american black

Increase Your Coaching Chances: Don't Be Black

White head coaches are less likely than their black counterparts to hire blacks as assistants, limiting black coaches' careers in schools with Division I basketball, a study released Tuesday suggests.

Texas A&M's Laboratory for Diversity in Sport surveyed 191 Division I men's basketball programs and found blacks make up 30% of assistants on the staffs of white head coaches and 45% of assistants to black head coaches.

The results suggest Blacks might face discrimination when applying for coaching positions.

Blacks Attempt To Buy Baseball Team

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined one of nine groups bidding to buy the Washington Nationals from Major League Baseball.

The group, led by Fred Malek and Jeff Zients, includes former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines, America Online founding CEO James Kimsey, lawyer Vernon Jordan and former Washington Redskins player Darrell Green.

The franchise was purchased by the other 29 major league teams for $120 million in 2002, and Major League Baseball is expected to get more than $300 million in a sale it hopes to complete this year,

Nine potential ownership groups have paid $100,000 deposits to enter the bidding.

Tiger Woods Talks Race

I've never been a big Charles Barkley fan but his new book seems like an awesome read. Excerpts from it can be found on BlackVoices. The interview with Tiger Woods really helped me to understand him and his veiws on race. It moved Tiger up a few notches in my book. Below Tiger tells when he realized he was Black.

“I became aware of my racial identity on my first day of school, on my first day of kindergarten. A group of sixth graders tied me to a tree, spray-painted the word ‘nigger’ on me, and threw rocks at me. That was my first day of school. And the teacher really didn’t do much of anything. I used to live across the street from school and kind of down the way a little bit. The teacher said, ‘Okay, just go home.’ So I had to outrun all these kids going home, which I was able to do. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, you know, being five years old. We were the only minority family in all of Cypress, California."

WNBA gets first black female owner

Former television executive Sheila Johnson and first Black female billionaire, became the WNBA's first black female owner Tuesday when she joined a group that purchased the Washington Mystics.

Johnson will hold the titles of president and managing partner of the Mystics and will represent the team at the board of governors meetings.

Her former husband, Robert L. Johnson, who co-founded BET with Johnson, is the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats of the NBA. The two divorced in 2002.

Race and Basketball (or How Steve Nash Solved The Race Problem)

If you're not into the NBA since Jordan left, you may be missing out on one of the most important events in racial politics. Let me give you a rundown.

Dan Le Batard wrote an article recently in the Miami Herald
saying that race might have been involved in Steve Nash winning NBA MVP.

No one who looks or plays like Steve Nash has ever been basketball's MVP. Ever. In the history of the award, a tiny, one-dimensional point guard who plays no defense and averages fewer than 16 points a game never has won it. But Nash just stole Shaquille O'Neal's trophy, even though O'Neal had much better numbers than Nash in just about every individual statistical measurement except assists, so it begs the question:

Is this as black and white as the box-scores that usually decide these things?

Well guess what. He pissed people off. Not white people. Black people.

Fowler likely out as Vikings majority owner

On Valentine's Day, entrepreneur Reggie Fowler stood before the TV cameras' bright lights on a chilly Minnesota afternoon and said that he would be the new owner of the Minnesota Vikings.

oops.

Fowler is having difficulty raising the money to become the general partner, a source close to the negotiations said. Other media outlets are reporting that one of Fowler's partners, New Jersey developer Zygmunt Wilf, is poised to become the lead owner.

Fowler could remain as a limited partner with a minority stake in the team.

Fowler kind of fucked up from the giddy-up with his inflated resume which  embellished events from his childhood, education, football and professional career.

Weekend Notes

In Tampa we had a visit today by Kerry. They expected 1200 to attend the rally. Over 15000 showed up.

CinemaNow Gets "Fahrenheit 9/11" Exclusive: Which doesn't really mean anything, firstly because
you can easily find copies of the movies for streaming and download online...example, check out Russell Beattie's site or if you are really into democratic online video propaganda (like I am!) check out the Never Forget site.

It includes fun clips like Rice's 9/11 Commission Testimony and the other famous female cheap labor conservative Britney Spears' and her gum smacking support of Bush.

Keith Olbermann had some interesting things to say on his MSNBC 'blog':

...And I think the political analysts have forgotten to examine the psychology of an electorate under the stress of war and fear. For the longest time, even when Mr. Bush’s approval ratings were at their apex in the post-Afghanistan and immediate post-Saddam periods, I kept wondering if he wouldn’t fall victim to the Winston Churchill effect.

Mid-20th Century British politics aren’t taught much in American schools any more, but it has fascinated me always that in the spring of 1945, with Hitler dead, England’s gamble to fight the Nazis having been vindicated, and his own gallantry and leadership acclaimed universally, that the British promptly voted Churchill out of office in favor of a first-time Prime Minister in Clement Attlee. It astonished Churchill, and British pollsters, and world leaders in general...

And in case you didn't hear: The Miami Dolphins have filed a lawsuit against former running back Ricky Williams, who retired abruptly before the start of training camp and owes the team nearly $9 million.

Big Boi Attempts To Save Athletic Program

Middle Tennessee State (2-4) had a problem: They need to average 15,000 people per game or their football team falls out of Division I. And right now they’re at 14,000 and change, with an epic battle with an 2-5 team on the horizon.

They also had a solution: Throw a concert. Invite Big Boi – one half of OutKast – to perform after a game, and limit entry to those who enter before kickoff. Given that MTSU is going to maintain their average of 14,000+ if there is no concert, and they’re playing a total of 5 or 6 home games, they’d need to draw an extra 6,000 people (just to be on the safe side). Can they get to just over 20k with Big Boi in the house?

um...no.

The record attendance officials were banking on didn't materialize Saturday, at least partly because of gray skies and rain. Slightly more than 16,000 fans showed up to watch the Blue Raiders win. The outdoor concert was cut short by the rain.

Damn.

Racial tension spurs fight at Calif. High School

The little details of this story bothered me...

Football practice turned violent in Trona on Oct. 19, following an argument between two students, a 17-year-old white male and a 15-year-old black male. The white male was arrested on charges of battery with serious injury on Oct. 22 and was transported to the High Desert Juvenile Hall in Apple Valley. The case is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime..

The worst offense in the history of the NFL

(via Football Outsiders)

One project I have on my mind is to try and research what team had the worst offense in the history of the NFL. Miami has to be on pace to compete for that title.

In his book Dominance, which tries to determine the best NFL team of all time, Eddie Epstein includes a short chapter called Football Hodgepodge with various ratings that had no place elsewhere in the book. One of the items in this section is a list of the worst offenses in NFL history as judged by Epstein’s OPI (Offensive Power Index). A brief description of OPI: it judges teams based on their yards gained and points scored and how many standard deviations these numbers are from the league mean for that season. This allows Epstein to judge teams based on the style of football played at the time. Epstein’s five worst offenses of NFL history through 2001 are:

1970 Boston Patriots (-5.08 OPI)
1988 Detroit Lions (-4.88 OPI)
1974 Atlanta Falcons (-4.86 OPI)
1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-4.75 OPI)
1992 Seattle Seahawks (-4.71 OPI)

By the way, Dominance is an excellent book