Here’s an article for you

IceSpeed

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Here's another guy wondering why white running backs
aren't recruited. Its before Chance Kretcshmer was cut, making it
an interesting retrospective read.



I think Jon Entine is a son of a c**t for essentially saying that
whites should accept genetic inferiority and not try to compete with
blacks. If he was saying something else, he can come on to
this board and explain to me what he was saying.








September 12, 2004


Endangered Species

A racial dividing line exists at the running back position,

and there doesn't seem to be a clear reason why.



By Chris Harry and Charles Robinson

Sentinel Staff Writers


Chicago
Bears running back Brock Forsey knew they would come. He and his agent
had discussed it on numerous occasions -- Forsey being white and all.


By
the time he gouged the Arizona Cardinals for 134 yards in a game last
season, Forsey had an idea of what awaited. People would want to ask
him about being a white running back -- about what it was like to be
the NFL's version of the bearded lady.


Fifty-eight
years after the NFL's reintegration, Forsey had become the
once-in-an-eon celestial event, a quizzical and momentary rarity in a
league spinning on an axis of speed and agility. An anomaly in a sport
that in 2004 features no white running backs on active NFL rosters, two
white starters among the 117 Division I-A college programs and precious
few legitimate I-A prospects in the nation's high schools.


This year, last year, 10 years ago -- little has changed.


That is what had reporters accentuating the pigment of the situation as Forsey sat at his locker last season.


"There
were a lot of questions about, 'Is it surprising you came out and had a
great game and you're white?'" Forsey remembers now. "I didn't think
they'd actually come and throw it out there like that."


Reporters
wondered at the irony (and oddity) of Kordell Stewart, a black
quarterback, handing off to a white running back. On the other side of
Soldier Field, Arizona running back Emmitt Smith, the NFL's career
rushing leader, answered a question about Forsey by invoking the name
of a Bears icon. A white one.


"You mean Brian Piccolo?" Smith deadpanned.


Through
it all, Forsey's agent, Derrick Fox, was fielding offers on his cell
phone. It seemed everyone wanted an interview: ESPN, The Sporting News,
Chicago talk radio. Fox had seen it coming. "We had talked about it,"
he says.


Fox's client had given the
people something to talk about, if only for a moment. The next week,
Forsey carried three times for minus-4 yards in a loss at Green Bay. He
didn't get the ball the rest of the season. Order was restored.


"They
can't compete with us," says Eric Dickerson, the NFL's all-time
single-season rushing leader, who dominated with the Los Angeles Rams
during the 1980s. "The black athlete, especially at that position, is
faster, more elusive. That's just a position made for agility.


"That's kind of like our chosen position."


As brash as Dickerson sounds, statistics are on his side:


Since
Craig James ran for 1,227 yards and was voted to the Pro Bowl in 1985,
95 running backs have combined for 235 1,000-yard rushing performances
over those 18 years. None has been white.


While
minorities make up more than 70 percent of the NFL, running back is
even more exclusive. In 2003, 98 percent of the NFL's running backs
were minorities. The NFL kicked off the 2004 season Thursday night, but
today marks the traditional opening weekend, and none of the 32 teams
has a white tailback as a first- or second-teamer. Forsey? He was cut
last week by the Bears.


A white
running back hasn't led the NFL in rushing since Green Bay's Jim Taylor
ran for 1,474 yards in 1962 or been drafted in the first round since
Penn State's John Cappelletti was chosen 11th overall by the Rams in
1974.


There are 117 colleges playing
Division I-A football in 2004, and none was scheduled to start a white
tailback this weekend. Two schools -- Nevada, with Chance Kretschmer,
and UAB, with Dan Burks -- have starting white tailbacks who are
injured. Kretschmer, who rushed for 1,732 yards and 15 touchdowns as a
freshman in 2001, received no scholarship offers and attended Nevada as
a walk-on. Burks was a star high school player in Birmingham who was
thought to be too slow to play for any "major" school.


SuperPrep
recruiting service ranks high school prospects at each position, and
there has been just one white tailback among the nation's elite in the
past five seasons. That was Tre Smith, from Venice, just south of
Sarasota, in 2000. Smith signed with Auburn and is the Tigers'
third-stringer this season.


The best
running back in Central Florida this season is Seminole High's Kevin
Harris, who is white. He committed recently to Wake Forest because it
was one of two Division I-A schools that promised him a shot purely at
tailback. Mick Harris, Kevin's father and the coach at Seminole, said
that during the recruiting process, "One recruiter just plain told me,
'Coach, I could never bring back a white running back to my
university.' I just kind of looked at him, and he said, 'That's just
the way it is. They just wouldn't accept it.' So I think it is there. I
think there is a perception. But I don't think it's because there is a
prejudice against a white running back. I just think it is because of
the overwhelming number of black running backs in the NFL and college."



There would seem to be a pattern
here, the source of which is neither simple nor agreed upon. The NFL's
changing racial makeup since reintegration in 1946 is the flashpoint to
the trend. Years later, as the '70s became the '80s, running back
evolved as offenses became more specialized. Through it all, coaches at
the grass-roots level went looking for that special athlete to build a
running game around. It wasn't long before the Ed Podolaks, Mike
Adamles and Scott Dierkings of the world no longer fit the profile.


Just
why that was so is debatable. "Stacking" or "slotting" -- the funneling
of whites and blacks based on stereotyped characteristics -- impeded
the progress of black quarterbacks for years, but the walls have begun
to come down. Now, some sociologists lean toward economic background as
a predetermining factor in what position a young player seeks. A more
controversial premise is based in genetics, with blacks said to possess
decisive speed and skill advantages over their white counterparts.


All theories can be questioned. The trend can't be.


A new era







Two
seasons. That's how long it took Kenny Washington, who was black, to
crack the NFL's top five rushers after the league's reintegration.
Washington and defensive end Woody Strode were the first players to
reintegrate the league after it closed its ranks to minorities in 1933.
And in his second season after breaking the color barrier in 1946,
Washington finished fourth overall in rushing.


It
was only a hint of how blacks would factor into the position over the
next six decades. In the 1950s, black running backs would finish in the
league's top five in rushing 24 times (48 percent of the time),
beginning a climb that would see them take over the position.


"You
had Ollie Matson, Jim Brown, Joe Perry and Marion Motley," says Jim
Taylor, the Packers' Hall of Famer, recalling four of the black running
backs who made major impacts at the position in the 1950s and early
1960s. "Here are some running backs who were very, very good players.
But wherever they came from, whatever they could do and whomever they
played for, it was totally irrelevant in terms of color. Their
abilities dictated them playing that position."


Eventually,
those same abilities fostered a shift in strategies. As speed in the
backfield increased, offenses began to move away from fullbacks and
split-back sets, relying on one dominant player to carry the rushing
load. In turn, the percentage of black running backs comprising the
league's top five rushers made healthy jumps each decade: 62 percent in
the '60s, 84 percent in the '70s and 100 percent since 1984.


Not
since Washington's John Riggins finished fifth in 1983 has a white
running back been among the NFL's top five in rushing yardage. Riggins
was a first-round pick in '71 -- as a fullback. But he morphed into a
feature back when Coach Joe Gibbs implemented a one-back system with
the Redskins that became a model for future offenses on all levels.


The
lone white runners to be taken in the first round of the draft in the
past 30 years were fullbacks: Brad Muster (23rd by Chicago in '88) and
Tommy Vardell (ninth by Cleveland in '92). Their pro careers were
undistinguished, with the players combining to run for 3,658 yards in
15 seasons (an average of 244 yards per season).


And
it's not like there are candidates on the horizon, either. "It's been
like this for a long time," says Allen Wallace, the national recruiting
editor of TheInsiders.com and publisher of SuperPrep magazine. "I don't
notice college coaches paying lesser attention to potentially excellent
white running backs. It's just been a long while where your best
running backs are almost unanimously black."


But
that hasn't been a point without debate. Most white backs who have made
it to the NFL in the past 20 years can relate tales of resistance, be
it encouragement to move to fullback, switch to defense or being
ignored altogether.


Forsey wasn't
offered a scholarship out of high school. And despite scoring 32
touchdowns (the second-best single-season mark in NCAA Division I-A
history) and rushing for 1,611 yards as a senior at Boise State in
2002, he wasn't invited to the NFL Combine, the league's annual
audition for pro prospects. Having a 4.6-second time in the 40-yard
dash will do that.


Former BYU
running back Luke Staley was asked to switch to defense by every
college that recruited him except for the Cougars. He eventually won
the Doak Walker award as college football's top running back in 2001,
rushing for 1,582 yards (on 8.2 yards per carry) and scoring 28
touchdowns. But Staley, a seventh-round pick by Detroit, never got a
chance to prove himself. Injuries ended his career in his second NFL
training camp, and he never had a carry in the regular season.


Tampa
Bay's Mike Alstott, who has become one of the NFL's premier fullbacks,
was told by recruiters while he was in high school that he had to bulk
up and switch to that position if he wanted to run the ball for the
various Big Ten schools that were recruiting him. Alstott was the
top-rated prep back in Chicago.


"Really,
no one was interested in me playing tailback," says Alstott, who was a
6-foot, 205-pound senior when college teams began asking him to switch
to fullback.


"People look at it, 'If
you're white, you can't be a tailback. You got to be a fullback,' "
says former Pittsburgh Steelers fullback Merril Hoge, who was a
tailback in college at Idaho. "When I was in the NFL, I had a coach
tell me, 'I can't have a white guy leading our team in rushing.'
Whether that was a joke or not, what does that tell you?"


It
says there's a stigma. Take Kevin Harris, who rushed for 1,179 yards
and nine touchdowns last season as a junior at Winter Springs, then
padded his résumé this summer with one of the best workouts at the Nike
prep combine in Miami (fourth among 30 running-back prospects, he
said).


"I've had a lot of people
tell me that if I was black, I'd probably have a lot more looks,"
Harris says. "There have been a few coaches from other high schools and
stuff like that. They ask me about some schools recruiting me: 'What do
they want you to play?' And then I tell them linebacker, and they're
like, 'They have got to be out of their minds. If you were a black kid,
you'd be on the front of all the magazines.' I get a lot of that."


But apparently little respect as a tailback.


See no evil


There are three standard answers when someone asks why the white running back has disappeared from football:


"I don't know."


"I've never really thought about it."


"Next question, please."


If
anything, discussing race and sports is like walking a tightrope made
of dental floss, particularly when it involves the prominence of one
group or another. Coaches and players would rather steer clear of it.


When
Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden was asked to explain the decline of
the white running back, he laughed so hard, he actually grabbed on to
the reporter posing the question. When NFL spokesman Greg Aiello was
asked whether the league kept statistics on white running backs --
perhaps the same way the league does on its black coaches -- he was
incredulous.


"White running backs?" he says, laughing. "No."


Most
recruiting analysts have a hard time remembering white prep tailbacks
with the talent to rival their black counterparts. Most players aren't
eager to delve into the subject. And most coaches stick to a party
line: "We're like everybody. You go and recruit the best you see,"
University of Miami Coach Larry Coker says.


In
the infrequent cases in which people are willing to take a stab at the
subject, they usually settle on this: If white running backs were good
enough to compete with blacks on an elite level, more would be there.


"You
go with the best, and it just happens to be there are more minority
tailbacks than there are non-minority," says Bowden, who has spent
nearly 50 years in the college ranks. "Why? I don't know. There's just
more of them. They run better, jump higher.


"God
has made every man different. He's even made our races different. There
are some races that are smaller than others. There are some races that
are taller than others. There are some races, it seems like they have
more athletic ability than others. It just seems they [minority
tailbacks] have more talent as runners than my race. I think that has
something to do with heredity, you know?"


While
some say the sheer numbers prove that point, others argue there are
several other factors in play, setting up barriers of perception.


"You've
got guys in high school, white players, who are discouraged from being
wide receivers, defensive backs or running backs -- I think we do have
that," Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy says. "It's 'this position
is a white position or black position. I definitely believe they are
channeled early on."


Sometimes the
channeling comes from within. New York Jets Coach Herman Edwards
painted a picture of tryouts during a football practice at the youth or
prep level.


"When you're young, you
think about how you're going to make the team," Edwards says. "The kid
is standing in a line, looks around and says, 'Whoa! I'm not making
this team as a running back.' He says, 'Hey, Coach, can I change
positions?' He says, 'Sure.' Kid says, 'OK, thanks,' then he goes and
plays tight end.


"He's like, 'Who am I fooling?' They don't mess with it. That's competition."


"Slotting"
is a theory that many cite for the dearth of black quarterbacks in the
NFL until relatively recently. But comparing black quarterbacks to
white running backs is a parallel few want to draw.


"The
African-Americans were good enough to be playing quarterback, but they
weren't getting the opportunity," Baltimore Ravens General Manager
Ozzie Newsome says. "What you're talking about [with white running
backs] isn't for opportunity. They're going into soccer, lacrosse and
golf or something like that."


Fact or fiction?


False
assumptions aren't hard to find. Ask Craig James -- now an ESPN college
football analyst -- and he will recount his Pro Bowl season and having
players tell him they were shocked he actually was fast.


Forsey
might recall seeing where new Bears Coach Lovie Smith cracked, "You
look at him, and you say, 'Hey, is this guy a manager or what?' Priest
Holmes, Marshall Faulk and guys like that -- they are about the same
size as me, and you wouldn't think something like that would be said
about them," says Forsey, who is 5 feet 11 and 208 pounds. "I don't
think it was meant in a negative sense, but at the same time, it's not
a good thing to be said."


While all the assumptions aren't accurate all the time, there is circumstantial evidence bolstering their existence.


"The
minority prospects tend to be faster," says Bill Kurelic, a recruiting
analyst for Rivals.com who has been scouting prep football players for
nearly 20 years. "It's not much different than track. At the high
school level, you don't have to run 4.4 [seconds] in the 40-yard dash
to be a pretty good high school running back. But if you're not in that
4.4 or 4.5 range, you're not going to be a pretty effective college
running back at the elite level."


In the book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It ,
author Jon Entine proposes the existence of a link between the genetics
of ancestry and success in sports. The book argues athletes of West
African descent -- believed to include most black athletes in the U.S.
-- have a genetic advantage that lends an edge in sprinting.


In a July issue, Science Magazine 's
Constance Holden writes that "various studies have shown that West
African athletes have denser bones, less body fat, narrower hips,
thicker thighs, longer legs and lighter calves than whites."


Such
studies have fueled the argument of genetics playing a fundamental role
in the development of sports in America. They also have provided a
series of extremely controversial dots to connect when explaining why
the speed of many white running backs falls short when compared with
black counterparts.


"Any geneticist
who is honest will say that ancestry and biology explain this more than
any other single thing," Entine said. "It's how evolution has shaped
body types. It's body type, but it's also things like muscle-fiber
type, aerobic capacity, all these other things that are linked to
biology and inherited."


On the
contrary, counters Keith Woods, who teaches the coverage of race
relations at the Poynter Institute, a renowned journalism think tank in
St. Petersburg. He says most scientists have ruled out ancestry and
biology, but society has not. That's what he teaches his students at
Poynter.


"We believe it exists, so it does exist," says Woods, who used to cover the NFL for the New Orleans Times-Picayune . "Therefore, there's meaning beyond the melanin."


While
some experts do agree genetics play a role in the athletic structure of
individuals, some of those same geneticists argue it isn't necessarily
a race factor. Philip Laipis, the associate chairman of biochemistry
and molecular biology at the University of Florida, said environment
may be a greater factor when determining a human's athletic success
than biological makeup based on ethnicity.


"Sure,
there are plenty of big, tall, fast black people," Laipis says. "But
there are also lots of short, fat, slow black people, too. The ones you
remember are the big, tall, fast people; you don't remember the short,
fat, slow people. This holds in any field of endeavor.


"Why
are Kenyans so good at the marathon? I don't think it's because they
are Kenyan. I think it's because they get a lot of exercise, and they
have a modest diet. Not to mention they come from an ethnic background
that's a herding society."


Laipis
points to the Genome Project as evidence that the difference in genetic
makeup among humans is no greater in different racial groups -- meaning
a black of Western African descent has nearly the same genetic
composition as a Caucasian or an Asian.


Laipis
says Entine is right in that both environment and genetics "play a role
in who we are, but you can't argue that one is more important than the
other overall."


Entine is persistent
in his theory that "slotting" against white running backs as football
players, while based on stereotypes, has legitimacy with regard to
skill and athleticism. "There is a prejudice by coaches, but the
stereotypes reflect reality," Entine says. "Just because they are
stereotypes doesn't make them wrong."


What
Entine rejects -- and many in the sports community cannot agree upon --
is whether the "slotting" or "funneling" of athletes takes place
because of racial bias. Is there a lack of white running backs at elite
levels because they can't compete? Or does a sifting begin at a low
level and wipe out the chance of competition occurring in the first
place?


Former Redskins quarterback
Doug Williams knows something about stereotypes. In 1988, Williams
smashed racial barriers by becoming the first black quarterback to
start a Super Bowl. Williams threw four touchdowns against Denver in
Super Bowl XXII and was chosen the game's MVP. He'll be the first to
say stereotypes are made to be broken.


"A
lot of it boils down to athletic ability," says Williams, now an
executive in the Bucs' pro personnel department. "If you have a kid
who's been productive who's a black running back and he's running a 4.8
[in the 40-yard dash], and you have a white kid who's been productive
who's running a 4.5, make no mistake, the 4.5 is going to be the kid
getting the opportunity.


"That's never going to change. Color will have nothing to do with it."


For
now, the NFL has no one to break the stereotype. Maybe it will be
Nevada's Kretschmer, who once rushed for 327 yards and six touchdowns.
Unlike Brock Forsey, NFL scouts already are saying Kretschmer warrants
an invitation to the Combine next year.


As a fullback."


Taken from http://jonentine.com/reviews/Orlando_01.htm
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2004
Messages
255
Location
West Virginia
This article has posted on the board before. It's one of the best ones to appear in the corporate media, as far as at least giving opponents of the Caste System a hearing. Then again, it's one of the best because it's one of the few to even talk about it at all.
 

bigunreal

Mentor
Joined
Oct 21, 2004
Messages
1,923
Doug Williams- what a joke. Yeah, the kid with the faster time will
always get the opportunity. Tell that to all the white RBs (Staley,
Konrad, Lumsden, Forsey, etc.) in recent years who have been passed
over, without any real chance to compete, while blacks who weren't as
big or fast (or productive in college) were handed jobs. Doug Williams
certainly faced a lot of discrimination. Not! While with the Tampa Bay
Bucs, Williams once complied an almost unbeievably low 37% completion
percentage for an entire season. Can you imagine any white QB putting
up that kind of unheard of completion percentage and still remaining
the starter for even half a season, let alone a whole season, and many
seasons afterwards? His entire reputation, such as it is, rests on a
Super Bowl in which he had forever to throw on every passing play to
wide open receievers in a game that was almost certainly fixed.
 

Alpha Male

Mentor
Joined
May 22, 2005
Messages
775
Location
California
This is why the fastest white kids are playing other sports. "White" sports. Soccor, hockey, lacrosse, wrestling, and baseball. The fastest kid at my university wasn't a football player or track star, but a white lacrosse player who ran a legitimate 4.4 sec 40 yd. Unfortunately, he waskilled this year when a lacrosse ball hit his chest and threw his heart out of rhythm,a freak accident. Edited by: Alpha Male
 
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