U. of Texas football coach Mack Brown has resigned. Manny M. Escam writes:
I’m a University of Texas alum and bleed orange and have always supported Mack Brown as HC. However, even I know he did the right thing in passing the torch to someone else. One thing that will always stick in my mind is this: What do the last 4 Heisman Trophy winners (Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel, Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton) have in common? They all wanted to play for TEXAS, but Mack & Company were not interested. Either they were not recruited at all, and if they were, they were deemed low-profile recruits for positions other than QB at TEXAS.
The other thing they have in common, excluding Griffin (who appears to be a decent guy even though everybody now thinks he's a terrible person because his leg still hasn't healed from the horrific injury he suffered in a Redskins playoff game last year), is that Winston, Manziel, and Newton have all had serious brushes with the law.
Football coaches get paid millions of dollars per year to find and slide large, scary men onto campus alongside the thousands of coeds.
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50 comments:
There is a professional Belgian footballer - Ilombe Mboyo - who is a convicted GANG-rapist, and he is playing at a high level and may well move to bigger and better clubs in the future. An English premiership club was known to be intending to sign him before the fans found out and made their feelings known.
P.S. I say "Belgian." There is a bit more to it than that, unsurprisingly.
RG3 is a diva who can't play the position and was more worried about endorsements than learning the offense. He will set Redskins back 7 years as franchise.
Jameis and cam are about as phony as they come. Jameis will meltdown in bcs championship and lose to Heavy underdog Auburn- bank on that.
Thank God Manziel is around to take brunt of QB criticism from Espn in regards to off-field behavior
I wonder if coaches ever feel guilty for bringing kids on campus who wreak so much havoc? Moments of quiet reflection I say......nah
Dan in DC
How can you put Manziel's transgressions-- fake id and a dropped disorderly conduct charge-- into the same category as rape and laptop theft?
I know it doesn't fit your pet narrative of 'smart, black, military parents' produce well-adjusted son, but RGIII is most likely a serial philanderer and was outed for trying to hookup w/ a Hooters waitress the day of his wedding.
What was Manziel's "serious brush" with the law?
actually, colt McCoy's younger brother case had some rape accusations flying around. I don't think anything became of them. and that was within the last two years.
Those Heisman voters really took a chance with Winston. Surprised they didn't wait til next year.
Brutal but fair
Just caught your joke in the Glory road review-
"Indeed, before WWII at UCLA, Robinson himself had starred in basketball, football, track, baseball, golf, and swimming."
Classic Sailer- lol I'm donating 42 bucks just for that
Dan in DC
Sooner or later some paent will sue. And win.
Jameis is a rapist?
I thought the DA said there wasn't enough evidence.
Guess he will always be guilty anyway.
"Football coaches get paid millions of dollars per year to find and slide large, scary men onto campus alongside the thousands of coeds."
Just heard another bad story about AA D1 football players sexually harassing a freshman woman. So why did the poor white girl get put in a football dormitory? Now if my nephew even thinks a stray thought on campus he would be drawn and quartered.
D1 Football is NFL Jr. with tax breaks and exemptions from discrimination laws. Oh wait, the NFL is exempt from discrimination laws except for head coaches.
Three points on this thread:
1) Though I mentioned Brown and Winston on the Naval Academy thread, I was not completely serious in suggesting that Brown's firing had much to do with his failure to recruit Winston. Actually, Mack Brown has done a fantastic job recruiting talent to Texas, and his firing seems to be because he consistently underachieved with that talent.
2) Johnny Manziel really must have been mistreated by the media, since it only voted him 5th for the Heisman. While one could argue Jameis Winston was better this year, Johnny Football was clearly one of the two best players in the nation, and probably a bit better than even Winston, too. See his astonishing performances against Alabama and Auburn if you need to be convinced.
3) Someone on this thread mentioned a black Belgian soccer player, which reminds me that, if I remember correctly, Steve wrote an article which argued whites were the best at soccer. However, the composition of Belgium's (and France's, and the Netherlands', and even England's) national team would indicate otherwise. On the other hand, in Steve's defense, most of the world's best soccer players are white. In any case, even if I disagree with Sailer, I have to respect his willingness to touch upon subjects like this.
wiseguy
Okay, you want to know ANOTHER fantastic Texas high school quarterback Mack Brown COULD have recruited and didn't? Andrew Luck! Luck wouldn't have had any criminal baggage. He's a very smart guy whose dad Oliver Luck was a Rhodes Scholar semi-finalist and earned a law degree at... the University of Texas!
Mack Brown bet the farm on Garrett Gilbert, who turned out to be a bust. And that mistake has proven extremely difficult to overcome.
That said... while I understand why so many Texas fans, alumni and boosters wanted Mack Brown out, I fear that the media have spent so much time hyping the bogus "Nick Saban Is Coming!" line that whoever DOES eventually get hired is BOUND to underwhelm, disappoint or even ANGER the fans.
There are really just a handful of potential hires that would really have EXCITED Texas fans- Saban, Urban Meyer, Pete Carroll and (maybe) Jim Harbaugh are on that short list. But the sad truth is, NONE of those guys is going to leave the great job he has now to coach in Austin. The job is going to some successful head coach from a lesser school.
But after all the silly Saban talk, fans are likely to be FURIOUS when the job goes to, say, UCLA's Jim Mora Jr., Vanderbilt's James Franklin or Clemson's Dabo Swinney (all of whom would probably do a good job!).
Getting rid of Mack Brown is all well and good, but the Texas administration should have been smart enough and prudent enough to have a solid replacement in hand before dumping him.
"Football coaches get paid millions of dollars per year to find and slide large, scary men onto campus alongside the thousands of coeds."
As several posts above this one demonstrate, people are so caught-up in their own jock-sniffery they're unable to smell the coffee - even as it boils over.
cipher
If mainstream America is a culture that worships athletic excellence and physical dominance, and if the hypergamic female thesis is true, then one would expect that cardinal athletes would father dozens of children during their lifetime.
Certainly the cultural and financial recognition distributed to these men is at least one or two orders of magnitude greater than that distributed to the average man. Coupled with - if I understand it correctly - the feminine imperative to mate with higher value males, and the male imperative to mate with whatever; it would follow that these men could, and probably would father childen in corresponding orders of magnitude. Yet we don't hear of this. Where does my logic fail?
Neil Templeton
Steve, I'm sick of your dog whistlin. We all know when you say rapist it's code for black. Shame on you!
False accusations of rape is a real problem because there are people out there with psychological issues.
They would never admit it, but I wonder how much off a selling points it is for the remaining all-female universities that there is a guarantee of no football players on campus.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/14/conformity-killing-creativity-at-work
'Creativity' is the new 'equality' or 'diversity'. Latest buzzword and panacea.
It's like 'creativity' is always a good thing and everyone is creative.
Not true.
As Anthony Bourdain said in
KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, most restaurants don't need creative cooks but reliable well-trained ones who can make the same dish over and over. When people order something, they know what they want. If you order pizza with pepperoni(not recommended as it would aid and abet the hogocaust), you want the same pizza with pepperoni; you don't want a 'creative' pizza with seaweed and curry.
In music, few people have the knack for hitting the ear-ogenous tones. Most people are not musically creative, even with much training. Indeed, when it comes to most classical players and pop performers, we prefer 'job well done' than 'job creatively done'.
Who wants to go to a Beethoven concert and have the player play it like reggae-polka?
A job place would be a mess if everyone tried to be 'creative', especially since most are not.
So, the value of creativity applies to just a few. Even most intelligent people are not creative--and some unintelligent people can be creative with sounds and images.
For most people, doing it right and being proper are what counts. Creativity bends or even breaks established rules, but only a very small number of such efforts yield anything special or worthy. We can all create new kind of music by making all sorts of demented or distorted sounds, but most of them would have no creative value. Listen to Yoko Ono.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJxV0pbTPjg
Even in science, only a handful of scientists have the ability to break through established theories. Most science people just have to good at properly carrying out experiments and teaching the established truths to students.
It's like in football, only the quarterback and running back can be 'creative' to some measure. Other just have to grinding away with the same thing or do as ordered. Most roles in life are established. Only a few are exploratory. On the film set, director, writer, and art director and few others are creative. But the vast number of the crew just need to do their jobs very well.
The last thing you need is a 'creative' grip, boom boy, or gaffer.
So, 'deadly conformity' isn't the problem in most cases. It's the deadly cult of 'creativity', which has become almost a status marker.
This is why Stephen Fry is wrong about 'grammar nazis'.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115817/stephen-fry-responds-grammar-pedants
He sees writing as a conflict between creative writing(good) and proper writing(bad and neo-victorian).
But most people can never write creatively. They cannot be great writers and can only hope to be good writers, and that means knoqing and following the rules. It's like most of us can't drive the car like Hollywood stuntsman and so must pay attention to watching the speed, road signs, traffic lights, etc.
I can understand how properianness and correctness can seem dull or stifling to genuinely creative people who can inventively bend and break the rules and create something interesting or even better.
But if most people are encouraged to be 'creative', they will break the rules only to leave them broken. Nothing will be improved.
Creativity is an individual thing. So, all this cre-active agenda to unleash 'creavity' in everyone is a fool's game. It's as if, since egalitarians failed in their effort to equalize intelligence, they now wanna pretend that everyone is equally 'creative'. Since 'creativity' is harder to measure 'objectively', the notion that everyone is equally creative is harder to disprove scientifically. Of course, we can say few people are as good as Beethoven or the Beatles, but then, post-modernism tells us that ANYTHING can be art--even Koons, Warhol, Akerman, and Hirst.
Most art schools suck cuz they emphasize 'creativity' over craft. If a student is genuinely creative, learning the basic craft will help him. If the student is not creative, learning the craft will at least make him good with his hands as, say, a draftsman.
But the emphasis on 'creativity' allows the uncreative to dabble in stupid ugly dime-a-dozen crap that they mistake for 'original'; they not only fail at being 'creative' but pick up no useful skills either.
If you can't compose good songs(creativity) or be creative with instruments, then the thing is to just learn how to play the instrument properly. Not everyone can be a Hendrix, but most people can train to be good guitar players.
Most original things have no value. I can come up with an original sandwich. How about a sandwich with ice cream, green beans, and garlic? Who wants it? Most original stuff is
bore-iginal or sorryginal.
So, false accusations of rape are a-ok with you? You leaving the Dark Enlightenment? Fairly sure the MRAs won't have you anymore, Steve-o.
Don't let the door hit you.
http://buchanan.org/blog/putin-one-us-6071?utm
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/12/singapore-deports-foreign-workers-after-riots-2013121712302378394.html
Why does Rice play Texas?
RG3 maybe a diva but he is no Geno Smith.
Whether this is good or bad we will have to wait and see.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-cities-are-killing-creativity-2013121065856922461.html
There is a kind of 'creative paradox' at work here, and for that reason, there's something disingenuous about all the gripes heard from the likes of Patti Smith and David Byrne.
Contrary to what they're saying, there are lots of places in NY where it's still affordable for people who are not rich. After all, NY still have a vast underclass. There are still ghettos and depressed communities in NY. There are still places with public housing for those who live on welfare or work at menial jobs.
And in all other rich cities, there are still plenty of underclass areas. Take Chicago for instance. You can find cheap housing in the South Side and West Side where the blacks live. Take Atlanta, which has lots of poor areas.
So, it's not like all of NY is expensive. Rather, the best parts of NY have grown more expensive and gentrified, and THIS is what the real gripe is all about. Even though Patti Smith, David Byrne, and their cohorts bemoan the power of money, privilege, and etc. they want ready access to rich people and where such people live. Prior to the clean-up of NY, there was more intersection of the best and worst parts of big cities. So, a luxurious place might be few blocks away from the poor dangerous run-down poor side of town. Today, there are still rich parts and poor parts of NY but they are more segregated. In the past, the creative types might find lodging in some poor part of the city with close proximity to the rich part of the city, but today, NY is more divided along rich parts and poor parts. Thus, you can still live in NY if you're poor but you have less easy access to the good parts of the city and vice versa.
If NY is ONLY for the rich, why are there still so many poor blacks and Puerto Ricans living there? And why can't creative people with limited funds just stop griping and find lodging among the blacks and Puerto Ricans--and immigrant groups starting on the bottom? It's because such people don't give a crap about 'creative artists' like Byrne and Smith. In other words, despite all the griping about the rich and privileged, the likes of Byrne and Smith always catered to the privileged classes. Real working class kids didn't buy FRESH HORSES or Talking Heads albums.. No, college educated types went for that stuff. And it was the privileged and educated who headed off to Greenwich Village to take in folk concerts and the like.
Most blacks, Puerto Ricans, and immigrant communities didn't pay any heed to Andy Warhol. It was the rich classes who made him what he is.
Indeed, if creative people wanna find cheap housing, why not all go to Detroit? You can buy a mansion for a few thousands. They can find a cheap place to live and create all the art and music they want. The problem is Detroit blacks and working class whites don't give a crap about all that 'radical-creative' crap. Artists can make art but without the kind of audience who will support them or write up reviews about them in 'alternative media'.
So, the real gripe isn't about NY being too expensive to live. There are still plenty of places in NY where the poor live. The problem is that it's more difficult for creative types to live in close proximity to the rich classes. As the good parts of the cities have been gentrified and/or turned into segre-gated-communities along economic lines, it's more difficult to get a toe into the door of the rich and privileged.
But here's the paradox. Even as the creative types bitch about the rich, what they really want is to be able to live close to the rich and highly educate since only those types really give a hoot about Byrne or Smith--or even know who they are.
"Steve wrote an article which argued whites were the best at soccer. However, the composition of Belgium's (and France's, and the Netherlands', and even England's) national team would indicate otherwise."
The 2010 World Cup final featured Spain and Netherlands. The Netherlands had one player who was half Surinamese (De Jong) and another who was half Curacao (van der Wiel). None of the Spanish players were black.
The 2012 Euro final featured Spain and Italy. Again, Spain had no black players. Italy had one black striker, an adopted Ghanaian, Mario Balotelli.
Black players tend to be useful at striker where strength, agility and fast-twitch muscles lend an advantage for a few seconds at a time that can lead to a goal. The other positions on the field require sustained effort and concentration for 90 minutes. You'll also see black players playing winger or outside defender at times, where they can play in space and take advantage of their athleticism. Central midfielders and center backs are predominantly not black.
The only dark skinned team that's successful in world soccer is Brazil. If you can explain why they're the most successful team in history whereas African teams hardly ever make a splash at the World Cup, then you can sell your insight to one of the major clubs for millions of dollars.
Spain's insight of the last ten years has been that they can play with the soccer equivalent of 7 or 8 Steve Nash's, with a couple of physical defenders as a safety valve, and control the entire tempo of the game. There's no shot clock, and height doesn't matter that much, so let's make the other team defend against backdoor cuts for 5 or 10 minutes at a time. Eventually, they'll get tired.
What do the last 4 Heisman Trophy winners (Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel, Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton) have in common? They all wanted to play for TEXAS, but Mack & Company were not interested.
Another poster has mentioned Andrew Luck. Unfortunately for Longhorn fans, the tendency of UT football coaches to pass on good quarterback prospects predates Mack Brown. Local boy Drew Brees led Austin Westlake to the state championship. UT didn't think Drew Brees was good enough to play quarterback for the Longhorns- unlike Drew's uncle Marty Akins, who was an All American quarterback for UT.
In 1997, Drew Brees headed off to Purdue instead of UT, where he showed how wrong UT's appraisal was.
In 1998, Mack Brown began coaching UT football.
it would follow that these men could, and probably would father childen in corresponding orders of magnitude. Yet we don't hear of this. Where does my logic fail?
You're assuming no birth control on the part of the man or woman, and these relationships are lasting more than a day or two.
"Thank God Manziel is around to take brunt of QB criticism from Espn in regards to off-field behavior"
I pointed this out to a bunch of college football heads last weekend and a collective light bulb turned on immediately. Manziel will be held to a different standard and needs to comport himself accordingly. Cam Newton is the most irritating football player I've ever witnessed.
Neil Templeton -- Wilt Chamberlain famously said he had sex with 10,000 women.
Here is Antonio Cromartie on Hard Knocks trying to remember the names of his eleven kids by 8 different women. Moses Malone famously has a couple of illegitimate kids, one fathered with a 14 year old when he was 21 IIRC. The son in question now plays in the NFL IIRC as well.
Asked and answered!
Let me add, a lot of the Black QB mania is the riff that "Moneyball" covered. Just as Billy Beane got frustrated by Baseball scouts and management falling in love with physiques and ignoring hitting skill, so too is the football world in love with the Black athletic ability.
It is pretty clear that Blacks are more athletic, by a LOT, than Whites ... on average. As Steve has noted on many times, no non-West African descent man has even reached the FINALS in the Men's 100 Meter Sprint in the Olympics since the 1980 Boycott Olympics in Moscow. Blacks make up around 85% of the NBA, and around 70% of the NFL. All the star RB and WR are Whites (though there has been a small resurgence of "possession" small White guys at WR who can catch the first down ball and hold on while being hit ... HARD.)
Black guys are superior physically to White guys on average, a LOT. And in the NFL, even more than the average person, Black or White, on the street.
BUT ... QB is not an athletic position but one of skill. It takes innate ability to "read" a Defense and quickly decide where the ball goes, and great skill to make the ball go somewhere where ONLY the receiver can get it, and not the defense. And throw that ball so the receiver can catch it fairly easily. All in three seconds. Being a faster runner, stronger player, quicker reaction time player is not important. Nor is really low body fat, great physique, and "swagga." All the province of world-class Running Backs and Wide Receivers and Corners.
Fans, alumni, sportswriters, etc. want the "great Black hope" because they confuse positions that require athletic dominance with those of great skill. Its like lining up Adrian Peterson at kicker because he's a great RB.
A post about blacks in sports will follow with a post by Whiskey fetishizing blacks like mushrooms after rain.
"It is pretty clear that Blacks are more athletic, by a LOT, than Whites ... on average."
No shit. In 'gay sex', white boy is usually the bitch. The future of white boy in interracial America, psychologically if not sexually.
"Wilt Chamberlain famously said he had sex with 10,000 women."
Women are, by nature, whores. Japanese women threw themselves at victorious GIs. French women threw themselves at Germans. Women are naturally wired to get all hot about winner men. In America, black men are whupping white boy ass, so more white women throw themselves at black men.
Men are, by nature, masters or slaves. While most males(of all species) may want to be masters, few win while most lose. So, the losers wanna be slaves on the side of the winners.
Look at sports. Few players on the field as dominant alpha males and a lot of wussy slavish males in the stands cheering like girls. They, as slaves, worship the champions and 'heroes'.
Since Negroes are tougher, white women are becoming whores to them, and white males are becoming slaves of them. During NFL season, white boys cheer like slaves at the black masters and white girls throw themselves at blacks.
That is the future of the West.
And it's just part of natural psychology cuz women are, by nature, whores and cuz men are, if they can't be masters, slaves and toadies.
Indeed, what really pissed off the blacks about slavery was that they thought they should be the masters. They could see that they were bigger, stronger, and more muscular than the white boy. It seemed like a biological injustice for the bigger/stronger negroes to serve the whites. White slaves feel the same way in the novel WHITE LOTUS where the bigger whites have been enslaved by smaller wussier Chinese.
If whites were stronger than blacks, there would be far less black rage about history. Blacks would still feel angry about slavery BUT would still feel that it was somewhat natural in that the weaker blacks served the stronger alpha whites as rightful masters. Blacks respect raw badass power.
This is why there's less historical rage among natives of Latin Americas. Smaller Indian natives looked up to white conquistadors as master-giants.
Why are Jews are especially pissed? They feel that they, as the smarter people, should never have had to live under the power of dumber whites.
Lincoln understood this, which is why he wanted to free the slaves but give them a separate nation. He knew whites would eventually be wussified under them.
manziel had no serious legal issues. he is attacked by the cultural marxist sports media for one obvious reason. in fact, for a few weeks there, he was on the verge of getting the tebow treatment. and still may, depending on how much ESPN, SI, and the various other sports media outlets want to attack him leading up the the NFL draft, to bring down his draft status.
he does appear to be a douche however, which is extremely dangerous for any european athlete. being a bro is a serious transgression in the new america, and it surprises me that so few european athletes seem to be aware of 'the rules' even by their mid 20s. if you're not african, don't ever be a douche. you're already disliked for being european, don't make it much worse on yourself. that's how you end up finishing 5th in heisman voting, despite having almost equal numbers to the winner despite facing much tougher opponents.
in mack brown's defense he recruited and played vince young, who was an awesome NCAA quarterback.
"It is pretty clear that Blacks are more athletic, by a LOT, than Whites ... on average."
this isn't clear at all. it is only africans in the US who are awesome athletes. the performance of other africans is sporadic at best. in pretty much every international sport, their national teams are routinely clobbered by even medium sized european nations.
Agreed, but one paragraph is more effective than 8
Being a faster runner, stronger player, quicker reaction time player is not important.
Being stronger is important to O-line. Don't whites outnumber blacks at O-line? They did last time I checked.
P.S., whites have faster reaction times than blacks.
It might help your case if you actually familiarized yourself with some of this stuff.
Just looked at France's 2002 World Cup roster. Of the 23 players, 10 would probably be classified as black, and 13 (including Berber Zinedine Zidane) would probably be classified as white. If whites were really better than blacks at soccer, I don't think there would be that few whites on France's national soccer team.
As far as explaining Brazil's success, it seems that Brazil is the best soccer nation simply because it is the most populous of historically soccer-mad countries.
wiseguy
"If whites were really better than blacks at soccer, I don't think there would be that few whites on France's national soccer team."
France is a special case because Frenchmen are less into sports than other European nations.
If whites were really better than blacks at soccer, I don't think there would be that few whites on France's national soccer team.
In France, soccer has always been largely an immigrants' game, even when those immigrants were from elsewhere in Europe.
8 of the 23 players on England's 2010 World Cup squad were black. Without doing research, I'd also venture to guess that the Netherlands' roster had a similar proportion of black players at the turn of the millennium.
Based on the historic quality of their national teams and domestic leagues, am I correct in assuming that England and the Netherlands are two of the more passionate soccer countries in Europe and that the natives in those countries are just as soccer-loving as the immigrants?
wiseguy
Have any of you guys ever dealt with black people outside of sports or fetish porn?
The OVERWHELMING majority of blacks make your average Wal-Mart white look like a dedicated crossfitter.
Speaking of which, how many black crossfitters do you see?
Yeah.
I vaguely knew from listening to sports talking heads of Manziel having "maturity issues" but the first thing to come to mind when Steve listed him in the Public Image Problem line-up was his clash with NCAA headmasters. Now, rapist thugs are one thing, but we're talking Serious Transgressions which can be Fatal To A National-Level Program here
Manziel got in a fight or something, and had a fake ID issue. Typical white college student stuff. he's not a bad kid, and he's a white guy with some swagger, which is welcome.
Cam seems...to be maturing as a player and as a person.
RG3 is an egomaniac who will be out of the league in a couple years.
Jameis Winston seems to be a pretty bad guy. That's just the impression I get.
OT: Only 24 games into the NBA regular season, retaliation in response to the physical play of rookie, Steve Adams, has led to three separate ejections.
Vince Carter
Jordan Hamilton
Nate Robinson
I'd say the reactions are probably due in equal part to Adams' style of play and 'latent' racial animosity.
Adams is a Kiwi, born of a Tongan mother and an Englishman father (who happened to sire 18 children w/ 5 women).
"This is why there's less historical rage among natives of Latin Americas. Smaller Indian natives looked up to white conquistadors as master-giants."
Excellent point. I might also add that the North American natives were on average much bigger than the Central and South American ones (some tribes, like the Cheyenne, averaged nearly 6-ft tall). This might explain why Anglos get so much more grief over their treatment of the natives than the Spanish do.
Anon 4:37, Bourdain may have written that 15 years ago, but if you've ever watched his show, he's come full circle from that attitude. Hey, he even admitted he was wrong about Emeril Lagasse. His original dislike of the creative chef was mostly because he wasn't.
Svigor, O-line is about thinking (and remembering the snap count), following your blocking assignment and changing it in real time according to the reaction of the defense, as opposed to D-line, which is just about hitting someone with a different color uniform.
@wiseguy
You're cherry picking stats badly. Citing one team at one point in time as having 40% black players does not constitute evidence.
Your point about Brazil's success being due to population size has some merit. The book Soccernomics developed a model in which population, wealth, and experience (number of games played by the national team in history; roughly a gauge of the nation's interest in soccer) explained much of the success. However, Brazil's success was an outlier above and beyond the success that was predicted by the model. Now, perhaps the missing variable is athletic genes due African admixture, but then we'd expect African nations to outperform the regression, and they did not.
The same book also explored black players in club football, and found that in the 70s and 80s blacks were underrepresented based on their contributions to their teams' success, but they’re closer to parity now. More thoughts on black players later.
Let's look at a sample of the best teams: the starting lineups of the four teams that made the semifinals of the 2012 Euro championship; Spain, Germany, Italy and Portugal. I'll throw in Holland's picture from the 2010 World Cup. These have been the 5 best European teams of the last 10 years.
Spain and Italy:
http://totallycoolpix.com/2012/06/euro-2012-spain-vs-italy/
Portugal:
http://footballsitrep.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Portugal.jpg
Germany:
http://totallycoolpix.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09062012_euro2012_germany_portugal/euro2012_002.jpg
Holland:
http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/match-centre/article518045.ece/ALTERNATES/gallery-large/Uruguay-Holland-World-Cup-2010-cropped
The ONLY player on the 5 teams who looks 100% afro is Balotelli. Holland and Portugal have a couple of players with significant black admixture, and Germany has one. Spain has zero.
Likewise, if we look at historical Ballon D'or winners, the award for best player in the world, only one player looks pure black: George Weah. Eusebio was half black/half white. Ruud Gullit was half-Surinamese, half-Dutch.
There are three Brazilian winners with dark skin: Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho. Given the award is 50 years old, this is a poor win percentage for players with black admixture.
The prominence of Brazilian players brings us full circle, though. As I said in an earlier comment, certain positions and certain situations in the game lend themselves to pure athleticism. There are times during the game where athleticism can be extremely valuable: chasing down a ball, leaping for a header, using strength to hold off another player. This is why blacks tend to play forward. An explosive play at forward can lead to a goal. An explosive play in the middle of the field can lead to…30 seconds more of possession for your team. The rest of the time, defenders and midfielders need to have discipline and tactical savvy rather than explosiveness. The closest analogy in the American major sports is point guard, where white players are overrepresented relative to the other positions.
My guess is that there’s an optimal mix of black and white genes that provides players with improved agility without losing mental acuity and endurance. Wingers and outside defenders seem to be the most common place for mixed race players. Maybe Brazilian players tend to have that optimal combination.
There have been other cultural explanations, such as the popularity of futsal in Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futsal
Heck, maybe even Samba dancing from a young age helps develop leg coordination.
My guess is that it’s a nebulous mixture of culture, genetics, and population size (large sample from which to draw), but exactly which factors make the difference is still a mystery. Which is why I say that you can make millions if you figure it out and can identify granular regions or individuals where you can apply it.
Since you seem to know a good deal about soccer, I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm just an American fan, so even though I've always liked soccer, I've only been able to follow it closely on tv the past decade and a half or so, and my knowledge of the game is pretty spotty before then. Therefore, I'll concede that you know more about soccer, and that my opinions are based on incomplete impressions of the game.
That said, of the soccer that I actually have seen, it has always appeared to have black players close to or slightly more than proportional to their populations. The best examples would be the countries of northwestern Europe, where there is presumably more immigration from Africa and the Carribean. Of those, I had in mind particularly France's teams from 1998 to now, the Netherlands' 1998 squad, and England's recent teams. I also assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Italy and Spain have had less black immigrants than the others countries, so that their black populations were still approximately proportionally represented by the rare Ballotelli or Senna. So maybe I'm wrong, but I at least wasn't intentionally cherry picking data.
Getting to the Ballon D'or, non-Europeans were ineligible for it before 1995, so it's no surprise that most of the winners were white. Of the greats of the past 50-60 years, though, the list is relatively balanced, considering where soccer has traditionally been played. The players on that list, whose ancestries I am only listing off the top of my head so could be wrong, are Di Stefano (Italian Argentine,) Puskas (Hungarian,) Pele (African Brazilian,) Eusebio (already mentioned,) Cruyff (Dutch,) Beckenbauer (German,) Platini (Italian Frenchman,) Maradona (Italian and indigenous Argentine,) Zidane (Berber Frenchman,) Ronaldo (already mentioned,) Cristiano Ronaldo (Portuguese,) and Messi (Italian Argentine.)
As to what makes a country good at soccer, I suppose it's almost entirely about culture, population, organized player development, and perhaps climate. Women's soccer might actually be a better gauge of what makes a country good at soccer, since it doesn't have a lot of the historical factors to muddy the waters. The best women's soccer countries, that I know of at least, are USA, Brazil, China, and Germany. What do they have in common? They have large populations, they play soccer, and they have the resources to develop talent. So I think those are probably the best explanations of men's soccer success aside from historical factors.
And as for the African countries, they're slowly getting better and better; Ghana was only a Luis Suarez handball away from making the semi-finals of the last World Cup. My guess is that it takes time for countries to become good at soccer, and that, someday, Africa, the United States, and Asia will get close to Europe's and South America's level.
wiseguy
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