[Promoted from the diaries.  I am going to add a few comments below this, but I think the member who found it deserves all the credit.  I was away trying to make money at my day job (so sue me!) and he was on the case. -- Ed.]

http://www.sportsline.com/columns/story/11188948

"I'm the only one who seems to have noticed, but that's OK. Being the only one with a clue is a burden I'm willing to shoulder. So everyone else can do their annual whining about the possibly racist hiring practices in college football -- Auburn made it particularly easy this year; so did Tennessee -- while right here at CBSSports.com we put some actual thought into it.

The outrage du jour, in addition to Auburn's indefensible hire of Gene Chizik, is the coach-in-waiting plan. Around college football, schools like Texas, Florida State, Purdue and Oregon had identified their next coach, even with their current coach still on the job. And what do you know? At those schools, the old coach and the next coach were white! It's racism!

And maybe it is. Look, I'm not about to read anyone's mind at those schools and decide they're racist. But I'm not about to do the opposite and decide they're not.

But I will look at Kentucky football, located in one of the deepest parts of the deep South, and recognize what has taken place. And what has taken place there is historic. "

[Addendum by Truzenzuzex 12/23/2008]

Gregg Doyel isn't just, "getting it," he is screaming, "What the ....???"

It's curious, in today's world, what makes the news.  Good reporting is, "fair and balanced," and I don't mean to unduly credit any particular news organization by using that description.  Gregg Doyel is not known for either fairness or balance, but in this particular case, he has embarrassed his hard news and opinion brethren by pointing out the reality right in front of their face -- news and context that has gone almost unremarked and unnoticed in the sports media.

One would think that the socially sensitive hard news sportswriters would be falling down to include the Kentucky story if only because it represents perhaps the most profound irony in the history of recent sports reporting.  Why, only a few years back, Kentucky  was forced to re-live and re-defend the record of Adolph Rupp in the Hollywood-created maelstrom of "Glory Road."  Dick Gabriel started making documentaries.  Loud-mouthed writers suffering from selective memory joined in in condemning Rupp's alleged racism, and suddenly we were transported back to the 1960's, except viewed darkly through the lens of the politically correct and socially hypersensitive  values of the 2000's, where the subject of race is so hot-button that even the Confederate flag was being banned from ...well, you name it.  It wouldn't surprise me if it were declared illegal even in museums and history books before long.

Not even the fact of Kentucky's then-African American coach seemed to matter -- it was as though the taint of alleged racism by Adolph Rupp could not be cleansed by either time, the times in which he lived, or actions of the present.  In the minds of the media, Kentucky == Racism.  Exactly equal.  Indistinguishable.  Inseparable.  One.

And yet ...

Here we have a situation in football which no hard news sportswriter or editorialist wants to examine.  After schools not only in the deep South (and Doyel's characterization of Kentucky as "the deepest of the deep South" is surely hyperbole ... or is it a reflection of "Glory Road?") but elsewhere seem to have trouble finding qualified African-American coaches, the single BCS school most reviled by allegations of racial bias during the civil rights era sets a standard that is utterly ignored by anyone ... except Gregg Doyel.  Yes, it was in two different sports, but can anyone seriously argue that is a distinction with a difference?  To further make my point, how many Northern schools (let alone Southern) have two African-American football coordinators and two basketball assistant coaches, let alone an appointed football head coach successor?

I used to loathe Gregg Doyel.  I loathed him for daring to tell the truth, that UK was underachieving under Tubby Smith in 2005-06 and 2006-07.  I loathed him for taking shots at our recruiting classes (and he will definitely be eating crow on that one, or so Jodie Meeks told me), and for his razor wit and uncompromising opinions.  I loathed him for rooming with Dwane Schintzius.  For going to Florida.  Good reasons, as you can clearly see.

He made it all up to me with this one article.