Whitlock: The ‘bread’ showered on Kyler Murray and Deshaun Watson fuels NFL ‘circus’
The same billionaires willing to pay Kyler Murray and Deshaun Watson $46 million a year in salary are too racist to pay black men $5 million to coach Murray and Watson.
The argument that the NFL is a bastion of white supremacy hasn’t made much sense for nearly 50 years. You’d think this past off-season would be the final nail in the outdated narrative. But it’s unlikely to die. It will be kept alive by a constant retelling of the league’s flawed history and a simple-minded explanation of the league’s hiring practices related to head coaches.
Welcome to NFL season 2022. Pardon me for my lack of enthusiasm.
Training camps have opened. We’re XX days from the start of the regular season. I’ve never been less excited for the start of professional football. The game feels disconnected from reality. It’s used as a prop to make specious arguments denigrating the league and America as systemically racist. I don’t have the stomach for it.
The American economy is in free fall. Inflation has shrunk the middle class. Times are hard for most Americans. Except for those with some rare athletic skill and/or a willingness to ignore the absurdity of elite influencers getting rich for promoting games and narratives intended to distract from our descent into Babylon.
Murray and Watson have rare athletic skills and little else. This off-season, the Arizona Cardinals and the Cleveland Browns rained record contracts on the pair of quarterbacks.
Despite two dozen sexual assault allegations and a likely suspension hovering, the Browns traded for Watson and gave him a guaranteed contract worth $230 million. It’s the most guaranteed money in NFL history. Imagine that. The man with a league-shattering number of sexual assault allegations received the most guaranteed money in NFL history. That’s quite the combination. And it’s rather surprising, given the fact that the NFL allegedly suffers from systemic racism. Watson is black.
So is Kyler Murray. Murray has no off-field issues. His issues are on the field. He’s now the second-highest-paid player in the league, trailing only Aaron Rodgers, but he’s not one of the NFL’s 10 best quarterbacks or 50 best players.
The wear and tear of the regular season causes the pint-sized QB to melt in December. In three seasons and 13 games in the month of December, the 5-foot-9, 190-pound passer has thrown 17 touchdowns and 13 interceptions. The Cardinals are 5-8 in those games.
In 46 NFL starts, Murray is 22-23-1. He’s never thrown for more than 26 TDs in a season. In this era, elite QBs routinely toss 35+ TDs. In his first three years, Murray has thrown 70 touchdowns and 34 interceptions. In comparison, in his first 46 starts, Patrick Mahomes tossed 114 TDs and 24 INTs. In 49 starts, Lamar Jackson has thrown 84 TDs and 31 INTs.
Let’s don’t even compare win-loss records. Mahomes and Jackson led winning teams. Kyler Murray makes more money than Mahomes and Jackson.
That’s likely going to change as it relates to Jackson. The Ravens and Jackson have spent much of the off-season trying to work out a deal. The contracts awarded to Watson and Murray have complicated those negotiations.
Given Murray’s deal, what do you pay Jackson? Jackson won the league’s MVP award in 2019.
But I digress. The point of this missive is to call out America’s absurd culture, priorities, and debates. The NFL, America’s national pastime, is America’s primary supplier of bread and circuses. It’s entertainment designed to keep the masses happy while the masses are robbed of God-given rights and freedoms.
That’s why the NFL refuses to defend itself from allegations of racism. That’s why Colin Kaepernick remains in the league’s conversation. The Raiders granted him a tryout this off-season. It’s why the Pittsburgh Steelers hired Brian Flores, the former Dolphins coach who is suing the NFL for racial discrimination. The Dolphins fired Flores. He claims he was fired because he’s black.
The NFL is a willing participant in the overthrow of American values.
For years, I wondered why a league and industry that produces more black male millionaires than any other industry is so reluctant to defend itself from allegations of systemic racism. Commissioner Roger Goodell and and the league’s top black executive, Troy Vincent, know the league’s positive impact on black boys and men.
Why won’t they tell it? Why do they constantly bend to the woke mob?
They know racial bias and animus do not explain the racial disparity between black and white head coaches. The owners don’t care who they pay to lead their teams. The Browns just gave an alleged black serial predator $230 million to play quarterback.
The truth is the tattered and shredded black family structure has undermined American black people’s ability to produce male leaders. We’re a matriarchal culture. Because of the psychological damage caused by having no father in the home, black athletes do not respond well to black male authority figures, especially in a sport with a leadership model similar to the military.
Here’s another inconvenient and uncomfortable truth: The rise of the black quarterback is directly tied to technological advances that allow coaches to puppet-master QBs from the sidelines.
In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, quarterbacks used to routinely call their own plays. That’s no longer the case. Football games, now more than ever, are orchestrated from the sideline and the press box. The players are less valuable as leaders. They’re paid for their raw talent. That’s why the Browns do not care about Watson’s character flaws. He’s not being paid to lead. He’s being paid to follow the instructions communicated in his helmet.
He’d rather those instructions be delivered by a white man. That’s part of the reason he was so comfortable last season skipping the opportunity to play for David Culley in Houston.
Black players don’t care about black coaches. The whole simple-minded conversation about black NFL coaches is manufactured bread and circuses for talk show hosts and lazy journalists.
Are you not entertained?
Whitlock: NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson could be the next Kobe Bryant
We live in an era without guiding principles and values. That’s the cost of a secular culture. Warring political factions randomly enforce a code of conduct based on polls, special interests, and the acquisition of power.
Starting tomorrow, with the beginning of the NFL’s crazy season of transactions and player movement, we will learn how our current ruling class plans to assess and/or use quarterback Deshaun Watson.
On the surface, it will be a difficult ruling. Watson spent the last 10 months under a cloud of negative suspicion. Nearly two dozen women accused him of sexual assault or sexual misconduct. In the past week, a grand jury declined to indict him on criminal charges. Watson spun the grand jury’s no bill as vindication of his innocence, tweeting:
“When you stand on TRUTH, the LORD will FREE you.”
Again, we live in a godless era. Watson is a professed believer. Somehow he foolishly believes God intervened on his behalf in a dispute revolving around Watson propositioning multiple Instagram models/massage therapists to provide him a happy ending.
Lawyers set Watson free. The truth is quite muddled as it relates to allegations leveled against Watson.
The bigger problem for Watson in the court of public opinion is that a decade ago, the NFL suspended Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for six games for two messy, public sexual assault allegations, even though he was never criminally indicted.
The ruling class demanded that commissioner Roger Goodell harshly punish Big Ben, who is white. Will they demand the same for Watson, who is black?
It seems unlikely. The spirit of the age dictates that, depending on their political affiliation, we hold black men and white men to far different standards.
Watson won’t be the next Ben Roethlisberger. Watson will be the next Kobe Bryant, the former NBA star who seemingly elevated his stardom by avoiding criminal prosecution resulting from a teenage woman accusing him of rape.
Like Watson, at the age of 25, with the bulk of his career still in front of him, Bryant faced a salacious rape allegation he deemed false. Much of the mainstream media celebrated Bryant’s ability to continue to play while the criminal prosecution loomed.
When the criminal case was dropped and the civil suit resolved, the media moved on and treated Bryant as a deity. Bryant’s tragic and untimely death in a helicopter crash further expanded his religious-like following. It is now far safer in American society to mock and criticize Jesus than Kobe Bryant.
The same fate could await Watson if he’s able to lead a team to the Super Bowl.
Within minutes of the grand jury’s no bill, influential NFL reporter Adam Schefter fired off a tweet announcing the news and insinuating the no bill equated to exoneration. The rest of the media immediately began speculating on which team might win the Watson sweepstakes.
The quarterback demanded a trade last off-season and sat out the 2021 season rather than play for the Houston Texans. The Carolina Panthers and the New Orleans Saints are reportedly leading the race to land Watson via trade.
Watson’s pariah status has disappeared.
Let me be clear. I don’t have a problem with Watson re-entering the league. I’m not bothered that a half-dozen NFL teams expressed an interest in signing him. I won’t be bothered if the NFL decides not to suspend him and considers the 2021 season as time served.
I believe in second, third, fourth, and fifth chances. America is the land of opportunity. I loved Michael Vick’s second career in the NFL after he served prison time for dog fighting. I argued that former Cowboys defensive end Greg Hardy was worthy of football redemption after his domestic violence incident.
I was no fan of Kobe Bryant’s playing career, his Michael Jordan impersonation, or his treatment of Shaquille O’Neal and other teammates. But I certainly believed he had every right to play basketball while the allegations against him were being resolved. And I loved how Bryant represented and carried himself in retirement.
What I don't like are racial hypocrisy and double standards. What I don’t like is a society with no guiding principles or values. What I don’t like is the fact that we pick and choose who is worthy of derision based on skin color.
I don’t like racism – regardless of the color of the perpetrator or the victim.
Former Baylor football coach Art Briles is treated as a pariah because of a bogus narrative created by powerful people in need of a scapegoat for a campus-wide sexual assault problem at Baylor. The media accepted and sold that bogus narrative. Briles is white. He never assaulted anyone or was accused of assaulting anyone. But he’s been deemed unworthy of redemption.
That’s racist.
It’s also racist that modern American society will determine its level of outrage over the murder of black people based on the race of the murderer. Black people killing black people is no big deal. It’s inevitable and harmless. It’s like abortion. It’s a good thing. It’s liberating. It’s my murder, my choice.
But when a white person kills a black person, the world must come to a halt and the actions of the victim are rendered irrelevant.
It’s racism.
When a society rejects God, it rejects principles and values that lead to fairness, order, and harmony. In this world of disorder, Deshaun Watson will be a hero and a martyr.
Whitlock: The war between fitness model Brittany Renner and NBA player P.J. Washington exemplifies the dangers of WMD: Women messaging directly
For those of you who have followed my work for any length of time, you know I consider the HBO show "The Wire" television's bible. The crime drama depicting the relationship among Baltimore police, politicians, drug users, and drug dealers explains America.
I can pretty much analogize anything to "The Wire." Today, I'll use the show to explain Instagram fitness model Brittany Renner, NBA small forward P.J. Washington, NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson, and the dangers of social media addiction.
Renner, 29, and Washington, 22, are back in the celebrity-gossip news cycle. A few months ago, the pair had a baby. A few weeks ago, Renner and Washington split as a couple. Yesterday, internet gossip spread that Washington would be forced to pay Renner $200,000 a month in child support.
Social media memes ran wild with the news, joking that Renner had scored a supermax "Thot" contract from a naive professional athlete. An old video appeared of Renner saying the easiest way for a woman to score a huge payday was to get knocked up by a dumb jock. The Renner-Washington news and the countless memes provoked me to join the tweet onslaught. I tweeted:
"P.J. Washington caught in the real Trap House. But for the grace of God there go I. Four years ago, I used to spend 30 minutes a day looking at Brittany's IG."
The tweet and admission formed the best kind of joke — humor laced with a kernel of truth and soaked in self-deprecation.
This leads me to my "The Wire" analogy. There are two problematic users in modern society — drug users and social media users. Both users chase the same dopamine high. In "The Wire," the highest form of heroin was nicknamed "WMD," a weapon of mass destruction. The same is true on social media corners. Women Messaging Directly is the best high.
When you see those three dots bubbling, you have the same excited anticipation the fictional junkie Bubbles had when he placed a needle deep inside a vein in his arm. You lie back and wait for the high. If she never hits send or the message is negative, you complain about the quality of the product and go buy dope on a different corner.
Brittany Renner is Proposition Joe. She is a weapon of mass destruction. Her dope is straight off the boat from the Greeks. It's uncut. Brittany buys for a dollar and sells for two.
The former Jackson State University soccer MVP started posting on Instagram eight or nine years ago under the name Bundle of Brittany. I can't remember when I discovered her. It was probably around the time she was dating Colin Kaepernick, back in 2014, before Kap turned woke. Back then, Kap was my favorite player. And good Lord, I loved looking at pictures of Brittany. I exaggerated when I said I spent 30 minutes every day perusing her IG page. But once a month I did.
I had an Instagram addiction. It was my Pornhub. At one point, I followed probably 75 IG models. Bundle of Brittany was my favorite.
I bring all this up because I actually have sympathy for P.J. Washington and, to a lesser degree, Deshaun Watson. If I were in my early 20s, super wealthy, single, famous, and attractive like them, I would likely be mainlining WMD.
It took 50 years of life experience for me to wean myself off my baby-got-back IG addiction. No way would I have conquered my addiction at 25. IG is heroin. It's an incredible delusion that cheapens all forms of human interaction. The sexual component makes IG more addictive and harmful than even Twitter.
Watson ruined his reputation and perhaps his career searching for rub-and-tug massage therapists on Instagram. A young kid with monopoly money could satiate his lust simply by reaching for his cell phone and direct-messaging the fitness model/massage therapist of his choice. It's too easy. It's too tempting.
Anything worth having should require some difficulty and discipline. Technology is removing difficulty and discipline from our lives. It's not improving our lives. Humans were meant to hunt and gather. We now Uber and DoorDash. I'm a symptom of an American reality. We're the most overweight place on earth.
Relative strangers create children after swiping right on Tinder or connecting over DMs.
Renner likely fished Washington out of her Instagram river. When Washington was a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, the then-27-year-old Renner started showing up at his basketball games decked out in Kentucky gear. She'd already been in relationships with or linked to former Jackson State quarterback Casey Therriault, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NBA players James Harden, Jamal Murray, and Ben Simmons, entertainers Lil Uzi Vert, Drake, Trey Songz, Tyga, and Chris Brown.
She was considered a "Thot," a new slang word for groupie. The letters stand for "that ho over there." She posed naked on the cover of her 2019 book, titled "Judge This Cover." She wrote explicitly about her illicit sexual lifestyle with high-profile men.
It's fair to blame Washington for allowing himself to get trapped by someone so open with her immorality.
But Washington is just a kid. How would we view this situation if a 27-year-old male porn star targeted a female sophomore in college?
I apologize for making excuses for Washington. I deeply apologize if this comes off like I'm excusing Watson. It's easy to point out Washington's and Watson's failures. I'm writing this so we can assess some of the other factors in play. The phony social media world baits all of us into phony casual relationships.
But for the grace of God, there go I.Whitlock: NFL's Roger Goodell is afraid of Deshaun Watson's black privilege
In the new woke NFL, the Deshaun Watson story is quite incredible.
Despite more than 20 civil allegations of sexual misconduct hanging over the Houston quarterback, Watson reported to training camp, business as usual, and the Texans are weighing options to trade him to another team.
Watson is drawing a paycheck, and demand for his future services remains strong. That's incredible.
According to a story on ESPN.com and Watson's attorney Rusty Hardin, 10 women have filed criminal complaints against Watson with Houston police. The lawsuits and criminal complaints should have Watson on the commissioner's exempt list, a tool Roger Goodell uses to sideline players charged with or under investigation for violating the league's personal conduct code. The exempt list is a paid leave of absence until the player settles his legal matters.
The fact that Watson isn't on the list is baffling at first glance but understandable upon further review. The left-wing website Deadspin published a column Monday asking, "Why isn't Deshaun Watson on the commissioner's exempt list?"
Funny that Deadspin would ask this question when the site is part of the reason Watson isn't sidelined.
Roger Goodell, the NFL, and the Houston Texans are playing racial politics. They fear attack from the identity politics police on the left. They're afraid to discipline a high-profile black quarterback. Deshaun Watson can't be treated like Pittsburgh's white quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
Eleven years ago, Goodell suspended Big Ben for six games because he faced a relatively small number — in comparison to Watson — of sexual misconduct allegations. Prosecutors declined to bring charges against Roethlisberger after a 20-year-old college student accused him of sexual assault. That did not stop Goodell from punishing Roethlisberger and requiring him to undergo a comprehensive behavioral evaluation.
Big Ben faced discipline long before the #MeToo movement and long before Trump Derangement Syndrome politicized every aspect of American life.
My point is, given the tenor of the country now, Watson should be facing a harsher scrutiny and punishment than Roethlisberger did a decade ago. Watson is not because the league fears a racial backlash.
Black privilege is the only explanation for the league's hands-off approach to Watson. It's the only explanation for Watson not being totally radioactive and untradeable.
I'm not arguing Watson's guilt or innocence. Some of — or even all of — his accusers might be motivated by money. Maybe he had a series of innocent sexual misunderstandings with personal masseuses he contacted via Instagram. I've heard that requesting a rub-and-tug from an amateur does lead to misunderstandings.
Whether miscommunication or criminal assault, 22 allegations in this climate should lead to Watson sitting in a corner somewhere until his legal matters conclude. A strong push from Goodell could compel Watson to financially settle with his accusers. That push doesn't appear to be coming. Goodell has prioritized Black Lives Matter above #MeToo. Given the racial dynamics and gender of his employees, Goodell's pragmatism makes sense.
So does Watson's reluctance to settle with his accusers. A settlement could provoke more accusers. How many massage therapists has Watson negotiated a happy ending with? This is starting to feel as if a fast-food drive-through employee sued me for misconduct. By the time the allegations finished rolling in, I would need a Dream Team of lawyers twice as large as O.J. Simpson's defense team.
The left constructed a safe space for Deshaun Watson. I'm not sure they're happy about it.
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How to Combat the Left This November | 8/19/22