Why is the argument here —
There is demand for minor league basketball and football, but there’s no need for it to be tied to universities, or for the leagues to abuse their workers. By spinning off these profit centers, universities could return to their educational missions, and treat athletics the way the NCAA’s Division III does: as an amateur activity to complement students’ education.
— so totally appalling to everyone? Just return to amateur, complementary football at universities, and if Americans seem to need more professional football teams so badly, form them. Why will this idea never fly?
It will never fly because it’s much more titillating to get your professional-level violence pure. It thrills you more, you’re more willing to pay for it, when you’re doing it, as it were, with a virgin. Not a wage-slave, exclusively-on-field, businessman, but – the heart begins to pound with the phrase – a student-athlete.
There’s an irresistible attraction here. You’re seeing the very first concussion, the initiation of the body into its brokenness. College is beautifully, irresistibly, caught up with youth, innocence, and bonding (the players aren’t individual, commercially transacting, agents; they’re unpaid members of a team), and those values – along with big-time football violence – can only enter the field with the big-time college team.
Why are luxury boxes full of excited businessmen in their fifties the real money-center of university football? Why are the mega-boosters with tens of millions of dollars in football donations, from T. Boone Pickens on down, old guys who’ve devoted their lives to the acquisition of wealth? Couldn’t they content themselves with the New England Patriots, etc? Indeed, why do people like Pickens and Nike’s Phil Knight get so involved with the team? Why couldn’t they get involved with the Patriots?
Because they love their alma mater? What a weird way of showing your love for your university. But like the latest football booster financial criminal – see this post – they all say the same thing. I want to show my gratitude to my university for giving me the academic skills to be a big success. Therefore, I’m giving my money to… the football team! Why not the library, if it’s about what the school gave you academically?
Because the library’s abstract, and anyway no one uses the library anymore. With the team, it’s all out there, a screaming brightly colored physically intense televised spectacle in which people not only pay attention to you but maybe even worship you, the way Oklahoma State worships Pickens and Oregon worships Phil Knight.
These motives go so deep that the reality of significant portions of some of these teams being composed not only of non-students, but criminals, doesn’t faze these men in the slightest. When they look at them play, they see deeply committed members of the student body who love the school as much as the old guys do. Students in the stands seem to see the same thing, strangely enough, even though the players tend to be totally isolated from the rest of the campus, living in their own dorms, taking their own special classes, and working out in their own gyms.
None of it matters – the corruption of the whole big-time university football enterprise, the high-profile bullies on the teams (and among some of the coaches, from Bobby Knight to Mike Leach), the university president and the board of trustees playing with themselves while their university gets shot to hell by the boosters and the coaches… None of it dims the peculiar fantasy the university football enthusiast is after.
So it’s got to be the university, and it’s got to be big. Until the age for entry into professional football is lowered and serious players don’t bother with universities, you’re going to watch the process whereby universities become Penn State or the University of Miami or Florida A&M happen over and over again.
“Football and the university melded at Penn State,” says Charles Yesalis, emeritus professor of health policy and administration at Penn State, who lived and taught in State College, Pa. for 25 years before moving to Virginia a few months ago. “The sports program and the university are one, in part because Paterno was the most powerful person on campus, by far. That’s what was problematic here, what made Penn State different. I don’t know of another place where that’s been allowed to happen. There was no firewall. Other universities have sustained that firewall.”
Penn State’s perspective got warped. “When these people decided to ruin their lives to keep the reputation of Penn State and Penn State football, I wasn’t surprised,” says Yesalis, who has also co-written a new book, The Fundamentals of U.S. Health Care: Perspectives and Principles. “Very much of the behavior was cult-like. There is this arrogance that ‘we are Penn State, we are above the law.’” When he chaired a committee on athletic compliance over a decade ago, Yesalis remembers suggesting that the university hire an outside auditor to make sure Penn State was following the rules. “I hate when people talk about body language and everything,” says Yesalis. “I’m a scientist, I think it’s total bullshit. Having said that, I looked around the table, and these people thought I had antlers coming out of my goddam head, because I questioned the integrity of Penn State.”
Skeptics have been peeling back the Penn State onion for several years now. In 2008, ESPN calculated that in the previous six years, 46 Penn State football players had faced a total of 163 criminal charges; 27 had been convicted or had pleaded guilty.
… [E]specially for a school of its size and budget — it has the largest campus in the Northeast and the 10th largest in the country — Penn State doesn’t match its football team’s prominence in very many of its myriad classrooms.
I took a look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings to see where the school stood. Its professional schools are barely mediocre: Business ranks 44th, law ranks 76th, medicine is so obscure that I couldn’t find it on the published list. The school is in the top rank nationally in only a handful of disciplines: earth sciences, criminology, and industrial and nuclear engineering.
Penn State’s other major strength, at least until now, was in several sub-specialties of education: administration and supervision, counseling and personnel, educational psychology, and higher education administration.
The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.
His last sentence is a little strange. Because it scores well in counseling we shouldn’t expect its leadership to cover up child rape in order to protect its football program?
… which Deadspin calls, correctly, “full of shit.”
Joe Paterno spent the last interview of his life lying to a journalist to protect his legacy.
But not just any journalist. This blog has followed with amazement Jenkins’ (scroll down) worship of university sports and coaches, and her excited proposal that universities make football an academic major and coaches professors. Jenkins was one more Paterno patsy, one more idiot-audience for his integrity act. The Washington Post should be ashamed.
A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.
But pause.
Reflect.
What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.
The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.
It’s a classic post-Freeh fret from a veteran jock pen. The giveaways are phrases like “our cherished universities” and words like “tragedy” to describe the Penn State story.
Ooh, I was so naive! the writer tells us. Although I’ve been covering university football for decades, I just, I dunno, thought the higher-ups at Penn State were good, decent people… And here comes this Freeh report and JEEZ.
Well, let’s wrap this up by saying I sure hope things will get better now!
F-u-u-u-u-u-ck you.
You know, as well as any random Penn State professor knows, how systemically sick Penn State and plenty of other football factories like it are. You’ve always known. What you’re saying today is what all the hacks are saying to their jock readers:
We are poor little lambs who have lost our way.
Baa, baa, baa.
We are little black sheep who have gone astray.
Baa, baa, baa.
Okay! We bleated our little bleat!
Now…
… back to the luxury box!
The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…
No one told Stevie Wonder, however.
The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.
The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.
It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.
The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?
Does it? Does the University of Georgia community grow more and more impatient with its homegrown mafia?
I don’t see the slightest shadow of the faintest possibility of that. On the contrary, they seem extremely excited by these guys.
“If you find it aberrant that the athletic director and the vice president of a university are taking their orders from a football coach, welcome to the state of Pennsylvania.
… Gary Schultz and Tim Curley are facing jail time; [former Penn State president] Graham Spanier needs to follow.
… Maybe the booster money will stop coming in as they realize that this was an institution-wide decision to harm children.
And maybe, just maybe, the enormous sum of payments due to be paid out in civil lawsuits, in a state already struggling with a budget deficit, will be too deep for the university’s pockets, forcing the university into bankruptcy.”
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1242628-penn-state-university-making-life-better-now-go-away