… Sayreville thing), allow UD to reiterate her position.
This is a blog about universities and the problems with them. UD‘s interest in football (which under normal conditions would have to grow to become cursory) is restricted to what it’s doing to our universities.
UD (as you know if you read this blog) calls football The Freak Show That Ate the American University.
As for football outside the university: UD recognizes that millions of Americans need regular, massive, violent, pissed to the gills spectacles. She’s had little to say about the NFL, the tax exempt non-profit organization to which the nation has given the job of mounting the spectacles. Similarly, she’s had little on this blog to say about NASCAR. If universities began fielding NASCAR teams, she’d begin talking about it.
That there is a world of blood-lust outside the university is unremarkable. That universities – outposts of civil reasoning – are sometimes little more than football camps is quite remarkable. The university, as institution, starts out so high that its transformation into a football camp represents a resounding fall into the gutter.
We all know the schools that have really let themselves go – Penn State, Rutgers, Alabama, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, Auburn, University of Miami, etc. – and we all know the obvious stuff covered by journalists: systemic cheating, sometimes orchestrated by professors; systemic corruption by money; high rates of player crime; budget-busting payouts of fired coaches. This blog covers that stuff, but also tries to evoke the daily, on-the-ground scummy environment that football camp university students and professors endure.
I don’t mean simply, for instance, the humiliation of being threatened all the time by coaches and high ranking administrators who are angry with you because you don’t go to games, or because you leave games early. How many emails per day does a typical University of Alabama student get from the school’s enraged multimillionaire coach harassing her about her non-attendance? How bad is she willing to be made to feel because she is focused on university studies? How often must she be made to defend her preference for reading over watching steroid poppers break each others’ skulls?
I also mean the literal filth of the university football camp. I mean the University of Georgia’s long struggle with post-tailgate trash all over campus (trash that includes human waste). I mean North Carolina State’s similar problem, concisely expressed by a campus journalist: “[W]hen the students get drunk, they don’t really care what goes where.”
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Why are university students en masse refusing to go to football games? Everyone’s worried about it. Michigan State’s AD says it’s “embarrassing,” but he doesn’t think it’s embarrassing that a coach putting on shows no one wants to go to makes three million dollars a year. One sports writer calls the non-compliant University of Miami student fans “pathetic,” but he doesn’t ask himself whether rational people might prefer not to be identified with a pathetically corrupt program. Florida A&M is all upset that no one goes to their football games. Does it occur to them that people would prefer not to have to think about manslaughter when they see a marching band?
October 16th, 2014 at 7:12AM
when you put it like that….
October 16th, 2014 at 10:02AM
Yes, but …. We should not forget that football and basketball, two big-time spectator sports played by physical freaks (OK, outliers) and enabling (even rewarding) thuggery, are in fact products of American higher education. The NFL and NBA still bear the marks of their origin as exhibitions for former “amateur” stars (like the Ice Capades); and of course college athletic scholarships, most plentiful in these sports, fuel overemphasis at lower levels.
The fundamental problem affecting football at all levels is that it doesn’t deliver as a sport: it is physically harmful to players, and it doesn’t seem to build character either. The NFL faces thus issues similar to those of the tobacco industry — except that instead of being banned from the airwaves it’s required by federal law to televise its games, so it’ll probably do fine.
Universities face more complex challenges, of which the most important have to do with mission and standards, image, and large-scale resource allocation. That coaches are often paid more than humanities professors, and that athletes receive minor-league compensation while generating big-league profits, are less compelling problems.
October 16th, 2014 at 10:59AM
Mr Punch: Coaches are paid more than medical school professors. But I’ve never been that interested in the comparative perspective – I’m interested in the way coach salaries/buyouts either bust a university’s budget or foster comically corrupt booster organizations.
October 16th, 2014 at 8:05PM
UD vastly over estimates the impact of football. Even at the universities she mentions, football represents little more than 3-4 percent of the total financial picture of the school. Its impact on the typical professor is close to nil. The more any of us buy into the outsized media hype about it, the more legitimacy we allow it to have.
October 16th, 2014 at 8:34PM
anon: The tragedy of university football is precisely its lack of any impact on professors. If they cared at all about what it’s doing to their schools (which has little to do with the financial picture – the main ongoing catastrophe is reputational) they might stop it from its destructive path.
I sense in your comment the classic response of professors to outsized football (and often basketball) at their schools – ignore it and it’ll go away. Big mistake.
October 18th, 2014 at 5:03PM
anon, I’m not sure how you’re coming to the 3-4% of anything. If you look at PAC12 schools over the past few years, most of them went on athletic building sprees to improve football stadiums, bond debt upwards of a $100 million dollars each. That cost is going to be borne by both students with elevated tuition, and tax payers, when the inevitable decline in student enrollment is going to put the debt service directly on taxpayers. Athletic buildouts have been a huge increase in university costs, and they are directly affecting professors, students and taxpayers….