Magary on Manziel: Talk about throwing stones in glass houses

Not only are they not mutually exclusive, they're probably linked. When you're a small-town Texas football star AND your parents have all the money you're ever going to need, there's really no motivation to even bother bringing your books home.

 

I sure love playing both sides against the middle. Stoke the flame of peek-a-boo moralists. Shame the moralists. Stoke their flame. Shame them.

Deadspin posts all the shit because it needs to make money, and what moves is the scandalous stuff. It's pure, unadulterated self-interest. And it disqualifies you from suddenly jabbing a finger at more established media that's up to the same thing.

It's all a pursuit of eyeballs. That's all. One side plays the mainstream, middlebrow phony integrist. The other plays the hipster iconoclast/faux libertarian.

 

F*** Johnny Hangover. He's a punk with a sense of entitlement who has been and continues to be enabled because he's a football star. NOBODY is that good for that long. When he hits a slump and the Aggies start losing, all the back slapping will stop and his partying will be what everyone blames for his not becoming Johnny Football.

Either this year or in the NFL, Manziel is gonna zig instead of zag and a slobbering, roided-out linebacker is gonna knock him into sobriety.

 

"Not becoming Johnny Football"? He already is Johnny Football. And if this "sense of entitlement" exists, I would think the only freshman in history to win the Heisman Trophy would be, uh, entitled to it.

Even if he does get knocked around the way you say he will, he'll still be a legend at A&M his whole life.

 

You censor your post but not your signature. That's by far the most interesting thing about the 86 words above.

 

So...can Ohio State fans scold Carlos Hyde today for allegedly punching his girlfriend? Or is that part of the crime clause?

People have clucked their tongues and murmured concern since human beings began to gather into communities. Jenkins' relativistic rant is a popular tool for sportswriters who finally make a big name, and thus stop giving a real shit what anybody does. Her column on Manziel should come with the disclaimer of "and as all of you know, I've pooh-poohed Lance Armstrong's lying and strong-arming."

To his credit, discredit or something, Paul Finebaum knows his listening audience gets downright pregnant with judgment of the tiniest thing, and he thus exploits it.

 

She didn't knock Lance Armstrong at all. Barry Bonds, on the other hand ....

But that was years ago. Jenkins over the past couple years generally has opposed this kind of handwringing.

 

You write "handwringing." Why? You don't seriously think sportswriters should <i>never</i> make moral judgments on subjects they know better than most of the extended family they freely and without inhibition judge, do you?

 

If the audience were me and me alone, I would prefer that. But when I said "this kind of handwringing," I meant this kind, which involves scolding a college student for doing the types of things many college students do and then associating that scolding with a lack of future success.

 

If it isn't worth the scold, is it worth being a news item at all? And if it's not worth the news item at all, shouldn't Jenkins real target be the mud slopping Web sites that revel in these stories because they need hits?

 

I've heard this from a sports editor more than once:
"Well, TMZ had it on its site, so we're going with it."