In today’s issue of The New York Times Magazine is The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas. If one looks under the heading “Sports” one sees a brief discussion of a paper Rob Simmons and I published in the Journal of Sports Economics. Our paper presents evidence that black and white quarterbacks are not compensated the same. More on this topic is offered in our next book “Stumbling on Wins” (which ships to book stores in two months and should be available in March).
Posted in: Football Stories
Ty from Bucks Diary
December 13, 2009
I love how YOUR article seems to ask and then answer a legitimate issue of fact based upon logic and the best evidence at hand, and yet the New York Times writer (stunningly) decided instead to use the opening two introductory paragraphs to basically imply an explanatory cause that I’ll bet your paper doesn’t in any way argue for… old fashioned rich white guy racism.
Look how they don’t even mention your actual conclusion until the very last sentence of the piece! Obviously they didn’t find that as sexy or inflammatory as the issue itself or their hoped-for alternate universe explanation that “All the owners are closet Limbaughs”.
Steve Sailer
December 19, 2009
Yes, black running quarterbacks are criminally under-publicized. They only put a black running quarterback on the cover of “Madden” every other year, when it should be every year. You would think that with all the Super Bowls that black running quarterbacks have won (five or ten, right?), the world would wake up to how great they are, but, no, you never ever heard any publicity about how black running quarterbacks like Michael Vick are the Future of Football.
Clearly, this lack of appreciation for black running quarterbacks is because everybody is obsessed with the NFL’s passer rating formula. Who hasn’t memorized exactly how that’s calculated? What casual sports fan can’t tell you what the NFL passer rating mean is to two decimal places?