In Defense of Brandon Bostick

White media has chosen a scapegoat for the Seattle Seahawk’s defeat of the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday, and that man is Brandon Bostick.

After Green Bay slid by a duplicitous call that ruled against a touchdown catch by Dez Bryant in the previous week’s game against the Cowboys, the Great Hype in Aaron Rodgers had been thoroughly hyped up, just as all Great Hopes are, to beat the Incredible Black Athlete, in this case Russell Wilson.

When the game mattered most, in the 4th quarter, Russell Wilson showed up. Wilson himself shrugged off the first half. “The game started off kind of ugly, huh?” Wilson said. “But that last, what, three minutes and plus the overtime is probably as good a game as you can get.”

He and his clutch team scored 3 touchdowns in a comeback victory, while the Great Hype in Aaron Rodgers turned the Green Bay Packers into the Green Bay Slackers. Aaron Rodgers was stiff and inept to respond to Russell Wilson’s thrilling comeback. His sluggish play matched his lackluster stats. The Great Hype in Aaron Rodgers is 1-1 in NFC title games with just 1 touchdown pass to 4 interceptions.

While Russell Wilson drove his team down the field to score 3 touchdowns in the last 4 minutes of regulation and in overtime, rising to the occasion, Aaron Rodgers was just stuck in quicksand, following a program that obviously wasn’t working.

Aaron Rodgers led the Green Bay Slackers to only 2 field goals in the second half. Where was Aaron Rodgers during the 3rd and 4th quarters? Aren’t superstars supposed to show up when the game matters most? How can Aaron Rodgers’ toes get frostbite for an entire half–and when it wasn’t even snowing?

Rodgers was clearly outmatched in skill, talent, athleticism, and leadership ability. Wilson played rungs above the competition.

The window for the Great White Hope suddenly slammed shut and just as quickly, white media wanted a Black man to blame, rather than admit their Great White Hope was a loser.

White media took 60 minutes of regulation play, plus overtime, and decided to pin the loss on a split-second where Brandon Bostick was in focus.

This sounds eerily familiar. White media needs a Black man to blame, and all of a sudden, they found some guy they never talk about, who happens to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And they run with it…

So here we have an on-side kick.

Green Bay has a plan, but so does Seattle. They, too, have a chance to play in the Super Bowl.

Oddly, we must be reminded that the on-side is designed so that both sides have a chance to make the play. It is no sides ball to lose. It is either side’s ball to gain. In fact, if the on-side kick was always supposed to be recovered by the receiving team, there would be no on-side kick, because the probability of recovery would be zero percent and rendered useless. Here, white media likes to forget that another team was on the field, that the very intent of an on-side kick is that the kicking team desires to recover it.

The ball comes directly towards Bostick and he gets his hands on it. And here is where the criticism comes: why doesn’t he just block?

Anyone who has ever played a sport, and I mean a real sport where there is real pressure and consequences and thousands in the stadium (not just your Mom and Dad), knows that there is nothing textbook about sports. No matter what the plan is in the beginning, sports is about improvisation, reacting to your surroundings. When X happens, do Y, not because you planned it, but because that’s what makes sense in the moment.

All white media wants to discuss is that Green Bay drew a Blueprint, better than Jay-Z’s Blueprint, and so you can’t freestyle on it, just say it as written. White media wants you to think that Green Bay had conjured the Seattle kicker’s foot and talked to the wind and knew the exact height, direction, and distance the ball would travel. Like they had it all planned out—where the ball was going to land—and having that in mind, players should have simply played to the MP3 in their heads.

But let’s look at the facts. The ball was coming directly at Brandon Bostick. He did what any intelligent player would do when the ball was coming directly to him—he made a play for it. What doesn’t make sense is how his fellow players around him did not react to his motion. Sports is about improvisation. When Bostick went for the ball, why didn’t Jordy Nelson react and block? On a pick and roll, do you stick with the guy you were guarding, or do you make a switch in the spur of the moment?

White media wants to put a glitch on the shoulders of Bostick, but really the only glitch here is how players like Jordy Nelson didn’t react to the game that was being played on the field. Nelson only stood still behind Bostick. He didn’t realize there was a real game going on, and during a live game, you can’t just abide by the textbook. But to react to the game, you need to be in the rhythm of the game, and maybe that’s where Jordy Nelson fell short in being able to adjust.

On the other side, if Bostick doesn’t make a play for the ball, the white media would say: why didn’t he go for that? It was right there. What was he waiting for–did he want the ball to hit him in the head?

We are all very familiar with this blame the Black guy rhetoric that white media will dispose no matter what the facts are. Why is he being strangled? He must have been fighting the cops. Everybody knows you shouldn’t resist arrest. White media likes to swing the story in whatever direction that makes the Black guy look bad, so I am not at all surprised that white media would like to focus on a split-second of an entire game that lasted 60 minutes of regulation, plus an overtime period.

This is the same white media that prints out two sets of championship T-shirts and writes out two sets of post-game notes, so no matter who wins, they always sound like they get it half-right.

We all know that had the Black man recovered the 50/50 on-side kick, he would not have appeared in the media at all. The story would have changed. That on-side kick would not have made any headlines. No one would talk about Bostick’s contribution to the team, just like white media never talked about him before. But instead The Great White Hope in Aaron Rodgers led his Green Bay Slackers to a torrential loss, and white media frantically scoured the tapes for a scapegoat.

The worst of this “blame the Black man” rhetoric is the red-faced white men who yell that Brandon Bostick should “Do his job!”

For some white man who is not a professional football player to tell someone who is a professional football player to “do his job” is belittling and unacceptable.

It’s also quite racist.

It’s also terrible to hear black people co-sign and repeat racist speech without understanding the intent behind it.

Telling someone to just “do their job” is equivalent to telling them to just shut up and listen, and not think, suggesting that they are incapable of thinking. In other words, we are the white coaches, white offensive coordinators, and white defensive coordinators. We are the ones who are supposed to do the thinking. You black players just do the playing. Leave the thinking to us.

But we all know this is not true.

Russell Wilson revealed this when he said that he called the final play of the game, a touchdown pass to Kearse, even before they took the first snap in the overtime drive. Of course this is not the first time a Black player has made judgments to enhance the game. It always happens. They know the game from years upon years of playing and critiquing themselves and others.

But how often do you hear from the white media that Black players give input on the plays, the strategy, the personnel on the field? White media decides it doesn’t want you to think that a lot of what transpires on the field is spontaneous and impromptu.

What happens when the play breaks down? You throw the ball across the field to the only place it makes sense, to complete a two-point conversion, as Russell Wilson did against Green Bay. If you are confused about the play, ask Russell about it. But don’t blame the Green Bay defense because they couldn’t read his mind.

For white media to blame Bostick for the loss of an entire team and the lack of leadership and clutch ability from the Great White Hope in Aaron Rodgers, is insulting Bostick’s aptitude and also the integrity of audiences around the world.

What did the black man ever do that you feel the need to malign his intelligence?