Colin Cowherd thinks the real victims of drunk driving are the drunk drivers

His stupidity goes well-beyond his dated views on race

Never heard of Colin Cowherd? He’s a middling sports radio personality with a national platform who likes to remind his audience that he’s “not like the local guys.” At least, that used to be his refrain. I haven’t listened to his show in years. To me, he’s always been one of those radio hosts who love to talk about how different their show is from the others, without actually saying or doing anything all that different. It’s almost as if he’s worried that people will think he’s just an average talker who got unbelievably lucky when a major outlet gave him a chance to not shit the bed. (Hmm…)

Cowherd’s made headlines recently for two things:

The announcement he was stepping away from a very lucrative offer from ESPN — the company that made him — presumably for Fox. The fact that his last hours on ESPN had him playing defense over some stupid things he said about Dominican baseball players, which lead to ESPN dumping him before his planned expiration date. (What did Cowherd say? Only that baseball is so simple, even a Domican can understand it. Oops. No way that’ll bite him the ass…)

Deadspin’s had a lot of fun at Cowherd’s expense over the years, gathering up just a tiny fraction of the dumb things he’s said during his ESPN tenure. One topic that seems to trip up Cowherd more than others is race. He has a nasty of habit of criticizing black athletes for doing innocuous things their white colleagues get a pass for. He’s prone to praising the whiteness of his favorite states. Oh, and if you happen to be a black athlete who dies under tragic circumstances, it was probably you’re fault. But race isn’t his only weak spot. From concussion science to business women, Cowherd has proven that foot-in-mouth disease is a recurring ailment with no cure. (I actually wish his show was more popular, so that we’d have a better record of his flubs.)

Okay, so filling multiple hours of airtime every day for years at a time isn’t easy. Even the best radio hosts say regrettable things on a semi-regular basis, which makes them all easy targets for critics. Too easy, which is why I generally avoid harping on them. The problem with Cowherd, though, is that there’s a disturbing consistency to his nonsense. It’s almost as if he actually believes the things he’s saying.

The point at which I stopped listening to Cowherd? Six years ago, when he produced the most inane segment of radio I’d ever heard. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. From commercial break-to-commercial break, the entire segment was jaw-dropping in its inanity.

Things started simple enough, with Cowherd returning from break and launching into a diatribe about the NFL and their DUI problem. Well, other people thought the NFL had a DUI problem. Not Cowherd. According to Cowherd, the NFL had no reason to worry about DUIs among players, and certainly no reason to punish players accumulating them.

At this point, I’m actually expecting some half-interesting logic exercise. Something like: “DUIs are against the law, therefore the NFL doesn’t have to punish players because that’s what real laws are for.” It’s not a point I agree with, but at least it’s a point. But it wasn’t Cowherd’s point. In fact, his point was the exact opposite. What was Cowherd’s reasoning for why the NFL shouldn’t care about drunk driving amongst their own? Because, to Mr. Cowherd, drunk driving simply isn’t a big deal. At all.

Cowherd’s exact words: “Drunk driving is a victimless crime.”

Yes, I put that in quotes, because that is exactly what he said. It was just a single radio segment that aired six years ago, but I’ll never forget it. I’d never heard anyone ever try to make that case before.

For the next fifteen minutes, Cowherd took the position that the real victims of drunk driving are the people who get pulled over for driving drunk.

The centerpiece of Cowherd’s argument was a single statistic he thought was so telling, it needed little explanation. According to Cowherd, something like 97% of all DUI charges do not involve accidents.

He related that fact (which I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume is true) like it was going to blow our minds. Like he expected his listeners to stand up and shout “Only 3% of drunk drivers are actually dangerous? Whoa! Why would MADD lie to me about how dangerous it is!? Friends SHOULD let friends drink and drive!”

Except the stat, even if true, doesn’t mean what Cowherd thinks it means. He presented it as proof that drunk driving is largely harmless. But all it shows is just how serious we, as a society, treat drunk driving these days. Go back to ‘70s and what’s the percentage of drunk drivers involved in accidents then? I’ll bet anything it’s considerably higher than 3%. It wasn’t until the ‘80s that drunk driving even became of an issue on the national consciousness. That’s when PSAs started airing to stigmatize drunk driving as a reckless, irresponsible act. That’s when state and local laws started getting much, much tougher. Oh, and that’s when the number of people killed annually by drunk drivers started going down. Dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved since then. And it’s all thanks to the fact that the entire nation went from lamenting drunk driving fatalities as mere “accidents” to seeing them as something that could be prevented — and actually preventing them.

Listening to Cowherd’s show, I was quite literally flabbergasted. Could he really believe this crap? At this point, I just assumed Cowherd was one of those guys who likes to tell stories that end with “…and I have no idea how I got home!” (i.e. “I got behind the wheel blackout drunk!”) I figured he’s the kind of guy who always has to be the driver, even when he knows he might not pass a breathalyzer test. That he probably even has a DUI or two. So to absolve his own conscience, instead of looking within… he adopted a worldview where he’s the victim.

Which takes me to his other major point from that segment — that there’s a group of people who have no right to voice their opinion on the subject of drunk driving. Can you guess who Cowherd thinks they are?

According to Cowherd, the people who shouldn’t be chiming into the drunk driving debate (because to Cowherd, the topic still open for debate), are the friends and families of those who lost loved ones to drunk drivers.

He actually said that. Not because anecdotal evidence is a terrible foundation for law-making (it is, but that wasn’t his point). But because the friends of families of drunk driving fatalities are too full of emotions. They’re too irrational.

Too irrational to do what, I don’t know. I don’t think he ever said. (Yes, I totally realize that his acknowledging the existence of drunk driving victims totally erradicates his “victimless crime” thing, but SHH! don’t tell Colin. He’s clearly too insecure in his beliefs to be challenged by people with first-hand experiences contrary to his own.)

Full disclosure: I’m one of those irrational people who lost a loved one to a drunk driver. And I’m clearly so irrational that I forgot about Cowherd and his dumb thoughts for six years, until he started making headlines again, which prompted me to finally write something about it. (I am a writer, after all.)

When I sat down to type this up, I knew I wouldn’t have a transcript to quote or an audio feed to link to. Back in 2009, such things didn’t exist for terrestrial radio shows, especially ones that never had a rabid fan base. I didn’t even have an exact date for the show in question.

So I did some googling and learned three things:

A simple googling of “drunk driving is a victimless crime” turns up plenty of instances of the phrase — many that predate Cowherd’s appropriation of it. What’s really interesting about all the instances of the phrase is that they’re made almost exclusively by over-eager libertarians seeking to score politically with people who hate traffic laws.

In other words: Cowherd was just parroting a libertarian talking point. (And not even one that a majority of libertarians seem to agree with.)

Cowherd’s views on drunk driving are starting to fall in line with his views on race. They both come from the same place, designed to appeal to the same audience — thin-skinned, white males with a victim complex.

Here’s the kicker, though. Why was Cowherd even talking about drunk driving at all on a sports radio program? Because this was around the time that the NFL was weighing in what to do with Donte Stallworth, a football player who had killed a man with his Bentley— while drunk.

That’s right. The only reason Cowherd was even talking about this “victimless crime” is because of an incident that involved an actual victim.

So how about this? Next time you need to illustrate the relative complexity of baseball, try: “Baseball is so simple, even Colin Cowherd can understand it.”