By: Coachjhurt
A basic point of argument: people are bad at argument. They are good at having arguments. But they are bad at presenting logical, lucid, sensible argument.
Case in point: Today I saw a tweet that had been retweeted by Louisville sports radio host and sportswriter Nick Burch (Louisville Sports Live). The highlighted portion of the tweet was in support of Lamar Jackson being the best player in college football. The gist: the eleven sacks given up against Houston counterintuitively bolsters the Lamar for best player argument because it shows how little help he has gotten from his OLine (although the sentence does not specifically say OLine but rather says without help…). In essence, LJ is so good that he has overcome a porous OLine while other candidates have better OLines.
This may be an OK argument had UofL fans including Nick Burch not come apart at the seams last week after multiple national college football talking heads, primarily Booger Macfarland and Joey Galloway, had essentially argued the same thing the week before.
Go back a few days to the good times when UofL was still in the playoff hunt. The argument around the Ville was that this was a complete team full of great players. It was the number one offense in the country and statistically the number seven defense. It had no weakness. Bring on the Tide. I too was on the bandwagon.
Then enter Galloway and Booger. They argued that Louisvile had one great player and a bunch of other dudes. Cards fans like Burch were aghast. I listened to the LSL podcast and heard in only a few minutes the two hosts (Burch is one) call Galloway and MacFarland a myriad of ugly names I usually only hear in the halls of my middle school (and then only occasionally). Their beef: How dare these two judge us when they have such uninformed opinions, they likely haven’t even watched us play!
Fair enough….except when asked what they disliked about Galloways take, one of the guys had the audacity to say…”I really didn’t watch it…I knew what he was going to say anyway.” And there you have it. In one second the LSL guys rip Galloway and Booger for being ill informed. In the next breathe one admits they are mad as heck about something they really didn’t even watch.
Which brings me to my bigger issue.
Tonight I tried to ask how it worked that when Booger and Galloway threw shade at UofL by saying it was a team with one star and a bunch of dudes? That was egregious, ignorant, etc. But, only a couple of days later Nick Burch could retweet and affirm a tweet that suggested LJ has done all his wonderful deeds without the help other Heisman candidates have had. I may be wrong, but this seems to be essentially the same argument from both sides.
Engaging in this discussion via Twitter only made the issue worse. You see, it is nearly impossible to try to explain a fairly nuanced stance in 140 characters or less. The Twitter interaction essentially ended when Nick Birch replied to my Tweet by saying, “That made literally no sense.” I suppose “I’m rubber and you’re glue” was too many characters for him.
Nonetheless, the irony is that my basic argument was a pro Lamar Jackson one, a pro UofL one, and a pro UofL OLine one. Yet even the hint of disagreement made things fairly disagreeable.
My stance: Lamar Jackson is the best player in the country. Louisville is an outstanding team. The OLine may not be as good as Alabama’s but if the team is truly the best offense in the country, then it must be pretty darned good.
And, you can’t get mad that some guys (incorrectly I might add) called the team LJ and the Gang one week and then turn around the next week and say…well essentially that.
Of course here is the difference: Last week Burch and Card Nation were sure they were headed to the playoffs..the only thing that could stop them was bias from the committee. So, the argument had to be: Lamar is great, but we have a bunch of great guys and a great team (an argument which at its heart I agree with to this day).
Then the landscape changed. Houston drubbed Louisville. The playoff birth became a distant memory. So what was left? Make any argument to bolster Lamar Jackson’s Heisman hopes. Retweet anything that pushes that agenda…even if it counters the argument you made…last week.
And that is what happened. And I mentioned it. Not because I dislike UofL or because I dislike Lamar Jackson or because I enjoy Twitter drama. But because I hate faulty logic. And I dislike homers on any side, Blue or Red, who will take whatever tact in order to push the agenda they choose.
The truth is Lamar Jackson is the best player in college football. He doesn’t need any help from Burch or Cards fans to make it so. Louisville is an outstanding team with many great players. We agree here. So why try to further the argument?
Lastly, The KY Sports Guys are something we do for fun. We are not LSL nor are we KSR. We hopefully are a place sports fans in the Bluegrass whatever their favorite teams can come to when they tire of childish, name calling, homerish arguments and instead want to engage in hopefully logical, fun and spirited sports argument. Make no mistake, the difference in the two is vast.