“I guess you could say the end zone was the beginning of the no-spin zone,” Bill O’Reilly wrote recently a reflective piece about his days as a punter in college.
“Ah, but Mr. O’Reilly has done a little spinning of his own,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said on Monday night’s Countdown. “The football office at Marist told me today that football was not a varsity sport there until 1978 — seven years after O’Reilly graduated. When he played, it was a so-called ‘club sport’ — where players paid all their own expenses… and schedules — and most importantly statistical record keeping — were haphazard.”
“So when he says he was the top punter in the country in his ‘division’ in 1970, it does not mean what it sounds like. He was not in the NCAA’s Division One, nor Division Two — nor the smaller college NAIA Division One or Two…” Check out the rest, after the jump…
“O’Reilly and Marist played in something called the ‘National Club Football Association.’ So writing in the Super Bowl program that you won the ‘punting championship’ in your ‘division’ would be like me writing in the World Series program that I led the nation’s high school baseball players in on-base percentage in 1973.
I did, too.
My on-base percentage that season was… one thousand — I came to bat once, and got hit in the backside with a pitch.”