pappymojo said:
For all the talk of the negative sideshow, why would a business not view this as a marketing positive? I would assume that signing an openly gay player to your team is a positive opportunity to sell shirts and promote your brand image not just this year but forever.
Personally I think this is the case, too. But as someone else said, probably a different mentality among a lot of NFL types. And, I guess that goes to much of my point: underlying mentality has a lot to do with one's "unbiased" judgements.
MyDaughterLovesTomGordon said:
We see all the time that the NFL is a hyper-competitive league and that you have to REALLY do some shit for talent to not win out. Kill someone in the crosswalk? Throw your girlfriend down the stairs? Kill someone in a DUI accident? Knock your wife out in an elevator?
Eh. If you can maybe give the team an edge to win, you'll find yourself on a team.
If Sam could play, he'd be playing. If he's not, it's because he's thought to be just not as good as someone else. Why would being gay be more of a black mark than actually killing someone? Don't you have to be remarkably cynical about the NFL to think that way?
Chemistry Schmemistry said:
Which is worse: prejudice, or the prejudiced assumption of prejudice at every turn? Hopefully, the answer is that they both stink.
I looked around for some strawmen but can't find any, probably due to how many have been shot down in this thread. I've yet to see a post arguing that the NFL is not hyper-competitive nor have accusations flown that homophobic prejudice is necessarily behind anyone thinking that Sam can't cut it in the NFL...spare me the victim playing violin.
The argument is a lot more nuanced, to quote a poster who I believe tends more toward the Sam can't cut it camp (correct me if I'm wrong on that):
dcmissle said:
Sure. If I am calling the shots for another team and on the fence about Sam and I then see the Rams unfairly savaged, maybe I think twice. Not because I am homophobic or a coward, but because I am ambivalent to begin with and don't need the BS.
That's not dishonorable. It's human.
I think that's a fair description of the sort of bias that may be in play here. I referred to that in regard to myself in that I fully cop that I'm politically/personally sympathetic to Sam, and have no doubt that influences my positive take on his play. But really it's basic social science, there's no one who seriously thinks humans make decisions without the impact of all sorts of subtle conditioning factors, even as we all think we're paragons of a lack of bias and everyone else is hopelessly biased. Welcome to Sociology 101.
Super Nomario said:
It wasn't overnight; it was a long slide over kind of a disastrous spring, starting with a lousy performance in Senior Bowl practices and culminating with the Combine, where he probably showed the least athleticism of any edge rusher there.
Shayne Skov is an example of a guy projected as a 3rd/4th rounder who ended up undrafted because his measurables were so poor (he ran a 5.09 40 at his Pro Day). So it's not like Sam is the only player this happened to. Of course, we can't rule out that his coming out hurt his draft stock, but I find the explanation that he fell solely for ordinary reasons convincing.
Bequette was just as productive in college - he didn't win the SEC DPOY because he missed three games his senior year, but he probably had the best year among SEC edge rushers, and his overall numbers line up with Sam's pretty closely. Bequette was also kind of a Combine freak; his 40 was just OK but he dominated the agility drills. And he's got prototypical DE size at 6'5" 274. Obviously it hasn't translated; he's been a waste of a pick. But there was a lot of reason to think his upside was higher coming out of Arkansas than Sam's coming out of Missouri.
I think this is right. We can say Sam got kind of a raw deal after the college career and preseason he had, but the reality is that lots of guys get kind of raw deals, and we can't necessarily assume it was because Sam is gay. There aren't enough slots in the NFL for everyone to get a fair shot, unfortunately.
First, one other correction of fact: it was overnight. Literally, per the links I posted above, Sam slid 60 (or was it 90? I'm having memory dyslexia between 6/9) slots on a ranking board immediately after his announcement. I don't mind the disagreement...but I do mind facts being mis-stated, which has happened several times now. That said, it's not like I disagree with the meat of SN's post -- certainly the combine either furthered that slide or justified it or both. And, again, no one is claiming that a bunch of NFL GMs who would kill their mother for the slightest advantage are looking at Sam and thinking, eh, don't want that gay dude on my team even though he's better than some of my guys.
But bias is much more subtle. Since a bunch of you are about to tell me how wrong I am about that, if you do tell me first why it is that hordes of NFL GMs with that same cutthroat attitude for years looked at black QBs and thought, 'eh, I wish...but sadly dude can't cut it.' In short, the following statement is surely false:
MyDaughterLovesTomGordon said:
...If you can maybe give the team an edge to win, you'll find yourself on a team....
No. For decades, without a color line and in a sport in which there was free mixing of the races and supposedly less than the general prejudice against African Americans, the perceptions of GMs about whom there is no reason to assume they were raging bigots still had a bias that, I think we can all agree, led them to ignore guys who could have given their teams "an edge to win." (A very big edge, I might add, given it's the most important position.)
So we can we at least stop with this silliness about how this is some sort of pure, unbiased world of judgment going on here? Obviously it's very difficult to find cases as obvious as black QBs, but it sure blows the shit out of the idea that there is no subtle biases among competitive, cutthroat GMs.
SN also writes that
I think this is right. We can say Sam got kind of a raw deal after the college career and preseason he had, but the reality is that lots of guys get kind of raw deals, and we can't necessarily assume it was because Sam is gay. There aren't enough slots in the NFL for everyone to get a fair shot, unfortunately.
I think that's fair enough, and the term I used for Sam's case (maybe Seoul used the same term, if bad memory serves) was "curious." I think DoTB overstated his case a bit here or there, but the gist was right on: in short, it's nuts the standard that Sam is being held to after what his resume says. SN says Bequette has been a waste of a pick, and yet that waste who demonstrably hasn't done jack shit in 3 years has a slot over Sam. And, like DoTB talks about, there are guys like that on PSs around the league. To think there aren't subtle biases (among people who, no doubt, can honestly claim not to be homophobic) playing into this curious situation is, to my mind, naive in the extreme.
