think-progress:

Travis Waldron at ThinkProgress explains Brent Musburger, Katherine Webb, and football’s culture toward women:

Painting Webb as merely a perk of the job, as nothing more than the Alabama beauty queen dating the quarterback of the Crimson Tide, only enables that culture. It’s a culture…

In light of an aggressively uncompetitive BCS title game last night, broadcaster Brent Musberger’s digression on Katherine Webb, reigning Miss Alabama and girlfriend of quarterback AJ McCarron, became the focus of much attention — Musberger joked that kids should start throwing the football around, because “you quarterbacks, you get all the good lookin’ women.” Waldron argues his awkward fawn over Webb shouldn’t necessarily be laughed off, because the core of what he said — that football players get to date attractive women — is part and parcel of a football culture towards females with very destructive implications. This is a pertinent topic to at least one of the two teams playing last night — The Nation’s Dave Zirin decried a college football culture of entitlement to female attention in a pre-game article yesterday, about a largely unpublicized rape allegation against a Notre Dame player, and his accuser’s subsequent suicide.