMO the Big 10 would have been a better fit.
prosperous suburbs of Atlanta
Go read SBPDL to find out more about the "prosperous suburbs of Atlanta".
Atlanta seems to have an especially high quality black population. There really do seem to be quite a few prosperous middle class and upper income blacks in the region.
I don't know much about Charlotte, but it seems like a metro full of prosperous blacks as well.
DC has a lot of affluent blacks because of the federal government, especially in Prince George County.
La Griffe found that Atlanta's crime rate was lower than racial demographics would predict. Charlotte's crime rate was particularly low in comparison to what a race-crime demographic model would suggest.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hispanic.htm
Scroll to the bottom of the page.
"In Minnesota, the big white kids all play hockey"
I wonder if Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a hockey fan? :)
Atlanta has always had the reputation as a city "too busy" to hate. On the surface, it'd seem to offer a Red State model of black-white racial harmony built on private enterprise and southern hospitality. Charlotte and some of the other southern metros (Dallas, Fort Worth, Jacksonville) seem to be emulating that model.
Not surprisingly, Herman Cain is from Atlanta.
Are there any posters here from Atlanta or Charlotte or Dallas? Maybe one of them could elaborate more on how well things work down there, relative to the rest of the country.
"The ideal set up for a private high school with football/basketball ambitions is to be located near a large pool of middle class blacks..."
By the at logic the Caribbean neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens should be winning every NY state high school championship in every sport. I don't know if that's actually the case.
OT: You might want to check out Orlando Shaw - fathered 22 children from 14 women, child support amounts to $7k/month. Your tax dollars at work.
I can tell you that Atlanta Blacks, intelligent or not, have an extremely low standard of behavior. Wherever they congregate you can be certain to have violence, rudeness and unbelievable levels of noise and destruction. "Intelligent Blacks" is an extremely relative, and not very useful term.
sailer wrote:
" I got in trouble during Hurricane Katrina for pointing out that the bad behavior of New Orleans blacks shouldn't be considered a random sample of how blacks nationally behave: we already had lots of evidence that New Orleans blacks, like Milwaukee blacks, were below the national average in law-abidingness and educational application."
I agree that new orleans blacks are bad actors in general. I once worked in new orleans for 6 months as an instrument tech troubleshooting controls for large ships. Interesting city, but crime-ridden. The origin of the ornery blacks probably goes back hundreds of years. Most american (and colonial) black slaves were held in the atlantic seaboard area on corn, cotton and tobacco plantations, but with many in mississippi, alabama and georgia. But there were also slaves in the deep south, and in the new orleans area. The slaves in and around new orleans area primarily worked on rice farms. And the rice plantation slaves had it much worse than slaves further north and east, who worked cotton, corn and tobacco. The rice swamp slaves died at a fairly high rate. Thus, the plantation owners would sell their most troublesome slaves to the rice swamp plantations in order to maintain discipline. In fact, it was so common that as a threat to troublesome slaves, the owners would threaten to sell them down south to the rice swamps. Anyway, over two hundred years or so, the new orleans area became home the most ornery slaves in america (and their descendants. And now you understand something about new orleans.
Also, slave owners would breed their prettiest female slaves to create near-white slaves that could be sold as so-called 'fancy kates' the new orleans bordellos. These slaves could fetch over 2000 dollars. In fact this industry was lucrative that it led to as many as five percent of all slaves were indistinguishable from white. That was a major cause of the civil war. A fact now shoved down the memory hole: it don't fit the narrative.
Renardo Sidney
Wow, waived by the D-league before he even appeared in one game. Must be some kind of bad guy.
The ACC gave Notre Dame a special deal so that Notre Dame could still be independent in football (keeping their games with USC and Stanford) while being in a super conference for the other sports. The small schools in the ACC like Duke, Wake Forest, Ga Tech, Boston College, Syracuse, Pitt will get to play Notre Dame in football once every three years.
The Big 10 would not have made that deal with Notre Dame. The other deal would have been to go to the American conference for other sports.
The current deal is good for all sports at Notre Dame rather than either selling out for football like BYU or throwing the basketball team under the bus in UConn.
Conference associations have almost nothing to do with recruiting. Recruiting is a function of the coaches and for teams outside of football and men's basketball, it is a function of appealing to suburban white kids.
"It raises a question that white people are generally oblivious to: metropolitan variations in black quality."
Oh Oh, you are arguing for nurture over nature.
Are there any posters here from Atlanta or Charlotte or Dallas? Maybe one of them could elaborate more on how well things work down there, relative to the rest of the country.
Yes, blacks are better behaved here, primarily because there are no old-style projects in the metro region (virtually 100% demolished in advance of the '96 Olympics) and since Atlanta has extremely low density in general, so regression to the African violence mean is very low as compared to what you'd see with the fishbowled black population in places like Chicago or Philadelphia.
I used to think that there was a race between making blacks smarter and making whites nimbler. I don't think that now.
Essentially all of the behavioral deficits of black people could be cured by just figuring out how to boost their IQs. There would still be the effects of MAOA and melano-cortin but smarter blacks would presumably produce less crime and more gainful employment.
In the meantime white people, who invented basketball, could be on the route to once again be competitive on the ball court. Most of the basketball players in America are white. Only the really good ones are black. Surely as we gain control of our genome that imbalance can be overcome.
So I always conceived the quest for better black brains and better white legs as a race. But I was almost certainly wrong.
The prospect for some technology to boost IQ seems remote. Intelligence, which for purposes of this discussion, I will define as better cerebral equipment, seems to be polygenic. No single SNP controls much of the variance, but athletic performance is much simpler.
There are only three kinds of muscle fibers in mammals and only two in humans. Basketball favors lean body mass and I expect obesity to come under better human control shortly. Blacks have slightly different body proportions like smaller calf muscles and larger thigh muscles. That too seems pretty easy to modify.
In short I expect whites to again constitute the majority of pro basketball players. I expect that in the next few years there will be a series of minor medical breakthroughs that will close the black-white athletic gap.
Wide receivers, center fielders and point guards will have in effect white heads on black legs.
Albertosaurus
"The ideal set up for a private high school with football/basketball ambitions is to be located near a large pool of middle class blacks..."
By the at logic the Caribbean neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens should be winning every NY state high school championship in every sport. I don't know if that's actually the case.
Bigtime high school and/or college football programs require white coaching leadership, to put it bluntly.
Coaching a successful football program is a complex, long-term development project that requires stringent discipline in leadership, along with constant follow-up. It also requires a large, realiable and qualified coaching staff. Blacks do not excel at this type of leadership, thus you have approximately ZERO successful college coaches at bigtime NCAA programs right now.
The best high school football programs (such as Hoover, AL or Valdosta, GA or Southlake/Carrollton, TX for instance) have significant black populations nearby to fill the skill positions of WR, RB etc. but they are actually located in middle class (or better) majority white suburban areas. This generally means heavy parental involvement, which has major impact on the quality of off-season development programs and on the quality of equipment and training provided for the players.
You never see inner city schools win big in football despite their abundance of athletic talent, their level of parental involvement is NIL considering that dad is never around and baby momma doesn't see why the school doesn't just step in and pay for all of the coaching and training that Je'Marcus needs, so she's not going to dip into her already depleted funds to send him to a 1-week blocking or sprinting camp in June.
"In short I expect whites to again constitute the majority of pro basketball players. I expect that in the next few years there will be a series of minor medical breakthroughs that will close the black-white athletic gap."
And why, pray-tell wouldn't black people take advantage of the "better legs" breakthroughs, not to mention white people taking advantage of the "better brains" breakthroughs?
Will there be some type of congressional legislation passed that only allows black people to get smarter or white people to jump higher?
La Griffe found that Atlanta's crime rate was lower than racial demographics would predict. Charlotte's crime rate was particularly low in comparison to what a race-crime demographic model would suggest.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hispanic.htm
While I respect Griff's great work, his chart here doesn't take into account population density or the topography of the cities in the list.
Even "inner city" Atlanta is very low density and public transportation is not very efficient here. Even the worst Atlanta neighborhoods are primarily composed of dilapidated single family homes and duplexes located on cul-de-sacs.
Hence, it takes a lot more work here for thug kids to get together and go somewhere for a flash rob, as compared to a place like Chicago where all of the underclass kids live in the same building and can mass together, walk 1 block to the train, and then go cause mayhem on the Magnificent Mile with glee. Also, the gang structure is significantly more dilute here and you don't have the same "pressure cooker" situation that comes with so many underclass, fatherless teens living in close proximity.
As far as Charlotte goes, their leadership made the conscious choice decades ago to spread their low-income housing around equally through the metro area.
I tend to think the talent pool of African-Americans who can compete at the highest levels of college football and not completely embarrass themselves in an institution where they must pass a calculus class and if they are business majors intro accounting (which is the class the ND starting QB got caught cheating in and subsequently kicked out of school) is increasingly found in the prosperous suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Baltimore.
Yes, but Atlanta metro itself probably has as many blacks as most great lakes states.
For instance, Ohio has population of 11.5 million, with about 1.4 milion blacks (12% of population. Georgia has population of about 9.9 million, with about 3.1 million blacks (33% of population).
Some people outside the South don't understand just how many minorities we have here.
For instance, many northerners like to point out the lack of achievement from whites in Mississippi, which has less than 2 million whites (55% of a population of 3 million), as compared to a metropolitan/urban northeastern state like New Jersey (75% white with a population of nearly 9 million for 6.75 million whites).
It makes a huge difference.
And Southern minorities are spread everywhere, and not just holed up in a few highly dense urban ghettoes like Camden. Southern states are actually LESS segregated than Northern States, generally speaking.
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