OT (Kinda): Hate for the enthusiastic unathletic looking white guy
was a top 100 recruit in the 2015 class. Pretty well sucked until just recently. But seems to be coming around now. I am guessing he is going to get a lot of minutes for the Tourney, and a lot of practicing by Sparty this week to get him some picks and open him up for threes.
But he also looks one dimensional. Can't remember him driving the lane once yesterday.
Made me really appreciate Robinson lately - he only drove a few times, but when he did, they were huge plays!
all the players around him better...
I was thinking he looked like Ralph Wiggum.
Beilein recruited.
slapping yesterday. Every time they slapped, we scored.
That was a thing back when MSU used to play defense, now it is merely symbolic and tired.
Let's go back even further and call them the next Don Hutson.
Ed McCaffrey
Cris Collinsworth.
alworth
Agree. These players get hyped up, which I can only guess it becuase they are a "great white hope." They are the gritty, gym-rats, sons of coaches, yada yada.
I get sick of hearing about these medicore players getting hyped to death.
It goes back to Isiah Thomas' comments about Larry Bird. If he was black, he'd be just another guy.
"I think there are two separate issues. The big controversy isn't about my saying professional athletes are stereotyped. The controversy is that I said Larry Bird, if he was black, would be just another good guy. But I think you all would agree that the sterotypes to exist."
"Larry definitely had to work hard to get where he is at, but so many times it's been said about black athletes that their talent is 'God-given' or that it's 'natural ability.' I had to work just as hard to get where I am. It's not God-given or instinctive. Basketball is a game where you do things over adn over again. When someone makes a great play it's not a matter of instinct, by how quickly you recall."
I pretty much universally hate white basketball players. I don't why it is but I find them douchey and annoying
They're more like the upper crust antagonists in those Rodney Dangerfield comedies, like Caddyshack or Back to School. All are arrogant, cheat, are named Chaz, and have incredibly punchable faces. A lot of those players, like the Duke guards, were also overrated and dirty as hell to boot. Grayson Allen checks all those boxes.
would definitely sweep the leg.
People hate Grayson Allen because he plays dirty.
The other guys are annoying rival players. I'm sure the rest of the country loved Aaron Craft's scrappy defense. And Diebler's ridiculous 3pt %.
There is an underlying racism when it comes to media's love for the scrappy, hard working, "White players". It is less about hate for people like Craft and Allen, but rather the love and obession with them. Brian a few years back described it perfectly>
"I'm not here to bash Aaron Craft, but let's be clear: he is a role player. He is the apotheosis of the role player, sure, but the reason people get cranky about Aaron Craft is the never-ending hagiography for a guy who is merely a pretty good player.
There is frankly a racial component to this. You don't see people falling all over themselves to hype up Briante Weber, whose VCU team is ranked and headed for about the same seed as OSU thanks in large part to Weber's third consecutive year at the top of the Kenpom steals leaderboard. Or his teammate Shannon Scott, who is also top ten in steals. It's Craft that gets glorified as the underrated gutty gritty leader in a way that is out of proportion to his talent.
That's unfair to the his teammates and Craft himself. I've long defended the guy whenever people try to trash his game (no offense to Derrick Walton, but put Craft on this Michigan team and oh my gawd), but that's because I love guys who can make an impact without using possessions. They need to be put with high-usage guys, though—you know, stars. Craft is not that. But he comes with an avalanche of hype enough to get him on the midseason Wooden list as he leads his team to a 10-8 Big Ten record while taking 15% of OSU's shots.
At its heart, Craft backlash is Forde-and-company backlash. Some of it's misdirected; a lot of it is from 14 year olds; everyone would be much better off if people in the media would just acknowledge that Craft is who he is. GIFs of aairballs are prominent because the media is insistent on pretending Aaron Craft is something other than what he is."
http://mgoblog.com/category/tags/nik-stauskas-probably-not-human
Perfectly good guy who played hard and tough, but the incessant hyping by every college football talking head for 4 years just dug the guy's PR grave until he became the player you most want to fail. Proseltyzing during media appearances probably didn't help the cause, but even if he'd never dropped a single religious reference, he was going to be the player people loved to hate after the media set him up like a set of pins at the Bowl-Mor.
"Underlying racism" is overly harsh IMO.
Here's the thing: Black people are better at sports than white people. Or, more precisely, people who are good at sports are more likely to be black. It's not a stereotype when it's true, and if it weren't true, a ridiculously disproportionate number of black people (as compared to the American population) wouldn't be playing football and basketball.
White guys playing basketball is now different, and different is a story. And of course, the media hammers stories into artificial narratives and that gets obnoxious fast.
(There is an interesting theory I once read, which is probably unprovable until someone does a really in-depth study of a huge population of human DNA. It says that the human population that migrated out of Africa and became Asians, Europeans, native Americans, etc., took with them a random sampling of DNA. If you have a million DNA samples that determine, say, athletic stamina, or sprinting speed, and you randomly remove a few thousand or a few tens of thousands, you're unlikely to get either the very best or very worst. Ergo, the best runners stayed behind in Africa and passed their DNA on to Kenyan marathoners and Usain Bolt. There's probably, therefore, a scientific basis for black people being most of the best athletes. Also most of the worst, but mixed in with the general population, you wouldn't notice.)
Black people not being hockey players is a socio-economic and geographic thing. As for baseball, there certainly are many, many people of African descent playing baseball. Just because they're not "African-American" doesn't mean they're not black. Those words are only interchangeable in PC-land, but there are lots of Cubans, Dominicans, and some Puerto Ricans as well, of African descent playing baseball. Black, but not American, so they get counted as Latino and lumped in with the rest of Latin America and then people wonder why there aren't any black people in baseball anymore. But, there was a long time there when a huge number of the best baseball players were black Americans.
Let's face it, when you list off winter sports and say black people don't dominate them, you gotta realize that Canada and Norway aren't exactly teeming with people of African descent. When you list off sports like golf and tennis, you have to know what socioeconomic factors exist there. And by the way, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Shani Davis do awfully well in their own sports. And P.K. Subban is a bit like the Greek Freak of hockey - a versatile matchup nightmare.
"Defining sports" is obviously going to do nothing but elicit everyone's personal criterion for sports, but here's a fact: Most basketball players are black. So are most football players in those positions which require the most pure athleticism. Ever seen a white cornerback? So are the world's best sprinters and distance runners.
"Here's the thing: Black people are better at sports than white people. Or, more precisely, people who are good at sports are more likely to be black."
You do realize that there are more than two sports don't you? People of African descent tend to dominate in track, American football, and basketball. People of European descent tend to dominate in hockey, swimming, field hockey, lacrosse, softball, etc. Latinos dominate in baseball and soccer.There are various measures of athleticism. Labeling blacks as athletic and whites as unathletic plays into old racist stereotypes and demeans both black and white athletes.
Secondly, not all Africans possess the same physical traits. Like Europeans there are variations in shapes and physical abilities due primarily to the environment in which they were raised. African Americans origins are in western and central Africa. They will possess different characteristics than southern and northern Africans. Again, like Europeans. Look at Scandinvians vis a vis Italians. Very different in physical traits from color of skin and hair to height and build. We have to keep in mind that even in regions there is remarkable levels of genetic diversity.
Thirdly, we have to keep in mind that up to 90% of all black people descended from slaves in the US have European ancestry due to the fact that slaveowners and overseers raped female slaves. Thus, African Americans DNA will look a little different from Africans. They, like most Latinos, are a genetic blend of two different regions. For most white Americans that isn't true for obvious reasons.
As with above, many of the sports not dominated by black people are that way because of geographical and socioeconomic reasons. Not many black kids growing up with pond hockey in Saskatchewan.
I don't think it's demeaning at all to say that in general, most of the best athletes are black. Labeling an individual white guy as unathletic is demeaning. Limiting black people to the definition of athletic is demeaning. But at some point, we have to look truth in the face and realize: hey, all the best sprinters are black, all the best distance runners are too, there are no white cornerbacks in the NFL, Dirk Nowitzki is the only white NBA superstar since Larry Bird, and so on. What's the reason for all this? Ignoring genetics as part of the cause would be doing a disservice to the truth, IMO.
Assigning the general properties or stereotypes of an entire race to an individual is wrong, and unfair to the individual. But not acknowledging things that are true, just because they're uncomfortable, is dishonesty.
Interestingly, most of the French team, for example, is of African descent. Their best player of the past 30 years is ethnically Algerian.
He was never even 1st Team all conference. It isn't like he was Jimmer Ferdette, dropping 28 a game. He was a very good role player. Thats it.
Craft got a ton of praise from announcers, which got annoying.
Craft also got the benefit of being a good defender and therefore not getting a lot of calls against him. That is insanely frustrating to watch.
Z actually gets some of that benefit right now on both sides of the ball, and I think being smaller helps there. But, this is bias becuase I don't care since he's on UM. Oh well.
Speaking of white guys who are pitbulls and get under your skin - we gotta face Mathias this afternoon. He has been terrific last couple of games, and is all over the place, constantly in motion. And has been drilling his shots. We need someone in his face - who is that? As I assume that Z is covering Carsen Edwards, is it MAAR or Matthews?
Screw him - we aren't Rutgers or Penn State...
I despise Mathias, probably totally unfairly. But it just seems like "how is this guy beating us" so maybe the OP has a point.