Top college football prospect [Michael Sam] comes out

I would give a crap, IF I were a coach. When you make a personnel decision, you’d like to make it football and character considerations. In this case, you’d have most of the media world watching over you shoulder as well as over the shoulder of the franchise.

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There’s always a minority that you can’t convince of basic facts.
While neither of us know what would happen. I assert that the majority of gay and lesbian advocates would not go apeshit over Sam getting cut if he is given a fair shot after being drafted. It’s common sense. And while not everyone adheres to common sense, I think the majority will see that “willing to draft” shows a lack of homophobia.
[/QUOTE]

I’m making an assumption here that the majority of gay and lesbian advocates don’t follow football that closely and would have no way of evaluating a player’s football credentials. He might look like a good football player to them, but they’d have no clue as to whether or not he was missing assignments and such. We’re talking folks like Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar evaluating a player’s skills.

Not an odd choice at all, if the reporter wanted to find out how religious, conservative players (and the NFL is full of them) are likely to react.

If even a conservative, religious player like Birk says “We’ve all had gay teammates before, and it was never that big a deal,” then it probably WON’T be that big a deal.

Is that perspective not worth hearing?

There are already several NFL players who came out after they retired. It’s possible more of them will come out, of course.

You really wouldn’t.

Which NFL coaches already have to deal with all the time.

Yes: NFL franchises will crumble under the threat of commentary from Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.

There’s no way to say where he would have been drafted before the NFL combine. For pass rushers, measurables are a Big Deal. If we were designing an experiment, he’d have come out after the combine. He didn’t, so it’s impossible to attribute his draft spot to his sexuality. If he doesn’t get drafted at all, he’ll have a legit gripe.

This definitely hurts his draft prospects. Even for a fairly progressive coaching staff, they may have concerns that even one or two players on their team being homophobic could create problems. Worse, it will bring a lot of attention to the team that isn’t even directly related to football. A coach could make all the right football decisions based on his talent, but there will inevitably be some questions about whether it’s because of his talent or because of his sexuality.

As an example, look at Tebow, he went into the NFL with a lot of questions surrounding how well he would do. Yet I knew several people who were huge fans of his because of how open he was about his faith. When he started to struggle, a number of these types people raised a ruckus about how he wasn’t getting a fair chance because of his faith. Now he’s out of the NFL, and I think as much of that is about the media circus that surrounded him as it was about his talent. That is, if not for the media, he could probably be a back-up somewhere or serving as a third-down or wild cat QB.

I suspect that Michael Sam will be in a similar sort of situation, except the media circus will be able his sexuality not his religion. He’s entering the draft with some legitimate questions about his ability to play; he’s not a clear-cut top prospect. How willing will a team be to take on a project that may not pan out and gets people questioning the motivation behind every decision related to his career. If he were a top prospect, I could see a team taking the risk, as there always seems to be whenever there’s players with potential huge upsides or questions about attitude in the locker room or whatever. But for a player projected for round 3-4, I think it could drop him as much as a round or more.

That all said, I applaud him for being brave enough to come out, especially fully aware that doing so now will probably cost him a lot of money over his career. I really hope it works out well, he can perform well and get a draft position that is appropriate for his talent.

If I were an NFL coach I would. Of course I’m not a coach, and like to stir things up, which is why I’d make a terrible coach.

You keep on saying that, but give only examples of coaches dealing with legal issues, not social issues. This is a unique case, and while it is not nearly comparable to MLB in 1947, I’m going to state for the 4th time, that the media will indeed assert that it is exactly like that. That’s what they do for ratings and readership. Hell, we’ve gone on for 70 posts about it in this thread.

But add in Rachel Maddow (who might actually know a lot about FB), Hilary Rosen and scores of others with nightly access to media outlets, and they’ll surely rile up legions of folks who don’t know a thing about what Tom Jackson and Merrill Hoge are talking about. If it happened, here in Massachusetts, they’ll be organized protests if a kid is drafted and then cut. Same thing on the other side. The GOP runs on the G-G-G platform; Guns, Gays and God. A gay kid trying out for a spot on an NFL team threatens 2/3rds of their doctrine.

I’ve witnessed this kind of sh*t for 50 years, from both sides. I’m a leftist, but I’m tired of excess wherever it’s coming from. My hope is that a current NFL player comes out this spring, and screws both sides out of their excess.

You’d be the only one in the league, then. They’re used to constant criticism and chatter. It just comes with the territory. Guys who can’t handle that stuff don’t last very long in professional sports.

Because it doesn’t matter what type of issue it is. They can handle media attention.

People who don’t care about football will continue not to care about football. In my experience gay guys are world champions at this. :wink:

If he can play, he’d certainly be welcomed in Santa Clara …

By July 397,000 other things will have happened to grab Twitter Universe’s collective attention. Sports Illustrated will be running Scoreboard items titled “Remember Michael Sam?”

This is an interesting milestone in the gay rights narrative but a minor one. A major college football team, and a pretty good one at that, won a division title in the nation’s toughest conference all the while living with the incredible and divisive knowledge that a gay man lived among them.

People adapt pretty quickly. People lose interest in items even quicker these days. I give this one until Thursday.

I think Master Blaster nailed it. I respect people being honest and open about who they are, and in his case I can respect the bravery needed for him to come out. But, I think it complicates things regarding his draft prospects and brings into play considerations that have little to do with his athletic ability.

How much did you hear about Manti Te’o being a distraction for his team this year? Or Chris Culliver’s bigoted statements being a distraction? Tim Tebow got drafted in the first round despite being a massive “distraction” (and not any good at playing QB).

I find the whole “distraction” thing to be a huge line of bullshit. As you point out, coaches and GM’s put up with “distractions” almost every day. Using it as an excuse to explain why a team might not draft a player is just silly.

My experience as a Patriots’ fan is that when the issue at hand has something to do with social issues, it usually becomes a huge distraction.

1990, in the first month of the season, 3 or 4 Patriots players taunted and wiggled their willies at a female reporter. New HC Rod Rust (hardly a Lombardi clone) handled it poorly, a sh*t storm erupted and the season went down the tubes.

In the 1996 draft, Bill Parcells drafted Christian Peter in the 4th round out of Nebraska. Peter had been charged and convicted with a things like public drunkeness, but he had gone uncharged with a couple of rape allegations. When the stories leaked to the press, Myra Kraft, the now-deceased wife of Pats owner Bob Kraft, demanded he be released, and he was 1 week later. The Pats actually made the SB that year, but Parcells was pissed that he “couldn’t buy the groceries” and left town for the Jets.

Both these issues involved social issues – sexual harassment and violence against women, and they ended the Patriots careers of one bad coach and one HOF coach. They both got enormous coverage in the media for months. I’m not in any way equating an openly gay player with violence vs women, but just that social issues have a larger scale that both the NFL and NFL coaches cannot contain like “garden variety” issues like PEDs, gun crimes and murder allegations.

Sad, but true, that after a while the media finds nothing “sexy” about violent crime, certainly not like wiggling your willy at a young female reporter.

Any issue with a significant social issue, especially with a ‘sex’ angle to it, draws in the media like piranha to an open wound.

The groceries comment was about Terry Glenn.

I’m not saying the coach can contain them in the sense of keeping them quiet. I’m saying that coaches and teams are used to responding to things like this, and the coverage always dies down and stops eventually.

Over on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, a reader who moonlights as a sports blogger said he thought that a third round pick would have been possible but pushing it, before the announcement, considering he only weighs 260 pounds(tiny for a DL) and doesn’t have the speed to be a LB.

It seems to me that like it or not choosing him is a risk and I suspect most will think he’s not worth the risk.

Hollywood is far from a homophobic place, but how many times has Hollywood been willing to cast an openly gay actor as the lead in an action movie and risk alienating their male audience members and how many romantic comedies have they cast openly gay men in the lead and risked alienating their female fans?

It’s one reason I think many gay men are crossing their fingers for their fingers at the casting of Christian Grey.

260 pounds isn’t tiny for a DE at all, just on the small side. 2013/4 Pro Bowlers Robert Quinn (264) and Cameron Wake (260) are in the same ballpark. Robert Mathis is only 246 pounds. It’s tiny for a 3-4 end, but he doesn’t project as one of those anyway.

If he’s not drafted, he can sign with any team as a free agent. Given the guy’s background I find it hard to believe nobody would take a flier on him in the draft or afterward.

A bunch of the biggest stars on TV are openly gay. How does that figure into this calculus?

I honestly don’t think that his coming out will impact his draft position much. He may drop a little if only because he’s getting more scrutiny, but he’ll be a value pick by the 4th or 5th round. Whether he makes a team will depend mainly on his ability to play whatever position the teams wants to slot him in, but he seems to have enough value to take a chance on.

There are enough owners that would want him on the team, and the league is going to be very careful around perceived homophobia. You can bet if it gets to be a problem during a game that some Unsportsmanlike Conduct flags will be thrown. It’ll be more interesting during practice and in the locker room where the coaches and team leaders will need to on board.

In fact that NFL and the NFLPA both issued supportive statements. The owner of the Patriots says his team would be happy to have him if he helps the team win. I expect enough teams will have that attitude that he’ll get drafted or signed somewhere.

I’ve merged the Great Debates and Game Room threads about Sam’s announcement and his draft prospects.