People are Dumb
Michael Vick topped the list of most disliked athletes according to a recent poll. This is not all that surprising. Despite keeping his nose clean since his release from prison, there are some people who simply won’t forgive him for his involvement in an illegal dog fighting ring. I may disagree with these folks, but I find there opinions valid and reasonable. But the rest of the list? Ugh…
Coming in second is Manti Te’o. Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated they disliked the rookie linebacker. This isn’t entirely unreasonable: depending on whose story you believe, Te’o is either a fool who perpetuated a lie because it worked to his advantage or a sinister mastermind of an exploitive hoax. Both are reasons to dislike the man. Oh… and he went to Notre Dame.
Ndamukong Suh, the Detroit defensive linemen, ranks third. Suh has a reputation as a dirty player, perhaps the dirtiest in the game. He has received seven fines totaling over $200,000 in his three and a half years in the league. That makes him an easy target for dislike. But off-the-field, Suh is a straight arrow. He is intelligent, an excellent interview, and remarkably generous; before even signing his pro-contract, he donated over $2M to his alma mater, with a good portion of it going towards an endowed academic scholarship.
So far, this list seems pretty reasonable. All these guys have fairly obvious black marks on their record which no one would blame anyone for holding against them.
So why are people dumb?
Because Ben Roethlisberger is number four on the list. Ben Roethlisberger, he of the multiple accusations of sexual assault. Now, the allegations surrounding the first case are admittedly questionable. As a result, Roethlisberger faced no discipline of any kind. However, the second one is far more concerning. While criminal charges were ultimately dropped, NFL commissioner Roger Goodel saw fit to suspend Roethlisberger for 6 games (eventually reduced to 4) and mandated that he attend a behavioral evaluation and follow through on any counseling recommendations. This is significant: as much as Goodel purports to be the Judge Dredd of sports commissioners, he is not particularly apt to suspend superstar quarterbacks. Though there was not enough to make charges stick, there was enough for Goodel to act, which indicates to me there was something real to these allegations. For this, “Big Ben” received negative marks from just 40% of poll respondents. This tied him with Mark Sanchez, guilty of little more than sucking.
That is pretty fishing dumb, if you ask me.
Is the poll of football fanatics? Or does it include casual fans or even non-fans?
Because Michael Vick was famous outside of football for what he did. Ndamukong Suh similarly has a reputation that people would have heard about without seeing a single NFL game.
Meanwhile, this post is the first time I have heard anything about Ben Roethlisberger.Report
Hey @vikram-bath
I initially neglected to include a link to the report, since added. It indicates that the poll was of the public at large.
“Pollsters have told us on a few occasions that while Vick scores well with hardcore NFL fans, casual fans still identify him mostly with the legal woes of a few years ago.”
This supports your theory.
I’m surprised that you are unfamiliar with Roethlisberger. He has won two Super Bowls, was a top draft pick, and is every bit the start that Vick was. It is curious to me that Vick’s crimes permeated the social zeitgeist but Ben’s did not.Report
I’ve heard of him. I hadn’t heard of the charges against him though.Report
That is part of what is curious to me: One multimillionaire star athlete’s transgressions are known to the public atlarge far more than another multimillionaire star athlete’s trangressions are… To say nothing of lesser players with lesser trangressions.
I realize this is an apples to bananas to pineapples comparison, but I’d be curious what are the factors that impact how deep a story penetrates. Why did Te’o get more pub than Ben?Report
The longevity of the cultural attention to Vick & Te’o over Rdfgdgr sadly does not surprise me at all. I think it boils down to the uniqueness of a case. The stranger or more unusual the facts, the longer something will be remembered. Dogfighting? Not bizarre necessarily, but certainly unusual (and people love animals more than people, generally). Te’o story IS bizarre. A star athlete [accused of] sexually assaulting woman? Meh. Those are a dime a dozen, and each instance is eventually replaced in the news cycle either by something more interesting to people, or by the next athlete in that position.Report
I think you seriously underestimate how much hatred is generated by “guilty of seriously sucking”.Report
Well, sure. But more than that which is generated by “accused of sexual assault… twice”? Perhaps the MRM has reached the mountaintop.Report
I have heard of Michael Vick only because of the dog fighting.
I have heard of Manti Te’o only because of some weirdness with a fake relationship or something. I could not be bothered to learn any of the details.
I have not heard of the third guy or the fourth guy. If I knew that one of them was guilty of serial sexual assault, I’m pretty sure I’d hate that guy a lot. But I knew nothing at all about them.
I know nothing of Mark Sanchez’s athletic skills. I only know that he is very, very, very handsome.
I do, however, agree that people are dumb.Report
“I only know that he is very, very, very handsome.”
It would not surprise me to learn that this was a factor in some of the dislike. Tom Brady also ranked in the top ten.Report
I know additional facts about Tom Brady! (He is admittedly very, very handsome, but he’s not my type.) He’s apparently quite good at his job, and he’s married to a very famous model (about whom I know much more than him).Report
He also likes baby goats.Report
One of my fantasy names is a lurid Brady/goat reference.
And Brady isn’t your type? Physically? Or his style? He could probably do without a couple of the turtlenecks he seems to layer one on top of the other.Report
He went through an awful phase where he was defeating his own good looks with really, really terrible hair.
And I should be clear that (in a sad world wherein I was not married to the Better Half) I would be quite happy to enjoy Mr. Brady’s romantic attentions. “Not my type” is relative amongst ridiculously handsome professional athletes.Report
Also I think you overestimate the degree to which being a serial quasi-rapist is important for people who hate Ben Roethlisberger. I think most of them just hate him because he’s a Steeler. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)Report
Making them all the dumber.
“Look… Rape is a tricky topic… But playing for the Steelers? That’s a bridge too far.”Report
Well, yes. But I’m just saying. I think the Steelers part is a bigger part of the hate against him than his serial rape.Report
I kind of doubt that, honestly. I mean, of all the teams that people love to hate, I think the Steelers are historically pretty low on the list – the Cowboys are at the top of the list, you’d have the Raiders fairly high, probably the rest of the NFC East as well, and definitely the Patriots. Possibly the Ravens. But that’s about it.
The last couple of years since Rerhasfdfdger’s rape allegations, I’ve gotten the sense that’s changed a bit, but that obviously would support the notion that it’s Rggdsfweter rather than the Steelers that people are reacting to.
The reason that he’s not higher on the list is I think pretty clearly that his story didn’t capture the front pages like Te’o and Vick’s stories. But with that, I think it can get explained by the fact that the Roethlisberger was never formally charged and the investigation was generally kept as low profile as possible under the circumstances – and understandably so; as a result, not a lot of details ever came out. On top of that, the charging decision was made fairly quickly – only about a month after the story first broke.
The Te’o story more easily caught the popular imagination because it was so bizarre; it’s also a lot fresher in the public’s mind than the Roethlisberger case, which was three years ago now.
As for Vick, even though it’s a much older story, it was a story that played out over a pretty lengthy period of time and actually resulted in not only charges but a conviction and jail time. On top of that, it’s important to remember that in many ways Vick was the face of the NFL for awhile – a megastar in a way that Roethlisberger has never been. It’s not often that megastars get multi-year sentences. It’s even less often that, after serving those sentences, they actually come back and have reasonably successful careers, albeit without being quite the megastar they had been.Report
Sexual assault? Very bad. Not excusing or domesticating it. Murder, however, is even worse. Let me give you three names: Aaron Hernandez (not yet convicted but it looks bad), Ray Lewis, and O.J. Simpson. Simpson escaped criminal liability under circumstances we all know. Ray Lewis? When he retired, they held a party for him!
And if you’re going to (rightly) condemn Roethlisberger for behavior that sure looks like sexual assault, let’s not forget the Oakland Raiders’ Darrell Russell, who might not have been actually raping that girl, but he did think it was a damn good time to videotape it. I guess we just expect that sort of thing out of a guy who plays for the Oakland Raiders. And maybe that’s true for any player whose team mascot resembles a pirate, like, say, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Nate Webster.
As a culture don’t seem to like drunk drivers very much. But people seem to like Donte’ Stallworth just fine.
Oh, and Ryan Leaf ought to retain high negatives too, but being a spoiled, prissy little bitch who stunk up the field isn’t the same thing as being a murderer, and his crimes (for which he is still serving time) were committed after leaving the NFL.Report
Itis unclear to me if former players were included. Because you also have Ray Carruth, Leonard Little, Randy Moss, Nate Newton, JaMarcus Russell, Brett Favre (how quickly we forget about his myriad off- and on-field issues because he had fun out there (TM)!)…
Jared Allen, among current players, also has at least a couple of DUIs on his record. But he has assumed the persona of a WWE character so I guess that’s cool…Report
I’ve come around on Ray Lewis. What he had was a valid stand your ground action, in my opinion. (It was still a significant error to obstruct justice and destroy evidence, however)Report
With a knife?Report
A case that led to a conviction is likely more substantive than one that was dismissed. If people are taking that into account, good for them.Report
This is truly a bizarre list. Of the 10 only Roethlisberger and Vick have perpetrated any crime, and half are are on the list just because they stink (Hello, Jay Cutler). And Reggie Bush???
Ray Lewis’ image being rehabilitated has to be one of the greatest PR campaigns of this century. How he didn’t crack the top 10, other than perhaps being ineligible for not being active, is inexplicable.Report
“And Reggie Bush???”
Missed out on football for marajuana, is my guess.Report
You must be thinking of Ricky Williams.Report