Ducks Lay Eggs and The Tide Rolls

Paul Finebaum back on the air with ESPN Radio

Paul Finebaum returned to the airwaves last week after several months of silence, now as part of the ESPN stable of talent. I listened to him before his hiatus, and I'm listening to him again. His show focuses a lot of SEC football, especially the Alabama Crimson Tide.

He hosts guest experts from ESPN and other sports journalists and figures to discuss actual facts and analyze teams, players and coaches. But what makes his show the success it is are the regular folks who call in. And many of them deserve to be featured in this blog, because they desperately need to get Above Their Raisin'.

I'm not interested in mocking an uneducated person for being uneducated, or a biased fan for being biased, but this display of down-home bloviation had a meta experience this week that deserves analysis.

Paul deliberately and maliciously invited onto his show an Oregon man (and Ducks fan) who wrote a book called  Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession. His name is Chuck Thompson and apparently, he will do anything to try and sell his book, even go on-air with Paul Finebaum and take calls from angry, offended southerners. This is the link to the segment that included Mr. Thomson if you're interested.

Paul hosts a sports show, so he focused on Mr. Thompson's opinions and statistics concerning the BCS and Thompson's perception of a conspiracy at ESPN to elevate the SEC over other conferences. I have no idea if his numbers are correct or not. Neither did the folks who called. But that didn't stop them from calling in and proving Mr. Thompson's point about the south.

One guy said he'd be happy to push Chuck in front of speeding cars. Another was offended that Mr. Thompson called out the south for racism and KKK culture. Another claimed Alabama had actually won 22 national championships. There was a lot of name calling and high pitched squealing with southern drawls. But not one of them effectively shot down his weak arguments about the SEC, the BCS and college football.

I am from Alabama, and I love my Crimson Tide football, but I honestly could not continue living there. I understand some of Mr. Thompson's points about southern culture. But his points about the BCS and college football are whiny and lame, regardless of the statistics he quoted.

Chuck tossed around a lot of statistics and claimed victory by pointing out that if any other team had lost to LSU at home and only scored 6 points, that team would have been a laughing stock, not invited to play in the championship game. There is only one response necessary:

"Chuck, had your beloved Ducks beaten USC on November 19, 2011, they would have played LSU in the championship game, but they didn't take care of business."

The same thing happened to his Ducks in 2012: they lost to Stanford and Alabama jumped back up the rankings and ended the year champions again.

See, the world is not a fair place. Apparently, they don't teach this lesson in Oregon. Black people are more likely to be arrested for pot possession than white people despite using pot at the same rate. Women make 77 cents for every dollar men make for doing the same jobs. (These inequities seem to me to be much more important than the accuracy and legitimacy of the algorithm used to select the college football champion.)  And the Oregon Ducks cannot seem to win a football game when there are championships on the line. The list of unfairnesses in the world is long and fuels a panoply of grievance.

The way we keep going and succeed in the face of all this unfairness is to do our best and take advantage of every opportunity we get. That's what Nick Saban's Crimson Tide team has done for 2 straight years, resulting in 2 consecutive BCS Championships. When the Ducks lay an egg, the Tide step in and bring home a Crystal Football. There are no bonus points for whining and complaining about someone else's shortcomings, especially when your own (duck) poop stinks that bad.

Paul Finebaum's listeners had a chance to educate Mr. Thompson on this point, but they pulled a Duck-move and threw that chance away, focusing instead on being personally offended by his criticisms of southern culture, which, IMO, have some legitimacy. (If I didn't think so, I would still live there.) They got baited into the wrong argument and ignored the entire reason he was on-air with Paul: football.

No one enjoys a good discussion of sociological issues and a spirited political debate more than I do (as you know). But trying to defend the south against the perceptions of an Oregonian is a fools errand. Plus, Paul Finebaum is not Meet the Press, it's a sports radio call-in show. Next time, callers, get Above Your Raisin' and win the game.