Kyler Murray, the quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners, won the Heisman Trophy this year. He also led his team to a Big 12 Championship and the college football playoffs for a shot at winning the national championship.
What he should be talking about is how the Sooners will beat the #1 ranked Alabama Crimson Tide in the Orange Bowl in order to play in the championship game.
Yes, the big news over the weekend was not his athletic accomplishments, but tweets discovered when Scott Gleeson of USA Today discovered when trolling through Murray’s Twitter account.
Below is an example of four tweets that have since been deleted:
Is this insensitive? Of course it is. Is it relevant to what he just accomplished?
Only to someone with an agenda, like Gleeson appears to be. He wrote:
Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray had a Saturday to remember. But the Oklahoma quarterback’s memorable night also helped resurface social media’s memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
When Murray was 15 years old, he tweeted at his friends (via his since-verified Twitter account) using an anti-gay slur to defame them. Four offensive tweets remained active on his account late Saturday night but were eventually deleted by Sunday morning — when Murray apologized for his insensitive language in a tweet.
The tweets didn’t “resurface” they were searched for.
If you look at Gleeson’s LinkedIn profile you’ll see he’s has been an “enterprise reporter” for USA Today since 2015 which he describes:
Report on the LGBT movement in sports. Comprised nationally-acclaimed series on homophobia and gay athletes. Focused heavily on LGBT struggles for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games with front-page covers.
-Story on the first openly-gay coach in a top-four sport was finalist for Top Breaking News Feature in 2016 by Associated Press Sports Editors.
-Human Interest piece on Special Olympics World Games was a finalist for 2015 Best Worldwide Color Story by International Press Association.
-2017 summer package focused on mental illnesses and the accompanying stigma in the sports community, with interviews from Michael Phelps, Jerry West and Brandon Marshall.
-2018 winter package focused on transgender fairness ahead of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
Why in the world
Also, what editor allows a writer to include terms like “homophobic” in a piece? Yes, I know AP included that word it in its stylebook, but it shouldn’t have, and this is after they’ve banned it for years. It’s pejorative. Was it insensitive? Yes. Does this mean Murray is phobic toward homosexuals? No.
Lastly, who cares what a person said when they were 15-years-old? 15-year-old boys say stupid and insensitive things.
Then Murray notes that Oklahoma did not respond to his inquiry, “The Oklahoma athletics department did not immediately respond to an inquiry by USA TODAY Sports regarding the tweets late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.”
Shocker. No, they were too busy celebrating this young man’s accomplishments.
I’m glad that social media did not exist when I was 15-years-old. I’d hate to think what would be drudged up by guys like Gleeson.
Shaming people for things like this is garbage journalism. Let’s remove identity politics out of sports and quit judging people over whether they were sufficiently “woke” when they were teenagers. The shaming of Kyler Murray by Gleeson and USA Today is absolutely disgusting.