Professional Football Scouts: An Investigation of Racial Stacking

Abstract

In this article the author examines sports guides that are dedicated to critiquing collegiate football players eligible for the annual National Football League amateur draft. An effort is made to assess whether the scouts in these guides describe collegiate players in ways that correspond with U.S. race logic as articulated by Coakley (1998). More specifically, the article focuses on the mental and physical descriptions of African American and White athletes by professional scouts. The results show that African American players are more likely to be described in physical terms (rather than mental terms) than are White players in the same positions.

“An Amazing Specimen”: NFL Draft Experts’ Evaluations of Black Quarterbacks

“…For example, "Not mobile, elusive, and cannot escape the rush." Woodward (2004) uses a five-point scale as well, but unlike Woodward who attempts to fit every evaluative comment into a rather limited mental/physical dichotomy our approach allows for more specificity and diversity. While this article is different from other works on this subject in several ways, the one thing we do share with Woodward (2004) is our coding scheme.…”

“…Woodward (2004) uses a five-point scale as well, but unlike Woodward who attempts to fit every evaluative comment into a rather limited mental/physical dichotomy our approach allows for more specificity and diversity. While this article is different from other works on this subject in several ways, the one thing we do share with Woodward (2004) is our coding scheme. We believe that lumping perhaps related but not interchangeable variables into a rather broad, yet at the same time limited mental/physical dichotomy, will skew the findings.…”

“…Using the Sporting News magazine J. R. Woodward (2004) examined a sample of 152 players that included quarterbacks, middle linebackers and centers over a 5-year period (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003) and found that with the exception of those who played middle linebacker, African American players were more likely to be described in terms of their physical/athletic attributes, and white players in terms of their mental/ intelligence abilities. David Niven (2005) tested what he called the "Rush Limbaugh Hypothesis," that the liberal media are less critical of black quarterbacks because they want to see them succeed.…”

Race and the NFL Draft: Views from the Auction Block

“…For example, white male professional athletes tend to be assessed as having high leadership skills, high mental acuity, and strong work ethics, all valuable assets in other labor markets, including the coaching labor market. Minority professional athletes, by contrast, tend to be credited with inborn strength or speed, negating the possibility that they may also succeed because of hard work and intelligence (Billings 2004;Childs 1999;Eastman and Billings 2001;Hardin et al 2004;Rada 1996;Rada and Wulfemeyer 2005;Rasmussen et al 2005;Woodward 2004). Some analyses suggest that racial stereotypes reflected in the institution of sport are spread to other facets of society via advertising and journalistic coverage of sporting events (Dufur 1997;Hartmann 2007;Messner and Solomon 1993).…”

“…1 Many athletes in the most visible U.S. sports are African American or Latino (and to a lesser degree Asian and Polynesian), and these athletes are beginning to move into playing positions previously staffed only by white athletes (cf. Buffington 2005;Roderick 2002;Woodward 2004). Some minority athletes in the public eye also enjoy lucrative contracts from teams and from corporate sponsors whose products they endorse (Dufur 1997).…”