Counter-Currents
Adam Vinatieri, the kicker who holds the NFL’s all-time scoring record.
2,014 words
A long time ago, in a magical kingdom tucked safely away from the flaming hell we currently inhabit, there used to be this crazy, hate-filled idea that if some groups performed better on average than other groups regarding any given task, it’s highly likely that the main reason for this is that they simply were better than other groups at that task. It was so pure and innocent in its reasoning that someone invariably had to come and fuck it all up.
Like a lunatic thief in the night, along came someone to rewrite half the rulebook and tilt the playing field: If whites excelled at anything requiring talent or intelligence, the culprit was “systemic racism”; but if blacks have won every hundred-meter dash at the Olympics since 1980, well, c’mon, get real, the only possible explanation is that blacks are genetically superior at sprinting, so dry your tears, white boy.
It’s largely agreed that the quarterback is the most important player on any American football team. The NFL playoff season starts this weekend, and of the 14 teams currently competing to win the 56th Super Bowl, a mere 3.5 have black starting quarterbacks. (The .5 is for biracial Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes.) Since the NFL’s roster is, in any given year, about two-thirds black, the fact that only one-quarter of this year’s surviving teams are helmed by black quarterbacks gives rise to sinister suspicions.
In the 55 previous Super Bowls, only three were won by a team with a black starting quarterback. The first, Doug Williams of 1988’s Washington Redskins (now simply known as the Washington Football Team because Injun Feelings Matter) was undeniably black. Black as coal. Black as the Ace of Spades. The other two winners — Russell Wilson of the 2013 Seattle Seahawks and the aforementioned Mahomes, who led Kansas City to a Super Bowl win in 2020 before losing last year at the hands of Ageless Aryan Übermensch Tom Brady — are what were known in better days as “mulattos.” Being generous and marking Wilson as three-quarters black and Mahomes as half-black, this means that, including the 100% black Doug Williams, a grand total of only 2.25 black quarterbacks have won the first 55 Super Bowls.
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There seem to be only two possible explanations for this grievous underperformance of black quarterbacks: 1) The NFL is systematically racist against black quarterbacks; or 2) Whites have a unique combination of cognitive and physical skills that make them better quarterbacks than blacks.
As anyone who’s seen even one NFL game on television for the past generation is aware, there are football positions where blacks dominate to a nearly comical degree. Among these positions are running back, wide receiver, and essentially every defensive position.
In 2002, the NFL expanded to 32 teams. That was also the last year until this season that a white person played the defensive position of cornerback. (The new white cornerback, Troy Apke, startled retired black NFL superstar Deion Sanders with his quickness, which Sanders implied was unusual for a white boy.) So when you multiply 32 teams, each with at least two cornerbacks, over the course of 19 years — that means around 1,216 cornerback positions that went overwhelmingly to blacks and possibly the occasional Hispanic and Pacific Islander — but no white cornerbacks. Again, one only seems to have two options here: 1) Conclude that the NFL is racially biased against white cornerbacks; or 2) Conclude that blacks are probably better equipped naturally than whites to play this position.
The most perennially persistent racial disparities in pro football, however, involve positions that require dexterity of the foot: place kickers and punters. Hey, it is called football.
For those of you unclear about the distinction between kickers and punters, the place kicker is responsible for kicking the ball off to the other team and for making three-point field goals and the short-range after-touchdown conversion kick that, in about 95% of cases, renders a touchdown as seven points rather than six. Although kickers don’t ever seem to become superstars, they provide about one-third of any given team’s total points, so they are actually crucial to winning. According to blogger Jason Matthews, “The top 36 leading scorers in NFL history played as place kickers.” In 2021, the mean salary for an NFL kicker was about $860,000.
By contrast, the lowly punter only shows up when his team’s offense has failed to gain ten yards in three possessions. He surrenders the ball to the other team by booting it as high in the air and as far toward the other end zone as he possibly can without having the ball go out of bounds or reach the end zone. There is even less glamour in being a punter than in being a kicker. The punter hardly ever scores unless the play turns into some kind of fluke. As of 2021, the average NFL punter earned about $1.5 million.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
But when you account for the fact that neither kickers nor punters hardly ever get hit on the field, it makes sense that they enjoy longer NFL careers than average. If a typical team punts about 4-5 times a game, and each punt takes about 40 seconds from start to finish — adding in the fact that many punters also hold the ball for field goals, which adds another 70 or so seconds to every game — punters barely spend four minutes on the field each game. Over 17 games, they get about 71 minutes of playing time — meaning they make over a million dollars per hour they’re actually on the field during a live game.
At the beginning of the 2017 season, none of the NFL’s 44 place kickers were black; only one was Hispanic, and all the rest were white. Of the 41 punters, only two were black: Marquette King of the Oakland Raiders and Corey Carter of the Houston Texans.
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During the 2020 season, there were no black punters or kickers in the NFL. For the 2021 season that is now headed toward the playoffs, I could only find one black punter — the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Pressley Harvin III — and no black kickers on the rosters.
With whites accounting for a measly 19.5% of total NFL players these days, why are they so vastly overrepresented as punters and kickers?
Self-published author Jason Matthews crunched some numbers back in 2011 and found that since the Super Bowl era began in 1967, there were “approximately 1,514 roster spots for kickers during that time, [but] only 14 spots have been held by 5 black kickers”:
If roughly half [of] all NFL players have been black, one might assume about half, or 757, of the kicking spots would be held by black players. The odds of having so few are astronomical. It’s like flipping a coin 1,514 times and having it land on tails only 14 times. The math is mind-boggling. Like quantum physics, it doesn’t make sense to anyone who truly understands it.
It’s unclear whether Matthews was one of those who “truly” understood the disparity, because his title hints that some invisible glass ceiling against black kickers may represent the NFL’s “Final Prejudice.”
But what if the awful truth is that whites are simply better at kicking?
The first black place kicker in NFL history was Gene Mingo, who joined the Denver Broncos of the AFL in 1960 and would play for five teams until his career ended in 1970. With a kicking accuracy of only 50.9%, he nailed 112 field goals and 215 after-point conversions for a total of 551 points from kicking.
The next highest-scoring black kicker was Donald Igwebuike, a Nigerian-born soccer player who racked up 477 total points with Tampa Bay from 1985-89 and Minnesota in 1990. Next up is Justin Medlock, who made 47 total career points, followed by two other black place kickers who scored at least one field goal each. And that’s it; I found only five black kickers who scored field goals in NFL history.
Gene Mingo, as the first and highest-scoring black kicker in NFL history, racked up 551 points. Adam Vinatieri, a kicker who currently holds the all-time NFL scoring record at 2,673 points — and that includes players from all positions — is white. There are at least five dozen, and possibly more, white kickers who’ve outscored Gene Mingo.
The first black punter in NFL history was Greg Coleman, who started with the Cleveland Browns in 1977 and played the next nine seasons for the Minnesota Vikings, making a total of 820 punts for a mildly respectable average of 40.6 yards per punt. Over 16 seasons through the 1980s and 1990s, black punter Reggie Roby played in three Pro Bowls and retired with a yards-per-punt average of 43.3. Perhaps the most statistically impressive black punter was Marquette King, whose career average of 46.7 yards per punt ranks as the fourth-best in NFL history. I was able to find a grand total of three other black punters in the NFL’s annals, none of whose careers were as distinguished or long-lasting as the aforementioned three.
Allowing that I may be missing a few, I only found five black place kickers and six black punters in NFL history.
Why so few?
Many have speculated that poor, starvin’ ghetto youth crave the glamour positions such as running back and middle linebacker, which usually pay more than punting or kicking jobs. But again, an NFL punter makes, on average, more than one million dollars per hour of field time. Surely there’s some young black buck out there who isn’t so vain and greedy that he’ll forgo a few million dollars and a lifetime of brain damage to become a kicker or a punter? And isn’t it kinda racist merely to suggest that blacks can be capable of vanity and greed?
Even at historically black colleges, white kickers and punters outnumber black ones. And in 2020, when there were an estimated 900 college scholarships available to punters, only two of them were snagged by black kickers.
Isn’t the most obvious answer — and currently the most dangerous one — simply that when it comes to kicking accurately under pressure, whites tend to be better than blacks are?
We’re at a weird stage in human history where scientists don’t hesitate to suggest that blacks may be better sprinters than whites for purely genetic reasons. But if whites happen to excel in any category, the answer is always “racism” — the systematic yet conveniently invisible kind.
Although it’s hardly scientific and my deadline does not permit me the time to completely verify the allegations below, the most sensible explanation I’ve yet seen for whites’ absurd level of overrepresentation among NFL kickers and punters came from an anonymous commenter under Jason Matthews’s 2011 article about black kickers:
The calf muscle plays a huge role in the physics of sports. Blacks (IN GENERAL) have smaller higher placed calf muscles that help in jumping and running. Whites have thicker lower placed calf muscles that help in kicking and powerlifting. White men can’t jump, black men can’t kick. Nothing to do with skin color, everything to do with physics.
If the correct explanation is something other than “thicker lower placed calf muscles,” I’d still bet the farm that the real reason for the disparity is physiological. Very few people care about kickers, and especially punters, and I doubt anyone would even notice, much less ignite a race war, if a few more Negroes of either position were to suddenly appear on football fields across the nation.
The more that “diversity” gets shoved down your throat, the greater the punishment one risks for merely following that concept to its logical conclusion, which is that “people of divergent ancestries wound up different from one another.”
I sincerely doubt that team owners are so “racist” that they’d risk a championship and the extra millions that would flow if they could improve their team’s performance with black kickers and punters. I also doubt that, vain and greedy as they can be, there aren’t at least one million black ghetto-dwellers who’d gladly swap a million dollars a year and a one-way ticket out of the ‘hood as a less-glamorous and less well-compensated punter or kicker — provided they had the talent.
As with most questions where “racism” is the answer, I’ll believe that “racism” doesn’t explain the paucity of black kickers in the NFL. Until I’m presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, I’ll go with the easy answer: Black men can’t punt.
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19 comments
Blacks are bass-ic creatures. Note their low-down fascination-orientation to shoes and wheels. In music, bass. And so in sports they will, depending, tend toward bass-ball…?
Transcending the transverse via foot is probably as subconsciously terrifying for them as the ‘free-wheeling’ feel of treading water.
Europeans are comfortable arc-ing towards the celestial, Africans the terrestrial. Or the African calculus declines always towards earth.
In the future, the NFL might overcome this zone of white supremacy by building a mound and allowing the pigskin to be stomped viciously into the ground by black feet–past buried white linemen, their hands stretching desperately towards heaven.
A terrific one from Mr. Goad. Sexism and racism accusations abound when a job seems desirable to those who want some affirmative action. Ladies aren’t clamoring for a variety of dangerous jobs in which men abound (ex. Bering sea fishing).
There is also a movement claiming racism and need to diversify sports team managers. Yet, the same folks never seem to have a problem with blacks outnumbering whites on the field.
Society generally has no problem with women’s sport teams, a tacit acknowledgement that men have a physical edge. But we also have women’s chess leagues, but not women’s law or medical schools. Transgender women wanting to play in the women’s leagues also becomes an Achilles heel for leftist ideology when you see their disproportionate impact. Right now this is an endless fertile topic I hope CC sticks to. The chinks in the armour are “problematic” for much leftist ideology.
Maybe it’s because the “blacks can’t kick” stereotype is deeply seeded amongst the coaches. NFL coaches are open about not drafting white wide receivers. This year I believe that a whitey led the league in receiving. It wasn’t that long ago that coaches thought blacks couldn’t play middle linebacker. The logic there was that one had to be like Sam Huff or Dick Buttkiss. I think center was another position that was off limits to blacks.
Really enjoyed this article. Mr. Goad’s points are very well made. Of course the scarcity of blacks at the positions of kicker and punter has spared them from the embarrassment of having some of the worst performers at these positions in their ranks, someone like Russell Erxleben, a punter a n d kicker of Teutonic extraction, who for his exploits on the field in college in Texas earned the moniker “Thunderfoot”. He was drafted in the first round by the New Orleans Saints, who hoped to kill two birds with one stone by merging the two kicking positions. The problem was, Erxleben couldn’t kick or punt. After missing one fiedgoal after the next in his rookie season fans started calling him “Blunderfoot”. He was soon axed as a kicker and went on to become only a mediocre punter.
They don’t seem to be able to swim either.
I have been making the argument that black quarterbacks don’t have what it takes to be champions for about two decades now. Are they great athletes? Yes, no argument there. But to be a championship quarterback you need a plethora of other skills including leadership which is something that a majority of blacks do not posses. Wilson and Mahomes might have dark skin and kinky hair but they have a lot of white blood running through their veins and most of all, their brains. As for Doug Williams, I think there should be a footnote with regards to his championship in that I believe he only started 3 games that season, as Jay Shroeder was the starting quarterback for the ‘skins and had some injuries that season which opened the door for Williams.
Rumor has it that the Denver secondary abdicated their responsibilities in defending the Redskin receivers, in order to let the brother QB Doug Williams make history.
I appreciate you pointing that important detail out. And, there are other factors that Goad neglected to mention that are also important.
Such as: that season was the season where the NFL canceled about half the regular season games due to the player’s strike, so the coal black QB Doug Williams didn’t have to play a full schedule of games, and then win a sufficient number of them to reach the playoffs and then cruise through the playoffs and reach the Super Bowl.
Another very important detail was the fact that once the Redskins hired Doug Williams to be a backup to the very White and previously highly productive Jay Schroeder (Schroeder had thrown for over 4,000 yards the year before), the black players on the Redskins decided to move into ‘tribal mode’ and started slacking off, so Schroeder’s productivity started to decrease. They were loafing so as to make Schroeder look bad, because they wanted him to be benched so their black brother Doug Williams could be the starter. I remember at the time, reading a news article in the sports page where Jay Schroeder asked for a private meeting with the coach and owner to discuss his situation – and the article made a point of mentioning that the details of what was discussed during that private meeting were kept secret. I have strong feeling that Schroeder pointed out the racial tension factor and cited how the blacks on the team were deliberately slacking off, so as to boost the chances of getting Williams to replace him as the starter. Which is precisely what happened.
Then, there is the Super Bowl versus the John Elway lead Denver Broncos. Denver’s defense and especially their secondary – consisted of mostly black players. I can distinctly remember watching Doug Williams throwing passes to wide receivers and they were so wide open that there wasn’t even a Denver defensive back anywhere in the television screen when they showed the replay. This happened over and over, throughout the game. I sat there watching this with a modest amount of disbelief, until it finally dawned on me that the blacks on the Denver team had also decided to ‘go tribal’ and it was more important to them that a black QB win a Super Bowl than it was for them to play at their top potential and try to help Elway come out the victor.
This is the kind of racial solidarity that, I’m sad to say, that our fellow Whites just cannot seem to understand or wrap their brains around. And, it isn’t only minority blacks who have this kind of racial loyalty and solidarity. All non-white minorities have this mindset.
Even non-whites who wind up latching onto a White partner – will hold onto their loyalty to their own race whenever occasions arise where their race is in competition with the White race. Case in point – AOC, who openly spews hate and venom at Whites, White men in particular, but who does she spread her Puerto Rican thighs for?
A self-hating, self-loathing, goofy looking White guy with ugly feet.
The winner of the 100 meters at the 1980 Olympics was Allan Wells, a Scotsman representing GB. He also thrashed the Yanks in open meets who missed the Games due to weakling Jimmy Carter’s boycott. Wells was the last white guy to win the 100m Oly title.
That’s quite a feat by Wells. Would be great it it happens again. The best wide receiver in the NFL this season is a white guy, Cooper Kupp.
By the way, “Yanks” is not the correct nomenclature for the (presumably) black Americans you refer to. In America since the 19th century “Yankee” a name used only for people from the northern states. The American blacks of course all originated from the South. A black guy is not a “Yank”, neither is any Southerner, technically speaking.
Basketball is pretty interesting too. I think Iowa was the first team in a major conference last year to start 5 white guys in what was maybe 60 years. At least since the days of Chuck Taylors, Brylcreem, and underhanded free throws, that is. I would guess a majority white starting 5 (at least 3) has not won an NBA or college title since the ‘60s.
NBA titles with 3 or more white starters since the ‘60s: without researching it, I know the 1980s Celtics that started Bird, McHale and Ainge won some titles.
Interestingly, it seems that most of the best white NBA players of the last several decades have been from Europe.
In basketball we should probablly differentiate between the “white peoples”. The Slavs seem to excel most of all, particularly the Serbs. “Pistol” Pete Maravich, for example, one of the best players ever and someone who you’d have to call a basketball genius (if there is such a thing) was of Serbian descent.
Why does NASCAR bend over backwards to promote a medium black driver in a sport that receives essentially no interest from that community? It’s a dangerous and tedious way to make a living driving race cars and the two current black racers definitely have a pint or two of white blood mixed in. Plus Grand Prix and nascar have long and boring minor league racing before you can hit the big time. A great kicker is one you don’t notice because he’s accurate and doesn’t miss important kicks. We remember the failures in kicking far more than the winners. Maybe blacks would rather not face the pressure tied to the job? I will say that white players still succeed at the safety positions since pure speed is not as valuable as intelligence and technique.
They can’t play quarterback either.
God is there a more dull sport and league that is the NFL? Presided over by jews and overly populated by negroids the two groups who hate L ron Whitey the most. But here are these dumbf**k, baby boomer, whites and their offspring idolizing both every weekend. Not long now and they’ll be idolized the negroid bakketball league.
The incredible genius of wearing a crash helmet where the only thing on the field that can hurt your head are the other crash helmets. And yet there’s more brain injury associated with it than any other game.
Excuse the rant Mr Goad – great article as always.
You are correct on all points. Whites showing up at NFL games is like Christians showing up at the Roman Colosseum to cheer for the lions.
I loved playing the big three (football, baseball, and basketball) as a kid and all the way through high school. Never been much of a spectator though. The last few years have found me totally disinterested in football or basketball and only mildly curious about baseball doings. The past few weeks have been pretty damn tedious for me here in Georgia. I’ve heard, “How ’bout them Dawgs”, so many times that I’ve been tempted to tell friends and family how I really feel about their negro-worship. I was thinking today about how, if every single POC on the planet suddenly vanished, I would not miss a single one for a single second. This was a pretty good article, but I think Mr. Goad wasted good ink and valuable time chitchatting about the obvious.
Your last point really sinks in because I too realize that I could actually thrive if I didn’t have to be irritated by the actions of blacks and others on a daily basis. I cut the cord many years ago and only enjoy watching my local team compete, though the continual placation of the blacks is sickening at times. Still waiting for a player with the balls to put Race Realist or White Lives Matter on the back of his helmet. That would be worth seeing heads explode coast to coast.
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