Collegiate sports teach discipline, sportsmanship, competition, how to win and lose, no matter how good you are, you can still lose; not all winners are better; how to plan, how to take orders, how to work in a team, consequences of public humiliation, humility, consequential statistics, and the list goes on and on.
I think banning college football goes a bit too far. However, they should probably eliminate any physical contact, get rid of those bulky uniforms and certainly there is no need for keeping score. This only causes the losing team to be psychologically disappointed.
So who is to enforce this banning? Will this entail a new Federal agency dedicated to making sure no colleges, public or private have football teams or any sports for that matter? Will this include the West Point and Naval Academy football programs too?
All that said, this knuckleheaded busybody misses a fine point about small government. As much as I abhor how NCAA Div. I is now a de facto farm club system for the NFL (and I love the NFL!!!), I don't think that's it's the government's place to tell colleges how to run their sports programs. I just want to smack Michael Wilbon and other sports journalists who actually want Congress to intervene in how the BCS is run. We can't get the Senate to pass a freakin' budget-- to hell with tinkering with the BCS.
I have an undergraduate and a professional degree. I would not have had that if it wasn't for football. I didn't play it in college, but I did play ball in high school. It kept me focused on my grades. It kept me from being drunk all the time.
College sports brings in students with higher test scores. My alma matter is Michigan State. It is much harder to get into MSU than it was when I was there. As the football and basketball teams got better, especially the last five years, it became more selective as more people applied. People want to be a part of a good program. Good programs bring in good students - not just as players, but spectators.
As for the other sports, the athletic dept budgets are separate from the university itself, so it is funds that bring that in. Donors from rich alums who are sports fans (Phil Knight and T Boone Pickens are two of the most famous of their schools) along with ticket sales and TV revenue. There are usually one, sometimes two, and rarely three sports that make money on campus. Football. Men's basketball. Sometimes hockey. These sports fund ALL of the other athletic programs.
The WSJ didn’t used to be known for its left wing dribble. Looks like it wants to go the way of most of the print media.
Everything I don’t like should be banned; like, permitted.
>>That’s because college football has no academic purpose.<<
And neither does anything else I did when I went to college with the small exception of going to class and studying. I did all that for about 25 hours a week (40+ in law school). That left more than 125 hours a week to fill up with other activities.
This is a patently stupid article. I didn’t play college football, but I played a little baseball and basketball in college. Don’t you (the author) dare tell me that I and my fellow athletes got nothing out of the experience. I played with some guys that might not have gone to college but for athletics and most ended up with a degree — they grew up and realized street ball and hanging with their buds wasn’t going to make much money. Others are better prepared for a career or avocation due to their participation. I officiate 2 college sports — football and basketball — and I am a MUCH better official for having played ANY college sport. Its just a different game than HS on so many levels.
There are college ADs and Presidents that have made bad decisions — not having a D-I playoff is a HORRIBLY STUPID decision (so far). But we need to change those things, not banning the game.
The only reason this guy has any sort of a name is because of Texas HS football. In Texas, college athletics can not be funded with public money, but HS athletics can. His argument doesn’t work on any level, but it makes a little more sense on the HS level — and that would have destroyed any way for this guy to be known. Sort of ironic.
It is tough to stop the elitists when they take on a cause. They just can’t stand that a bunch of red necks from Alabama arebringing in more money to their university than NYU or Columbia... and that someone like Nick Saban, the leader of the rednecks that couldn’t ever hold a conversation in any of their intellectual cocktail parties discussing the latest social theories, makes more money than any or them. I’ll bet if Harvard was the national football powerhouse, they’d be fine with it.
I don’t think it can be banned outright, but it can be gradually downgraded to the point it loses many of its most repulsive characteristics.
Probably the most damaging thing that could be done to it would be to prohibit televised games. While initially this would result in much better box office at the games themselves, that would soon only remain for the best teams.
Downgrading from there would be a lot easier.
You got to admit it would be interesting to see
a football game between the Womyn’s studies and
the radical african liberation groups.
Dweebs against Lesbians?
Engineers against sociologists?
Liberals serve no academic or useful purpose. Can we ban them?
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Who should do the banning?
By what authority?
The shame of college football is that they won’t pay their players. Or allow them to make money from endorsements. Why is that?
Because they don’t want to share the billions from college football with the actual wealth generators.
How does that square with the free market?
Let’s retire the fiction that at the big schools, there’s such a thing as a student- athlete. There are students and there are athletes. Football at a big school is a sixty-hour-a-week job.
Of what use to them is their free degree in Communications? They’re never in a classroom or the library — football at that level and getting an education are incompatible.
And so what? Talent is talent; let them make some money. Most of these guys will never make the NFL. They will never have a better opportunity to make money with their skills than while they are college football stars.
What I’d like to see happen is every single big school football team go on strike simultaneously. The NCAA should work for THEM, not the other way round.
Pay them. And let them sell their names to Nike.
The system we have now is un-American.
After watching the Gators on offense last season, I'm inclined to agree.