News-Record.com

While hard to side against the NCAA's intentions, David Teel of the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press does a nice job of spelling out how Myles Brand et al bungled their efforts to banish offensive Native American mascots from the college arena.

Seems this is happening a lot in the political arena, too. Here, the NCAA more or less assumed Seminole Indians would be -- or should be -- offended by Florida State's mascot and ignored the existing, easy-to-locate evidence to the contrary.

As Teel writes:

More embarrassing was the NCAA's ignorance of how Seminole Indians view Florida State's nickname and mascot. The university has a long-standing and mutually profitable relationship with its home-state Seminoles, but in rebuking Florida State, the NCAA's vice president for diversity and inclusion, Charlotte Westerhaus, said "other Seminole tribes are not supportive."

Well. The other Seminole tribe resides in Oklahoma, and last month its General Council rejected 18-2 a resolution condemning Florida State's use of Seminoles.

This rather salient fact, discovered by Florida reporters in about five minutes, escaped the finger-on-the-pulse NCAA, specifically the Executive Committee and the Minority Opportunities and Issues Committee.

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There are some genuinely offensive mascots out there, i.e. the Washington Redskins. As ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski puts it on his list of 99 Imperfect Things in the sports world, coming in at No. 24:

The Washington Redskins. Has Daniel Snyder ever spoken to an actual American Indian about that nickname?

My question: Has the NCAA?

Oh, and an interesting take on the NCAA's holier-than-thou hypocrisy from collegeRPI.com guru Jerry Palm:

Since this is only in effect for NCAA championship events, can we assume that the NCAA will no longer enter into sponsorship agreements for those events with companies that use hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin names and/or logos?

If you watched the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and I'm pretty sure you did, you saw roughly 1,425,618 ads for Pontiac, which is a major corporate sponsor of the tournament. Pontiac was an Indian chief who led raids on Ohio Valley settlers during the days of the French and Indian War and the company logo is an arrowhead. If it were a member institution and not a company, it would certainly be in violation of this policy. Now, we have a situation where CMU could play Wichita State in a men's basketball tournament game and "Chippewas" has to be covered, but "Wichita" (another Indian tribe name) does not and Pontiac arrowheads are on display everywhere.