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The basic idea is that black players that had not taken the Wonderlic when joining the league had their post-career Wonderlic score compared to a lower default/baseline than white players that had not taken the Wonderlic prior to joining the league. The reason for this being that the median black Wonderlic score is lower than the median white Wonderlic score. There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race, it was applying a baseline for players that hadn't taken the test before.
Hlynka's characterization of the incident is... uncharitable to say the least.
That's where you are wrong. A major part of the scandal was that it was revealed in discovery that the NFL had attempted to use the lower "race-normalized" scores to justify reduced payouts even in cases where the initial score for an individual player were available. Only problem being they got caught by a player who'd saved a copy of their initial scores and subsequently challenged the ruling.
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
Edited to be less antagonistic.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
I don't think you're a white identitarian.
No, there isn't, at least at the raw, verified facts level of "there are significant, persistent, well-verified differences in population-level IQ between demographic clusters that map pretty well onto the normal understanding of races."
And yet, I see people who I'm quite confident would not self-ID as white identitarian, people who I would not argue are white identitarian, people who have been democrat-voting progressives most of their lives but who now have grown progressive-sceptical, lamenting that Red Tribers have "wasted" political capital preventing poor black women from aborting their babies, because HBD. I don't believe that perspective is coming out of what people commonly understand as "the Right", and I certainly don't believe it's coming from the zeitgeist of Red Tribe. It's a fundamentally Blue Tribe perspective, a progressive perspective, an Enlightenment perspective. And it's pretty trivial to see how integrating HBD into their worldview got them from a normie-progressive viewpoint to what most normie progressives would consider an abomination without ever leaving the general Progressive worldview-space.
Likewise, "IQ is of paramount importance" isn't part of raw-facts-HBD, but it is an assumption that most of the HBD proponents I've talked to and seen have held, and I, like Hlynka, am pretty confident that it's disastrously wrong. Again, this is distinct from white identitarian ideology, but it's likewise not coming from Red Tribe, and is pretty clearly the product of a fundamentally Blue/Prog/Enlightened perspective.
I am pretty sure raw-facts-HBD is true, and I am certainly not committed to white identitarianism. But neither am I on board with HBD-as-a-worldview, which I think ranges from highly questionable to disastrously wrong, depending on how far people take it.
I am not interested in putting words in your mouth. I am interested in critiquing HBD-as-a-worldview, among other things. I am entirely willing to take you at your word that your aim is race blindness. I think this is true for a lot of people who believe raw-facts-HBD. It is noticeably less true for the HBD-as-worldview set.
I disagree quite strongly that it is useful for counter-arguing against disparate outcomes as proof of discrimination, but laying out the argument isn't something I'm going to start at this late hour.
I'm tempted to go point by point but am on mobile today so I'll be brief. There needs to be a way to describe the truth value of HBD without the baggage of the vile hateful racists and you describing the vile worldview with a portmanteau containing the word is not helpful. We cannot be this afraid of the truth. It's beneath us.
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