MARIOTA is an actual robot and that’s why Oregon will win Monday

January 26, 2010 is the day the University of Oregon football program took its most decisive step into the future.

The previous morning, the Ducks’ then-starting quarterback Jeremiah Masoli stole two laptops and a guitar from a U of O frat house. Masoli pled guilty to the charges and served 12-months probation. Weeks later he was cited for misdemeanor drug and traffic offenses and dismissed from the team.

Oregon football overlord and fetish shoe market provocateur Phil Knight caught wind of the trouble brewing and immediately pressed the go button on his most audacious program to date—completion of a robot.

Somewhere in a basement southeast of Beaverton, Nike engineers had been working since the 1975 death of distance runner Steve Prefontaine to assemble the perfect student-athlete. Coined the MARIOTA program (Mechanized ARtificial Intelligence Offensive Tactical Android), the robot would not only be seen as capable, precise and methodical on the field, but amiable, diverse and engaging off of it.

Ignoring the abject failure of fans to embrace RoboDuck, Knight kicked the program into high gear.

Two seasons later, on Sept. 1, 2012, the MARIOTA was unveiled without fanfare but with quiet quality control and efficiency assurance—just as Knight and his black-op engineers had planned.

The MARIOTA unit, disguised as a redshirt freshman, led the nation’s then-no. 5-ranked Oregon Ducks to a convincing 57-24 season opener victory over Arkansas State. MARIOTA was heretofore unknown even by team watchdogs: “Mariota was on the practice squad last season and was something of a mystery because Oregon closes practices, but he beat out Bryan Bennett for the starter’s job in fall camp,” wrote Ann M. Peterson of the AP in the wake of the robot’s 18-22, 200 yard, three touchdown debut.

At first, Knight and the MARIOTA team were conservative with their new toy. In 2012, they let offensive skill set pieces De’Anthony Thomas and Kenjon Barner (not robots) grab most of the headlines and the credit for the Ducks’ continued rise to the elite of college football.

But slowly, Knight let the throttle out on the MARIOTA unit. Insiders say to date the builders never have run the MARIOTA full-bore, not for fear of overloading its circuits, but out of concern people wouldn’t accept what they were seeing as real.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned at Nike, it’s that people will believe anything within the context of shoes and outerwear,” Knight was overheard saying at a Rose Bowl tailgater as Blue cheese dressing dripped onto his beard. “Look at the Air Yeezy 2 things or whatever. Someone paid $16 million for red shoes that didn’t even belong to Judy Garland. Once I saw that, I figured—people will buy anything.”

The MARIOTA unit concluded the 2012 campaign going 230 for 336 for 2,677 yards with a Fiesta Bowl victory over Kansas State. The robot team stayed on message coding in a “plausible fallibility” algorithm in 2013 resulting in the completion of 245 passes in 386 attempts for 3,665 yards and a victory over the Texas Longhorns in the Alamo Bowl.

Nike engineers wanted to see what the MARIOTA could really do for his assumptive final campaign. And Knight wanted to push the limits of what people would believe was truly humanly possible. In 2014, the MARIOTA threw 280 completions and only three interceptions in 408 attempts with 4,121 yards passing and a 184.3 rating.

The numbers, Knight said, were beyond the “metaphysical and spiritual and into the realm of ‘no way Jose’.”…But people still ate it up.

Worrying the MARIOTA unit would be outed as an android prior to the championship game, resulting in all kinds of Nike-as-Skynet headlines, (though in the 1,076-page NCAA rulebook currently has no ban on android or synthetic student-athletes) MARIOTA engineers installed tear ducts for the Heisman speech (note, the tears did not actually flow but the MARIOTA did simulate wiping them) and programmed him to throw an end-of-first-half pick in the Rose Bowl.

A Nike quality control insider revealed CFB conspiracy theorists have already all-but-outed the MARIOTA using the Heisman pose engineers coded prior to the 2014 Civil War:

…as well as this play during the Wyoming game:

…along with the fact that his hair has never been out of place, nor has it grown in three seasons:

2012

2013

2014

…as evidence.

Yet the pervasive wisdom going into Monday’s first-ever College Football Championship Game is the MARIOTA is simply a human being who just happens to do everything like a robot would do, except maybe better.

Sy Pfeiffercorn, a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, has been analyzing the MARIOTA for the past three seasons. “His statistics, not to mention aesthetics, are definitely beyond human, but they’re not exactly merely robot either,” he said, pronouncing the word robot, rōbət. “My guess, based on more than 4,277 hours of analysis, would be alien robot.”

An alien robot who has never stolen a laptop. Though that may change if the MARIOTA turns evil someday and needs to break into The Mainframe.

Bettors thus far are showing they have no idea of the actual future they’re witnessing today in no. 8 as they’ve moved the line from the 7-point Oregon favorite opener to 6.5 this week.

“People who bet against robots usually end up dying,” Knight wrote in a memo to the MARIOTA team this week. “I don’t want Buckeye fans to die. But if they lose their shirts so they have to buy a Nike Dri-FIT™ instead. I’m OK with that. LOL.”

The brilliant end of the Southeast’s stranglehold

The Ohio State vs. Oregon college football championship Jan. 12 in Jerry Jones’s basement game room is causing more heartache in football’s America than Papa John’s Fritos Chili pizza.

Because, well, it SHOULD’VE been Bama and FSU. The BCS WOULD’VE given us Bama and FSU. And two weeks ago nobody COULD’VE believed it wouldn’t be Bama and FSU.

Yet, the semi-final games were played and it’s very decidedly never going to be Bama and FSU.

That Nor’easter nipping at your neck is everyone west of the place that decided a president by the margin of a piece of confetti in 2000 breathing a collective sigh of relief.

And the crosswind is a pair of decisive victories by Oregon and Ohio State breathing life into the notion that a four-team playoff—at once incomplete in its infancy while adding heft to the notion college football is about as close to an amateur enterprise as amateur porn sites—is thus far working.

The decisive semi-final outcomes resulting in this unlikely pairing is such a disturbingly better match up than the prospect of a traditional Southeast-themed championship that it can only be the result a couple decades of gears turning toward college’s fringe, rather than sheer luck or fate intervening on Jan. 1.

Oregon, a program on the rise since Rich Brooks roamed the sideline and title sponsor Nike’s best-selling sneak was coined for a man named Penny, is still routinely maligned by the blubbery pundits as gimmicky; versus Ohio State, resurrected and spit-shined from the 2011 rubble of Jerseygate by one Urban Meyer—known from his Utah days to now as a little flavorful and gimmicky himself.

But these gimmicky West Coast-based blend (not bland) spread offenses and other erstwhile ignorable programs which color outside the margins and the hashmarks (think: Marshall, Boise State, Utah State, Baylor and TCU) will grow in number and remain venerable for the following reasons:

• The SEC’s patsy out-of-conference regular season schedule does come back to bite it (or at least took a chunk out of Vegas) during bowl season: Mississippi State, which was one game away from being named the second SEC team in the final four, was trounced by ACC also-ran Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl joining other top SEC programs Auburn (34-31 loss to Wisconsin in the Outback Bowl) and LSU (31-28 loss to Notre Dame in the Music City Bowl) in this year’s SEC bowl bust…a parade of futility whose grand marshal was Ole Miss. The school with a secession-era mascot less than two months ago stood tall with Bama and Mississippi State as three of the top five programs in the nation. Then they got waxed like Andy Stitzer by, who else? Final-four odd-team-out TCU. The 42-3 final score doesn’t take into account TCU suited up the band for the fourth-quarter SEC mercy rule and the Rebs still barely avoided a shut-out with a late field goal. On the bright side, new-to-conference Missouri does run a very fresh-looking offense under second-year coordinator Josh Henson. Though the Tigers lost to Bama in the SEC title game it was more at the behest of head coach Gene Mauk’s conservative play calling which loosened up ever-so-quietly as Mizzou took down the Golden Gophers of Minnesota at the Citrus Bowl.
• College football’s parity is just beginning to show not only because Oregon and Ohio State represent teams with progressive coaches who run progressive schemes, but because the regions slowest to embrace football as a track meet or ballet not a heads-down Smashmouth scrum are going to continue to lose. And by lose we don’t mean just 42-3, we mean lose athletes, lose alumni support, lose programs. The spread is quickly becoming the offense of choice of high school football because it plays faster, smoother and more athletic/watchable than the rendered fat amorphous blob of your grandfather’s single-wing attack. Well-publicized head injuries and the expense of equipment has dropped Pop Warner participation numbers almost 15 percent since 2012. Nutrition, conditioning, speed and sportsmanship are the new pillars of youth sports which doesn’t leave much room for molasses asses and barking coaches. Prep football programs will still cherry pick some of the school’s best athletes, but gone is the propensity to want to hit and be hit. Scrambling brains and sacrificing joints truncating careers in track, soccer and swimming—sports student athletes can more likely excel at at the next level—no thanks.
• Recruiting and appeal is no longer regional. The rest of the country, specifically the West, has quietly caught up with and surpassed the Southeast on defensive size and speed, offensive schemes, coaching prowess and practice facilities. Oregon’s current top two commits are from Missouri and Georgia and another five of their top 10 hail from Southern California including guard Zach Okun, skill position player Malik Lovette, defensive tackle Rasheem Green, defensive end Keisean Lucier-South and inside linebacker John Houston Jr. Stanford, USC, Washington, UCLA, Arizona and even Utah are ever closer to tipping the scales of in-state/out-of-state recruits to even, each taking big chunks from yesterday’s stay-home football states Texas, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.

Still, it is a transition moment. And this year, to much of sports nation, the Buckeyes/Ducks sounds like an aberration, a great Holiday Bowl match up and not much else. But that’s the same “Oh, it’s just one comet” mentality that did in the first set of dinosaurs.

Recruits will continue to migrate to the West and regardless of tradition and a TV contract, the ONLY thing the Southeast has in store for the rest of the country henceforth is Sperry topsiders and blotchy frat guys screaming in the Gameday broadcast backdrop with crooked hats and half-empty Solo cups to house their beery tears.

And no, one disastrous bowl season combined with emergence of a four-team playoff does not spell the end for the biggest conference in all of amateur sport. What it does show is SEC has much more to prove in coming seasons than they’d like to admit. Without change, the very distinct, very recent memory of relevance could be the only salve as the search continues for a schedule replacement for University of Alabama-Birmingham 

A timezone stranglehold on an arcane cable highlight show no longer matters and neither does the old guard in a burgeoning meritocracy spawned by manifest destiny and the possibility of more than 700 really ugly uniform combinations per game.

Though it may already be too late for some storied programs because change—a college football first in the first year of a playoff—has already taken place.

 

Final Faux: Finding flaws in the four-team BCS playoff

When I was born, all four Beatles were still alive. There was no such thing as Excel. Phones had dials and cords. TVs were expected to break and be repaired—not replaced. A peanut farmer and humanitarian was president. He established a national energy policy and said the government should be “competent and compassionate.” Back then, bankers made about the same wage as you.

Bowl games were decided by the Associated Press and UPI polls, a combination of writers, insiders and coaches. Bowl games were set with the rankings and tradition in mind. Each year, without controversy, a national champion would be crowned.

From 1936 to 1997, the two polls didn’t mesh 11 times—an 85 percent success rate over six decades.

The BCS came to be in 1998, the year Will Smith got Jiggy wit it. High school Freshman Mark Zuckerberg was writing sweet nothings on his actual bedroom wall. AOL, Netscape and AltaVista is how we did search and on July 1, Armageddon, the greatest movie of all time, was released.

In the decade and a half of the BCS, there has been controversy over the eventual taker-homer of the big giant football crystal ashtray EVERY year of its existence.

That’s a 100-percent not success rate.

To recap what the BCS Computer has done to basically ruin everything:

1998-’99: One-loss Kansas State finished third in the standings but was passed over for a BCS bowl berth by Ohio State (4th) and Florida (8th). The Wildcats were relegated to find the basement of the Alamo Bowl against Purdue.

1999-’00: The K State rule was adopted ensuring the third-ranked team get an automatic bid to a BCS bowl. Problem solved, right? Nope. This time, K State finished 6th in the BCS rankings. Their invitation again got lost in the mail. Michigan (8th) did make it to the party, however. The Wolverines also got a bid over in-state rival Michigan State, even though Sparty had the same record and beat the Wolverines head-to-head.

2000-’01: One-loss Florida State played undefeated Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl for the BCS championship. The Miami Hurricanes, also a one-loss team, BEAT Florida State, but played for nothing. Miami only lost to another one-loss team, Pac-10 champion Washington. Both Miami and Washington won their bowl games and Florida State’s bullpen couldn’t keep Oklahoma’s bats quiet in a 13-2 loss.

2002-’03: Otherwise known as the year the BCS ruined the Rose Bowl. Big 10 co-champion Ohio State (2nd) passed up the Rose Bowl for a shot at the Fiesta Bowl/national championship against Miami. When it was the Rose Bowl’s turn to select, the best available team was Oklahoma (7th). Pac-10 co-champion USC was taken by the Orange Bowl and matched up with Iowa (a Pac-10/Big-10 rival game 2,500 miles from Pasadena). The Rose Bowl was left with Washington State. The Oklahoma/Wazzu game had the lowest attendance in Rose Bowl history and was the first non-sellout since 1944—thus giving rise to the notion that the BCS, in its fourth season, was now worse for college football than a world war.

2003-’04: Total shit show. Near the season’s end, the three top schools, Oklahoma, USC and LSU all had one loss. Oklahoma got whipped by K State in the Big 12 conference championship game, so they went from first to fourth in a week. This still did not prohibit the Sooners from making an appearance in the title game. LSU beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl for the BCS championship. USC beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl. Coaches are contractually obligated to pick the championship game victor as the winner, but Lou Holtz of South Carolina, Mike Bellotti of Oregon and Ron Turner of Illinois gave USC their first-place votes.

2004-’05: Even more disastrous than three one-loss teams is five undefeateds. That’s what happened in this iteration of the BCS mess. Auburn, Utah and Boise State ALL ran the table. The other undefeateds, Oklahoma and USC, played for the title. USC beat Oklahoma 55-19. Auburn and Utah won their match-ups handily and Boise State was beaten by Louisville in the Liberty Bowl. In second-tier controversy, Texas coach Mack Brown, showing early signs of dementia, lobbied for the Longhorns to get the last BCS at-large bid over Pac-10 runner-up Cal. Brown won his shell game and in protest Cal sat on the ball on the 22 with 13 seconds on the clock as coach Jeff Tedford refused to run up the Vegas Bowl score against BYU to pander to voters.

2005-’06: Texas was undefeated. USC was undefeated. Vince Young scrambled into the end-zone during the final minute to defeat the Trojans and his Longhorns became the undisputed champions. This is the one year the BCS worked (by default, because the system would’ve worked using a connect-the-dots). Worked, that is, other than the fact there was no Big 10 team within spittin’ distance of Pasadena on New Year’s Day.

2006-’07: Boise State and Ohio State were undefeated and Louisville, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida had one loss each. Ohio State went on to lose to Florida in the championship game, and nobody remembers what happened to the rest of the schools other than they got jobbed.

2007-’08: This time Hawai’i was the undefeated school that would not get to play for a championship because their schedule was deemed too weak. Ohio State, idle for the last two weeks of the season, climbed from number five to number one because everyone else imploded. LSU lost in triple overtime to Arkansas in the second-to-last game of the season, giving them two losses. But the computer still thought the Tigers’ schedule and margin of victory was enough to put them in the championship game where they beat Ohio State by 14. The Rainbow Warriors, meanwhile, put a totem curse on the rest of college football for the next decade or so.

2008-’09: Utah and Boise State both finished undefeated. Utah got a BCS bid and waxed Alabama. Boise State played one-loss TCU in the prestigious Poinsettia Bowl. It was the first time ever two teams from non-BCS conferences ranked higher than participants in a BCS bowl …bringing the new revelation that BOTH computers and humans are flawed.

2009-’10: Undefeateds Boise State and TCU were paired together again because computer/human was scared about rendering the whole system moot. Alabama, Texas and Cincinnati also finished undefeated. ‘Bama beat Texas but nobody really cared because the 13-0 Broncos took down the 12-0 Horned Frogs 17-10 in the Fiesta Bowl …for no share of anything according to the BCS.

2010-’11: Undefeated major conference champions Oregon and Auburn left TCU (second-straight undefeated regular season) as odd-frog out. In May 2011, the US Justice Department sent a letter to the NCAA asking for an explanation why it did not have a playoff system in place and why it had given the authority to designate a champion to an outside group, the BCS. The questions went unanswered.

2011-’12: For the third time in the BCS era no major conference team finished the season undefeated. Though LSU finished the regular season with no losses, they lost to SEC-rival Alabama 21-0 in the lowest-rated BCS national championship game of all time.

2012-’13: Kansas State, Oregon and Notre Dame were all undefeated going into the last week of the season. Kansas State was beaten by Baylor and Oregon fell 17-14 to Stanford in overtime. Non-conference Notre Dame secured a berth in the national championship game to play Alabama who leapfrogged to number two, because SEC. Once again, nobody cared and the game became the second-lowest rated BCS national championship game of all time.

OK, one more:

2013-’14: Continuing the tradition of bypassing higher-ranked teams to suit its needs, the Sugar Bowl selected Oklahoma over Oregon to play ‘Bama. Oregon ended up putting the smack down on the swan song of Mack Brown 30-7 in the Alamo Bowl. Auburn lost to undefeated Florida State in the third-lowest-rated BCS game of all time, in the BCS-as-you-knew-it-then finale.

Or was it?

This year’s four-team playoff with the new upside-down-unicorn-horn-which-blooms-into-a-football-vagina-on-top trophy is a scant re-branding of the same BCS ways. The computer is the same (think of the BCS as the Craigslist of rankings devices: Janky, yet the only thing out there pretty much). The key voters/committee members are the same, sexagenarians whose wealth of experience is likely only matched by present-day inefficiencies and hang-ups (Tom Osborne? Check. Mike Tranghese? Check. Pat Haden? Check. Tom Jernstedt? Check. Archie Manning? Check. Oh, and Condi Rice so the class photo isn’t all Haggar slacks and Cialis bathtubs). And the format is the same. Only now, the two finalists get a pair of marquee bowl match-ups instead of one = $$$.

The number four-ranked team will face number one and number two will face number three at the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1. The final will be Jan. 12 at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T stadium.

But if you look above to the history of the BCS, the problems didn’t arise from the pairing of teams in the one through four slots, it came from everywhere else. Bowls skipping over worthy schools and bidding others with more money, bigger alumni bases or a conference cache; big-program coaches launching campaigns for their schools to leapfrog or upend smaller-conference challengers with better records; coaches forced to run up the score to mesh with the computer’s algorithm for purported excellence and idle schools leapfrogging schools who lost their conference championships—penalties for playing in to a playoff.

I’m not the only one who wishes all of the Fab Four were still around or who thinks the Dow above 17,000 is not to be trusted or that a two-game playoff can’t hide an at-best unsustainable and at worst criminally flawed system that colludes the NCAA with its biggest football brands. There are others. “If we’re going to go anywhere,” former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe told the New York Times recently, “I’d rather go back to the old bowl system.”

Seems like an 85-percent success rate is pretty hard to beat after all.

Donald Sterling so much more than just racist

Embattled Clippers owner Donald Sterling is not just racist.

The operative word being just.

He is racist and a whole lot of individual and societal bad things more all hiding behind a melted Mickey Rourke mask.

Sterling, 81, who is currently under investigation by the NBA for racist remarks recently released from a recorded conversation with his girlfriend V. Stiviano (38), is probably not going to run a NBA franchise for very much longer, not on the letterhead anyway “banned for life” — but somehow still owns the team/owes the league more than three month’s LeBron pay.

Even in context his remarks were simple reminders of how far the American experiment hasn’t come in the last century and change.

If you haven’t already, you can listen to the conversation here on Deadspin. Basically he tells Stiviano he doesn’t want her to be hanging out with black guys because all the Ferraris and Bentleys and million-dollar apartments in the world can’t buy a flaccid, acrid white guy out of insecurity.

Stiviano, perhaps seeking a little spotlight (spotlight = $1.8 million to pay back the Sterling family in the embezzlement lawsuit dropped on her by Rochelle Sterling, Donald’s betrothed for the last half-century), has the nerve to question the flaw in her sugar daddy’s strategy/sets him up: “Do you know you have a whole team that’s black, that plays for you?

And this his response: “I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? …Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?”

So, yes, he’s racist, but he’s also so much more. After all, he basically outlines how he treats his players like his mistress …to his mistress.

Only one type of person could have such hubris.

If you peruse the Hare Psychopathy checklist, you’ll find a good many traits embedded in that singular comment:

• Glib and superficial charm
• Grandiosity
• Need for stimulation
• Cunning and manipulating
• Lack of remorse
• Callousness
• Poor behavior controls
• Impulsiveness
• Irresponsibility
• Denial
• Sexual promiscuity
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

…There’s a handful of other tells related to more juvenile functions, but I believe it is safe to say Sterling, similar to the majority of professional sports franchise owners (see: Jerry Jones, Mark Cuban), publicly displays the same traits of a psycho.

Now, just because you’re a psychopath doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a quiet neighbor who “keeps to himself” and then one day is discovered to be hiding all kinds of journals with tiny writing and hanging car freshers from the ceiling of a slowly dying man; in fact, Kent A. Kiehl, PhD recently released a book about interviewing psychopaths for the last two decades and how most of them are integrated into mainstream society — or are at least up in the masters’ owners’ suite.

Team ownership is the perfect avenue for a psycho who also happens to be white and, well, let’s face it — an oppressor.

Ever been to an NFL combine? No? Ever been to a cattle auction? Yes? Good. Because they’re the same thing. There is no more apparent subjective event that showcases how few steps we’ve come since we sprouted legs and trudged out of the mire than an NFL combine.

Potential draftees about to be shackled by the league’s many draconian policies, including no guaranteed contracts, no revenue share, a look-the-other-way drug enforcement program and its refusal to partner with Obama Care (though, to be fair if you play for three years you get five years insurance from the league after that, which gets most players and their scrambled brains almost through their early 30s) are numbered, tagged and monitored as they undertake a number of tests of physical stamina under the watchful eye of the overlord.

Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on stadiums make for the new plantations and even when the analogy is spiffed up as gladiators going to war, well, it helps to remember most gladiators were slaves. The benevolent owner staring down all pale Jell-o faced and creaky looking might as well be the archetypical villain in a Tarantino period piece. He’s not fooling anyone as he coaxes money from everyone.

And yes, it does matter that virtually all professional sports franchise owners are white men.

In 2013, more than 76 percent of NBA players were black. Of the NBA’s 49 majority owners, only one (His Airness of the Charlotte Bobcats) is black. All Major League Baseball owners are white with the exception of the LA Angels’ Arte Moreno, who is Latino. There are no black owners in the NFL even as the number of black players is more than 70 percent.

Sterling is a lesion soon to be extracted from professional sport and he will then report to rich old white guy oblivion, which happens to be movie night (Tuesday) at the Playboy Mansion. BYOO (bring your own oxygen). But the problem he represents is a Stage 4 Sarcoma.

It has spread to every vital organ of professional sport and into the soft tissue of society.

By thrusting through the turnstile, you enable a very elite/select/self-appointed group of mostly vapid, mostly grandiose, mostly ego-filled, mostly giving-two-shits-short-of-a-fuck-about-anything-about-you-besides-what-floats-out-of-your-wallet marshmallow men to control your leisure time.

What’s more, they not only have a disdain for you, the consumer, but apparently for much of the product they’re putting out on the floor. In other words, they like their charges to resemble Uncle Toms to keep things noisy in the arena and quiet off the court and field.

Good on the Clippers’ players for their silent protest against the man who cuts their checks as they wore their warm-ups inside out prior to tip-off Sunday against the Golden State Warriors. Good on the Heat squad for backing up their brothers in arms with the same gesture prior to their game. But that’s not nearly enough. It’s not even a start.

Warriors’ head coach Mark Jackson has been criticized this week for calling for a Clipper fan boycott prior to Tuesday night’s game in LA.

“I believe if it was me, I wouldn’t come to the game,” he said Monday. “I believe the fans, the loudest statement that they could make as far as fans, would be to not show up to the game.

“This is a great league and they’ve done an incredible job, and I’m sure commissioner Silver will make a swift, correct decision. We are the league that’s an example of the most minority African-Americans in management position, front-office, in professional sports.

“The loudest statement to be made is not showing up.”

The knee-jerk is coach Jackson’s comments are self-serving and flawed. Sterling benefited from the playoff gate from Sunday’s match-up in Oakland, so a more effective boycott/statement could have been made on the Warriors’ home court.

But there is a kernel of truth in what Jackson is saying: What if we did stop going, stop watching? Stopped caring?

We’re a society obsessed with professional sport. Maybe it is a sign we have too much leisure time and that truly is the mark of the beginning of the end of an empire. Maybe it is that we truly only feel comfortable when the power is in the hands of the oppressor (again, your-empire-is-on-a-downward-trend 101) or maybe it’s something simpler than that:

Maybe as a collective we just can’t stand up collectively to the faces of evil at the cost of our convenience.

And that’s why Donald Sterling and his insecure, entitled, racist, psychopathic …and pale contemporaries are still grinning. Still winning.