Posted on 11/12/2011 8:49:23 AM PST by Publius804
A few millennia from now, when archaeologists from an ascendant Brazil or Turkey or wherever sift the shards of American civilization and find the ruins of the Big House in Ann Arbor, Mich., they will wonder why a 109,901-seat entertainment venue was attached to an institution of higher education.
Today, the accelerating preposterousness of big-time college football is again provoking furrowed brows and pursed lips. But there probably were few of either among the 20 million who Saturday night watched Alabama's student-athletes play those of LSU.
These teams' head coaches' salaries are $4.6 million and $3.75 million, respectively, and their additional perquisites and incentives have cash values not to be sneezed at. But by some hedonic or other calculus, these coaches may add more to the national stock of pleasure, and even more value to their institutions, than do Alabama's president and LSU's chancellor, who earn $487,620 and $400,000, respectively.
The college football conglomerate has recently been roiled by an unseemly scramble — if seemliness pertains to this industry — of schools abandoning their old conferences and jettisoning traditional rivalries in a race to get into other conferences where television revenues are more bountiful. For now, the landscape is as follows.
The Pac (for Pacific) 10 now has 12 teams, having acquired Utah and Colorado, which is 936 miles from the Pacific. The Big Ten, which has had 11 teams since Penn State joined in 1990, now has, with Nebraska, 12.
The Big East, having lost several members (including Pittsburgh and Syracuse, to the ACC) and its sense of geography, is courting Southern Methodist, which is in Dallas, and Boise State, which would have to fly 4,300 miles round trip to play South Florida in Tampa.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Bread and circuses.
As always, for the love of money is the root of all evil.
Will is probably just pissed that no one cares about college baseball.
The problem with education in this country has virtually nothing to do with football. The problem is leftist indoctrination by universities designed to propagandize our youth with liberal/socialist belief systems.
Not news. My undergrad University spent more on astroturf than lab equipment for the sciences combined over the 4 years I was there.
The correlation between bowl games and especially wins and alumni giving is extraordinary.
Big school football is its own industry. Has been for at least 50 years.
Big schools are also notoriously caste-based. The counting coup of academe seeps into everything, absolutely everything on such campuses. You don’t toe the line, you spin out toute suite.
George Will needs to learn about all the things a successful program at Alabama has done, from supporting other sports to upgrading many of the facilities at the school.
You are right about leftists indoctrination...but I believe you are wrong about college sports I do not like nor do I follow college sports as it has ZERO to do with education....especially the way it is funded in this country...especially the way schools recruit mental midgets and defectives...but the term FAN should not be abbreviated when FAN means FANATIC and even child rape is acceptable to college football FANATICS
That’s precisely Will’s point. Those programs have become so powerful that the schools are essentially at their mercy for funding and support. When something threatens the money train, like oh I don’t know a sicko pervert raping little boys, it gets covered up.
The cult mentality being showcased by you college football “alumni” aint pretty either.
There can be more than one problem. The influence of big-time college athletics is greatly corrupting to the institutions.
Personally, I think this indoctrination idea is exaggerated. Students are far more influenced by modern culture and TV and movies pushing the cultural envelope than they are by their professors.
Even small state colleges have problems too. I remember how UAF catered to their precious no winning hockey team. The players could do no wrong on campus. Made me sick.
...for the love of television money is the root of all evil.
There, fixed it.
"Of all the various sports, however, football became the major instrument of publicity because both on and off campus it was the sport that inspired the most enthusiasm, enlisted the most interest, and brought into the camp of college and university supporters people for whom the idea of going to college was out of the question but for whom the idea of supporting a team was a matter of course."
p. 385, The American College and University: A History by Frederick Rudolph, 1962
You might want to research that a bit and I'll bet you'll find that the "party line" is wrong.
A few years ago, my sister-in-law, who was a top official in the athletic department of another SEC powerhouse, was touting all the wonderful things her department was doing for the university. In almost all cases with major universities, the athletic departments are separate legal entities from the university and seldom if ever, transfer monies to the general fund of the university. Being aware of the typical relationship between the university and athletic department, I challenged her and told her that I bet I had more money in my pocket than her athletic department transferred to the general fund. A few days later after checking herself, she sheepishly admitted that I was right. She is now earning an honest living in the corporate world.
I do believe, for example, the NFL is pretty much the only major sports franchise aside from NASCAR that is right leaning in its contributions to politicians and causes.
Personally, I think this indoctrination idea is exaggerated. Students are far more influenced by modern culture and TV and movies pushing the cultural envelope than they are by their professors.
Seriously? Have you looked at what is going on at our college/university campuses? College athletics is probably one of the few decent things, with some notable exceptions, happening at most of our larger universities. Which would you trust more politically? A football player who's been busting his hump to make it and is surrounded by a sometimes very conservative atmosphere stressing individual effort? Or your average liberal arts major who is steeped in leftist thought and how awful Western civilization supposedly is? Notice how many football coaches people like Hannity have on as guests for example. Notice how many are pretty conservative?
College athletics are NOT the primary problem with our universities. These institutions are turning out kids who have no understanding of what makes America actually work - in fact they turn out kids who are taught to hate the very country they are benefiting from.
One of the great football powerhouses during the first 40 years of the Big Ten were the Maroons of the University of Chicago.
Coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg it claimed 2 national championships and 7 Big Ten championships. It has 11 members in the College Football Hall of Fame. Halfback Jay Berwanger won the first Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, the Heisman, in 1935. And then in 1939 it simply quit football.
3 years later the abandoned Stagg Field was occupied by the physicists of the Manhattan Project and was the site of the first self sustaining nuclear reaction.
The tribalism exhibited by sports fans resembles the most primitive of human cultures. College football fans haven't quite reached the level of the hooliganism of the European soccer fans but that day is coming.
I say this as my family is getting ready to leave for a college football game. We're all wearing our tribe's...err, team's colors.
Sure there is a great deal of money in college football, but then is that not the ostensible goal of most students are attending the college? Why complain about a successful wealth generator, would it not be better to study how and why college football is financially successful so that other enterprises may emulate that success?
You are absolutely right and the poster who mentions indoctrination of left-wing ideology and its implicit
fatal Political Correctness is missing one large and crushing
irony, which is that in THIS case, at Penn State, you had BOTH, coexisting in extremis. We had this guy, Jerry Sandusky, the WORST kind of pervert, getting away with the worst kinds of perversions only because the Penn State football program became SO important to the identity of the school and its economic feasibility, that the buck was continually passed down the ladder, starting presumably and importantly with the Grand Poobah, Joe Paterno, and up and down that ladder with McQueary, who actually witnessed a criminal act but was too timid to be a whistleblower. Who wants to be a whistleblower in the midst of these “good times” and profitable jobs? No doubt there ARE colleges with great teams who have been able to maintain some kind of
reasonable “balance” between the “bread and circuses” another poster tersely invoked, but with Penn State you had the intersection of perhaps the BIGGEST football program with its ‘iconic’ chief, Paterno, AND the cultural climate of “look the other way” in the face of transgressive sexual
behavior, which we all should have learned from, if nowhere else, in the still-lingering case of Michael Jackson.Both Penn State, Paterno,Sandusky, and Jackson comprised their own versions of “too big to fail”.
Oh, heck yes, College sports is the priority in the national zeitgeist. Better buildings, better facilities, better everything. We’re graduating hoards of people who can’t use the simple past tense of American English, but we got a new gym.
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