Another reporting failure, and a sad commentary

I need to start out by saying that I love the South. My fascination with the trials and tribulations of Miss Teen South Carolina aside, I've never even remotely been tempted to buy into the notion/stereotype that southerners as a group are less intelligent/educated than people from other parts of the country. I've been around the country, and I've come to the conclusion that the ignorant are pretty much equally distributed by region, color, gender, and just about any other designation typically used to classify people.

I am convinced, however, that the South has a PR problem. I believe it was the great Southern thinker, Jeff Foxworthy, who once suggested that the problem is not that southerners are stupid, but that they can't keep the most ignorant of their people off the television. Miss Teen South Carolina is a perfect example of this. And today, we have what seems like another example here. In way of summary, Channing Crowder of the Miami Dolphins, who are in London this week to play their game against the Giants, is quoted saying that he didn't realize that they spoke English in London until he arrived there earlier this week, and that he couldn't find London on a map if the map wasn't labeled. Crowder grew up in the Atlanta area, and attended the University of Florida.

On the surface, this seems like a classic case of what I described earlier - an ignorant Southerner getting the microphone and giving the South a black eye. Given the way it's been reported to date, that's exactly how it's going to play. However, the reality is that this is a another classic case of taking a shortcut through the facts for the sake of an interesting story. The article in question, which was the source for many similar articles throughout the media, mentions the possibility that Crowder might have been joking. They can do better than that. It took me all of 5 minutes research to discover that in his time at Florida, Crowder posted a 3.5 GPA. Not too shabby. Lest you question the validity of such a mark for a star football player at a major football school, the same research also revealed that he scored a 30 on the Wonderlic intelligence test that all potential NFL draftees take prior to the draft. For some perspective on that, 20 on the Wonderlic equates to roughly a 100 IQ, or average intelligence. Crowder's 30 puts him in the company of an average chemist. This is a bright young man we're dealing with here. Another minute or two of research revealed that Crowder is a notorious smartass and joker. This is such a non-story it's not even funny, and any reporter interested in the actual facts would have seen that right away.

What's most sad about this whole thing is that the American public's view of major college student-athletes has become so low that we would so quickly believe that a young man who was admitted to and spent 2 years at what is a pretty solid university would say such things and mean them. Furthermore, looking at the entire landscape of major college athletics, I can't blame people for having that perception. There are exceptions, and clearly Channing Crowder is one of them, but playing college football stopped having any significant link with getting a college education a long time ago.