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| The nation's no. 1 high school recruit, 18-year-old Reuben Foster, and his four year old daughter.... |
Seriously, that's who RGIII is: the antithesis to Michael Vick.
With the quarterback position being the most important - and most marketable - position in the NFL, the media and Corporate America has been longing for a black athlete with the moral character and apparent intelligence like RGIII, who seems to have come straight from central casting. [Building An Empire: Debating The Future Worth Of RGIII, CBS DC, 12-28-12]:
Ron Oswalt, CEO of Sports Marketing Experts, has been following Griffin since his high school football days. Throughout his career thus far, he said he has noticed a humility and maturity that, to him, makes RGIII unique.
“One advantage I believe he does have is the great education he received … and his military background and really strict upbringing,” he told CBSDC. “All of those things will really benefit him in the long run – [he is marketable] on and off the field.”
He added, “An athlete giving back who’s well-educated and well-spoken, it’s one of the best attributes of RGIII. He gets out there with kids and the local community.”Well-educated compared to whom? Well-spoken compared to whom? Mr. Oswalt, please answer the question.
Are you referring to the 69 percent of the NFL that is black, players like Ray Lewis who were in questionable situations last century and have helped convince a growing number of people that the NFL is destined to become just another variation of the thug National Basketball Association (NBA)?
RGIII doesn't look like he's going to engage in dog fights with Michael Vick, or go to the club and chase women with Chad Ochocinco, appearing to have assimilated to a higher form of culture then what predominates through the NFL.
But let's compare him to certain high school football athlete, the highly recruited product of Columbus, Georgia, Reuben Foster. A linebacker who is rated a five-star prospect by both Rivals and Scout.com (a Web site populated by primarily heterosexual white males who salivate over 16-to-18-year-old black high school prospects that might sign with their alma mater, like a NAMBLA member would at a Boy Scout convention), he originally signed with Auburn University.
With the firing of Auburn Head Coach Gene Chizik, he de-committed from Auburn; as an 18-year-old, this black male happens to have a four year old daughter.
He is quite different then RGIII was when he was being recruited by Baylor [Five-star LB Reuben Foster 'confused' on where to commit, wants what's best for his daughter, family, Al.com, 12-30-12]
When asked where his head is at in regard to recruiting, Auburn High's Reuben Foster recently revealed things have been quite difficult and confusing.
"I want the best for me and my family, but it's confusing right now," Foster told The Opelika-Auburn News. "I don't know what to do."
Foster recruiting past is littered with uncertainty. He originally committed to Alabama over Georgia in 2011 before flipping to Auburn prior to the 2012 season. He then decommitted Dec. 7 after the university dismissed head coach Gene Chizik and his staff.
Since decommitting, Foster has opened his recruitment back up, and is now considering Alabama, Auburn and Georgia as well as LSU, Miami and Washington.
Foster also spoke about his family and 4-year-old daughter, A'Ziya Blackmon, in the wide-ranging Defensive Player of the Year interview.
"My daughter means the world to me," he said. "Just to know that I'm trying to support her and my family. It makes me go harder. It makes me want to die for the sport because if you want to die for the sport, you want to die for your family because I'm doing it for my family."
The 6-foot-2, 242-pounder is considered to be one of the top high school football players in the country. 247Sports rates him as the No. 2 linebacker in the country and No. 10 player overall, while ESPN has Foster sitting at No. 24 on its list of the top 150 players.Foster was 13 or 14 when he conceived his daughter; as a high school student, how on earth has he been providing his daughter? Can you say 'welfare/Section 8/EBT'?
Mr. Foster would not be being considered by any university where he not a highly sought after football recruit; his labor wouldn't be prized by any entity on earth, outside of college football or basketball coaches.
College athletes can't be paid and I've yet to read of a college football program that offers babysitting services as part of tuition. Hilariously, Auburn University has a football program that scarcely reflects its student body -- like most Southeastern Conference (SEC) football teams, Auburn is an overwhelmingly white university with a football program that is disproportionately black.
After a number of off-the-field problems, former coach Gene Chizik had to hire a professional babysitting service to make sure his majority black team met curfew and went to class [Auburn hires private security company to enforce curfews, AOL Sports, 10-8-12]:
If things weren’t bad enough at Auburn, the program has hired a private babysitter for its players.
Actually, the university has contracted with a private security firm to help enforce player curfews, according to The Montgomery Advertiser.
Stanley Dallas of the Event Operations Group confirmed to the paper that the company is working in conjunction with Auburn’s football player development department to make sure curfews are being kept.
Curfews, as the paper points out, are commonplace for the nights before games. But Auburn has a nightly curfew for players.
“We always do what’s in the best interest of our team,” Auburn coach Gene Chizik told the Advertiser. “We have a curfew check and we have to employ people to help us with some of the kids off campus. Other than that I’m not going into any details on that.Auburn University has put together a number of "top rated" recruiting classes over the past few years, replete with players who racked up impressive high accolades that put them in same category of Mr. Reuben Foster in their respective graduation class. So it's safe to say that Auburn's primarily black football program is populated not by black athletes like RGIII, but by black athletes like Mr. Foster. More on the curfew program is found at USA Today.
Auburn University has an undergraduate student enrollment of roughly 25,000 students, of which only 3.6% are black male; however, a study by the Soviet-sounding The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that 67 percent of the football and basketball is black.
Just as RGIII is marketable because he has apparently assimilated to "white culture," Auburn University's football program collapsed in 2012 (and Gene Chizik lost his job) because the team capitulated to black culture [Gene Chizik’s Auburn program was reportedly ‘coming apart at the seams’ well before season, Yahoo! Sports, 10-26-12]:
When a coach is fired, in any sport, there's often many details which get leaked and explain exactly why the move was made. After Gene Chizik was fired by Auburn, it didn't take long for many unflattering details about his program to be unearthed.
Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham News wrote a comprehensive piece on Chizik and the problems his program was having. The full story can be found here.
The problems weren't just on the field, although those were plentiful and were discussed in the column. Off the field, Auburn was apparently a mess too.
The column outlines how players weren't going to class and quit coming to mandatory workouts. Chizik tried to implement an 11 p.m. weekday curfew, hiring a private security firm to check on players, even those who lived off campus, and the players grew to resent that in a hurry.
The column said the problems started to surface shortly after the 2010 national championship season, when four players were arrested and charged with armed robbery.
When Chizik didn't get much credit for the title, with a lot of that credit going to Cam Newton and then-offensive coordinator Guz Malzahn, Chizik "seemed to change," in particular taking more control over game plans.
About that time, discipline in the program started to slip, and there were problems with academics. Here's one particularly damning passage from Scarbinsky's column:One example: During the second week of the regular season, before the cracks in the foundation began to show up on the field in a lifeless 28-10 loss at Mississippi State, an academic adviser told Chizik there was a problem with one of his Auburn starters.
The epitaph of not just the Chizik era, but of the American Century simply reads as such: "In a quest to watch their alma mater's win college football glory, white American's tolerated the proliferation of black culture and uplifted the one or two black individuals who assimilated to white culture as the paragon of virtue and all that is good and holy."The adviser said the player wasn't going to class, wasn't doing his classwork, wasn't making much of an effort at all in the classroom.There are more examples in the column, which serves as a epitaph to the Chizik era that will go down as one of the more unique runs for any coach in college football history. Whatever Chizik wants to do next, future employers will have questions for him about what happened near the end of his time at Auburn.
Chizik's response: He told the adviser he didn't believe him. That player started the Mississippi State game and struggled terribly, never showed much development on the field and eventually lost his starting job.
Seriously, a black high school athlete, with a four-year-old daughter, is being courted by some of the top colleges in America; not because he is an academic titan who will enrich society with his labor, but because we have been conditioned to believe that only black athletes make college football legitimate.
Were Reuben Foster not an athlete, he'd be the type of black person you do everything possible to live nowhere near; were RGIII not an athlete, he'd be the type of black person Conservatism Inc. bent-over-backward to give a Senate seat too.
A four-year-old daughter at 18?
Dysgenics in action.
So yes, honor RGIII as a black 'diamond in the rough'; just remember we notice those who standout as assimilating to some form of white culture, because the rest of the NFL and much of college football is populated by Reuben Fosters, whose sole ticket to a scholarship is because they mature faster then their white counterparts, leading recruiters to believe in the superiority of black athletes.
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