Thursday, September 10, 2009
How ESPN Got LeGarrette Blount Booted
Oh, college football. How I missed thee so. How I will tenderly embrace the hearth of your warm love forevermore. This time, I promise, I will never let you go.
I'm not the only one who was ready and hungry for college football. So was ESPN. And what good are just the games to ESPN? Don't get me wrong. I defend ESPN. Because along with that ceaseless hype, they do deliver the content. And a lot of their more cynical stunts make them money, just as the focus groups told them they would, because (as hard as this is for people to accept), ESPN gives people what they want. It's just that, well, not a lot of people are like you and I, who want the sports without the bombast. They know they have us, so they have to make their money on the fringes, by attracting the casual fan.
Still, besides admirably pining for the minimal, straightforward approach of Setanta USA — who often fill the slot between one match beginning and the last one ending by just giving us a closeup of a soccer ball, soothing moog music, and their schedule for the next few hours repeated ad nauseam — I often think ESPN puts the cart before the horse.
Such was the case with LeGarrette Blount. I'm sure you saw the clip. After a week of talking trash about Boise State and how his Oregon Ducks would exact revenge, Boise State put the wood to them once again. And when an obnoxious BSU player said something to Blount in passing after the game — and tapping him on the shoulder pad to make sure he had Blount's attention — Blount socked him in the jaw. Later, it appeared he needed to be restrained from going into the stands.
Blount saw the handwriting on the wall and apologized pretty quickly, right from the locker room in fact. Having seen it live, I asked myself what would be an appropriate punishment for Blount, and I decided a game or two — and I decided this knowing he has already had discipline issues of the other kind (showing up to practice out of shape, academic problems) and suspended for that.
Why a game or two? Like any good jurist, I look for precedents, and the first person who popped into my mind was Robert Reynolds. You remember Robert Reynolds, right? No? He's the Ohio State linebacker who was revealed to be strangling Wisconsin quarterback Jim Sorgi after the pile cleared on one of those three yards (actually eight in this case) and a cloud of dust plays.
It was enough of a choke that Sorgi had to leave the game, and he did not return. Reynolds issued a public apology later. His suspension? One game.
Blount's victim, Byron Hout, was not hurt. The punched floored him, but he popped back up immediately, like one of those children's punching bags with sand at the bottom (I forget what they're called).
Even with Blount's spotty history, and Reynolds's clean (as far as I know) one), it would be difficult to argue that Blount deserved an exponentially more severe punishment than Reynolds.
Of course, an exponentially worse punishment is exactly what Blount got. He is suspended for the season, including bowl season.
So why exactly is Blount worthy of such a stiffer penalty than what Reynolds got? Let's examine the possibilities:
A. Reynolds's action was in game, while Blount's was after the game was over.
B. ESPN played the story like it was the JFK assassination.
C. Racial double standards (Blount is black, Reynolds is white).
D. Blount's prior history of violations.
As far as A goes, don't make me laugh. It's more okay to injure a player in game, in a dead ball situation, than it is 30 seconds after a game ends?
I'll get back to B.
I'm going to say no to C, as well, but I always, always wonder about this. It is a rhetorical fallacy to presume a hypothetical situation and argue based on how you have decided the hypothetical would have been handled, but I still wonder. I wonder if Peyton Manning would have gotten the same amount of time that Mike Vick did, and if we would've gotten more columns marginally defending the dog fighting as a part of good ol' boy culture.
D, maybe, but none of his other misdeeds were those of the poor snap-judgment variety.
So, back to B. ESPN has been eager for college football to return, too, and with the return, they are salivating the next big story. Stories come thick and fast in midseason, both on and off the field, when we go back to debating the BCS, keeping an eye on records about to be broken, and seeing which SEC school will lead the nation in arrests.
But the cupboard is slightly more bare in the season's infancy, so ESPN takes what it can get and wrings it out like a washcloth. The Blount debacle was perfect for this.
Throughout the halls of the Oregon athletic complex, where ESPN is usually broadcast the clock, the TV's instead just bore Oregon's ubiquitous O logo the day after the game, rather than the looping newsreel of the team's embarrassment that ESPN was providing.
It's easy to see, then, that Oregon felt a greater need for damage control than it felt the need for justice. This is particularly true considering the disarray the program seems to be in all of the sudden. The Ducks, known for their offense, started their season with seven straight three-and-outs. They were dominated by a team they were eager to get revenge on. The biggest problem, however, may be the respect, or lack thereof, that new head coach Chip Kelly is commanding from his players after taking over for the beloved and successful Mike Bellotti, now the school's athletic director:
Kelly was disrespected multiple times on the Ducks sideline during the game. Players scoffed in his face. Another shouted at him. Bellotti undermined him, too, by walking up in front of Kelly's players to offer the new guy input in the second quarter.
That, if I can borrow some ESPN-style hyperbole, sounds like a mutiny in the making. And if the players and the old coach don't respect you, how do you force your team to stand up and take notice, to acknowledge and really feel your authority?
Kicking your star player off the team for a impulsive transgression no one will remember two years from now is one way.