Why do we see different race at different NFL positions?

Great Debates
1

I was just looking at the SI top running backs for the NFL draft. They are all black. This got me thinking, why are different positions filed by different races in the NFL. As far as I know all the cornerbacks are black. All the halfbacks are, too. Maybe there are few white players at these positions that I do not know. But other other positions are different. There are very few black punters or place kickers. Quarterbacks are more mixed. There is some level mixing at wide receivers, but when you think the best deep threat receivers they are almost all black.

So what is going on? Why don’t we see white halfbacks or cornerbacks? Why don’t see black punters or place kickers? Are there physical difference between the elite black athlete and elite white athlete? Is it a cultural thing?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0801/nfl.top12.rb.prospects/content.1.html

2

Uh oh.

I’m going to stay away from this other than to note that the proportions of players are not static over time.

If you had been looking at this twenty years ago, you would have seen more whites at some position (offensive lineman and quarterback, and even linebacker to some extent, were heavily “white” positions back then, not totally so much now – but twenty years ago, you might have seen a few more black kickers – Reggie Roby, Donald Igwebuike).

Nor are trends over time one way. My perception (I haven’t seen the stats) is that the NBA has in recent years gotten somewhat “whiter” with an influx of good European players.

3

Come on Two, tell us what you think. Are we to believe that you started this thread without the slightest idea of what you believe the reason to be?

4

Given the size of the NFL, are there even enough players to get a reliable read on this? There are about 100 active QBs, for example, and far fewer punters… I don’t think any conclusions would be reliable.

Even then, it’s a big stretch to interpret the makeup of each position as reflecting anything about different races. There are just too many other factors involved, like geography, weather, the views of scouts, changing trends or opinions of what kind of players are best for any given position and so on.

5

At the risk of going the way of Jimmy The Greek, I’ll give you my opinion. This is one of the rare instances where one racial group has an inherent advantage. A great running back must be a great sprinter. Great sprinters need big strong butts and thighs. They need light, small calves. By a happy coincidence, those traits are found more often in black people.

I worked in the factory with two state champ level bodybuilders. Both men told me they had to avoid too much glute work, and they struggled to get more muscle mass on their calves. They are both black.

6

[QUOTE=Marley23]
Given the size of the NFL, are there even enough players to get a reliable read on this? There are about 100 active QBs…
[/QUOTE]
A sample size of 100 is actually pretty large for most studies, and you can get perfectly good results from these numbers. Even if you only had one person per team for a particular position you’d have a sample size of 32, and that’s plenty big to get statistically significant results from.

7

[QUOTE=AskNott]
At the risk of going the way of Jimmy The Greek, I’ll give you my opinion. This is one of the rare instances where one racial group has an inherent advantage. A great running back must be a great sprinter. Great sprinters need big strong butts and thighs. They need light, small calves. By a happy coincidence, those traits are found more often in black people.
[/QUOTE]

If it was that simple, then there would be some scientific evidence to support it. Is there? (Not saying I know there isn’t, just wondering.)

8

[QUOTE=El Zagna]
A sample size of 100 is actually pretty large for most studies, and you can get perfectly good results from these numbers. Even if you only had one person per team for a particular position you’d have a sample size of 32, and that’s plenty big to get statistically significant results from.
[/QUOTE]

I think the problem the OP is going to run into is that the sample size is probably quite adequate to establish the prevalence of the demographic pattern, but that this doesn’t establish the causal link he seeks for that pattern.

There’s lots of variables too: kickers – mostly white. Why? One possibility – all kickers now are soccer style kickers. I’m not sure that all or even most soccer-style football kickers grew up actually playing soccer, but I know a good number did. Soccer is perceived as more a sport of the middle class suburbs than of the inner city (in America). Ergo, perhaps, a larger pool of white soccer-trained kickers. Or: quarterbacks – historically pretty white. Well, maybe that’s the Bobby Hurley phenomenon (Hurley was a point guard, sort of the basketball equivalent of quarterback in terms of leading the offense). Hurley was also the son of a famed coach, who imparted to him the strategic and field-generalship skills he’d gained over the years. Let’s say lots of (not all) high school and college coaches in the past were white. Let’s say quarterback’s the most prestigious and important position on offense. What position is a coach dad going to encourage his son to take up? John Elway’s son is about to become the third generation of Elway to play quarterback in college (and was in fact coached by his dad), for instance.

9

[QUOTE=Huerta88]
I think the problem the OP is going to run into is that the sample size is probably quite adequate to establish the prevalence of the demographic pattern, but that this doesn’t establish the causal link he seeks for that pattern.
[/QUOTE]
Well, the standard caveat about correlation and causation should be applied here. Still the “Coach’s Son” theory could be tested if anyone wanted to do the background checks.

10

A lot of the demographics that you see in sport aren’t down to any innate differences in athletic ability, but are due to subtler forces at work. Why play sport at all?

1 You have the opportunity to play it

2 You’re good at at it and you think you have a shot a becoming a pro.

1 When was the last time you saw a black swimmer, pro cyclist or NASCAR* driver? I’m sure there are some, but there are factors other than purely athletic ability that might preclude minorities disproportionately.

  • NB in Formula 1 racing, there is a huge diversity of drivers, but the pool of “talent” is easy to break into if daddy is willing to pay $10,000,000 a year for a drive. Racing teams are often sponsored by eccentric foreign billionaires who have dilettante offspring

2 Most team sports in the US draw almost exclusively from college athletes. What drives a college kid to concentrate on sports rather than academic studies? Surely the biggest incentives are the money and the fame. But the downside is that the chances of success are very, very slim. If daddy is a member of Skull and Bones, why risk blowing out your ACLs when you already have a decent job lined up? Since I doubt that there are many African American Bonesmen, they “gain” an advantage on the Football field.

Finally. if there were any kind of truth in the whole “race X” is better than “race y” at sports, how does that explain the dominance of Jewish basketball players in the 1920s? Did they suddenly forget how to be great doctors and bankers for a few decades? :dubious:

11

[QUOTE=John Mace]
If it was that simple, then there would be some scientific evidence to support it. Is there? (Not saying I know there isn’t, just wondering.)
[/QUOTE]
Science isn’t just in a lab. There is a pretty well verifiable fact that when it comes to running very fast for short periods of time, the very very very best we see are more often black than white. Thousands upon thousands of trials (races/games/practices) where people are tested in an unbiased fashion have shown this outcome. If you were going to “scientifically” test how fast people can run, what would be better than the 100M dash, as it’s run in track meets all across the globe?

It’s not necessarily true that blacks are always faster than whites, nor is it necessarily true that blacks are on average faster than whites, but it sure as hell seems to be true that for the extreme outlying value, the fastest .001% of the population, blacks are more represented than whites. Maybe it’s only a .001% difference, and it shows up at the tail end of the curve, but you can’t argue that years upon years of track meets and other athletic competitions don’t provide any legitimate probative value.

Selection bias works to explain it if we can point to populations avoiding the events in large numbers. You may be able to say this about blacks and Hockey, I doubt this is the case with white folks and running.

12

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Come on Two, tell us what you think. Are we to believe that you started this thread without the slightest idea of what you believe the reason to be?
[/QUOTE]

Actually, I do not know.

I would think that someone has studied this issue, but I cannot find any research.

13

It’s so obvious that race decides what you’re good at. :rolleyes:

This why people of the Soviet race are good at chess and why only male white Americans have been US President. :smack:

14

[QUOTE=glee]
It’s so obvious that race decides what you’re good at. :rolleyes:

This why people of the Soviet race are good at chess and why only male white Americans have been US President. :smack:
[/QUOTE]

But that analogy is a bad one and doesn’t explain the racial breakdowns in US pro sports, particularly certain positions in the NFL and the NBA as a whole.
However, does this question apply to baseball? Now there’s a pretty equal appearing sport. Whites, Latinos, black Latinos, African black people, Asians…

My guess as to the OP’s question is that it is a mixture of factors…cultural, a matter of opportunity, perhaps some genetic predisposition to certain body shapes amongst the races…

15

[QUOTE=Cheesesteak]
Maybe it’s only a .001% difference, and it shows up at the tail end of the curve, but you can’t argue that years upon years of track meets and other athletic competitions don’t provide any legitimate probative value.

Selection bias works to explain it if we can point to populations avoiding the events in large numbers. You may be able to say this about blacks and Hockey, I doubt this is the case with white folks and running.
[/QUOTE]

Hmm… interesting, but ‘track meets and athletic competitions’ certainly are loose enough experiments, as it were, that there are other possible variables acting on the results than simple physical ability, I would say.

For instance, you could probably build a convincing case that in a lot of communities, athletic competitions attract more attention from from black individuals than white, because it’s one area of achievement where they aren’t discouraged and might even be encouraged to participate, as opposed to areas intellectual or financial, say. With more blacks participating and more blacks driven to succed in that particular area, more of them are represented among the winners.

Not saying that this is the explanation, just wanted to throw out the thought.

16

[QUOTE=Tapioca Dextrin]
A lot of the demographics that you see in sport aren’t down to any innate differences in athletic ability, but are due to subtler forces at work. Why play sport at all?

1 You have the opportunity to play it

2 You’re good at at it and you think you have a shot a becoming a pro.

1 When was the last time you saw a black swimmer, pro cyclist or NASCAR* driver? I’m sure there are some, but there are factors other than purely athletic ability that might preclude minorities disproportionately.

  • NB in Formula 1 racing, there is a huge diversity of drivers, but the pool of “talent” is easy to break into if daddy is willing to pay $10,000,000 a year for a drive. Racing teams are often sponsored by eccentric foreign billionaires who have dilettante offspring

2 Most team sports in the US draw almost exclusively from college athletes. What drives a college kid to concentrate on sports rather than academic studies? Surely the biggest incentives are the money and the fame. But the downside is that the chances of success are very, very slim. If daddy is a member of Skull and Bones, why risk blowing out your ACLs when you already have a decent job lined up? Since I doubt that there are many African American Bonesmen, they “gain” an advantage on the Football field.

Finally. if there were any kind of truth in the whole “race X” is better than “race y” at sports, how does that explain the dominance of Jewish basketball players in the 1920s? Did they suddenly forget how to be great doctors and bankers for a few decades? :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

Basketball was a fringe sport in the 1920s. There was no significant pro basketball league until much later.

Jews didn’t dominate basketball then because they were better than all the other races- they dominated because the game was confined to a relatively small number of urban athletic clubs. Once the game was played more widely, Jewish dominance vanished.

17

[QUOTE=FoieGrasIsEvil]
But that analogy is a bad one and doesn’t explain the racial breakdowns in US pro sports, particularly certain positions in the NFL and the NBA as a whole.
[/QUOTE]

The NBA as a whole is pretty easy to explain; blacks play basketball more than whites. Basketball isn’t a one-talent deal like sprinting, it’s a sport where a multitude of physical attributes are important, and it’s dominated by an ethnic group that plays it a lot. The NHL is dominated by Canadians for the same reason.

Volleyball, a sport that favours the same basic athletic traits as basketball, is NOT dominated by blacks.

Latinos are heavily overrepresented in baseball as compared to their population, especially Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.

As to the issue of blacks in various football positions, it’s pretty commonly known that they’re strongly discouraged from playing quarterback. Warren Moon wasn’t welcome in the NFL coming out of college because NFL teams didn’t think a black man could be a QB. Some of that thinking still prevails out there, although it’s dying off.

18

[QUOTE=RickJay]
The NBA as a whole is pretty easy to explain; blacks play basketball more than whites. Basketball isn’t a one-talent deal like sprinting, it’s a sport where a multitude of physical attributes are important, and it’s dominated by an ethnic group that plays it a lot. The NHL is dominated by Canadians for the same reason.

Volleyball, a sport that favours the same basic athletic traits as basketball, is NOT dominated by blacks.
Latinos are heavily overrepresented in baseball as compared to their population, especially Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.

As to the issue of blacks in various football positions, it’s pretty commonly known that they’re strongly discouraged from playing quarterback. Warren Moon wasn’t welcome in the NFL coming out of college because NFL teams didn’t think a black man could be a QB. Some of that thinking still prevails out there, although it’s dying off.
[/QUOTE]

Not just dying off, DEAD. And the reason was NEVER as simple as mere racism. Come on, Deep South schools that ran the wishbone had black quarterbacks more than 30 years ago.

When John Robinson was the coach at USC, he turned a successful black high school quarterback named Marcus Allen into a running back. For that matter, Yale turned a successful black high school quarterback named Calvin Hill into a running back.

Were the coaches wrong to do so? Were they racist to do so? I think not, considering that Allen won the Heisman Trophy and made the Hall of Fame as an NFL running back, and Calvin Hill led the Cowboys to a Super Bowl as a running back.

When Robinson coached in the NFL, he made a black man (Tony Banks) his starting quarterback, so it’s not a simple matter of racism. Robinson made an informed decision- in the Seventies and early Eighties, speed was deemed a very valuable commodity for a running back or receiver, but NOT for a quarterback. Robinson figured that Marcus Allen’s speed would be put to better use at a different position.

The reason we see many more black QBs in the NFL is NOT so much that coaches are now more enlightened- it’s that speed is no longer an unnecessary luxury in a quarterback. The pass rush today is so fast and so intense that a quarterback who can’t run at all is increasingly a sitting duck.

Today, coaches see the value of a mobile quarterback. THAT’s why Mike Vick and Vince Young were drafted so high. If they’d come along when the pass rush wasn’t so fast, they’d have been moved to wide receiver or running back.

19

Well…I really don’t want to sound racist but the way my great-grandfather explained it to me was like this. (many years ago)

In the olden days people owned slaves. (they were black)

It was cheaper to breed new slaves than to buy new ones when the old ones died

So since slaves were treated pretty much like livestock it made sense that they would be bred like livestock (if you have bunch of horses and you want to breed the strongest possible offspring than you breed your biggest strongest stud with the biggest strongest mare)

After multiple generations of selective breeding you are left with mostly bigger,stronger,faster slaves who can work more efficiently.

These slaves eventually became the african-americans we now how have in the united states. So it stands to reason that a larger percentage would have more athletic traits than people of other races (size, strength. speed.)

Now granted probably nothing I just said has any scientific or historical merit, and might just be the delusions of an old codger who died when I was 12, but it does present a theory.

20

Well, I just went over to NFL.com and came up with these numbers based on the pictures on the rosters:



**Position             % Black**
QB                     17%
RB                     78%
OL                     35%
TE                     36%
WR                     77%

It’s interesting that the positions that favor speed and agility (RB and WR) have over twice the percentage of blacks than those positions favoring size and strength (TE and OL).

I didn’t look at the defensive positions because it’s late and I’m tired. Maybe tomorrow.