Thayer Evans and Sports Illustrated Are Doing Great Satire on the Michael Sam Story

Thayer Evans is making noise again at Sports Illustrated, and this time the topic is the Michael Sam situation. In doing so, he has graduated from not being able to spell cat to becoming one of the great satirists of our generation. You might recall that Evans became part of the story when the Sports Illustrated “exposé” of the Oklahoma State football program last fall, with Brandon Weeden calling him out for earlier unprofessional comments, and plenty of folks claiming that he didn’t follow through or that the facts didn’t line up with claims of people quoted.

Evans has been on the byline of pieces with some great quotes, though, recently. Yes, you can question whether they will just publish anything, but I tend to think America, again, does not pick up on the sarcasm and satire font. Let’s see if you can judge the source of these quotes.

“It’s a powder keg just waiting to explode. Why did [Missouri] cover this up? What else are they hiding? What were they trying to do? Keep a secret society?” [source]

“But the more I think about it, I’ve come to realize that maybe players won’t want to block a gay guy. To block someone well you have to touch them a lot. Will players be willing to get all handsy with a gay player?” [source]

“It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room.” [source]

“I see him as a tweener. Some games he won’t be as good because maybe the opponent will really step their game up to not suffer the humiliation of a gay man beating them for a sack. Other games you’ll have opponents who don’t want to touch him and he’ll be in the backfield all game. At least those are my current working theories. I’ll have to break down more film, both game film and gay film.” [source]

“There’s nothing more sensitive than the heartbeat of the locker room. If you knowingly bring someone in there with that sexual orientation, how are the other guys going to deal with it? It’s going to be a big distraction. That’s the reality. It shouldn’t be, but it will be.” [source]

“Every Tom, Dick and Harry in the media is going to show up, from Good Housekeeping to the Today show. A general manager is going to ask, ‘Why are we going to do that to ourselves?'” [source]

“No pro team wants the kind of controversy having a gay player is going to cause. If he had just been convicted of DUI manslaughter, or, obstruction of justice in connection with a murder, or had been accused of sexual assault, or screamed the ‘N’ word at a concert, or killed a bunch of dogs and buried ‘em in his f***ing yard, you know, NFL material.” [source]

“You shouldn’t have to live your life in secrecy,” said [anonymous source afraid to say things in public],”but do you really want to be the top of the conversation for everything without ever having played a down in this league?” [source]

When you cannot tell what is real between talk of NFL executives warming up because players might not want to touch Michael Sam, and assistant coaches accusing Missouri of having a secret society, that means you are doing good work. John Stewart, D.J. Gallo, and Thayer Evans, coming soon to an auditorium near you.