Sunshine and SEC Football
The cover story for Sports Illustrated two weeks ago described the dominance of the South Eastern Conference (SEC) in US college football.
“More players are invited to the NFL combine each year from the SEC than from any other conference,” Ole Miss’s [Head Coach] Nutt says when asked about the quality of the athletes who compete in the league. “The most players drafted just about every year going back 10 years come from the SEC.” Indeed, dating to the 2000 NFL draft, the conference has had 400 players selected; the next-best league is the ACC, with 364.
It’s no mystery to Nutt why an SEC team has won the BCS national championship each of the last three years (Florida in 2006 and 2008, LSU in 2007) and is favored to produce the champ again this season. “I watch [teams in] other conferences all the time and I think, Boy, I’d like to play them,” Nutt says.
But, for GNXP readers, this is the most fun comment.
It all starts with recruiting. Nutt says that players from the South, particularly those who reside in Florida, become better college players than kids from other parts of the country, though he can’t explain why. “Maybe it’s the sunshine,” he says. “In any given year an average of 335 young men [from Florida] sign with Division I schools. When I was coaching at Murray State [in Kentucky], I remember going to Florida and seeing, maybe, coaches from Wake Forest down there. But now? You’ve got Wisconsin, Minnesota, Purdue, Virginia, Virginia Tech. You’ve got schools from North Carolina. They’re all down there, and they’re coming for the speed. We signed nine from Florida this year. Nine!”
Yeah! It’s the “sunshine” that causes the “quality of the athletes” in the SEC. Caste Football calculates that the percentage of white starters at SEC teams is 25%, lower than any other major conference.
Of course, from a GNXP point of view, sunshine may be actually have played a role, but not in the way that Nutt implies . . .
I am very skeptical. The Caste Football site lists as an affiliate the American Nationalist Union, an anti-Semitic outfit. Check out their web sites.
There is also something to be said about being able to play all year round.
The fact that SEC teams dominate college football, and their (black) players are heavily recruited by the pros directly contradicts Caste Football’s central tenet: that heavily black teams are the result of discrimination against whites.
The South also has a much stronger football culture than the coasts or big cities in general. About half the black population lives outside of the South now, though there’s been substantial remigration for better job opportunities (and to get away from Latinos in the West).
I don’t believe that the millions of black Americans in major urban areas like NYC, Philly, Chicago, & LA are represented in college football in proportion to their share of the black population. The SEC is both a black and a Southern phenomenon.
Genetics and culture interacting in ways that are difficult to sort out. (Surprise!)
The Penn State study of race admixture at the beginning of the decade found that rural Southern blacks were blacker than urban blacks, with urban West Coast blacks having the highest level of white admixture. One sample from the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, where the African-influenced Gullah dialect is spoken, was the blackest of all, at 96% African. (Clarence Thomas is a Gullah.)
This argument by elambend has been used by scouts. Ditto for Caribbean-origin baseball players.
My daughter dated a back-up [white] QB for THE U [UMiami] who was sort of told that he wouldn’t be needed when Jacory Harris [whose seven teammates at Northwest Miami-Dade High all came to UMiami---undefeated in 30 games during high school] started to blossom. Robert Marve was also told to take a walk. My daughter’s friend will be just fine at Memphis, which like UMiami also has 4/22 ratio, because his dad owns a little company called FedEx, lock, stock, and barrel!
And football is much more of a social phenomenon than baseball or basketball, especially down in the deep South. Texas & Florida live for those Friday Night Lights. UMiami & LSU are tied for the number of NFL players who are grads at 41, last I checked.
I believe that Caste Football is reliable on this sort of stuff. You can check their totals for individual teams if you like. (Keep in mind that players get injured, starters get benched and so on.) I don’t know any college football fan who would disagree with the claim that the SEC has a higher percentage of black players than other conferences.
Note, also, that it is not clear why Caste Football would want to lie about this. Their thesis is that white football players are unfairly discriminated against by coaches. If that were true, one would expect to see teams with more white players do better. The fact that the most successful conference is the least white one contradicts their prior beliefs.
What’s funny is that your observation directly disproves Caste Football’s central tenet, that the black domination of college and pro ball is the result of bias against whites.
I am puzzled by David Kane’s defense of his use of Caste Football as a source. It would seem to me that if Caste Football willingly associates with a nationalist, anti-Semitic group, then Caste Football is quite willing to associate itself with completely unreliable people. It’s not just a matter of shunning someone because he or she holds vile beliefs; anti-Semites like the American Nationalist Union are extremely fast and loose with the facts. Isn’t that alone enough to make people who wish to make serious arguments refuse to use Caste Football as a source?
Let’s quote from the ANU web site:
“Abraham Lincoln enjoys a sainted reputation in history. Supposedly the reputation derives from his saving of the Union.
However, the facts of his relationship with a certain group of people suggest a more fundamental reason for his fame. Lincoln was an intimate of Jewry throughout his politi”
http://www.anu.org/
1) Caste Football is making a series of empirical claims. If you don’t believe them, you can check those claims. If a noxious group X claims that the sun will rise in the east, they may be right or wrong.
And, as pointed out above, in this case the data contradict the central tenet of caste football. When group X produces data that goes against their prior beliefs then, on average, I am more likely to believe the data.
I poked around a bit on various college teams websites. I found nothing that contradicted the claims from Caste Football and much to support. Is there a specific team whose data you distrust?
2) Steve: I would tend to doubt that admixture tells the story here. Judging by skin color, there is a wide range of ancestry among black players, in the SEC and elsewhere.
3) daveinboca: Agreed. There is clearly something of a social/cultural phenomenon related to region. If you are big and fast and grow up in the south, local football coaches will come looking for you, no matter what your color. That happens a lot less in, say, New York City. So, it is not just raw population that matters but the intersection of population and sorting efficiency.
I was just amused by the “sunshine” comment, especially in conjunction with “they’re coming for the speed.” Every knowledgeable football fan knows what that means . . .
I have no special knowledge of college football, though I would not be surprised at all if CasteFootball’s narrow claims about the numbers of football players in different categories are correct. In fact it is quite possible that CasteFootball does good empirical work in some limited range. But David Kane doesn’t acknowledge the point that racist groups might not correctly report the facts.
It’s telling that Kane uses the claim that “the sun will rise in the east” as his example. To him the fact that blacks do better in college football is as plain as day and that justifies citing anybody to support that claim. I’m not saying that CasteFootball’s work may not be valuable; I’m just saying that one should be more skeptical when it comes to using the work of people who’ve demonstrated that truth is not important to them. It’s nice that Kane did a little checking himself; it makes me put more trust in the data. But the very fact that Kane cites CasteFootball without an explanation as to why we should believe them makes me put less trust in his posts.
It is of course a good thing that Kane provides a link to CasteFootball’s web site so that his readers can check for themselves what kind of hateful people he is relying on.
As with all complex human activities there are multiple factors affecting the outcome. It’s amazing how often people in the HBD-sphere forget this.
Football, like all sports, requires skill development.
States vary a lot in the level of football skill development. In some states 8 year old kids are already playing in helmet and pads, whereas in other states this doesn’t happen until junior high. This makes a big difference later on. The intensity of HS football in Texas (see FNL) is way beyond what you’ll find in most other states. I doubt NYC has good youth leagues for football, but Ohio and Pennsylvania do.
One of the least skill-intensive events is the 100m dash — yes, technique is still important, but less so than in soccer, football, basketball, etc. If you want a good measure of the genetic football potential on a state by state basis, look at the list of fastest 100m times by state (easy to find online). I think you’ll find most SEC states eclipse the times put up in places like Iowa or Oregon. Around here, you can probably win the state title with a 10.8 or so. Down there, it might take a 10.2 or 10.4 (that’s a huge difference).
You can easily get to a few-factor model for football prospect output by state — genetic (100m times), skill development (penetration of pop warner leagues, budgets of HS programs), and overall state population.
1) I am happy to “acknowledge the point that racist groups might not correctly report the facts.” In fact, the same is somtimes true of non-racist groups.
2) “To him the fact that blacks do better in college football is as plain as day and that justifies citing anybody to support that claim.” This is as “plain as day” to anyone who watches college football. I don’t think that there is a single FBS team (out of 100+) — excepting, possibly, the military academies — in which African-Americans are not over-represented relative to their share of the population.
3) “As with all complex human activities there are multiple factors affecting the outcome. It’s amazing how often people in the HBD-sphere forget this.” Which people in the HBD-sphere forget this? I don’t know a single HBD-blogger who would disagree with this obvious truism.
“I don’t know a single HBD-blogger who would disagree with this obvious truism.”
I was mainly referring to commenters, but probably it occasionally applies to bloggers.
Just because they wouldn’t disagree with the explicit statement doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally make a slip in logic.
I live in the South. I coach youth football. In our league, the players start wearing pads and playing tackle football at five years old! I’ve looked on occasion at the Caste Football site because Steve Sailer has linked it, most recently concerning the leading rushers in the NCAA. The standard non-HBD response to a query about the over-representation (relative to population) of blacks in college and pro football is, as Steve has noted, that they are more motivated by their circumstances to excel in sports and thus work much harder to achieve greatness. Ridiculous. When you coach youth football it is exceedingly difficult to defend against speed, unlike (at least to an extent) junior high and especially high school where a good defensive scheme can somewhat lessen its advantage. In youth football, if you have speed, you simply put the speedy kid at QB and run him around the end. Result, touchdown! You get three guesses as to the race of the kids who run the ball in our leagues, especially on the 5-6 and 7-8 year old teams. I suppose it’s all that work ethic they have when they’re 0-4 years old.