Deadspin Attacks Biracial NFL Coach as Just “Another White Guy”

BUCK: It’s fun, because I get to learn about some of this stuff from Clay, because as you all know I’m not — one thing I’m not up on is the sports media. I do not know much about the sports media. I’m busy learning about other things. But here we had at Deadspin, which I have heard of before, this guy writes this headline. Clay sent it to me. “Sure, Mike McDaniel Seems Cool, But He’s Not Worthy of the Head Coaching Gig Yet.

“Please stop and think before you inadvertently dub another young, white guy as the next hot NFL coaching prospect,” and then they had to add an “Editor’s Note: We learned after the publication of this article that 49ers OC Mike McDaniel, whom we describe as a ‘white guy,’ is in fact biracial. The article’s original text remains below. We regret the error.” Clay, wow.

CLAY: It’s just emblematic. I know you’re stunned by this, but whatever you think of the larger political media bias, at least there is some form of balance, right? Now, we know that balance is not equal. The media is overwhelmingly left-wing as it pertains to covering political-related issues. There’s virtually no one who pushes back against far-left-wing agenda journalism connected to sports.

For those of you out there, they literally wrote an article saying that this guy who has a job, doesn’t deserve to be considered as a head coach because he’s just “another white guy,” and then they had to issue a correction because they found out that the guy that they were attacking as being “just another white guy,” his dad’s actually black. So, he’s of mixed-race descent. So, this idea — and I think it’s emblematic and honestly connected to what we saw from Joe Biden in his announcement today.

What you are seeing… Did you see — I’m sure you did, Buck — where Kamala Harris came out and talked about all the people that needed to be protected in America, and the only group that wasn’t included in needing to be protected was white guys? And I don’t know what the total percentage of white guy is in America right now. Maybe 30%, roughly — 31%, 32%, something along those lines. We’re a substantial minority country. One-in-three people, maybe, in America would be a “white guy,” which means two-thirds of people are not white guys.

Yet the war on white guys in media is really kind of crazy, even in the world of sports, which objectively you could look at data, Buck, and be like, “Oh, this guy’s doing a pretty good job,” or, “This guy’s doing a bad job,” based on having the meritocracy of wins and losses and yards gained and touchdowns and everything else to use as your metric. Yet skin color is overwhelmingly the way that they want to analyze this from a sports perspective.

BUCK: Sports, kind of like gambling or being a portfolio analyst at a hedge fund, there are numbers, there are wins and losses, there’s how you doing, right? So, it should be pretty clear who is good and who’s not, and so that’s why you’d think maybe it’d be a little bit hard to push some of the anti-meritocracy nonsense out there.