Does race affect whether a Super Bowl MVP will receive prime endorsements?

AdAge has an interesting article on why 2009 Super Bowl MVP, Santonio Holmes, will probably not rake in huge endorsement dollars.  The reasons that AdAge says Holmes won’t get the big deals is because he lacks “marketability”.  They go on to say that his position and off-field problems will “relegate Mr. Holmes to the fate such players” that previously won the Super Bowl MVP but were not able to cash in on “national endorsement deals”.

The players AdAge compared Santonio’s plight to are: Deion Branch, Dexter Jackson, Larry Brown, Richard Dent, Desmond Howard and Hines Ward.  Only three of those players named play Wide Receiver, the other three were defensive players.  None standout as having excessive off-field problems like Santonio does.  But what they do all have in common is they are black (African-American).

Did AdAge shy away from the elephant in the room here? Does race play a part in deciding which Super Bowl MVP’s are going to get the big deals? Perhaps.  There is no way of knowing whether Santonio would be marketable if he didn’t have the off-field issues, because he does have a long list of them.  But the Super Bowl MVP’s who they compare him to cannot be brushed aside due to off-the-field issues.

I do think there is a strong argument that a players football position plays a factor in endorsement deals.  Quarterbacks have always been the darlings of Madison Avenue, so there is no doubt they tend draw more endorsement dollars.  But there is a little bit of a chicken/egg thing there because quarterbacks have until recently almost always been white.  So that kind of skews the question of how position effects endorsement dollars, at least until Donovan McNabb or Vince Young win a Super Bowl MVP.  The only black quarterback to win the Super Bowl MVP award was Doug Williams back in 1988, which is too far back to compare to today’s modern endorsement environment.

So what is my point? First, AdAge is right that Santonio is probably not going to get the big endorsement dollars because of his checkered past.  But I think AdAge overlooked the affect race could have on the process.  Although I hate to play the “race card”, I think it is likely enough to at least deserve to be mentioned.

Do I want to get into a debate about whether racism exists in the sports endorsement world? Not particularly, but I think AdAge made it relevant to discuss because they avoided it in their piece.  They might have at least mentioned that of the last ten Super Bowl MVP’s, the white guys have raked in way more national endorsements than the black guys.  Ranking those last ten MVPs by endorsement success shows an interesting trend.  The trend is that the white Super Bowl MVPs almost always make more endorsement dollars than black athletes.

Peyton Manning (2007), Tom Brady (2004) and Eli Manning (2008] are the top pitchmen on the list.  Then Ray Lewis (2001) slides in ahead of aging Kurt Warner (2000) to buck the trend slightly.  After that you can group Holmes (2009), Hines Ward (2006), Deion Branch (2005), and Dexter Jackson (2003) at the same level.  So the white guys take four of the top five spots, and the bottom five spots are all black football players.

Is it the QB thing or the white thing? Impossible to know, but it sure looks like black Super Bowl MVPs are getting the short end of the stick compared to their Anglo counterparts.  I think AdAge should have at least mentioned it in their article.