It’s not all about PR. As others have noted, Oklahoma is in a constant recruiting war against other schools. If I work for another top program and a Black recruit I want is leaning toward Oklahoma, I could bring this up and say, “Coaches say the n-word in film study and the school doesn’t do anything about it.”
Would something like that change an impressionable 17-year-old’s mind? Can’t rule it out.
It’s certainly possible but not definitive.
It happened at Iowa and took a long time to stop and the cachet of playing in the Big XII was still a draw. OU? Maybe a recruiting disadvantage but it’s hard to say for a program that is annually a contender for national titles.
I’m wondering how much it factors that this is Brett Venables first season as HC. There can’t have been many carryover coaches and they may be on short leashes.
I don’t know. Yes, the majority of boosters might not care or excuse it, but last time I looked at Oklahoma’s team, the majority of the players are Black. Ostensibly, with Black parents, who probably care a lot about how their sons are treated. I think Great_Antibob is probably right - Gundy’s explanation might be omitting some things, like who heard him, and how it was perceived and impacted the people who heard it. If he was angry and loud when he read the word… and worse, if he said it with the hard R, I think that’s going to be very unappealing to Black athletes and their parents.
And trust me every other Big XII team or rival school will be all-too-willing to remind recruits that ou is where the coaches will drop the n-word willy-nilly.
Welp, never mind. The ESPN article in the OP has been updated with a tweet Venables put out saying Gundy read the word aloud multiple times. Once I can sort of understand as maybe an accident. Repeatedly? That’s pretty bad.
I suspect that might come down to an individual assessment of what we might consider “trivial” and I suspect we wouldn’t agree.
The word “trivial” is doing a lot of work here and I’m not sure the example you give is something that I’ve claimed.
In any case, I have first-hand experience of people scared to make important factual points for fear of the implications, not opinions, facts.
Each time they fail to speak is an example of a corrosive and damaging culture, would you not agree?
Would something like that change an impressionable 17-year-old’s mind? Can’t rule it out.
It’s 2022. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Black Lives Matter changed things. This is a generation that expects their institution to be responsive to racism. At the very least, you have to ensure that racial slurs aren’t used by employees of the university who have power over these young men.
On one hand, you’ve got a highly-ranked university where the coaches don’t use the n-word. On the other, you have one that does. Choice seems pretty easy then.
Norman is not exactly a dream destination and while ou has dominated the Big XII, they tend to come up short on the playoff stage. So they need to make that campus environment as appealing as possible.
Oddly enough, Gundy’s brother Mike learned that wearing an OAN shirt would lead his players to potentially boycott team two years ago, and made an apology. (I find it sus that Mike Gundy didn’t know what kind of programming OAN had, but whatever…)
Fundamentally, yes. “Film study” will be either:
At that level of play, film study is often done by position group, under the supervision of the coach(es) who work directly with that group. Gundy was OU’s wide receivers coach this year; I’d guess that the event occurred while Gundy was leading the wide receivers through a film study session.
What I see is so-called centrists and such coming here to post about a coach who resigned because he may (probably was going to be) have gotten fired. If the incident really went down as described, and he had no other skeletons (both of which I doubt, but I have no cites), this may or may not have been because OU is concerned about cancel culture, or it may be that they were concerned about recruiting other black players to their Division I team, where there is lots of competition.
Then, I see you trying to change the subject with vague references to non-verifiable personal experiences.
Meanwhile, a million minorities, women, and LGBTQ folks have dealt with yet another million slights, remarks, racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes and behaviors that pass with no consequences at all.
Cancel culture is death threats against librarians for having books the Right doesn’t want on the shelves, or the state or municipalities using their powers to ban those books from the shelves, or lawsuits against librarians for not having a sufficiently positive book about Trump, or death threats against healthcare workers and election workers for doing their job. And yet, I never see you or Omar Little whinging about that cancel culture.
I believe you when you say you believe that people have withheld, not opinions but facts. I don’t know if it actually happened, but I believe you think it happened. That has zero to do with this thread because no one has yet to show that “cancel culture” had anything to do with this resignation/firing, and certainly your experience in the UK is even less relevant.
Well, a word devoid of context is not hate speech. Hate speech itself is a concept poorly defined and used primarily as a cudgel to censor not to enact good of any kind.
Yawn.
THIS is a significant new fact, in case anyone just blasted by it.
I’m going to go with “something more than zero”.
A perpetual problem is that UO’s HR department has obligations/conventions of confidentiality about the situation that Grundy does not, so the public story is always going to be told more from Grundy’s side than from his former employer. If there are other skeletons, records of complaints, &c., we are unlikely to hear about them.
I’m shocked by this unexpected turn of events.
Which, ISTM, is a good reason for not having attacks of the vapors about this resignation incident unless and until we know more about the context that supposedly caused it.
To quote Fry: well, not that shocked
Not me. I’m going with “zero.”
It doesn’t take a world where these things actually happen at all: it takes a world where an extremely organized, slick, and well-funded propaganda machine constantly distorts the truth to make it seem like it’s happening all the time.
In such a world, people will be afraid and engage in self-suppression even when the danger is entirely imaginary.
Apparently, just saying the phrase over and over again makes it true.
We only know what was in the public letter and judging by that the situation is farcical and very hypocritical. If a word was so dangerous why didn’t it hop out of the laptop and strangle or stab someone? Oh… that’s right. It’s a word.
What we really need is a good stoning for people who utter the forbidden words.
“Look, all I said was, 'This piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah.”
“HE SAID IT AGAIN!”
Progress.