DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Indians 2020 (continued)

Yup.

Since we don't spend, Dolan makes a profit on the team each and every year.

It's a garbage league compared to the others.

For awhile I was on the "we need a salary cap!" train, but then I realized it's just a distraction for small-market teams such as us and Pitt to make hand over fist in profit.
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Dave,

I believe a lot of the NFL stuff is for player safety to minimize concussions and injuries.

Yes, because its so much fun to watch the NBA where 5 guys play one-on-one 82 nights a year. Dribble-dribble-dribble, and chuck up a step-back 30-footer. Yippe-ki-yay.

Or the NFL, where DBs can't even breathe on receivers without a flag, and you better not let your hand even touch the QB's helmet when trying to tackle him.

As far as I can tell, the only major sport that hasn't sold out, catered to, and knelt before their new altar - Offense - is hockey. I'm waiting now for the NHL to make the pipes an extra foot wider on either side of the goalie, or maybe just do away with that pesky blue line.

It'll happen too, because the dollars have gotten so big that sports franchise owners know that they MUST have the casual fans to make money, to the detriment of their sport, and at the expense of their fans who loved what their games used to be.

Sorry for the rant, but don't pretend that baseball is the only major sport to sell out.

The Rays were just in the World Series and are consistently one of the best teams in the league.

Capitalism is a hell of a thing.

Not a fan of this trade. Kind of a head scratch her to me.

Florida State’s pre-game ritual, a tribute to Chief Osceola on horseback, was developed in consultation with the Seminole Tribe. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press)
By Chuck Culpepper
December 29, 2014

TALLAHASSEE — Given the 80-odd mostly white students, the occasional ball caps and tattoos, the Tuesday morning hush and the student quickly punching her phone for the time (10:30), this Room 208 could grace most any pretty campus. Only two things hint as to the whereabouts. The preponderance of shorts means this could be in Florida, and the professor’s subject matter means this must be Florida State.

“History of the Seminoles and Southeastern Tribes, Pre-Contact to Present” is an elective many have chosen because they’re “Seminoles” who wish to know more about real Seminoles than just the Florida State Seminoles, the football team for which they’ll root in a national semifinal against Oregon on New Year’s Day. So the details of Seminole history flow from the captivating voice of Andrew Frank, whose brain never seems to lose its place across 75 minutes.

He tells them it’s hard to look back through the past few centuries and peg when the Seminole Tribe self-identified as Seminoles, but they first centralized as a tribe in 1957. He tells how Seminole ancestors, including the tribe called Creeks, traveled by “dug-out canoe” because, “If you need to go 20 miles, better to float there than walk there.” He’s on his semester-long way toward modern day, when he again will inform students that modern-day Seminoles are adept businesspeople, and that the trappings of mascot-hood can fail miserably at accuracy.

He might even tell them, as he said in an interview, “It’s hard to imagine 4,000 people wielding real political power and economic clout, and they do so gracefully.”

The course — born in 2006, hatched right after the NCAA clamored about changing Native American mascots, conceived with input from the Seminole Tribe of Florida — doubles as epitome. It demonstrates the unusual bond between a 41,000-strong university way up in the Florida Panhandle and a 4,000-strong tribe that history shoved into the Everglades and below Lake Okeechobee and way down almost to Miami, some 400 miles from Room 208 of the HCB Classroom Building. It helps explain why, if Native American mascots keep ebbing in the United States through the 21st century, “Florida State Seminoles” could be the last one standing in the 22nd.
A Florida State Seminoles cheerleader runs with a flag bearing the team’s logo. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

As a contrast to, say, Washington and the controversy over the Redskins name, any rancor with the Seminoles nickname has gone deluged in conciliation and cooperation.

“It’s an absolute reverence,” said Myron Rolle, the 28-year-old former Florida State safety and Rhodes Scholar. “It’s a reverence where the spirit, the unconquered nature of the internal values and ethos of these people, FSU tries to embody that. I love the way it’s intertwined.”

“I just feel a huge amount of honor,” said Justin Motlow, a freshman walk-on wide receiver who just became possibly the first Seminole Tribe member to play football for Florida State.

“I think it was a learning process for both parties,” Louise Gopher, an elder in the Seminole Tribe of Florida, wrote in an e-mail.

“I’m never under-enrolled,” said Frank.
A fascinating culture

At Florida State’s fall commencement on Dec. 13, the keynote speaker and honorary-doctorate recipient was Gopher, the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s first female college graduate (1970, Florida Atlantic). “I don’t think my feet have touched the ground yet on receiving an honorary degree,” she wrote in an e-mail.

As Florida State administrators altered the sports teams’ logo and fashion last spring, they consulted the tribe, and new patchwork appeared on jersey sleeves. Tribe leaders who visit Tallahassee know both the president’s yard and the stadium’s cheers.
Two Seminole Native Americans named Heni Yahula, known as Cowdow Billie, and Hia-Et-Tee, known as Annie Tiger kiss after they were married in front of members of their tribe in Miami on March 16, 1930. (AP Photo/Associated Press)

For Florida State’s national title game against Auburn last January in Pasadena, Calif., a Seminole Tribe of Florida jet stopped in Tallahassee to collect Bobby Bowden, the retired 34-season head coach at Florida State, and Bill Durham, the Tallahassee businessman who in the mid-1970s devised, and who still oversees, the cherished mascot concept of a “Chief Osceola” riding a horse onto the field during pregames. Durham, unprompted, says this: “How would it be if somebody comes in, knocks your door down again and says, ‘You’re out of here,’ then takes your precious metals and you have to move again? Basically, that’s what the white man did. We took this land away from Native Americans. We took it. We stole it. I’ve never understood why. I still can’t understand. My heart won’t allow me to.”

Last Mother’s Day weekend, Frank joined a few Florida State officials on a flight south, where they attended a powwow and a Tribal Council meeting and brought gifts that included women’s basketball uniforms. A flute player/storyteller visits Frank’s classroom every semester for no cost other than hotel and gasoline, and he stops off to stock up on Florida State apparel. Some students from Frank’s classes have gone on to internships with the tribe.

When Rolle sought to use his football stature to start a benevolent project, he consulted then-university president T.K. Wetherell, who suggested Rolle look into the Seminole Tribe. Rolle did so. He learned of obesity, hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes in Native American children, made that his project, spent 100-plus days at the three South Florida Seminole reservations, lectured children about vegetables, became something of a local hero and served as grand marshal in a parade.

Across the Atlantic at Oxford, he wrote his Rhodes medical anthropology thesis about North America. Title: “The Native-American Body: Internal and External Controls.”

“It just fascinates me, this culture,” he said.
Eliminating stereotypes

Rolle also notes that his brother, McKinley, a Florida high school football coach, graduated from St. John’s (N.Y.), which in 1994 changed its nickname from “Redmen” to “Red Storm.” That joined the decades of nickname exodus that have included Dartmouth (“Indians” to “Big Green”), Stanford (“Indians” to “Cardinal”), Miami of Ohio (“Redskins” to “Red Hawks”), Syracuse (“Orangemen” and “Orangewomen” to “Orange”), Utah (“Redskins” to “Utes”). When the University of North Dakota played the men’s ice hockey Frozen Four last spring in Philadelphia, it brought along no nickname.

North Dakotan voters overwhelmingly nixed the name “Fighting Sioux” in 2012. A new name will appear in 2015.

The same NCAA that aimed to scrub away the stereotyping granted a waiver to Florida State in 2005. It cited unique circumstances. Those included the partnership that stretches from Tallahassee to the six reservations near the base of the state, including Hollywood, Brighton and Big Cypress. While the Seminole nickname dates back to 1947, the partnership accelerated in 1976, after Bowden arrived to coach and Durham arrived to dine one night at Bowden’s house. The football program had no real national identity. When Durham suggested forging a tradition of a student horseman depicting the revered Chief Osceola (1804-38), with a seasoned student horseman riding out to the field with war paint and a spear, and Bowden agreed, Durham consulted the Tribe straight away. He asked Howard Tommie, the former tribal chairman, who said, “I’ll have ladies here at the reservation make your first regalia for you.”

“And so he did,” Durham said, “and he sent it on a Trailways bus.”

Through time and Seminole input, the university has made tweaks including, Frank noted, the discontinuation of a Sioux headdress for the Homecoming king. “Lots of changes took place outside the public view,” Frank said. “One of the things was there was a booster club, a group on campus that used to be called ‘Scalp Hunters,’ and they were the ones at the football games who would paint your face on the way in. Now they’re ‘Spirit Hunters.’ The name was changed, became remarkably innocuous, and I know there are groups out there that don’t call themselves ‘Spirit Hunters,’ but they’re not the official group on campus anymore. And ‘Spirit Hunters,’ how hard is that?”

Wrote Gopher, “FSU in earlier times was showing the Seminoles in feathers and war bonnets, which they never wore, and with caricature faces. We were being stereotyped with what was seen on the movies and television. Now Florida State University makes sure that the Seminoles are not depicted in a disrespectful manner in any way. They check with the Tribe for accuracy of any changes they make.”

Historical oddities do linger. Stadium rituals include fans “war-chanting” and using arms for “tomahawk-chopping.” “We also understand that some of it is for show, such as the horse, Renegade, and the flaming spear, and we are okay with it,” Gopher said. Around town, Native American iconography still appears on some local businesses such as vacuum repair. A restaurant at the edge of campus goes by the name Tomahawk’s, which baffled some scholars visiting Florida State for a conference.