JUST THE BLACK-AND-WHITE FACTS

If there is justice in the universe, Rick Reilly, the nation's best sports columnist, will provoke a much-needed conversation about race in America.

Reilly's latest column in Sports Illustrated discusses the smackdown of Air Force football coach Fisher DeBerry, forced to apologize after he remarked on the TCU squad that beat his team: "[TCU] had a lot more Afro-American players than we did, and they ran faster than we did ... It's very obvious to me they run extremely well."

Racially hypersensitive white America demanded, and got, DeBerry's apology. Reilly thinks that's ridiculous, and he's right. As the columnist notes:

In football, if you're looking for speed, 99.9% of the time you'll find it in a black athlete. All but one of the last 100 wide receivers taken in the first round of the NFL draft were black. Of the last 50 All-Pro cornerbacks, only one was white. Only 48 men have broken 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash, and they're all black. You think that's a coincidence?

I have no clue why this is true. I just know it is true. Running fast is not the only thing these athletes are good at. Not by a million miles. But it is one thing.

As Reilly notes, wryly:

If I were DeBerry's boss, I'd have screamed at him, too. "You've been coaching here 22 years and you're just now realizing black guys run fast? No wonder we suck!!!"

Why is it verboten to note the fact that black athletes are faster than white athletes? Some guilt-tripped whites think anyone who even mentions race is "racist." Sadly, most of them are liberal.