Sports – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

November 19, 2023December 2, 2023

USC 20, UCLA 38; Five Losses Over the Last Six Games

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Once again, USC proved that it doesn’t have much of a functioning defense. And that incapacity has disheartened the offense. Caleb Williams and company had a bad day from the offensive line with the sacks to the receivers with the dropped passes to the running backs with a total of 3 yards rushing. Losing is a downer and the team is beaten. It shows.

The team has quality players, by all accounts, but maybe not enough of them. Yes, poor alignments, delinquent adjustments and strategy, poor coaching play a huge role. But I’m wondering if at least some of the problems can be traced to California’s changing population. California is becoming more feudal each decade. The state may not be producing as many of the 5-star recruits in all positions, particularly the ones that require the big, burly types: d-line, o-line, linebackers. I’m not an expert. I’m just wondering.

All I have to go on is personal anecdote. I taught and coached in a California Central Valley high school and went to high school in another one of those Central Valley secondary schools. By the time I am working through my career as a teacher and coach, I began to notice the gradual decline of the towering, big, and burly teens in the student body. It reflected the shrinking portion from African Americans and the descendants of European immigrant families, far different from my personal high school experience and my early years in teaching and coaching.

It’s not simply a matter of race. The relationship between the social environment and biology is only beginning to be understood. We do know that over time, maybe generations, new groups take on the characteristics of the surrounding and prevalent groups. Point: things change and blend.

But, for the purposes of recruitment today, the pool has changed. There are indications that some in the coaching ranks allude to the fact.

I’ve monitored online forums, social media threads, and web reports on the state of play in college athletics, especially USC. Head coach Lincoln Riley naturally has been the brunt of criticism for the team’s performance. One of the recurring complaints is the relatively mediocre recruiting classes, especially if you want to compete for national championships. Related to that is the charge that he hasn’t recruited enough local talent (LA area, California broadly), like from powerhouses like St. John Bosco (Bellflower, Ca.) and Mater Dei (Santa Ana, Ca.). It is true but that the talent pool is plucked clean by programs from all over the country; though, this fact doesn’t detract from the possibility that the amount of highly rated athletes is incrementally shrinking leaving an intensifying feeding frenzy for what’s left each succeeding year.

May be an image of 1 person, playing football and text — USC coach Lincoln Riley

May be an image of 5 people and text — UCLA coach Chip Kelley celebrating

So, when Riley responds to questions about mediocre recruiting classes, particularly locally, he’s quite right in saying that the local pool may not give you what you need. And, like everyone else, USC is in need of big, burly, fast, and smart. They surely can be found in California, but it’s unrealistic to expect USC to rake in the vast majority of them. And the problem worsens over the long term as California’s persistent outflux and influx change its population and athletic talent pool.

I’m wondering if California is demographically doomed. Somehow, USC and the other big California schools will have to increasingly try and convince athletes from a national pool to come to the land with the highest rate of poverty and homelessness, expensive everything, violent and property crimes galore, gangs, blight and filth from the urban core to exurbia to small towns to the fields and orchards.

The weather, beautiful coastline, and the Sierras may not be enough.

RogerG

January 10, 2023January 12, 2023

Whew, What a Blowout! Georgia 65 – TCU 7.

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As of now, the South is the king of football, with competition from the upper Midwest. It’s much more than the SEC. It’s regional dominance. There are places where physical, masculine virtues still prevail. Football thrives in a culture that has a place for such attributes.

I invite others to do a detailed analysis of the region’s productivity of top-tier football talent throughout the NCAA top 20. I’ll admit that it’s more than the South, though. California still gives the country some of the most highly recruited players in the country: C.J. Stroud (The Ohio State), Bryce Young (Alabama), Brock Bowers (Georgia), to name a few. Up and down the west coast, schools constantly dip into the state’s talent pool. Where would Oregon be without California talent?

But the state is shedding population (114,000 last year and almost 118,000 for 2021) and its reigning culture isn’t conducive to the exaltation of virility. The state is too busy becoming the Mecca of transgenderism, which says a lot about where that social eco-system is heading. Persistent pockets of male virtue exist, but the trend is increasingly inhospitable.

Texas, like the rest of the South, produces much talent that is diluted among many schools in the region. So does Florida. The performance of those states’ schools says little because of the chronic raiding.

In addition, the powerhouse schools of the South have a tendency to dominate because they are assisted by coaches who have the magic elixir to draw in much of the region’s pool of talent: Dabo Sweeney (Clemson), Nick Saban (Alabama), Kirby Smart (Georgia) for instance. There will always be exceptions, but they confirm what Cicero of ancient Rome said in Latin, exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which means the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted. In my mind, the generality of the South’s preeminence rings true.

As for the Midwest, they compete with the South. The Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State compete with the best of the South. Based on what I saw in this year’s playoff games, the real national championship game was between The Ohio State and Georgia. This region’s dominance, like the South, draws on the same residue of cultural male virtue.

This shift of football power may partially explain USC and UCLA’s move to the Big Ten in 2025. Some say that it’s all about the money. Yes, it is, and money follows success. It’s striking to realize that these big schools have to turn to red America to maintain competitiveness.

Some of my dear friends and family in California may find this assessment jarring, but it’s my judgment of the state of play circa 2023. I could be wrong, and the situation could change. There’s nothing more permanent than flux in human affairs.

RogerG

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

See the source image — Yard signs in Kansas regarding the upcoming vote on Amendment 2, August 2, 2022.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)

March 29, 2022March 29, 2022

Stop the Politics in Everything, Literally Everything

Please watch the clip of political sloganeering in March Madness:

I love March Madness . . . until this year. Today, the c-suites managing the tournament from their metropolitan lairs gave us a steady diet of messaging, or what is often called “virtue-signaling”. It’s simply revolting to find almost everything polluted with not-so-thinly-disguised political messaging. With the tournament as a backdrop, you can see it on everything from the team warm-ups to the litany of ads punctuating every broadcast. This isn’t basketball. It’s the same monotonous, droning sermon in the church of the woke revolution.

We are pummeled by “Black Lives Matter” (and its companion, “Stop Racism”) which, by the way, was worn by the players of the tournament’s “Cinderella” team, St. Peters. Nothing new here. The banality has been with us since neo-Marxist hooligans started chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” in 2014. What does the slogan mean? Simple, and it’s not the obvious. If we were limited to the direct meaning of the words, it would be the equivalent of “Breathe” on the St. Peters’ t-shirts. The slogan is the crowd favorite of revolutionaries for a reason. It pushes the same tired, worn-out oppressor/oppressed gag. The real meaning: a state takeover of life by us (Antifa, BLM, Inc., snotty upper-middle-class whites, college ASB’s) is essential to make “Black Lives Matter”, and the lives of all the other identity clients in our sloganeering repertoire. It’s revolutionary theater.

Not content with that, we get walloped by ads from the NCAA, Buick, and Adidas. The point in the NCAA commercial is a pure inanity. They are committed to “opportunity” for “all of us”. Well, if they weren’t, they’d be sued. What’s new here? Virtue-signaling. The NCAA’s corporate bigs are saying that they aren’t like those yahoos at Trump rallies. They don’t discriminate . . . in sports that have to discriminate, as in distinguish between winners and losers. To get around the reality that not everyone gets a trophy, they inundate us with images of the Supreme Court’s “protected classes”, as if there is a shortage of black players on basketball teams. Do we really have to be constantly reminded, going back decades, that Title IX commands equality in sports, that there exist women basketball players?

They do the “opportunity” schtick to such an extent that they’ve created real opportunities for men to compete on women’s teams. Can’t make a go of it on the men’s team, jump over to the woman’s pool after pumping up on estrogen and announcing that you feel like a woman today, thanks to the NCAA. So much for opportunities for women . . . while expanding opportunities for men.

Car companies juice-up their commitment to the revolution by playing the statistical-disparity game. Going to a break during a timeout, Buick prints across your tv screen, “Over 40% of athletes are women, but they get 10% of the media coverage”. The ad continues, “Buick is committed to raising that percentage.” In actuality, they mean, shame on you, the viewers, for finding men’s basketball more interesting than women’s hoops. Bluntly put, that’s the rub. They, of all people, should know that ad exposure and expenditures closely track Nielsen ratings. Dah!

As for “raising that percentage”, Buick apparently believes that the natural human preference for watching excellence in greater physicality in speed, strength, and agility can be reshaped by c-suite decisions to spend more of the shareholders money on social engineering. Is Buick selling cars or militant affirmative action? Could the money on that ad campaign be better spent on improving Buick’s competitiveness with Toyota? Shareholders are indicted for letting them get away this.

And then we got Adidas’ ditzy ad offering (see below). They’re all-in for the trans agenda, the freedom of trans women to compete. And shame on you for not relishing the thought of your daughter sharing swimming lanes and a locker room with a woman with male genitalia. Are these folks selling shoes or gaslighting us into ignoring our lyin’ eyes?

For once, can’t we just sit down and enjoy the performance of exquisitely trained athletes and great coaches without the constant clamor of how committed the c-suite is to lefty politics? We need a separation of politics from athletics in much the same manner as some have constructed an impenetrable wall separating church and state. If we can ban the post-game prayers of football players and coaches, we ought to be able to keep the inane political opinions of billionaire athletes and c-suite execs from spoiling the fans’ experience.

For me, once again, I’m done with the whole sordid mess. They just made my time better spent in my garage working on the MGB and reloading cartridges for sport shooting. Please, stop the politics in everything, literally everything.

RogerG

February 9, 2022February 16, 2022

The Super Bowl LVI, Meh (So-So)

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Rapper 50 Cent performs during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show at SoFi Stadium on February 13, 2022 in Inglewood, California. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

Let me start by saying, I don’t care. As a Florida allegator hunter might put it, I don’t have a dog in that hunt. The game pits two teams for which it’s hard to conjure any enthusiasm. The Bengals are from Ohio and the Rams have never been, for me, an object of affection. So, what will I do . . . if you’re even interested? I’ll record the thing to zip out all the hype, including the unbearable half-time show. I’ll get the result and later see how it ended that way. In other words, I’ll view the spectacle in my old role of a coach analyzing game tape.

My only interest, and it’s a slight one, is in the underdog (LA is favored) and maybe watching the next Tom Brady in the making: Joe Burrow. After that, meh! My appetite has been ruined. The NFL, like the rest of the big-metro blue bubbles, has shown itself to be duly immersed in the cloistered zeitgeist of the fashionable neo-Marxist critical theory, pushing radical BLM slogans throughout the season. A game not about politics came to be about politics. It’s hard to get up for the America sellout (the NFL).

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How appropriate for the game to be played in a lefty metropolitan funhouse in the leftward most governed state on the furthest leftward edge of the continent. I pity the athletes for they will pay the greatest pound of flesh for playing a game in the highest taxed state outside of North Korea. But what does it matter if you earn a million and have to turn over a couple hundred thousand to subsidize a fiscal and cultural nightmare?

Once again, meh.

RogerG

January 23, 2022January 27, 2022

The Woke Bowl

It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).

May be an image of 3 people and people playing football — 49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.

May be an image of 4 people and people playing sports — Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.

That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.

If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.

As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.

See the source image

RogerG

January 19, 2022January 19, 2022

Our Defiled Brahmin Caste

At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.

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Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.

How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.

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Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.

It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.

“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.

As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.

Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.

Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?

We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.

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May be an image of 7 people and people standing — Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

May be an image of 3 people, people playing sports, people standing and text that says 'BLACK LIVES MATTER' — Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.

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P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.

RogerG

January 2, 2022January 2, 2022

Are Bowl Games Another Canary in the Coal Mine?

USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.

Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.

The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.

The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.

Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.

UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.

Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.

Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?

Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.

Think about it.

RogerG

October 15, 2021October 15, 2021

From Hypocrisy to Historical Illiteracy in the NBA

Friday, Greg Popovich regaled us with a lecture on the evils of Columbus. Popovich’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. You’d think that an Air Force Academy grad would have a better head on his shoulders. One reason that a half-wit like Popovich can get away with this moral flim-fllam is the pile of Red Chinese money going into the pockets of people like Popovich and Le Bron. Bash a guy dead for centuries but don’t disturb the CCP money train. It’s revolting.

A Himalaya-size hypocrisy envelops Popovich and the NBA when it comes to a “just” society. Ask the people of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs. As the people of Hong Kong face “disappearance”, as a surveillance state with its chain of gulags blankets the nation in ways that rival anything in Orwell’s imagination, as the Uyghurs face certain annihilation, Popovich and other millionaire titans of Big Sports, Inc., conveniently go mum, so long as the flow of Chinese cash from sneakers, caps, and jerseys continues unimpeded.

The NBA’s conspicuous moral blackout is even more galling when we come to know that Red Chinese officialdom is conducting a snuff film of the Uyghur people with forced sterilizations and the officially-sponsored rape and adultery of Uyghur women by ordering Han Chinese men to live in the homes of jailed Uyghur husbands. Now that’s racist, racist with a capital R.

Uyghur inmates in a concentration camp in Xinjiang province.

To set the record straight, let’s go back to real history. The world’s 15th,16th, and 17th centuries were a violent time, and it wasn’t limited to Columbus and company. Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec empire was made easy by the defection of the indigenous Aztec-oppressed from daily, ritual human sacrifice. Other Native Americans peoples were not immune to culturally-based brutality. “Marauding” is applied by anthropologists to tribal assaults on rival tribes, usually at night or in the early morning. Massacre sites of men, women, children, the old, the young, and the infirmed are the stuff of the archeological record.

An example Mohawk savagery occurred in 1642. A band of Hurons with two French priests accompanying them were attacked by a force of Mohawks. Many were killed while others were taken captive, including the two priests. One of them would survive to tell the tale. In a letter in 1643, Father Jogues wrote,

“On the eighth day we fell in with a band of two hundred Indians going out to fight (on an island in Lake Champlain); and as it is the custom for savages, when out on war-parties, to initiate themselves, as it were, by cruelty, under the belief that their success will be the greater as they shall have been the more cruel, they thus received us: First rendering thanks to the sun, which they imagine presides over war, they congratulated their countrymen by a joyful volley of musketry. Each then cut some stout clubs in the neighboring wood in order to receive us. After we had landed from the canoes, they fell upon us from both sides with their clubs in such fury, that I, who was the last and therefore the most exposed to their blows, sank overcome by their numbers and severity before I had accomplished half the rocky way that led to the hill on which a stage had been erected for us. I thought I should quickly die there; and therefore, partly because I could not, partly because I cared not, I did not rise. How long they spent their fury upon me He knows for whose love and sake it is delightful and glorious thus to suffer. Moved at last by a cruel mercy, and wishing to carry me to their country alive, they ceased to strike. And thus half dead and covered with blood, they bore me to the scaffold. Here I had scarce begun to breathe, when they ordered me to come down to load me with scoffs and insults, and countless blows upon my head and shoulders, and indeed my whole body. I should be tedious were I to attempt to tell all that the French prisoners suffered. They burnt one of my fingers, and crushed another with their teeth; the others already thus mangled they so wrenched by the tattered nerves that even now, though healed, they are frightfully deformed.”

I suppose that Indigenous Peoples Day would have a different ring to the indigenous peoples who were captured to keep the sacrificial altars of Tenochtitlan filled with a steady supply of open chests. Yeah, you’d be right to say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but at least admit cruelty isn’t the sole possession of those from European locales. Europeans landed on a continent that was beset with savagery.

In the Mandan tribe, you were suspended by hooks (and had your fingers chopped off).

Popovich, please stop the moral grandstanding. Your hypocrisy in the service mammon is loathsome.

And you wonder why the NBA’s popularity is fading in the US. Thank people like the money-grubbing charlatans of the NBA.

RogerG

October 11, 2021October 12, 2021

What has happened to USC? Is Something Deeper at Play?

Utah quarterback, Cameron Rising, from Ventura, Ca., via Texas, celebrates a touchdown in Utah’s 42-26 win over USC in the LA Coliseum Saturday night, 10/9.

My answers are, I can’t say for sure and I can’t say for sure. But hints are scattered about. My principal guess is that the breeding ground for football success lies in . . . wait for it . . . the regional culture. This is not the southern California of USC’s John McKay or the entire PAC-8 of Washington’s Warren Moon any longer. The whole west coast shifted deep blue which might prove to be the catalyst for a deemphasis of the manly arts (as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield would put it), like the manliest of all sports, football. Trump might have had a better chance to win California’s 52 electoral votes if the electorate was limited to the LA Coliseum’s attendance, but that isn’t the case. There’s more Bernie Bros in the state than college football fans. Socialism and love of the nanny state undermines fan and program support and player development. Again, my guess.

Hugh Hewitt last week raised an interesting point. He observed that college football is a “red” sport. The top 25 has only two slots for teams from “blue” states: Oregon (#9) and San Diego State (#24). The rest is a monotonous rendition of “red” to “purple” states, mostly “red”. In the last decade, only one “blue” team by the end of the season with any regularity has been in the running for the college football playoffs – Oregon.

Take a look at something as simple as stadium capacity. The top three are in the Big Ten – Michigan (purple, red part of the state, 107,601), Penn State (purple, red part of the state, 106,572), and The Ohio State (red, 102,780). Eleven of the top 25 are in the SEC – which should change its initials to RSC, the Red State Conference. We won’t find a blue state facility till UCLA’s Rose Bowl at #10 (91,136) and USC’s Coliseum at #20 (77,500) – both very ancient and for the most part half empty on Saturday.

Interesting anecdote: Iowa’s quarterback, Spencer Petras from Greenbrae, Ca., chose the Iowa corn fields because he wanted to play in the electric atmosphere of a Big Ten stadium, according to yesterday’s broadcast team for the Penn State/Iowa game.

Iowa’s quarterback Spencer Petras in Iowa’s 23-20 win against Penn State.

Fans swarm the field after Iowa’s victory against Penn State.

Helicopter-parent government of the blue states nurture Pajama Boys (Remember the ads for Obamacare?), not football players. The attitude spills over into athletic policy. Arizona State’s punter, Michael Turk, one of the top punters in the country, transferred to Oklahoma due to ASU’s vaccine mandate for away games. Washington State’s head coach, Nick Rolovich, is reported to have a date with the guillotine for refusing to take the vaccine.

No surprise there, college bubbles everywhere are replete with “safe spaces” and triggering hyper-sensitivities. Blue states are nothing but the college bubbles writ large. However, if the surrounding culture won’t play by the campus’s snowflake rules, COVID paranoia will play second fiddle to the gate. MSNBC anchors may go bonkers with the Chicken Little hysteria of “super-spreader events”, but many folks prefer to live in the real world of risk and are voting with their tickets to have a good time. Damn the mommy spoil-sports. Welcome to the “red” states.

Now 3-3, in USC’s losses, their opponents scored 42+ points. Swiss cheese comes to mind when talking about the team’s defense, whether in the run box or the defensive backfield. As a consequence, Utah, like Oregon State and Stanford before them, looked like Alabama when lining up across the USC defensive line. USC attracts some flashy offensive skills players but the rest of the roster looks mediocre. Since the defense can’t hold the more physical offenses, those stars get fewer opportunities to shine. By the third quarter, the team is down 24 points, the game’s tenor has been set, and the LA media darling in cardinal and gold watches his star fade.

Lapses like USC’s have been a concern up and down the west coast. The occasional good team can still be found, something unavoidable in the eight teams from LA to Puget Sound. Beyond the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the picture might look a bit different. Arizona prohibits vaccine mandates in schools, a far cry from California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee – cultural socialists all. The off-putting social milieu of those states might be a huge drag on recruitment for Utah, the Arizona schools, and Colorado as they are corralled with the nanny staters. Flying from liberty zones to the lands of COVID fascism in inter-conference play creates difficulties for scheduling and compliance. A five-star recruit, young and healthy with a greater chance of serious medical problems from a frat party than COVID, has a choice between a Chernobyl-like college life or a normal experience in the SEC’s Mississippi or the Big-10’s Iowa. This might be the reason for more California talent showing up in the big schools of flyover country.

A worker at Lumen Field holds a sign stating the stadium’s mask requirement before an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)

I hear that the Big-12 is shopping for some replacements for the defections of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Hear that, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado? Maybe a move to the Mountain West might be an improvement.

I am prepared for a long run of mediocrity for my much-loved PAC-12 teams. Once the rot of cultural Marxism gets fully established, the malaise infects everything from the economy to the practice field.

RogerG